Game Consoles - History and Future...How does that Impact the Market Today?

In this episode, Rob and PJ explore the history of consoles. How did some of the technological advances from the 80s and 90s influence the rise of capabilities we see today?

With the increasing convergence in hardware between the XBox and Playstation towards a PC model, where does the market go from here? Is Nintendo the big winner?

Finally, does this convergence play into the current set of layoffs, where skills become more fungible across platforms?

(And yes...a tiny addendum at the end on mobile gaming...)

Transcript

0:00

Ierengaym. com ierengaym. com

PJ: 0:14

All right, everybody. Welcome back to Tricky Bits with Rob and pj. Today we're going to take a both timeless and timely discussion on consoles, game consoles, both their history of where they've come from, their future, and talk a little bit about the state of the game industry today, now, Rob, I remember as a kid a flotilla of hardware that used to exist. There was pong and television ColecoVision. Atari in the US anyway, was the giant lion of the early eighties all the way until the NES hit the scene. In which case that really took the zeitgeist of everything at that moment in time. it seemed that everyone had their own form factor. Everyone had their own format. Everyone had some overlap in games, but a lot of it really was like, okay, you know, we have these bespoke things. And at for a little while until the NES hit the scene, almost very little difference in my mind between a lot of the game hardware manufacturers and then the publishers. And you had some companies like EA that started to break that Activision. And nowadays all of that seems to have collapsed into a couple of different companies. We seem to have Microsoft and Sony nowadays. Any thoughts on how we got from there to here?

Rob: 1:57

it's just the natural progression and I, I think we got here because of the PC and the cost of development and the type of programs we have today. Going back to the mid generation to consoles. On the PlayStation three, I was involved in the hardware of the position three and there was a lot of kickback against Sony for having esoteric hardware. I mean the PS three wasn't that esoteric. It was the same processor as the Xbox 360, but we had the spu. So in total it was more esoteric than a typical pc. As we've talked about before, data design and laying out your data such that the s ps could DMA and use, it was part of making the PS three work, but the general consensus developers hated it, which was one of the reasons why Mark Sony, when he did the PSS four basically made it a pc. And that means PC code, PC tools, everything that you know about a pc, mostly other than the typical system memory, video memory split.'cause the consoles are unified memory. Other than those, the consoles today are a pc. So I think that's how we got here. But going all the way back, all of the devices that you mentioned and funny enough, the AT toy wasn't big in Europe because their PAL support was kind of terrible.

PJ: 3:25

I was curious about that.

Rob: 3:27

and you can get them to output pal, but the colors are weird. I think if you do c camm, it's only black and white. So there's lots and lots of issues with the 2,600, which made not popular in England and in Europe. the 50 hertz, 60 hertz split was a, a big thing too.'cause obviously you've gotta raise the beam and all the, the code was very timed to you. It took three pixels per instruction, something like that in a scan line on the 2,600. But on PAL that's different because the lines are a different size. So the whole game changed because the game was interleaved. All the game logic was interleaved with actually drawing the display. So the type of games you could do were different. And a lot of games wouldn't easily port it. Not as easy as you think it is to take a 60 hertz, 2,600 game and make it 50 hertz on a bigger screen. Just never forget. And, uh, par is higher, is higher resolution And has a different number of lines.

PJ: 4:20

and lower frame

Rob: 4:21

Yeah. And has a different number of lines that are invisible. And that's where you did all the game logic. So overall, the timing was very specific to NTSC. So those games didn't pull, uh, very well. So overall, 2,600 was not popular in England and in Europe. The home computers were very popular as we talked about in origin stories. I had a BBC micro that fed, it was a com 64 was very popular. The com amigo was incredibly popular. Atari really showed up. The ST was very popular. The 800 before it was a little. Popular. It's when it had a real, that one, a real graphic strip so could drive Palt sc the same but differently. So the consoles didn't get popular in England until the Mega Drive, which was called the Genesis here. So the, the, Sega Genesis and the UK was called the Sega Mega Drive. Uh, that was incredibly popular. The Nintendos at the time, the NES super NES were very, popular. The Game Boy was also very popular. Well, back then, all of the early consoles, even in the US too, is every game was bespoke and every game was exclusive. It's this game was a Nintendo game. This game was a Sega game. And then in the background you've got the Amigo and the St, and the PC and the Apple two all kind of having these games that were ported back and forth. So there was always kind of a, a disjoint market. There was the the home computer market, which became the PC market, and there's the bespoke console market.

PJ: 5:57

and in the console market, part of it was ip, but part of it was also capability, right? I mean, I couldn't run Sonic on, let's say the NES or SNES, right? I mean,

Rob: 6:11

The games were made for what the hardware could do. So if you had great scrolling spray hardware, you'd have great scrolling Sprite based games. And the games were very specific. So porting Sonic, even though technically it's possible from a mega drive to a Super Nintendo was for example, is possible, but it wouldn't be the same game. the way the timing works, even those games are still racing the beam down the screen.'cause they're changing the map tiles. As the raster goes down the screen, as soon as you've passed certain point on the screen, you know, everything above it could be changed. So you'll change it for the next frame. So it's still kind of only single buffered data. So it's very hardware based. It's, it's very Rasta based, where the PC never had that. The Amiga did, but didn't have the Sprite hardware power that the consoles had. And back then Sprites were King. Artists knew how to make Sprites knew how to animate them. Could you rotate them, could you scale them all? Things like that were all part of the key hardware so the games were made specifically for that platform. And then obviously the IP came into it where it's like, we now have this great game called Sonic and we're just gonna keep making those games. And today, the fact that Sonic exists on a Nintendo platform is mind blowing.

PJ: 7:20

Sure. Sure.

Rob: 7:21

but so the PC was always in the background, but it couldn't do these games. It couldn't do the fast action Sprite games.'cause the PC's always been V one based. It never had hardware back in the day. It was always software, rendered. It had a few sprites that you could do in direct draw, mid nineties type era.

