EA Calls for Open Platform/Single Console for Games

[wraggster]

EA's head of international publishing made some interesting comments on what he'd like to see in the future of gaming. 'We want an open, standard platform which is much easier than having five which are not compatible.' While the rest of his comments imply that he simply meant 'one' platform instead of removing development licenses, it is an interesting concept. This is obviously a move designed to cut their development time and costs. But could this have other implications - like easier homebrew development for consoles?

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/19/1410234

[Duobix]

You may don't know, but EA's 3DO was supposed to be something like the thing EA's head of international publishing ment.

[bah]

There will be as many consoles as are financially viable, and devs have to deal with that.

Its a free market, if company A makes a product, then company/startup B is going to make (or otherwise market as a competitor) company A's product plus * (or at least market it as such).

There are a lot of things that you could argue (and quite possibly be correct) would benefit from standardization/a single body working towards the goal (a simple in context example would be the original xbox vs a pc of equivalent specs), but thats not the way our system works.

If they didn't have the new job of segueing terrorist fear into unjustified wars and all that goes with them, western governments would decry him as a communist. :)

[Johnny Rash]

Console wars will always exist.

If there's no competition, there's no advancement.

[XDelusion]

Consolidation is bad mkay?

[Sonny_Jim]

This stinks of "Please everybody use generic PC hardware as we the publishers no longer like paying through the nose for development licenses and hardware".

Most new consoles are what you could called "Trusted computer platforms" ie If the manufacturer doesn't like you, they can stop the console from running your software. Because of this, publishers like EA pay people like Sony and Nintendo to be able to develop games for their consoles. Seeing as 90% of EA's turnout seems to be Sports Sim yearly updates they probably are getting sick of paying these license fees.

[ab88]

...Seeing as 90% of EA's turnout seems to be Sports Sim yearly updates they probably are getting sick of paying these license fees.

You are right. Maybe for a change they should do, let's say, a QUALITY game every 2-3 years, then they wouldn't be having to pay these fees or waste their time in their ports.

Someone is going to say the sports franchises change from year to year and yada, yada, blah, blah. instead of a "new" (read same) game every year they could roll out a pack or two a year with updated team and player information in between "real new" games.

In short EA sucks for making such rushed games, thus making their statement above sound like a little kid whining.

[goity]

EA just have a fetish for monopolies of all kinds

[RowaN]

Sounds like he's lazy. Its akin to a web developer saying "Its too much hard work making a website for IE, Firefox, Opera, etc... can we just have one browser instead?"

[yaustar]

No, what he/she is saying is "Can't every browser follow the same standard (correctly)". This is no different to the push for the OpenDocument (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument) for word processors or Collada (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLLADA) for graphical data.

They are asking for an Open standard, not for every console to be the same. Think Linux and the thousands of different distros. They are all different but follow a core standard which allows programs to work on virtually all versions of Linux.

RTFA.