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On Nintendo

2 Comments Posted by Parallax Abstraction on April 30, 2013

I’m a Nintendo fan. Now, don’t read that as me saying I’m a Nintendo fanboy. I like to think I’m not a fanboy of anything, though I proudly proclaim to be an anti-fanboy towards certain things. Like many, a lot of my gaming history and literacy was formed on Nintendo platforms. I didn’t start gaming on the NES but I owned one and loved it to death, as I did the Super Nintendo. Both of these systems are the subject of many a Retro Flashback. I skipped the N64, got back in on the GameCube which I quite liked and own a Wii and a Wii U which I also really enjoy. The company’s history is varied and fascinating, having began over 100 years ago as a playing card manufacturer before evolving into the household gaming name they are today. They have brought a ton of innovation to the industry and take risks where others fear to tread. It’s safe to say without hyperbole that a lot of what the game industry has evolved into today can be traced back and credited to Nintendo.

The last couple of years, all has not been rosy however. After attaining stratospheric levels of success with the Wii and the DS–the latter of which is the best selling dedicated gaming system of all time–they’ve been on a pretty rocky path. They just recently reported their first yearly loss ever (remember, they’re 100+ years old), their stock has dropped substantially (though they are still one of Japan’s biggest companies), 3DS sales have picked up nicely after a very poor launch but are below expectations and the Wii U is doing very badly at the moment. More than a few in the press and in the “professional” analyst field have been decrying the company’s failures, saying Nintendo doesn’t know how to compete in the modern games industry, that they can’t sustain a hardware business and just need to start making games for already oversaturated and teetering mobile platforms. This culminated in last week’s announcement that they are not going to be holding a press conference at E3, instead holding media specific events and running a number of their Nintendo Direct streams, most of which are aimed at core fans. Indeed, many say the end is nigh for this gaming juggernaut.

Certainly, their challenges are many but a lot of this can be tied into the press needing something to write about in the void between now and E3 and their insistence that there always be someone to hate. It used to be Sony. They certainly provided a lot of fodder for that during the early years of the PlayStation 3 but with that company seemingly firing on all cylinders these days, Nintendo has come under the hateful gaze of the “enthusiast” press. There’s certainly a lot of valid criticism and many lessons that Nintendo has yet to learn. However, I do think a lot of this sentiment–which has gotten downright vitriolic at times–is uninformed and misplaced.

There are many reasons for that and I’m going to outline them here, just to give you readers some perspective when you’re reading all the doom and gloom on this company.

The first is the kind of company Nintendo are in general. In a business world that has become transfixed in the next quarter at all costs, Nintendo has always taken a long view. They don’t do things just for the next quarter, they build things to succeed over years. Some of their systems have launched strong, others not so much but with the notable exception of the Virtual Boy, every game system they’ve released has made money and often, done so while not being the top dog. The N64 was a distant second to the PlayStation 1, the GameCube was a distant third place last generation, at least in North America. Yet both of these systems were profitable in the end, even when Nintendo themselves called their sales disappointing. That’s because they managed to get good games on them which generated momentum and drove a steady curve upwards. The modern business market doesn’t like this. They like companies that come roaring out of the gate and leap from hit to hit, until they miss once and then they drop them like a hot potato.

The market wants everyone to be like Apple (something even Apple themselves are starting to falter at) and that’s not realistic. While Sony and Microsoft lose buckets of money for years at a time on their hardware launches, Nintendo quietly sits back with their often underpowered machines, slowly letting them grow and grow and usually, turning a profit on day one. The Wii was a huge exception to this rule but it was a fluke, one even Nintendo themselves didn’t see coming. The DS started slow and nearly everyone (chief among them the press) called it a ridiculous gimmick that would never catch on. How did that turn out? Companies that take a slower and steadier approach don’t make for exciting market narratives but Nintendo has stuck to this methodology in spite of that because it works. It’s one of their greatest strengths, not a weakness.

The Wii U has been a big exception to a lot of what I wrote above. The system apparently doesn’t make money on the hardware but Reggie Fils-Aime has claimed that the royalties from one game sale put it in the black. I actually think the system launched with a decent line-up but most of the games were met with a tepid response and while there does appear to be some good stuff in the pipe, they’re being drip-fed and the lack of information (even with E3 coming soon) is a big misstep. People who bought them want games and those who didn’t buy them need a reason to. Every day without more games is another day they give Sony and Microsoft the chance to steal their thunder.