PJ: 7:36

What's interesting, Rob, is'cause you make a mention that the PSS three, 10 years later is considered esoteric hardware. But is it fair to say that effectively, like in this mid, early to mid nineties or maybe even eighties through nineties, every bit of hardware was esoteric? Like the PC had its limitations, like NES had its thing, Genesis had its thing like each of these things were just

Rob: 7:59

Oh, absolutely. There was nothing consistent about any of these consoles. It was all assembler, it was all interrupt level programming, chasing the beam, generating, interrupt the, change the sprite, do this, blah, blah, blah. It was all very bare metal as you would call it today. Program. There was no operating system involved. It was all fairly bespoke for that particular piece of hardware. And that's what console programming was. You went game programmers on home computers, which were very the Amiga is the exception'cause it's kind of both. You had PC programmers say, which started to make the bigger games. The Adventure games. The games that first were on CD rom, used more memory, had more resources as a whole. That's where the bigger games came from. Then you had the programmers who stuck with the consoles and just hammered out the best things they could over the life of the console. And in some ways the PC models the best way to go because everything you learn, you can continue to build on. Where in consoles, nothing changes for five years. And then everything you knows irrelevant, you've gotta learn everything again. And that step actually took out a lot of companies because as we went from 2D to 3D, a lot of companies that were great at the 2D side, never transitioned to the 3D world. So you have all this dichotomy between the PC and the consoles. And that lasted all the way until the PS two, I would say was the last, the Saturn was incredibly hard to program. It had this like weird 128 people register, which I still don't know what it does, uh, if you either configure all the DMA timings and cycle into leaving and things like that. Um, yeah, I could, I never did figure that thing out. The Saturn was like sega's last attempt, I think it was the last year. It was up against the PlayStation one, and it kind of faded out before the two. And then the Xbox, original Xbox was up against the PlayStation two so when we made the Xbox, we were called insane because we used PC hardware. It was like, this was the peak esoteric of consoles it was understood that consoles were consoles and not PCs. So when we made the Xbox, we were called crazy because we was like, okay, everything's in place to make a game console from PC Hardware. And the Xbox was literally a pc. It had an Nvidia, slightly custom chip functionally, not custom audio was all PC based DSP audio at the time. Direct sound, uh, 3D audio. All that was done in a Nvidia DSP, which is actually a TI think it was A-T-I-D-S-P in the Nvidia chip. that was all done on there. Had a South bridge of North Bridge, had an Intel, supposed to be md, but ultimately was Intel processor. And it was effectively a PC with a slightly different operating system. So it transitioned from being hardware to software, like the hardware didn't matter, it was the services and things that became important. As we transitioned consult online and Xbox Live PSM. And these things showed up of security started to matter. Protection started to matter. Having a store you could protect so the platform could sustain itself, started to matter. Companies like Microsoft were in a much better position to provide things like network stack and. This was kind of the, where the traditional console started to flounder. It was like, okay, we need all of this support. We're gonna do online play. And then Microsoft was already, they're not the best at networking, but they already had the networking stack from the Windows side and they had a lot of software engineers, a lot of software research, and a lot of outright written code to pull from. So as the operating system and the support and everything transitioned to be more like a typical pc, whether it be B, s, D based, Linux based, windows based, doesn't matter. It's the services that you got is what mattered. At that point, the consoles kind of did just become PCs. They was the 360 and the PS three were esoteric, but had customer operating systems which supported them. And then, like I said, the feedback was so brutal against Sony versus the 360, which was also esoteric.'cause it wasn't X 86, but it had six symmetrical cores. It was three basically ppu from the cell, each one with two threads. So you had six hardware threads. You wrote code that was standard multi-threading. It was basically Windows APIs across six threads. And you just wrote standard Windows code. You could take your X 86 code from Windows. We pilot it and it would work. Yes, they did modify Direct X. So you've got lower level access, but Direct X was still there in its PC form. So your PC code would more or less just work around this same time. All the tools started to migrate towards Visual Studio. Sony had their own SSN systems tools for the PSS three, for the PSS four, and that was all integrated into Visual Studio. PS five's no different. Microsoft have always been integrated into Visual Studio that was the, the litmus that set everything else going. People had Visual Studio for pc, they had Visual Studio for Xbox and they could just click a button and recompile for the other platform and it just worked. The development tools on Microsoft side have always been great And the Sony side was kind of all these haddock pieces put together some command line tools. Very good tools. Mind you, you could do very good debugging with the s and debugger. You could. The profiling tools, the GPU breakdown tools were very good, but over time, that's been integrated into Visual Studio. So now it's just expected that you will use Visual Studio, that's kind of the letters towards the pc. Like lots of big games were made on the pc. The engines, the Unreal, the Unity engines got big on the PC and they wanted traction on the consoles. The people using those engines wanted the engine on the consoles, so it kind of just became this PC fest that just kind of happened naturally. There was no intent that it would go this way. It's just literally the market pushed it that way.

PJ: 13:47

so let's roll back the clock a little bit.'cause I think there's a bit we should chat about, uh, the evolution of the graphics card side. And I, I, I am gonna dovetail back to, to consoles for a second because, you know, back in the day when you had the cartridge, you shoved in there, I mean, it obviously was sort of conceptually equivalent to a disc drive and I would load it up on my machine. But there's one game that I really think is really fascinating to talk about, which is starfox, the original starfox on the SNES, which not only was the game, but they also embedded a chip in there so they could do more complex polygonal like 3D rendering, which was kind of a very cool idea, which is like, oh, you know, for this game we are using the hardware inside of this cartridge to expand the capabilities of your machine. And I do think that there's, there's some pivot point that's in there that we start to lead ourselves down this path of what we need to do is like create some new set of cards, which ultimately became the graphics cards that we'd be shoving into our PCs.

Rob: 14:58

so there's a few things there to pick up on the hardware companies. There was loads of hardware companies in the mid nineties. If you look at the like early direct draw saying 4,000, the TSS 4,000, uh, the matrix cards, a TI and VIT didn't really exist at this point in time. This was all 2D days and direct draw was kind of the, the starting point for the 2D engines for Windows. They realized that the, the hardware had all of these hardware blitzers built in,'cause it's how you move in windows around the screen. Like if you want to move a window bl it, you don't have to literally rerender the window in a different position. You can just take the old one and move it over here. And so these video cards started again, memory, basically all that memory was for GDI to use in Windows. It would keep snippets of blitz of windows and it would just bl little 2D rectangles with them with without Alpha to, uh, make this happen. That's why you have accelerated desktops back in the day. And they were very fast and very nice to use. But then someone at Microsoft, Colin McCarthy, his name was Scottish Guy, realized that you could use that BL engine in the graphics card to Blitz Sprites. You could do little rectangle and BL into the screen and you could start to use the same hardware for a different purpose. Some of it was great'cause it had alpha support and pallet support and things like that. And some of it wasn't'cause Windows didn't need it. Over the next couple of generations of video card, this all standardized into, basically these are the features that we support Autumn, people were using this blitz hardware in Doss. And way before Direct Draw showed up, by the way, people figured out, oh, we can poke these registers and we could get this thing to BL rectangles. And so people were using it way before Windows, but then Windows standardized it with direct draw, have an API that you could easily access very low level, not very low overhead. But again, the type of games that were me were changed. So it's that transition to 3D is what took a lot of the companies out.

