Hey folks,
You naysayers are being a little silly. Let me clarify:
1) I'm not a bad person cause I post on Resetera. I usually don't post much anymore, because journalists love finding things they can make controversial, usually without even getting into the context. It's shit journalism, but hey, clicks! I usually use forums like these to catch up on news and I'm thankful that you crazies deliver that service
That said, every now and then I feel the urge to speak up, so I did. Suggesting that someone is a bozo for posting on some forum... give me a break. I know everyone loves Twitter these days, I just never really got into it.
Please ignore the loons who push these kinda narratives. Despite the fact that site is a shithole, it doesn't automatically mean that everyone posting there is equally a derpster.
2) It should be very, very obvious that I meant the same thing for Nintendo and Sony as well, I didn't call out Microsoft specifically. I obviously love Microsoft for how they supported Moon Studios and I think they're generally a good force in this industry. I called out that walled gardens in general are shitty and should be going away. Microsoft has been outspoken about being against walled gardens and hey, they usually support Steam / PC now as well and we even got MS to allow us to publish Ori on Switch. That's great and ideally they should be doing more of that. We should all be against walled gardens and if we want the industry to grow and see more games being played not just by 5-10m players, but by 100m players, well, here's one obvious answer. Don't lock your stuff behind artificial barriers, make your games as accessible as possible, let everyone play. I bet that's actually also how Phil thinks. And I understand that the current way the industry is set-up doesn't allow for that, games are being subsidized through other income, etc., but why accept a Status Quo that in the end might not be the best thing? And here's another truth: What I'm proposing here is more than likely going to happen anyway. The box you own won't matter that much in the future. It'll be more like your typical streaming service where content might still be locked to a certain store, but right now the games industry is just still stuck in the 90s with this idea of exclusivity. Imagine a world where the film industry releases some content that's only available on Samsung TVs while other content is only available on LG TV's. That's dumb, right? That's sort of what we're used to in the games industry. If I want to experience all games of this hardware generation, I need to buy 3 different devices, 2 of which are basically identical to one another. Some people will never get to experience some game that might be meaningful to them simply cause they don't own the 'right' device. That sucks.
I can understand the rationale for this, but I think the industry history and the data shows that the devices a game is played on matters. The arguments for walled gardens aren't simply limited to fanboy tribalism. There are very good reasons why walled gardens do and should exist and the very fact of the existence and success of consoles as a consumer product is a testament to this.
The biggest argument for walled gardens and the importance of console hardware is the hardware features themselves. This isn't just about CPU cores and terraflops. Actual hardware peripherals and hardware features matter, especially when you consider that developers who may want to make a game designed around those specific hardware features need to be able to rely on the promise of feature ubiquity across the platforms supported. Great examples are VR (not supported by Xbox), dual sense's advanced haptics, the Wiimote, the Wii balance board, new-gen console SSDs.
The concept of hardware platform independence already exists today, across mobile and also on PC, and in many cases, it can have a deleterious effect on the consumer experience when it's simply not clear which hardware is supported and which isn't for a given game. Idealistically, it makes gaming for the consumer easier because they don't have to worry about the device they are playing on, but in practice, it clearly doesn't because consumers sudden have to worry about minimum hardware requirements and the possibility of weird untested bugs popping up in their games, because their specific device hardware setup includes hardware in a configuration that the developers weren't possibly able to test on beforehand.
Subsequently, the answer to the above bevvy of issues is to simply go with a fixed standardized hardware specification and limit game development to a small number of fixed target specs.... well then, welcome to consoles and their subsequent walled gardens intended to maintain this universally smoother user gaming experience.
With this in mind, I fundamentally disagree that fixed hardware specs and walled gardens intended to maintain them are artefacts of a dated industry gaming concept. Short of removing all hardware and allowing only gaming through the cloud exclusively (and no-one wants that shit show), there really isn't a way for the open platform model to address the above-mentioned issues that consoles and their walled gardens do so elegantly.
I understand why as a developer you would want the maximum number of gamers to be able to play your creation. But the issue I see with your argument for an open platform on consoles is that you presume gamers think the same way as you, and I really don't think they do. Most gamers overwhelmingly don't care about the gaming experiences of anyone but themselves individually, and they absolutely shouldn't either, because we're not just gamers, we're consumers and we pay out of our hard-earned money to support our hobby, so the sole directive for us is the maximization of our enjoyment in our gaming hobby. Being able to enjoy seamless, stable, gaming experiences that maximise the features of the hardware that we paid good money for, is what concerns us gamers. Not whether some unknown, faceless, poorer person, elsewhere in the world isn't able to also enjoy the games we do, because they bought the wrong console.