They also completely bungled the message for the system. Naming it anything but the Wii 2 was a huge flub and even company President Satoru Iwata stated that a lot of people think the Wii U is just an accessory for the original Wii, an error you can’t fault anyone for making. The thing is, they can still fix that with good games, primarily from their internal teams. Nintendo has some of the best game developers in the industry and on top of that, they’re led by management that is not only skilled but who actually like and play games. Yes, Nintendo does need to court and nurture both indie and big third-party developers alike but their in-house talent always make games that both sell and show off whatever hardware they’re put on.

The games will come and I think as always, the Wii U will find success. Wii level of success? DS level of success? Absolutely not. But I have no doubt that Nintendo is aware that those days are over. The 3DS has a similarly difficult launch and then as well, many in the press said the era of dedicated handhelds were over and that the public had “moved on” to mobile games wholesale. Similarly, the games came and now the 3DS is doing very well. Now those same press types who should be eating crow are instead shifting their doom and gloom to the Wii U. The cycle continues.

Then there’s Nintendo skipping their E3 press conference this year. Many are saying that’s an admission of defeat and that they are conceding that nothing they show will be able to get any attention versus the big new console announcements Sony and Microsoft have. That was my initial reaction too. Then I thought about it for a bit and realised that I think most people are looking at this the wrong way.

I don’t think Nintendo dropping their E3 press conference says as much about them as it says about E3 itself and how important it really is to them. I said before that the press needs to stop whining about E3′s relevance and to a degree, I still believe that. But think about this for a minute. Sony and Microsoft aren’t announcing their new consoles at E3. They will certainly have a lot to show and talk about but Sony announced the PS4 months ago and Microsoft is announcing the next Xbox in May. These guys aren’t announcing at E3 either, they’re doing targeted, focused events dedicated to that separate from the press conferences. And that’s exactly what Nintendo’s doing. Many people (press included strangely) are acting as if that by not holding a press conference, Nintendo is essentially bowing out of E3 and that couldn’t be further from the truth. They still have a booth, they’re still showing tons of stuff to the press and sure, their Nintendo Direct presentations are watched more by the core than by casual consumers but the core is who ultimately spreads the message for you.

Nintendo knows that them showing games for a system that’s already out won’t get covered on Good Morning America like new systems from Sony and Microsoft will. Press conferences are expensive and rather than spend a fortune on what is frankly, usually a cringe-worthy show anyway, they’re going to spend less and speak directly to the press and their most evangelical fans. They’ll probably get the same amount of exposure at worst but they get to control how much information gets out and they get to do it for a lot less money. I don’t know about you but that sounds pretty damn sensible to me. And lest we forget, Nintendo’s not the only big industry player backing off at E3 this year. I still think E3′s important but Nintendo not doing a press conference says far more about the show than it does about them.

My point with all this is simple in the end: There’s a reason the phrase “Never bet against Nintendo” was coined and I think it still applies to this day. Yes, they’re a company facing difficulties right now but they’ve faced plenty before. They have an extraordinary management team of actual enthusiast gamers, they have some of the most valuable IP and developer talent in the world, they know how to make hardware and despite the fact that they seem to not always pay attention to the industry around them, they are still a humble company that’s learning from their mistakes. I say all this as someone who beat them with a stick about Wii U Virtual Console pricing. They aren’t perfect but they have consistently demonstrated that they can find a way to survive and thrive. For all the companies that have come and gone in the hardware space, Nintendo has been there and personally, I think if this upcoming console generation is the last as many will predict, Nintendo will still find a way to survive in it, even when Microsoft and Sony have left the building. That their business strategy doesn’t jive with the way most of the market wants things to work these days is in my opinion, a failing of the market, not Nintendo. I think more companies should take a long view approach to things and that the current market’s obsession with pump and dump strategies will backfire one day soon.

I admit that I do sound like a bit of a fanboy with how strongly I seem to be defending the company here. Don’t get me wrong, I think they’ve made and continue to make a lot of mistakes and as someone who got a Wii U right near launch, I want games and I want them now. But in their burning desire to always have something to hate on, the press and the analysts who want little more then attention have set their sights on Nintendo, ignoring their history of overcoming virtually all challenges and being a driving force in the games industry, even as those who beat them in the short term crumble and fade away. Dumping hardware and jumping into the mobile gold rush bubble is modern business thinking but doing so would be a long term disaster for Nintendo and in a few years, the same people telling them to do that now would be back deriding them for it. I think this is a company that not only has a lot of lessons to teach about the video game industry but about how to run a business for the long term in general. They may be the target du jour but I think their wisdom is ignored at our own peril.