Track 1: 16:50

So going back to your point about Starfox,, before we go any further, I wanna point out that in the UK it was called Star Wing. So if you look online, there is a lot of information. You have to search for both names, but there's a lot of info out there.. So to figure out how Star Fox works and how it did what it did, we really have to go back to the original consoles with cartridges like the 2,600 and the Kika vision. The cartridge isn't just a storage device. It's not like it's a flashcard and you're reading from it and putting it into rem. The cartridge is just a RO on the buzz of the processor, and it executes directly from the rum. So although the 2,600, for example, only had 256 bytes of ram, you could execute as much code as you wanted. From the room and I say as much code as you wanted, that isn't quite true. The 2,600 had, I believe, 24 pins that went over the cartridge and eight data lines, 13 address lines, and a couple of grounds and a power, and that was it. There was no control lines, no nothing. So those 13 address lines give us eight K of accessible space. But there were cards that had more than eight K. You could get 16 K, 2,600 cartridges. How is that possible with only 13 address lines the 20th century hundred, like I said, had no control lines of the processor going to the cartridge. It was assumed you would always read from the cartridge. So the read right line, which is a pin on the processor, doesn't go to the cartridge. It just goes across the board to the ram and some other devices on the motherboard, but doesn't go to the cartridge. So it was always assumed you would only ever read from the cartridge. So doing small things like looking for a special address and then switching, the bank of a valuable memory isn't something you could trivially do, but in effect, that's really what happened. You would do things like read from a special address instead of what you'd assume to be right to an address to switch a bank. You'd just read from a fixed address, and the hardware on the cartridge would detect that. Address being accessed and different address would be in different Bank of Rome and it would just page in four or even the whole AK at the time. And that's how the bigger cartridges worked. This is kind of important'cause it sets the stage for what we call smarter cartridges, cartridges that did things that weren't intended and. Because it's just the buzz of the processor. That's the interface to the cartridge.. As long as you kept within timing and AB obeyed everything you had to obey, you could do all of these tricks and the base console would be non the wiser later consoles fix some of this problem by having the control lines of the processor go to the cartridge. I don't think it was intended that cartridges would do smart things, but it kind of was to some extent because the read write pin went over there. So obviously it was intended that maybe someone will put ram in a cartridge. So this happened a lot for things like non-volatile storage, and there were some cartridges that had ram in them and it was used as extra memory for the game. It wasn't very common, but it certainly happened like I say, they were very bespoke solutions, but this put a lot of cost into the development of the game, or at least the retail of the game. The development probably didn't cost anymore, but for retail now, you had to have engineers, electrical engineers to make these cartridges design the circuit boards and also the extra cost of getting them made cartridges were not cheap to begin with, and. Having custom electronics in every single cartridge just added to the cost Like I said, it's a whole new team of people who want nothing to do with the game. They're just there to support this custom hardware in the cartridge,, so it, these custom cartridges with extra hardware weren't terribly common until Star Fox, the game you mentioned. Earlier, and this one kind of just knocked it out of the park. They basically put an entire new processor in the cartridge and the processor, funny enough was called Mario, and I believe it stood for mathematical organal rotation in io. Everyone else knew it as the Super fx, and if I recall, it was a 16 bill. Risk style processor, it had something like 32 KA ram, a megabyte of ROM, and had a frame buffer that was right next to it.. And that custom processor would literally render into its local frame buffer. It could do scale sprites, and you could trick it into doing scan lines, which you could be used to do. Flat shaded triangles, which is what it was probably most famous for. But in the later Mario Games, it was also used for, like I said, scaling Sprites and rotating Sprites so the main processor wasn't doing a whole lot in this sense. Everything was done in the cartridge. It was quite an ingenious way, but they really took it to the limit as to what was possible. But they weren't the only one to do it. Everyone always thinks of these super FX chips Capcom had a thing called the CX four, which kind of did the same thing. It just helped out with math and could do sprites and you could trick it into doing flat shaded triangles. So I think what this really pointed to is kind of the end of life for the console. It's if people are having to hide.. Fairly powerful processors and memory and everything else. Basically a whole computer in the cartridge. It's a good sign that your consoles get into the end of its life and it's in fact what happened. Yeah, these were all the latest generation, the late generation Super Nintendo games, and it was soon replaced with its big, more powerful big brother.

PJ: 22:41

Which I think is actually an interesting point because like at the same time, this is happening in the nineties. I mean, you do start to see this influx of 3D or 3D like games that are on the pc. I mean, it starts with Wolfenstein 3D, which I know is not quite 3D, but then you've got Doom, you get Quake that starts to pop up. And that combined with the network connectivity that the PCs had for enabling multiplayer games really seemed like this was a big advantage that the PCs were, were gaining over consoles, which largely had been localized

Rob: 23:20

I mean, we, we had the whole, initially like the, the land politics. People drag a PC to your friend's house and you'd plug it into the same land and you'd play, you'd, you'd play Quake and the hot. So Quake had a software render. John Carmack wrote a, It's fantastic render. It's a classic code in there. Mike, Abrash also helped out, I guess some of the most famous code in there is Ash's articles from Dr. Dobbs Journal back in the day And lots of PC programs learn to program from those classic Mike Abrash articles. At the time, yeah, hardware was becoming more popular in PCs. We talked about this in. About trespasser too, when you had a great software renderer that had features of the hardware couldn't do of like, did you pick the features or did you pick the speed, of the hardware? Most people pick the speed of the hardware. You started to have Glide 3D, FX and all of those show up and very gls, very fast APIs, very minimal feature set, but enough to do quake. So quake was this first 60 hertz, ultra high resolution, violently a filtered kind of filter fest back in the day. If you look back, it's like, oh my eyes, everything's fuzzy and blowy and uh, it's, uh, but it was fast and It worked. It worked really good And then as people started to get ethernet based internet, faster internet, other than that a OL Pac Bell type dialup systems now you'd start to play with your friends over the internet. So a PC solve a lot of the, how do you do a online game with long latency and things like that and make the game fun. So a lot, all of this came from the PC space consoles were still stuck without network connectors. A lot of that core tech, which is what consoles are based around today, came from the pc. A lot of that came because like the consoles were hard to program. And don't forget you couldn't just buy a Nintendo dev kit. It's today, it's remarkably easy to get a PlayStation DEF kit or Xbox DEF kit or a Nintendo DEF kit. None of this exists existed back then. If a university would've called Sega or Nintendo in 1993 and said like, can we get some death kits? They'd have been like, no. It was a very closed market. It's who you knew was how you got your death kit.

PJ: 25:27

The dev kits were not cheap. They were 10,$50,000. They were expensive.

