Games consoles don't release OS updates which delete a chunk of old APIs and break your game -- once you've released for a console, you can generally assume the game will work on that console forever.
Consoles give 6-8 years of guaranteed compatibility for a single console life cycle, and often extend that compatibility for another 6-8 years for the next version of the console. Is there any game that does not run on the console hardware that was current at the time the game was shipped that now doesn't because of OS updates?
API works around just fine like I said. I cannot recall any recent (in the past 10 years) AAA games, which don't run on the consoles. PC exclusives have not been setting graphcis bar for a long while.
Games, and especially console games targeting immutable hardware, are a different world. On a console you control the environment 100% and it simply doesn't matter what you do behind the scenes as long if it works.
Up until recently, consoles have been a bit of a weird case, since "game" in that context usually meant something more like "game plus a baked-in operating system communicating directly with the hardware". The Xbox360 and PS3 were among the first major systems (outside of the PC realm) to run games on top of an existing operating system. Even somewhat-recent consoles that ran proper operating systems (original Xbox, Wii, PS2, Gamecube IIRC) treated them more like really complicated firmware/bootloaders; execution would be transferred to the game itself even as late as the Wii (where each game would implement certain things like the Wii home-button menu individually).
In such cases, most console games were thus mostly protected from software updates on the consoles themselves, but this also made it much harder for developers to patch their games after release (they'd basically have to rerelease or otherwise introduce fixed copies of the game alongside broken ones). On the plus side, it meant that the only time one would likely have to learn a new programming method/framework/etc. was when programming for a new platform.
> API works around just fine like I said. I cannot recall any recent (in the past 10 years) AAA games, which don't run on the consoles.
But they all run with reduced settings, and their non console versions offer higher quality on better hardware (if developers of course took care of taking advantage of that and make it all configurable).
So I'm really not sure how API can change the simple fact that current day consoles are underpowered in comparison with modern high end PC hardware.
Every game I've shipped has been far more stable than the majority of applications I use on a daily basis today. Most of those codebases where then used in other titles, aside from the very game-specific parts.
Sony/Nintendo etc require that your game runs for 1-3 days without a crash, on a platform without virtual memory, before they'll put it on a disc that cannot be patched (well, until this-gen of consoles. Now it's just expensive to patch).
Quite a bit different from platforms such as iOS where developers get upset that Apple take five days to approve updates for for free (fail a Sony submission and you'll be paying $$$$$)
Consoles have always been a special case, though. For one thing, the entire API is usually under NDA, so a different graphics system is the least of your problems.
Give it one, three, five, ten or fifteen years. When will these proprietary binaries stop working?
I look forward (probably in vain) to the day when game developers want their games to be playable by anyone on any system, any time, even long after release. Played by everyone. I mean, who wouldn't want his work to be loved by everyone and forever? Why?
Because dealing with many APIs is an extra effort and proprietary APIs make games harder to port to other platforms. Of course those who have unlimited resources are free to write games even in assembly for each platform, but most don't have such resources.
> And that convenience derives in large part from the monoculture
Convenience of users has nothing to do with monoculture. It has something to do with form factor and design of hardware and software interfaces. Monoculture is just a sick method to lock developers into one platform. Convenience of developers on the other hand should not be based on poor competition. That's a dangerous convenience which leads to stagnation.
> Low-overhead bare metal programming is what enables the relatively long life of most consoles compared to PC gaming
Which is a double sided issue. Longer update cycle makes development simpler but it also limits creativity by artificial technical limits. The update cycle of consoles can be reasonably more frequent.
First off, you can’t OSS consoles. The manufacturers require an NDA and arpproval to gain access to the hardware and SDKs. This costs real money.
Second, every console and to a lesser degree mobile are constantly changing their SDKs and that requires a lot of testing to ensure that your engine works across a huge permutation of platforms. Throw in the need to support an LTS version of your engine and it balloons in cost.
FOSS folks make this a bigger issue than it really is, game studios make a pluggable API on their engine and call it a day, move on into everything else that matters in actually delivering a game.
Well, there's the case for other platforms than PC.
Also, maybe if you are a major studio who will with certainty release your game within 18 months, perhaps you should. But if you invest heavily and lock yourself to a specific SDK of a single vendor, you better hope the SDK survives and remains relevant.
reply