Don’t count Nintendo out until they’re out. They can still surprise us all.

Business, Coverage, Predictions, Video Games 3DS, E3, Nintendo, predictions, video game industry, video games, Wii U

THQ’s Demise & Why There’s Plenty of Blame for Gamers Too

Leave a Comment Posted by Parallax Abstraction on January 25, 2013

Yet another AAA publisher bit the dust today. After over 20 years in business but several of those spent struggling and a Hail Mary saving throw that a bankruptcy court ended up rejecting, THQ was officially carved up into pieces and sold off. Most of their successful studios and IP ended up at new homes (though many not at all where I expected) and a bunch of other beloved but dormant IPs like Red Faction and Homeworld will be auctioned off for much less at a later time. The auction raised only a fraction of what they needed to pay off their debts and even the biggest bids on many of these properties and teams were stunningly small, plus they have received no offers for the very talented Vigil Games studio or the Darksiders IP. Not that many years ago, all of this stuff would have been snatched up in a heartbeat and for a lot more money. Few stronger signs have ever been shown that the AAA industry doesn’t have much cash to spare these days.

I know and preach that businesses are not anyone’s friend and they are not something to get emotional over but I can’t help but feel sad at THQ’s demise. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of this failure is squarely on their shoulders and in particular, those of Brian Farrell whose years of inept leadership got them here. Relying on licensed properties for too long, focusing on quantity over quality and worst of all, the uDraw, were all done under his watch and even when it was most important, he refused to step aside and let smarter people try to save the business. He deserves to never work in video games again, though he made so much money even as the ship sunk that I suspect he will just retire after this. Despite it all, they had gotten well under way to transforming themselves from a licensed shovelware peddler into a decent mid-tier core publisher that put out largely quality games and had a bunch more in the pipe. I think if the economy wasn’t so poor and they’d been given enough capital to see out Jason Rubin’s vision, they could have become a force again. Unfortunately, we’ll never know now. Through all the mistakes and stumbles, I was still really rooting for THQ as they seemed to understand a facet of game creation that the likes of EA and Activision had forgotten. For lack of a better term, THQ’s games had soul and you could feel the passion that went into them.

With each passing year, we have fewer and fewer companies making and releasing the kinds of AAA experiences that are still my favourite way to game. There’s only a few publishers left, most of them are making their stuff in-house and almost all of them are in the red. There are no new independent AAA developers starting and most of the ones left are dropping dead or switching focus at an alarming rate. There’s more doubt than ever before that the new generation of console hardware may not be enough to reinvigorate things and that this type of gaming is simply not a viable way to make money unless you have a name like Call of Duty on your package. Even then, a couple of wildly successful franchises cannot sustain an entire platform. The thought of the majority of gaming becoming based off the current concepts that are popular in the mobile and indie scenes makes my heart sink. I feel those arenas as they are now represent a huge evolutionary step backwards for gaming and many of the design tenants and especially the business practices are not what the medium needs to evolve.

There’s a lot of blame to go around for the state of AAA gaming right now. Corporate leadership that is in many ways clueless and in other ways incredibly greedy. Short-sighted investors that don’t understand what’s necessary for long term success in a creative medium. The platform holders clinging to hardware well past it best before date and trying to make consoles about everything except playing games. The “enthusiast press” which seems to relish tearing things down these days rather than you know, being enthusiasts. And to top it all off, we have a world economy that’s still in far worse health than politicians want people to believe and the industry’s about to ask people to spend hundreds on new consoles when many are still neck deep in Apple’s fashion trend. It’s a recipe for uncertainty and doubt and I have plenty of both but there’s one key group that deserves a lot of the blame but which is rarely talked about here: Us, the gamers.