Rob: 25:31

they were ridiculously priced. It was like you and now the same price as a regular piece of hardware have free in some cases so will give'em to you. Microsoft will too. I dunno much about Nintendo, they'll probably give you one too. It's the only way you can take a content is to get kits out there. This all goes back to like the closed market nature of it. It's like these companies wanted the high costs'cause they kept people out. If it was 50 grand for a death and you could afford it, you were guaranteed to make games for that platform. This all played out in the Xbox. We originally talked about not having any sort of license fee for games and the powers that be at the time, ea in particular caused a huge stink. Like it went all the way to Bill because,

PJ: 26:09

didn't they?

Rob: 26:10

They were adamant they? wanted the fee. They, they happily pay the fee, to keep, they didn't want to compete with Jerry Blogs who might have the next best idea. They'd rather buy the idea from Jerry belongs and make it their idea. Then let him compete with them. So the license fee stay and it's still there to this day probably good because they needed the money to pay the bill, so all of this kind of converged at the same time. The PC was leading the way in certain types of gameplay, online multiplayer games in particular, 3D in particular was very big driving force from the pc. The consoles had a different trajectory. They were coming from the single player world, very high like Twitch type, blaming, platformers were still very big. And we had this release cycle and we still have it to this day where consoles are what they are for five years. And in the meantime, the PC was on this continuous improvement where the consoles kind of take this staircase approach where it's like, take a huge jump five years, take a huge jump five years, where the PC's just this continuous onslaught of everything getting better all the

PJ: 27:17

Which creates different dynamics, right? I mean, that's a different market dynamic, which is that yes, I could, I could upgrade to the latest RTX chip every year if I want to at this point in time to be at that bleeding edge. But I also don't know if I wanna drop two, three K on a graphics card every year. And so that creates a very small marketplace

Rob: 27:39

it is, that's small though. When you think there's a billion PCs, it's, there's enough of those people who will support it. And it's just like you buy a new pc, you get last generations hardware, you can buy a 30 90 alpha. Basically, pennies and forties are still expensive, but twenties, you can't even sell'em on eBay. It's, it's like there's a little window where it's good, But you've gotta bear in mind this also affects development more than it affects consumers. If you are making a console game today, if you are making a PSS five game today, there's rumors of a PSS five Pro. Sure. But let's assume you're making a PSS five game. You still have to target the base. PSS five, the specs are known. What you can do is known. You get better performance by being better programmers, naughty dog, insomniacs, all of those people, the gorillas of the world, are very good at knowing like, we can do this. This is the next step we're gonna take. So they look at it, the fact that if we don't optimize the hell out of this system, or this algorithm, or this entire engine, our competitors will and they'll have better games than we do. And that's the drive and the console has always been optimize the hell out of the process, the game, the tools, everything to make the best game you can for the budget. PCs don't have that problem. If I'm making a PC game now, I can say, well, I'm not gonna ship for two years, and in two years this hardware take a guess at what it will be just on a trajectory from two years prior. Hardware be able to do this. So if my game runs like crap right now, it's okay because it won't when it ships and it's a hard line to walk. Plenty of people have walked this plank and fell off and got it completely wrong. Especially a few years back where multi-core processes came out because people were going, oh, we're at three gigahertz and we'll go to 4, 5, 6, 7 gigahertz or just this this linear interpolation of being like, well that didn't happen. Processes went back in speed, but we got more of them. That screwed a lot of people because they were expecting their code, single threaded code to run twice as fast in two years, when in reality it ran half as fast, but you had eight calls. Different way to write code. So predicting it's hard, but you can do it where in a console you don't even attempt. Like people make it PSS five pro games now if it exists, all they know what specs are, they're just making it for that spec,

PJ: 29:56

you're guaranteed about five to seven years of, of length of time of that console being around. that's the other side of this, right? Which is that I have a constancy that I can count on of like, Hey, this is gonna be the standard console specs for half to three quarters of a decade.

Rob: 30:14

Yeah, for sure. And that breed, different type of programmers. You get the programmers who want that continuous evolution who I'll just let the hardware take care of it and you get the programmers. I want to get the most out of this. And so there's still a split between good console programmers and good PC programs. It's much easier than ever to go back and forth. Previously it was next to impossible to go back and forth. The only people who could do it, you had know 68,000 assembler. But then when you got the MIP chips and things like that, you, it was much more difficult to go back and forth'cause there was no seed back then,

PJ: 30:44

Yeah. Yeah.

Rob: 30:45

at least in the console space. Knowing the hardware was like, I'm a Sega programmer and I can make that thing dance, but I can't do shit on the Nintendo. I'd have to take two years to learn. By which point it'll be irrelevant.'cause the next one will be out. So the good console program is get in from day one and they stick with that a piece of hardware and they keep going from there, PCs, this continuous ramp. But now we're seeing a different type of approach for consoles even because the PSS five is very much an evolution of the PSS four plays, PSS four games flawlessly. They're not emulated, they just run. And so it's backwards compatible. It's the same a MD processes. It's the same A MD GPUs, it's the same operating system. It's kind of the PC model In a more staggered approach, Xbox is the same. an Xbox today has the two As the X and the S, which are very different performance beasts. And you have to write games for both. They're kind of all backwards compatible with the Xbox One. Same model. Why do we have consoles,

PJ: 31:50

today? Why is it effectively Sony and Microsoft at this point in time?

Rob: 31:54

this Nintendo and I think Nintendo is the ultimate winner here.'cause they're the ones who have the old console mentality and they have the games that go with it. They have these great games that are fun to play. Sony and Microsoft are both going down the PC path. Microsoft would love the

PJ: 32:08

Sure.

Rob: 32:08

be a PC in your

PJ: 32:09

It's the media PC idea that they always had.

Rob: 32:12

Always had this idea of like, the Xbox is just a PC in your living room. And over time it's becoming more and more pclike. Today you can literally run Windows code on an Xbox and it will compile. You have a, you create a window, you have a message pump, and it's like the main loop of a Xbox app is a Windows app. So it all looks very Windows like. And then you factor in that Microsoft don't have any exclusives. Not many, not, not like Sony do. So what is the future? Let's look at the future of consults. We've talked just of past of consults, how we got here, but what's the future? Is there any point in keep making two platforms? Why don't Sony and Microsoft just get together and make, this is the console that we're gonna make and we're all gonna make games for you. Is that just the piece thing in your living room or is it the 3D model where there's a spec and anyone can make hardware to that spec and add bits and remove bits, but you can't break the base spec. That's literally what three DO did. Panasonic made the only three Ds we had, but there were some others that were out there, which are far rarer than the Panasonic ones. Would that help? It would get Microsoft to where they want. I don't think Microsoft want to make hardware. They, they do it because they have to. I think Sony also potentially like, eh, there's not much in it. We're basically making PCs. I can envision a world where there's only a box you put under your tv. It's, it's just the game console. And it's literally same as it is today. It's a PC in a box, and the only difference between the PlayStation five and the Xbox Series X is the operator system. the software stack is what's different.