3) I'm 37 now, I've been a gamer since I was like 4, starting with a Commodore 64. I grew up as a Nintendo Fan, but with age you ought to grow out of fanboy'ism. You folks should be loving the games themselves, not the hardware the games run on, cause it's just hardware. It's meaningless (and in fact, your Xbox and your PlayStation are basically just a PC these days). The hardware itself is and always has been secondary. The games are what matters.
Again you make this mistake. We do enjoy games. But we also place value on the consoles too, and we absolutely should do. How the hell else can these gaming companies convince us to spend literal hundreds of dollars of our hard-earned money on these boxes?
When games cost $60-70 max, but consoles run easily in excess of 8 times that amount, why would anyone think it logical that after making such a huge investment, gamers would be so easily convinced to not care about the box they play the games on as well? It's a perspective that ignores the reality of the situation gamers face.
For me I currently game on PS5 and PC. I care about the 3D audio on the PS5, the dual sense haptics and the super-fast SSD. It's why I upgraded to PS5 from PS4 in the first place. So given this fact, I'll often want to pick games that maximize the use of these features to ensure I'm seeing the maximal return on investment (in terms of enjoyment and satisfaction) from my purchase. To say I shouldn't is the same as telling me to throw $500 away and not think about it. It's a denial of my reality.
4) I realize that what I'm saying might still be controversial in this present day, I'm not sure I even want some of this myself. Like... I still would want a company like Nintendo to make a crazy device with completely new input methods and be successful at that. They're great at that, so more power to them. But as an industry, if we want to see it grow, one way to get there is by making games as accessible as possible. To everyone. If I see a kid in the train playing Fortnite on the iPad, I don't cringe, I think it's cool. I wouldn't play it on a touchscreen myself, but hey, the kid is having fun playing a game, so that's cool. Microsoft is actually ahead of Sony / Nintendo in that regard cause of GamePass / XCloud. In my ideal scenario, I should be able to play a game on my PC one night, take my Switch with me the next day and keep playing. Or whip out my phone and keep playing. I think that'd be pretty cool, you folks disagree? I would've liked playing Animal Crossing on Switch and then at home when I'm on my couch just be able to whip out my phone (+Backbone Controller, cause let's keep it real) and keep playing exactly where I left off without me being tied to some specific device. Gaming should be as ubiquitous and as accessible as Film or TV. Does anyone here actually disagree with that? I actually think a lot of this exclusivity stuff is beyond silly. I can't play Bloodborne at 60+fps these days cause the game was only released on PS4 and is locked to that hardware, just like Demon's Souls was locked to PS3 for a good decade. That stinks. Make it available on PC, let people decide what device they want to play on and let the company that makes the best hardware win, don't lock art behind some pretty steep paywall.
It's not really controversial. It's just ignoring the basic premise and reason why consoles emerged as a product in the first place and why they've been so successful.
You're really arguing and advocating for consoles to become what they were never intended to be. Which is an argument that console gaming companies should abandon everything that's made them so successful---because the market demand itself selected for this success---to follow a model that already exists on other supplemental platforms, i.e. PC and mobile.
The mere fact that console gaming continues to thrive alongside the existence of mobile and PC proves the intense consumer demand for these products and what they offer. Removing them by making them into PCs, only actually removed gamer choice and forces console gamers into a gaming business model they neither want nor asked for (otherwise they would have already migrated across to PC and mobile).
5) I love you all
We all love games, so we should all think about how the industry can grow and be better in the future. Just accepting the Status Quo usually doesn't get you there. What might feel uncomfortable today might just be the way towards a brighter future. Just cause things have been a certain way in the past doesn't mean that that's how they have to be in the future.
Just because things have been a certain way in the past doesn't mean we should change them either. It's much better to assess the pros and cons of various different approaches, and trying to tell gamers how they should enjoy their hobby, by making purely developer/publisher-focused business arguments that don't at all, in reality, serve actual gamer interests isn't really going to convince anyone.
Instead, I would argue it would be better for industry personnel to examine why console gaming together with their walled gardens have been so successful and continue to be. So as to inform perspectives on where the industry should look to go in the future.
Most other industries outside of gaming, spend literal millions in research to assess their customer's requirements, needs and desires and use that information to inform the direction of their product development and business models. Gaming is the only industry I've ever seen where corporate folks will decide based on largely irrelevant metrics (or even no metrics at all) what gamers want and then use that to chart the direction for their platforms, more often than not to increasing failure. The few companies within the industry that do get it right, thrive and yet the rest of the industry continues to look down on them and demean them for being "old fashioned" and "stuck in the past". It's really quite bewildering.