When you boil everything right down, we as a group are some of the worst customers any industry can ask for. We bitch, complain and fight about everything. We are full of mysogninist, racist, homophobic children that pollute forums and online communities. We shun and denigrate anyone who dares to try to get into games and isn’t as good at them as we are. We demand better graphics, longer campaigns, more multiplayer modes and customisation options yet still expect AAA games to cost the same amount or less after inflation that they did 30 years ago. Assuming of course that we don’t just steal them out of some warped sense of entitlement. And worst of all for the industry that tries to accommodate us, we scream for things that are different and innovative and most of us just end up buying Madden and Call of Duty for the millionth time while fresh ideas like Sleeping Dogs, Darksiders and ZombiU are ignored, lose money and end up collecting dust. Meanwhile, a company can crank out another soulless mobile Skinner Box game and have a much better chance of at least not losing any money, if not making a tidy profit. If you were trying to plan the future of a video game company, which would look better to you as a businessperson?

I of course speak of gamers in very generalised terms. Obviously we’re not all like that and I’m not lost on the fact that I speak from a privileged position where I can and do spend a lot of money on games. I get that many don’t have that luxury (especially now) and have to choose where their gaming dollars go much more carefully. But consider that if even 10% of the people who bought Call of Duty 9 this year bought Darksiders II instead, THQ might still be hanging on. If 10% of the people who bought Madden this past year bought Sleeping Dogs instead, it would have been considered a success and not a failure. We don’t get to bemoan the massive consolidation and constriction of innovation happening in the AAA space right now while also feeling like we don’t have to do our part to keep it going. Games are an incredibly high risk industry and getting more so by the day. It’s a business and it needs to make money. If we aren’t going to do our part to support the types of games we all claim we want to see, we aren’t going to get them, that’s just reality. If you don’t want to just see the shelves full of Call of Duty derivatives, then stop buying only Call of Duty and give something else a chance to impress you with something new.

Industries need customers or they can’t survive and grow. There’s a lot of us out there who still love AAA gaming and don’t want to see everything slide into the mobile sinkhole. But it’s up to us to make AAA gaming attractive and to support the kinds of things we want to see whenever we can. If you’re one of the many people bemoaning the death of THQ today, think about how many of their games you bought in the last year when they needed you the most. If we’re not going to be part of the solution, then we are automatically part of the problem. Either we create the market for what we want or it will cease to be, it’s as simple as that.

Business, Culture, Predictions, Video Games AAA gaming, game consoles, predictions, THQ, video games

My Bold Predictions for 2013

Leave a Comment Posted by Parallax Abstraction on January 2, 2013

Happy New Year! Alrighty, now that I’ve judged myself on my Bold Predictions for 2012 (and done not so badly overall though always with room for improvement), it’s time to spit em’ out for 2013. I’m hung over, have a sore back, haven’t slept and oh yeah, have to head back to what will be an insane merger-induced grind tomorrow so I’m actually not in a blogging mood but dammit, predictions must flow! I’m going to try to put in everything I can think of before posting this but I do these kind of off-the-cuff and with no pre-planning so I am going to reserve the right to add to the post for up to 48 hours after publishing it in case I remember anything. These are also tech and gaming predictions. I have predictions in the economic and political arenas too but these will be long enough and frankly, I don’t have the time or the energy for political arguments.

And away we go!