PJ: 33:46

so in the previous generation, I remember you telling this me this a number of times. I think it was the. The Xbox One and the PSS four. The only difference was basically The speed of ram. are we saying that now in the very latest generation?

Rob: 34:01

That's the, Same Now speeds are different.

PJ: 34:04

This, okay, so the,

Rob: 34:06

RAM speeds

PJ: 34:06

is the same.

Rob: 34:07

Yeah. It's basically, it's a, it's a multi, it's an A-M-D-A-P-U with unified memory. The only significant difference between the two is the software stack and how you write games for it. You could just meet in the middle. They are different enough that some things work on one and not on the other. But they both have ray tracing. They both have the same generation GPUs, so they both have the same features. How those features are exposed is slightly different across the two

PJ: 34:33

well, this is interesting because is there an argument to be made that Microsoft is incentivized to basically create a unified stack between like it's Windows, PC machines and Xbox, but Sony is incentivized for performance reasons. And so, you use a BSD kernel. So unless effectively we get. You know, wine on BSD as being the ultimate goal of what Windows ends up to be. Like, is this actually like the, the breakpoint between the two? Like they're incentivized in different ways to say like, Hey, windows wants this as a, something unified. Sony wants still to be ahead of the game in terms of, you know, pure performance. Is that enough of a differentiation or is that, am I making shit up?

Rob: 35:22

I think you're making shit up. Uh, it's, it's, uh, yes, there's difference between the platforms, but it's nothing that couldn't be overcome. I think Microsoft just want the cohesion with Windows and Xbox because it's easier. It's like, windows is fine, let's just make Xbox the same. Could it be better? Yes. Which is what the PlayStation does, but how much do developers really want it? And I'd say to some extent they do want it because all the exclusive games they want PlayStation, everything else on Xbox is mostly just unreal engine or back ports from the PlayStation. This brings us to another interesting point of now it's not just these ultra exclusives you've now got, big cost platform games, that's your own by Microsoft. Microsoft just bought Activision Blizzard and now they have Call of Duty, which they have to support for PlayStation.

PJ: 36:14

They do. Yeah.

Rob: 36:16

they make a reasonable effort or do they sabotage their cash cow to make it worse on PlayStation when people are expecting it to be on par or better on PlayStation?'cause most games are. So how does that all fit in? How does it fit? In The same for Sony. Sony by studios and they tend not to continue making Xbox games, uh, Microsoft by studios. And they do continue making PlayStation games. So there is this muddling of the water if you wish, because now, you don't even have any secrets. You can't say, well, Microsoft don't know what we're doing.'cause they have their, they have your SDK and they have your future. They have at least as much information as you're given to any other developer that's not ultra first party. And they have to be involved in new release cycles. If they're gonna keep making call of duty for the PSS six, then Microsoft need a PSS six before it's out. How does that fit into the dynamic of the market of we're also competing with you again, I, I don't see, I see this being a blip in time. I don't see the current status quo being sustainable.'cause there's all these questions that need to get answered into the future At some point, it's like this, just hardware

PJ: 37:21

I mean this, this blip in time that we have, I mean, we're, we're effectively have entered in the hardware space into a duopoly. Yes. Nintendo still exists.

Rob: 37:32

Got more successful than ever. Switch, I believe, is like the second best selling console they ever made or something like that. The third best selling consult ever.

PJ: 37:43

Wow.

Rob: 37:43

Position two is first with 155 million greater than 155 million. The Nintendo dss, the 154 million,

PJ: 37:53

Hmm.

Rob: 37:54

and the switch is 132 million, which is more than the PlayStation three at 87 million. It's more than the PlayStation four at 117 million.

PJ: 38:07

Hmm.

Rob: 38:08

It is more than a PlayStation five at 50 million. So it's a very, very popular, console,

PJ: 38:16

Yeah. Well that blows my duopoly theory out of the water.

Rob: 38:19

but it's a handheld, it's a different thing. People can connect it to a tv, but it's not meant to compete with the others. It's in a different world. it has some engine support from the other engines, but not as much. And again, it's very exclusive. They've got lots of really cool first party games that are on the switch and will stay on the switch. Nintendo is very open to like, I've got a quirky game I want to play. It's super fun to play. It's super pretty, very much like Flower was on the PS three, like that game company. Remember that game? It's beautiful games, super artistically weird. Sony ultimately bought them. And uh, but Nintendo is very open to those sort of games where today, if you make an indie game, it's very hard to find them anywhere on the Xbox or the PlayStation store because the big companies pay to get listed and that's how it works. So there's no fair ranking chart store, for example, where it's like, oh, these are the best indie games right now. They're very hard to find. Unless you know it exists, you're not gonna stumble on it. Nintendo is far more open to these games, and I think that helps them. I think it gives them that it's still an environment where you can experiment. Where I think the big consoles have lost that. It's basically first person shooters and exclusives, a massive budget games outside of that very little experimentation.

PJ: 39:37

and a lot of those, a lot of those exclusives are first person shooters.

Rob: 39:41

It's all the same. Uh, but yeah, there's not much experimenting. You, if you show up with, even as a registered, licensed developer, you're not doing it in the game. You're a full first party developer. If you make a quirky game, it's not accepted very well.

PJ: 39:55

It's interesting because like we're, the way we're talking about this, especially with Microsoft and Sony, these things are converging onto a pc. I mean, it's all become software. There's very little hardware bits that are unique that I'm aware of. Maybe if the, if they re resurrect basically, or do more on the PlayStation VR side of things, that could be something interesting.

Rob: 40:23

There's no reason Xbox could to make VR hardware either. They just don't want to. I think we are converging on a PC architecture'cause developers want that. They wanna be able to just easily pull the code. They don't wanna spend money moving this stuff around. They wanna know it works. They want similar specs. Like if you was to make another consult today, you'd have to make it similar spec for all of these reasons,

PJ: 40:46

well part of my point is you'd either have to make it as similar specs and my response to that is why bother just run it on one of these things? Or you would need to have a significantly large enough Gotcha. A hook to have different hardware to say, Hey, this is a different type of game you can play on these things now. Where it's like radically like shifted over. And that's kind of why I bring up the VR side of things, because at this moment, I mean, it's all software really.