Gaming

THQ’s new private equity owner will ensure all their games in the pipe come out but the company will be split up and sold off shortly after. This is honestly a shame because despite the absolute idiocy of that company’s management (Jason Rubin being very much an exception), they’ve managed to keep a lot of talent and put out some pretty good games. That said, the AAA industry is in a state of massive flux right now (more on that later) and even the big boys can’t figure out how to reliably succeed in it so I can’t see who would want to fund another go for THQ in that arena. There’s a lot of mystery around this eleventh hour deal but from what I’ve read, it looks like vultures who want to ring out whatever profits they can from the nearly finished games in the pipe and then sell the studios and IP for some additional profit. I hope I’m wrong but I don’t think I am.
Mobile gaming will continue to grow but the honeymoon is over. This is kind of an extension of a prediction from last year but I’m declaring it to have a bigger effect this year. I’ve banged on about how the meteoric growth of this industry (and the companies whose platforms it runs on) is a fashion trend, that the growth is unsustainable and that a big equalisation adjustment is coming as it already has in the social space. Mobile has quickly been usurped by big companies and the only games that are attaining mass scale success are from big companies with the occasional fluke like Angry Birds was. It’s a super hit driven industry just like AAA is and the press will no longer be able to ignore that as they’ve been doing for a while now. This type of gaming’s not going anywhere and that’s a good thing but this is the year reality hits and people realise it isn’t all milk, honey and guaranteed riches. Mobile will continue to exist and thrive but it’s not going to replace other ways of gaming any time soon if ever. To tie into this…
The general public will start to tire of free-to-play Skinner Box mechanics. This right here is why I can’t stand most mobile games. Everything’s filled with microtransactions, nags to spend money and a damn store front between every level, whether it makes design sense or not. It’s a terrible, exploitive way to design games, I hate it and I’ve already heard more than a few other people who are tired of it too. When people look at their credit card statements and realise those 5 $0.99 games they bought actually cost more like $25 in total in order to make them good and not just grind fests, they get frustrated and I think we’ll see more of that. This mechanic isn’t going away but I do think we’re going to start seeing mobile games that offer complete experiences for a higher price.
The WiiU will be a modest success. I’m sure Nintendo realises that much like mobile is now, the Wii’s growth was fashion driven and I’m sure they have no such expectations with the WiiU and have budgeted accordingly. I got one of these for Christmas and despite some dumb decisions they made (largely regarding patch structure, DRM and the GamePad’s battery, all of which can be fixed), this is an amazing platform that offers a lot of promise and uniqueness. This isn’t a Wii with a low-rent tablet attached and anyone who thinks so is either uninformed or more likely an Apple fanboy. I still don’t see Nintendo winning over third parties in a big way with this but as always, their own stunning developer talent will carry the WiiU to profitability.
The Vita will go from limping to crawling. Naming the Vita one of my disappointments of 2012 hurt because I love this thing so much. It’s incredible hardware and it’s a steal at $250 and it shows how you can do good portable gaming without compromise but no one’s making games for it. Even when they’re hurting bad though, Sony’s not one to throw in the towel and I don’t think they will here. They’ll keep pushing it and I do believe it will continue to sell small numbers and probably will never be a runaway success but I do think it will advance enough this year to keep owners like myself in some decent content. I also believe Sony’s next home system will give it a big push but more on that later.
Console shovelware is dead. It’s already happening and good bloody riddance! The Wii and DS were kind of the last bastions for the vulture publishers who make their living cranking out cheap, garbage games for $30-$40 in the hopes of catching suckers at Wal-Mart. The increased development costs of the new systems (which many believe to be 2-3x what they are now at a minimum) will make this slimy practice an impossible model. These publishers won’t simply move to mobile either because there’s already too much garbage in that space and because they were run by scummy businesspeople who didn’t really understand the industry as a whole, they won’t know how to adapt to the realities of the mobile market and will likely just up and die off. They deserve to rot.
The first major Kickstarter disaster will happen and will test people’s faith in the crowdfunding model. I think this model of funding games is brilliant and I spent way too much on Kickstarters this year. However, at least one of these projects is either not going to come out and zero out everybody’s “investment” or it will come out, be far below the majority’s expectations and people will feel ripped off. There have just been too many projects and a big portion of those are fuelled by rose-tinted nostalgic expectations. I know I’m probably going to hate at least a couple of the finished projects that I backed. No disrespect to Brian Fargo and I so hope Wasteland 2 is killer but inXile’s track record is not good. The Peter Molyneux and David Braben projects are also just gross and while perfectly legit, abuse the Kickstarter spirit in my opinion. The thing is, I fully knew what I was getting into when I backed them and the whole point of Kickstarter and that you roll the dice and take your chances. Most people don’t know that though or they say they do but don’t really mean it. When one of these games comes out to poor reviews or worse yet, doesn’t come out at all, a lot of people are going to feel burned and run away from crowdfunding. The people that do get it will continue to make it a viable means of indie development which is awesome but much like mobile, we’re still in the honeymoon phase.