Rob: 41:21

Yeah. And it's software stacks everywhere. Like third party libraries are the same on both people use, library X for audio, and they expect it to be on both platforms. They use standard network stacks. They expect it to be on both platforms. things like Sony had all of this hype early on about how fast they can load and the ultra streaming type technology, but that's really just like the direct X 12 loading system that PC's already had. But software stacks across the board are being unified into this is what we use for audio. This is what the engine we use, this is, what we use for physics. And there's a few options in each of these, but it's mostly. A handful of things. So for developers it's like I know how to use havoc so I can go to this company and do havoc. I'm very good at doing W Wise Audio so I can go over here and do W Wise audio. It's like specialization in the program as it's happening and happened for years. And that allows people the flexibility to move around the industry that's also in important, that fits in the whole developer story. And because me as a programmer would prefer the old days or even the switch, J as an accountant doesn't see it

PJ: 42:30

Sure. the standardization, as you say, makes programmers more fungible now across these different platforms. But to what we've been saying now, how, these platforms aren't that different. Like maybe there's a bit of software stack, a few APIs that are bespoke between Sony Xbox, but if everyone's using Unreal Engine or the Havoc physics engine. Using a standard network stack using Lua, like all this stuff really starts to look the same and then it's all about, it's not even like, Hey, I want to port this game over. It's just like, you know what? I'm gonna retarget, I'm gonna hit compile and let the compiler effectively like do all the heavy work for me.

Rob: 43:10

Yeah. I mean it's not even doing any heavy work'cause it's exactly same code would run on both of the same processor with the same feature sets. The big difference is the interface to the audio and the APIs for graphics and. A lot of cross platform studios, even if they're not using on Unreal or something like that, will just abstract that away. They make their own rendering, API, which sits on top of, GL X, whatever it's called, on a PlayStation and direct X 12 on Xbox. There aren't that many features that aren't exposed on one platform that are exposed on another. So that API now you just write your code to that API and even be, if you wanna port it to a third platform, you just re-implement that API, and that's all you have to do As far as the engine's concerned. The thread model's the same. The number of core you have to split those threads across is the same. It's all, I won't say easy, but it's easier than it's ever been.

PJ: 44:02

Well, what's fascinating is if I, from this conversation, if I start to squint my eyes a bit, then the difference between the PlayStation, the Xbox at a PC like all that difference starts to fade away. It just, it becomes a little bit in the noise. Using that as a, a jumping off point is that any aspect of the motivation for some of the layoffs that we're seeing right now, which is that if it's the same to program each of these things, I don't need as many bespoke programmers on any of these things. I can actually just utilize the same code, retarget each of these things really easily, and therefore there's less need for as many programmers or people at these game companies. Do you think that's playing into that at all, or you think that's entirely separate?

Rob: 44:50

I think if you're a junior programmer or a very seasoned programmer, it's a different argument. Obviously the cost factors and those two are very different too. Uh, but if, if you are a seasoned PSS five programmer, then you're probably staying where you are for now, and you'll probably be the one who gets access to it next time around. If you're a junior programmer just doing junior type game developer jobs, then I think there is a very high commonality between the two platforms and when companies get acquired, some of these jobs are not needed. I'd very much like to see the Microsoft today announced they were laying 1900 people off. After the Activision Blizzard acquisition and it seems to be all Activision Blizzard people worldwide. How much of that is just due to overlap with what Microsoft already provides? Uh, HR type jobs and things like that, which now are technically not leading'cause Microsoft will just absorb the people. how many middle managers, just general reorging of moving this org chart into this org chart, how many of those are from that? And how many of those are from like we don't actually lead you anymore. I can't say Microsoft bringing the Call of Duty team inside and putting it under Microsoft Game Studios, for example. I think it'll be ran as a completely separate entity. Everybody, I assume would stay as they are pretty much.'cause I assume they're all needed. Otherwise Activision would've got rid of them. So I'd like to see the breakdown of those jobs as to how it affects devs, senior devs, art animators, designers, and then management as a whole. Activision was a fairly inefficient company, so I could see them having a lot of overhead in management and I can see a lot of the people in this layoff being in that realm just due to the nature of integrating the two companies. Happens all the time with airlines

PJ: 46:35

Any, acquisition? It's the same story.

Rob: 46:38

Yeah, we're buying you for the product and the product needs these staff. So those staff are probably. On the safer side of the acquisition than people who are, have identical jobs in the parent organization.

PJ: 46:52

I've been thinking a lot about this one and, acquisitions across the board. This is true of every industry. There's gonna be overlap. You often see this kind of set of layoffs that will occur because of the, exactly, the overlap you're talking about, or the shutting down product lines, et cetera, et cetera. I do think there's also this boom and bust cycle that we've seen in games before, or media in general. Like once you're done with a project, a whole bunch of people get laid off and they go onto the next project. In this particular case, I think the lion's share of this is the acquisition. The thing that gave me a bit of pause is that they only closed it I think three months ago. I'll double check on that date just to make sure I'm not wrong. But it was fairly recent when they closed it. And like, I usually think of this kind of like layoff period as happening closer to six months rather than three because the amount of time you need to integrate plus those three months were taking place over the holidays, which, you know, stuff really slows down. I do have this suspicion that can never be proven that there are taking advantage of the layoff cycle that is currently in play right now to effectively make it part of the noise. There's a, an old saying from Machiavelli, which is commit all of your sins at once. So if they happen less often, they'll be more easily forgotten. And, you know, we're two weeks ba or no, we're three weeks now into January, like the last two weeks we've seen massive layoffs from Google, Twitch. Discord Riot at this point in time also announced a bunch of layoffs and so I don't know to what extent Microsoft had planned this already or is taking advantage of this and sped up their timelines effectively to try and make it a part of the noise of the story that's already in play.

Rob: 48:45

Yeah, I have no insight into that. So I don't know. We'll have to wait and see what happens. and is it part of the boom and bus cycle of games? Maybe we are kind of over the peak of the middle of the current generation of consoles, so it's people know what they're making for the rest of this console generation type thing. It happens periodically with the PC lifecycles and with the console lifecycles. I do think it's better now than it ever has been because it used to be hire a bunch of people, finish a game, fire them. Now a lot of those jobs tend to be done by contractors who want to be contractors, and let's draw a very definite, definite line here. There are people who are contractors who are forced to be contractors and don't want to be contractors and should be full-time employees. That's a whole nother employment argument to have. But there are plenty of people out there, myself included, who would happily do contract work for any of these game companies on a short, long, medium term basis. Doesn't matter. Like you want us for three months, we'll come work for you for three months. You want us to finish this specific feature, we'll finish that specific feature, And we're very good at it. So they're all plenty of people like us out there who do this. Small houses, the huge houses that subcontract out to China. So that fixes some other boom and bust because contractors are expected, like, I have a three month contract, I'll be gone in three months, six months, a year, whatever that number is. And it's, and it's known upfront. It's not like I got hired and now I'm scrambling to keep my job.'cause we know layoffs are coming, but who is it gonna be? It's like, is it me because I'm the newest or is it not me? Because I'm really good at what I do. And it's all that depends on the company, what department you're in and things like that. It's not an easy thing to do, but it has mellowed out quite a lot. I know a lot of the Sony first party companies don't really hire fire

PJ: 50:36

Yeah.