The OUYA will come out and find niche success. I don’t really think the OUYA folks believe this is going to be the thing that overtakes Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo but I also think the fanboy press who largely hated on this thing not because of it’s ideas but because it’s Android and called it no less than a scam were dead wrong. None of them will do the right thing and eat crow of course but I didn’t expect it as such. Developer kits for this have already shipped whereas the press’ golden boy project I’ll talk about next is delayed until March, maybe. There seems to be a lot of developer hype for this and I think it’s a really cool idea. I actually backed it but had to reduce my pledge due to money issues but if this makes it to market, I’ll happily grab one to try it out.
The Oculus Rift will come out late and underwhelm. The same press outlets who have been dumping on OUYA have used such fashionable terms as “the future” to describe this thing. I think it’s very cool and if it does what it does well and gets game support, I’ll totally get one. However, all attempts at virtual reality have proven cumbersome and not generally worth the experience and I’ve seen nothing to indicate this will be otherwise. I do think this could find niche success but I think the press’ own hype of this will be to its detriment when normal consumers start getting their hands on it. I’ll be happy to be wrong about this.
Layoffs, studios closures and the viability of AAA development will be a bigger story than ever. This was one of the dominating themes of 2012 and as we go through yet another year waiting for new consoles, I think it’s only going to get worse. Sales are falling (no one’s 100% sure of why but many think it’s not just the normal end-of-cycle downturn), costs are set to skyrocket and anything that isn’t a sure fire hit is a recipe for financial catastrophe. Any studio that hasn’t consistently pumped out critical and commercial successes can’t get work anymore and we now have fewer publishers able to fund new AAA projects than ever before. I love AAA gaming and it pains me greatly to see it in such decline but unless people get bored of mobile games and come running back to it, I don’t see how they fix this going forward. My hope is that this is an adjustment and the industry will realign itself and come out stronger but that requires new players to enter the space and no one is.
Valve’s Steam box will not release this year but will enter the promised beta phase. My feeling is it will be a standardised PC design that runs customised Linux with Steam on it. And for that reason, I will probably not care because it will have a fraction of my library available to me and most of it is going to be indie stuff I don’t need to play on my TV or that I can play by running an HDMI cable from my laptop. Don’t get me wrong, I think this is a cool idea and from the way they’ve talked about it being able to run competing software, it might even be Valve’s own attempt at an OUYA-like thing which could be something special indeed.
Steam on Linux will remain niche at best. Despite the hypocrisy of Valve and others towards Windows 8, I do get where some of their concerns are rooted and I share them. However, to think Linux is going to ever gain mainstream adoption of any kind, especially gaming at this stage is a pipe dream. Even the versions of it that are designed to be “desktop friendly” are a nightmare to maintain, drivers are a mess and the community as a whole is still full of elitists who drive the mainstream away and like it that way. All that’s fine, I’ve got nothing against any of that if that’s the way you want a platform to be but all of those things mean it will never take over Windows. Kudos to Valve for making a concerted effort to make the platform viable for gaming and I do hope they can succeed in some way. But if they do, it won’t be for a long time to come.
Cross-media gaming will be attempted multiple times and never take off. Frank Gibeau from EA as well as babbling heads like Kevin Dent say that big gaming franchises have to have components everywhere. Beyond your console or PC game, there has to be a tie-in product on your phone, your tablet, your browser and anywhere else in order to keep you engaged at all times. I think this is a dumb idea and a waste of developer talent and resources. EA tried it with Mass Effect 3 and all the tie-in content sucked and no one really cared as far as I can tell. I won’t talk about this too much here because I have a future blog post about it planned.
There will be no new games announced or released from Valve this year (Dota 2 excepted). Forget Half-Life 2: Episode 3, we will get zilch from them in 2013. Between their new hardware experiment, Steam for Linux and whatever else, they aren’t going to be in a rush to put anything out. I excepted Dota 2 from this because it’s technically out to anyone who wants it already but it may exit beta.
DayZ standalone will launch late and be a buggy, hacker ridden mess like all Bohemia Interactive launches. Don’t get me wrong, I think the ideas of DayZ are absolutely fantastic, even if I burned out on the game after a month and I respect Bohemia as a developer a ton for finding a super tight niche and thriving in it. But the fact remains that their launch track record is abysmal and I don’t expect that to change with the standalone DayZ game. I hope they buck the trend this time because they might have the birth of a new genre on their hands and they’d be foolish to burn it right at the start.