Rob: 50:37

a whim anymore.

PJ: 50:38

I,

Rob: 50:39

It's this quite a bit difficult to hire people. With all the training and all the HR process, there's quite a cost to hire people and firing them three months later is just a waste of that money. So I think companies have learned this too, and. It's not easy on the management side to hire and fire at will. If they have to, they will, but it is an expense to them. So if they can use contractors or hire you as a part-time, temporary basis, even if you're technically an employee, it's a different employment system, different set of rules. I think that fixed a visible boom bust cycle of games. It used to be horrible and there's more to do, don't get me wrong.

PJ: 51:21

I, I find it fascinating because there's a, there's an underlying argument here that if you look at what has happened in the game space, especially, there's been incredible consolidation of smaller studios into larger ones. And so there's an aspect to what you're saying that because the bureaucracies have gotten so large at these large companies, like that actually acts as a leavening force against these boom and bust cycles.'cause it's harder to hire and fire people it's fascinating because, one of the natural results we have right now is we have very few independent game studios that are out there. You effectively have like ea as a giant third party studio. But I remember, you know, years ago when EA wasn't as big, you had Activision, you had Blizzard, you had THQ, these were all separate companies. Now we've seen incredible consolidation across the board. For all of these things. And it's fascinating because I, it's not a, a perspective I ever thought about before, that the size of these effectively acts as this force against the, the boom and bust.

Rob: 52:32

It absolutely does. and I mean, I've been on hiring panels where it's like it's, we'll hire this guy over, this guy just because he's probably gonna stick around and this guy may not stick around. And it's not even you. It's not even them firing you, it's you leaving. If you, they're a month and you leave, they'd rather hire the guy who they know stick around for 12 months, even if it's not quite as good, because there's a significant cost to hiring people.

PJ: 52:55

Fascinating.

Rob: 52:55

So it's also coming back to the layoffs, there's also now a potential gluttony of programmers in the market. How does that affect things? Are they getting rehired at similar positions? Is there enough jobs around? Are there studios that are expanding, making new product lines? It's like everything's so carefully planned now. Nothing happens by

PJ: 53:17

Right, Right, I've seen some stuff in our, my LinkedIn feed about some game companies that are hiring. But off the top of my head, I, I can't think of them as being major names at this point in time.

Rob: 53:30

That's the point. There's lots of junior, lots of games now are made by junior programmers doing junior type level jobs. Higher ups, senior programmers make tools and systems that get used and then the gameplay elements are done by lots of junior guys. I think these layoffs also restructure in some ways how teams are formed of like, Hey, we, we could do more with junior or less with junior. We need more senior programmers, which is more cost. I think this whole thing is just one big machine and then ultimately it'll wind back and the structure of the industry will change because of it. It's happened over and over to get us to this point. And I, again, you can say, well, this is happening, so we are gonna keep doing this. But plenty of people in games have been burned by that long cycle prediction. And I think everything in games should be taken as macro scale blip in time. This will have a dramatic effect on this and it will ramp down real quick. And like I said, it's like years ago you wanted predicted the number of contractors in games or movers and special effects to, contract individuals. Contract companies, and. It happens because the boom and bustle reflects badly on companies. So movers have been through this, special effects have been through this, games have done the same thing. And It is just what it is. It's the nature of producing content to get something out.

PJ: 54:45

You do,

Rob: 54:46

It's very reflects very badly to hire them and then just fire them at the end.'cause we're done with you. We don't need you for the next project yet.

PJ: 54:51

I wonder if what we're waiting for or what the market needs effectively is some radical amount of innovation to shift things up again. Are we gonna see innovation in game content from smaller studios that becomes a new zeitgeist where it's like, everyone wants to play this game and it came out of a no-name studio in the Midwest. Is there something we need to do in terms of hardware to shift it up, to create some kind of innovation?

Rob: 55:17

I think Steam is the play, the place here, like I said, it's, you can't really make a quirky game for Xbox or PlayStation. You,

PJ: 55:24

Sure.

Rob: 55:25

can, but getting that game out in the, in-channel marketing, you can go and broadcast into the world outside of the stores for sure. And get it known and get it played. Finding it is the the hard part. I think Steam plays a big role here. But then if we have all the same apps and we have all the same games from all the same companies. Why do we need to make two versions or three versions or four versions of that game? Why don't we just all agree that the 3D model was horrible at the time and today it kind of makes sense. Just like here's a spec, you have to make this spec hardware with these speed memories and things like that. And it used to be a problem that games wouldn't work. You made your memory faster. Game wouldn't work.'cause now timings are off, but all games now are made to a cross platform and B, be scalable because of the PC side. So if you just made a base spec, if you said like PSS five hardware spec, that's what you make. You don't run Windows, you don't run this, you run game OSS from somebody. Maybe everyone works on it together. Maybe it's open source.

PJ: 56:27

Sure.

Rob: 56:28

That's game oss that's effectively steam. To be fair. Then that's the game os and that's what you run. And it's a nice launcher. It's got all your save games, got all your leaderboard stuff, all the bullshit of Xbox Games won't play with PlayStation unless you're big like Fortnite. Magically works on both. Lots of other games magically work on both. But if me and you made a game, it wouldn't work on both. It's, it's a bit of a pain in the ass to do that. And I think getting rid of both and having one, I have no idea how it would work. I'm just speculating that it's not hard to see.

PJ: 56:59

uh, I think, I think you're, you're trying to take the hardware approach here and you're gonna hate me for what I'm about to say now. I think the platform does exist across these things. I just think it's, it's the software stacks of HTML five. An unreal engine is effectively like the, the stack that these things ha are converging onto

Rob: 57:20

The, what happens to all the exclusives? what happens to all of Sony's first party teams, which is basically what makes the PlayStation. The PlayStation, you eliminated all of them by saying use the Unreal engine. You also eliminated a whole bunch of really small programmers who program better than the Unreal engine.

PJ: 57:38

oh I'm not trying to get rid of these folks, just to be sure. I'm just saying that. If effectively, like the hardware converges every studio effectively wants to run everything everywhere else. You effectively look at convergence on that software stack as well. So whether it's not, it's like Unreal or something else, I don't know. But what I mean to say is that, you are already seeing like a lot of conversions is happening just because you're using the game engines, whether it's Unreal or Unity or Cocos 2D or whatever as effectively that substrate that then runs everywhere else.