Next-Gen Consoles

This gets its own section because there’s just too much to talk about regarding the next Xbox and PlayStation. There’s no doubt in my mind that these machines will be radically different from anything that’s come before. They have to be because making themselves stand out against phones and tablets (for better or worse) is a must.

Both the next Microsoft and Sony systems will be announced and shipped this year. Rumour is the next Xbox was supposed to come out in 2012 and got delayed for major retooling. The industry can’t wait any more, new hardware has to happen this year or there will be no one left to make stuff for it.
Both platforms will use far fewer specialised parts and be more like PCs than ever. It’s cheaper, most of the off-the-shelf parts are more powerful and most importantly, it’s much easier and faster to develop for. The days of Cell processors and weird memory allocation issues are over, they have to be. I’m guessing each system will have a minimum of 4GB RAM and hard drives will be standard but not SSDs.
Both platforms will offer every title in every tier for sale digitally on day one. Sony’s already trying this with select PS3 games. We’ve reached a tipping point where despite the telecartel’s best efforts, broadband is becoming a viable way to get large content and video game retail is losing its stranglehold on publishers and platform holders. By selling games digitally, the useless middleman who rips off the industry and consumers with used games gets cut out, pricing flexibility and sales are easy obtained and everyone makes more money. Retail is the only reason this wasn’t done before and Microsoft and Sony realise it’s time to throw caution to the wind and just do it. Whether I embrace this depends on whether they do DRM intelligently. They can look to Nintendo for how not to do it.
Free-to-play will become a big deal on consoles. Again, Sony tried this first with DUST 514 and Microsoft tried it with an XBLA title that wasn’t very good. However, they both know how much money there is to be made here, Sony especially since free-to-play is where Sony Online Entertainment makes most of its money now. The ability to handle microtransactions will exist at the system level and seamlessly integrate into both platform’s store front systems. For this to work though, another major change must happen and that is…
Console certification processes will continue to exist but will significantly lighten and be sped up. Free-to-play titles live and die on how quickly they can iterate. PlanetSide 2 has probably had a dozen or more patches since it left beta and it’s a better game for it. If each of those patches required weeks of sitting in certification limbo, it would have been disastrous. One of the big complaints from developers big and small over the last year has been how expensive and unnecessarily burdensome the console certification process is. Given that numerous games still ship completely broken or in some cases unfinished, it’s clearly not working as it is. Games shouldn’t have to wait weeks to make sure they prompt you to select your storage device and specifically tell you “Don’t turn off your console” when they’re saving data. I don’t know enough about the current processes to know how they will be streamlined but this must and will happen.
SmartGlass will be a big deal for Xbox and Vita integration will be big for PlayStation. Being able to have your console content interact with your phone or tablet is largely a dumb gimmick right now but Nintendo is showing how you can do it in unique and interesting ways. Microsoft will expand their SmartGlass platform to make this a much bigger (yet still optional) component of the gaming and media experience on Xbox. I believe Sony has plans to do something similar but on a more unique scale with the Vita due to the things it offers that phones and tablets can’t. I don’t know if tightly integrating the Vita into the home PlayStation experience can save the platform but I really hope it breathes new life into it.
Motion gaming is over. The Kinect was a fad and it’s largely dried up and almost no one’s making games for it any more, certainly nothing with a decent budget. Move died even quicker. The public’s got over motion gaming and I don’t think putting it in the box with the next systems is going to make it popular again. No matter how precise you make it, it’s still not the best way to play games. The next Xbox might support the current Kinect but I don’t think we’ll see another one.
Like PC, AAA games will be only a single segment of the gaming experiences available on consoles. This industry simply can’t afford to focus on AAA content exclusively, especially since costs and risks are only going to get more insane. But variety is good and despite some incredible gems coming out of console downloadable services (including half of my top 10 games of 2012), there’s really only the AAA stuff and the high-end downloadable stuff. I believe that free-to-play and a newly refocused effort on promoting and fostering smaller indie development, consoles are suddenly going to have the wide variety of game types, production values and price points that you could previously only get on PC and on mobile to a lesser extent. I think this is going to be the single biggest paradigm shift in the history of the console industry and it’s sorely overdue. This is what’s going to keep it relevant against up and coming platforms.
Sony will offer backwards compatibility via their Gaikai acquisition at some point but likely not at launch. They bought that company to probably eventually make PlayStation a platform that isn’t dependant on hardware but for now, I could see them using it this way since the rumoured radical hardware changes in the next console will likely make built-in backwards compatibility impossible. I don’t know if you’ll buy individual games or a subscription service or maybe some kind of hybrid tied into PlayStation Plus. Personally, I’d happy pay a few bucks a month to get access to a huge PS2 and PSP library. I do sincerely hope people who made PSN purchases on PS3 will get automatic Gaikai versions. I’m not counting on it though.
Microsoft will not offer retail game backwards compatibility but will offer it for certain XBLA titles like the 360 does with original Xbox games. I don’t think they want to risk pissing off people who will lose access to everything XBLA but they also aren’t going to go through the headache of making every game work. Most XBLA titles never pushed the 360′s processing power very hard so in theory, software backwards compatibility could be enough for most of those titles. I imagine they will also keep the 360 on sale and the Live system for that system up and running for a while.
PC gaming will keep getting bigger and challenge the notion of whether many hardcore gamers even need a console. Due to the PC-like architecture rumoured to be powering the new systems, making quality PC ports will be easier than ever and with that goes the reason many PC gamers had for also owning a console. If I could be assured that the majority of AAA PC ports were well done and more like they’ve been in the last year, I’d seriously consider only buying the next consoles when they were cheaper for exclusives.