Rob: 58:10

Yeah, but no good games do it. There are no good unreal games. They're all bloated, slow, chunky things. Fortnight's the only kind of example, and that's done in house most unreal games are you can look at it and go, that's Unreal game. If you factor in that all of Sony have all their first party teams and they do share code, but they don't share an engine, so they all have their own way of doing things and they all, they'll learn like, this is a really cool way to do this trick and it works well with this hardware. Share that with. Insomnia, like a naughty dog or naughty dog. Share it with Gorilla and Sucker Punch and whoever else is out there. So they all have access to this really cool way of doing things, but they have to do it themselves, which is, again, it's a very different approach to a, a shared engine where it's all worked for you. When you get what you get, this is, there's a little stubs of code that all kind of work or don't work together. You have to integrate it into your engine. So it's a, it's a tool set rather than a, complete engine.

PJ: 59:06

a and this goes back to my claim, that what we need actually is innovation and games to drive better technology so that we're not all under the tyranny of first person shooters. Because if we're all under the tyranny of first person shooters, we're gonna end up like with the same software stacks everywhere.

Rob: 59:23

and I, this comes again back to Sony exclusives. There aren't many first person shooters

PJ: 59:30

Hmm.

Rob: 59:30

and they have very, very games. You have like, uh, gorillas Horizon Dawn versus Insomnia Lan or Spider-Man and whatever naughty dogs working on won't be a first person shooter. It might have shooting aspects, but it won't be a first person shooter. In fact, none of those games are actually first person. They're all third person. So there is definitely like a cultural difference between Xbox and PlayStation. Um, Nintendo too. They fit more, I think on the PlayStation side. Xbox is basically, we'll take it if we can get it. And that's why they ended up with all the first person shooters'cause they came from the pc. Sony is definitely on the other side. So having a console that was just for both may not work. it could happen, but I don't think it will happen. I think we'll stick with two identical pieces of hardware with two different software stacks that you have to support. I think it's the status quo right now is what we have, at least for the next generation. They're both gonna make a next generation, but all of these business things of like, how does this fit in with Microsoft? Have an access to a PS six, are they gonna change the ps, make the Xbox better? So it's just different or they just stay the same because it makes the porting job easier. And they're technically a porting platform at this point. It's not a lead platform. So I don't know, it could go any number of ways, but I don't see any fundamental change right now into how consoles are gonna be for the next decade. Other than potentially just going away.

PJ: 1:00:55

That's maybe is the question, like if, if we've effectively converged on a PC model at that point in time, whether or not we have common hardware or not. Perhaps this all goes to the particular ip, the cultures, the types of games that these companies want to create that effectively shifts them from being any sort of hardware companies to simply being software publishers.

Rob: 1:01:18

Yeah, so we'll have to see what happens. Again, it's a long-term prediction. I think the next generation of consoles will happen as normal after that. We're gonna start seeing some certain convergences as to how this works. But I do think we probably have one more generation, which puts us about a decade out.'cause there's, there's three, four years left of this generation, plus the next generation I think. Yeah, within mid 2030s consoles will look very different to what they are today

PJ: 1:01:47

So they'll either, they'll look very different or they'll look more the same than ever before. Right?

Rob: 1:01:53

or both. And people might say, well that's a long prediction. Like tell, of course they'll look different in 10 years. Is that really is a big decision? I think it is because 10 years ago they looked exactly like they looked down

PJ: 1:02:06

Hold on folks. There's something we didn't get to and we want to touch on it very briefly.

Rob: 1:02:11

There's one thing that we've not talked about this entire podcast, which is huge here, and that is mobile.

PJ: 1:02:16

Yes, that is true. we we did skip that.

Rob: 1:02:19

If I was, gonna make a quirky game, I would make it for iOS, probably get it on Apple tv and it's, there's a whole nother play here. Of course. It's why Apple never made a game console. And do they care? They all technically the biggest gaming platform in the world, and they have great hardware. So they take that new iPhone ship and pull it in an Apple tv, that's PlayStation power right there. So they can make these games, whether they're just expecting it to organically happen over time, which maybe it will, maybe if they, in five years when Apple TV's a way more powerful can be on them. But then PCs will be way more powerful too. So there's always this generational gap, but at some point, does it matter that we're still in that building phase right now of like, if you make a 2D game on Windows today, does it matter what video card you have? Does it matter if it's five years old? Because it's still plenty fast enough to do exactly what you want to do and it's only when you get into the really high end volumetrics and ultra. Complex compute shaders that you need. The high-end GPUs, they're plenty. The games you can make without that. And there are a lot of games on iOS and Apple TV and they use game controllers. They use Xbox or PlayStation game controllers. Which, which I think that's funny'cause I, I think, that, is that an admission that Apple can't make a

PJ: 1:03:38

so I,

Rob: 1:03:40

Like you think Apple could make a game controller? They could definitely design one. No doubt about it. Is it the fact they say use an Xbox or a PlayStation controller? Your choice, whichever you prefer. Is that just saying like, we can't do any better? These things are almost perfect for playing games.

PJ: 1:03:53

That was not the way I was gonna take it. I think, what they're effectively signaling to the market right now is we have no real intention to want the Apple TV to be a, game console. I think that they could put up more powerful chip in there, and if they still didn't make their own controller, they're still signaling that to the market. My guess is that they, even if they made, you know, the exact same controller with the exact same buttons as Xbox, PlayStation, Logitech, pick one, doesn't matter. Like that would actually be the signal to say, actually now we care about games. On your iOS device or on the Apple tv? I think it's actually more of a business thing rather than a product thing to

Rob: 1:04:39

don't agree. I'm the exact, I'm the exact opposite. I think they're just like, these controllers are great. It's like we are not gonna make one better use. The one you're most familiar with, if you play Xbox games and you want to play games on Apple tv, use your Xbox controller. It's comforting, it's familiar. It's ease of entry to play games on the, on the iOS, it's one less thing to buy, which is surprisingly from Apple. That is,

PJ: 1:05:03

so what's fascinating with that though, it, and this is, this is why I still will, lock into the business side of it

Rob: 1:05:11

Apple don't do games and they'd get slammed if they made a controller. Don't forget, half the world hates one of the controllers.

PJ: 1:05:17

no, no, totally. But my point is that, if it's like, go use your Xbox or PlayStation controller, it makes a presumption that you already have an Xbox or a PlayStation. So to me it, it shrinks that Venn diagram down to, you have an Apple TV and you have one of those consoles.

Rob: 1:05:34

Yeah, but it's not.'cause you can just go buy an Xbox controller for 40 bucks. Apple would make a controller and it would be more than 40 bucks. The remote control is more than 40 bucks. So the controller would definitely be PlayStation five controllers are 80 bucks, they're getting inexpensive. Uh, but, and then it's, I think it's like just buy an existing controller. If you're serious about playing games on your Apple tv, I think we could do a whole nother podcast on gaming, on iOS and mobile,

PJ: 1:06:02

I think there's a general podcast we should have on mobile gaming. So I do think that we have a lot of very rich material there that we will do in an upcoming podcast. So look forward folks to a future episode where we get into the rise of mobile gaming.