Technology

The Apple fashion trend will finally begin to normalise but the press will ignore it. I’ll say it again before fanboys lose their minds: This does not mean I think Apple’s going away. They aren’t and despite being a mean-spirited, greedy company riding a choreographed public and press perception, it’s a very good thing that they’re around. However, between market saturation, maturing competition and people realising that a lot of their products are underpowered, overpriced and riding hype and form rather than function, their growth is going to start to go from bubble to something more realistic. This is what happens with bubbles. Their stock price has already slid 25% in 2012 but you know how many stories about it I’ve seen from the numerous tech sites I follow? Zero, even though many of these sites live blog their earnings calls. There’s a trend in modern media to build people or companies up high and then kick them back down but that’s never how it’s worked with Apple. They always get a huge free pass that others don’t and I think that’s going to continue. The market’s waking up though and whether fanboys like it or not, a lot of people still don’t use Apple products and many more realise their stuff isn’t necessarily the best at everything.
The Apple television is not coming. I made this prediction last year but the rumour won’t die so I’m reserving the right to make it again. Nearly everyone who is big in the TV business is bleeding to death right now. The HDTV market is saturated with people who see no compelling reason to upgrade. Paying 30-50% more for a screen with an Apple logo and the guts of a $99 Apple TV box (especially when many already have iPads you can plug into any TV) is simply not going to happen. Steve Jobs had one line in his biography where he said he’d figured out how to innovate in the TV space. Only for Apple does that one throwaway bit of information lead to an endless stream of speculation on how they’ll somehow revolutionise the TV space. It’s not going to happen.
The iPhone 5S will be the next model but in the Fall, not the Spring. Many think that after Apple burned their hardcore by announcing a newer iPad only six months after the previous one that the same thing would start happening with the iPhone too. Aside from the fact that iPhone sales are down because the 5 doesn’t offer anything worth upgrading for, the 6 month iPad debacle was I think just an experiment to see how far they can push people. I don’t think they’re going to keep doing that.
BlackBerry 10 will sustain RIM, not catapult them forward. By all accounts, it’s a fantastic operating system and their stock has been reflecting the buzz. The problem is that all 3 of the other major mobile platforms all tie into something bigger. iOS ties into Apple, Android ties into Google’s many services and Windows Phone ties into PCs. All RIM has is mobile and that’s going to make things tougher for them. I imagine that it’s extreme manageability, security features and flexibility will still make it the ideal corporate platform and most of their current corporate and government base will continue using them, as will a niche group of others. But their previous leadership was too short sighted to see the consumer battle approaching and they’ve lost it. I think they’ll refocus on what they have and serving that well.
PC sales will slide a bit as the industry normalises but the slide will not be huge and it will settle. While I think tablets are a horrible way to do anything but the lightest computing tasks, there’s a big segment of the population that only has to do the lightest tasks. Those people are buying tablets instead of PCs and with good reason. In addition, a weakening global economy means enterprise spending is slowing across the board and that’s where a lot of PC sales come from. The PC will be the dominant computing platform for the foreseeable future, anyone who says otherwise is clueless. But the industry has been red hot for too long and some cooling should happen. I hope this will thing out some of the garbage vendors and maybe stop the race to the bottom for a while.
Windows 8 will sell well below expectations. I think the hyperbolic hate for Windows 8 is way overblown but I get and share some of the big concerns about it. I’ve used it but not full-time and at some point soon, I will be upgrading my gaming rig to it so I can properly judge for myself. Depending on who you ask, it’s either selling OK or worse than Vista which was a dud as Windows sales go and for good reason, it was garbage. Some sales softness can be attributed to slowing PC sales but there has rightly or wrongly been some poison injected into the mainstream consciousness about Windows 8. Microsoft’s been desperate to chase the anti-choice, closed ecosystem model that Apple made popular and I think that’s stupid. They should be running the other way, embracing the opposite side and evangelising that. I believe that the poor sales of Windows 8 and the Surface tablets will cause them to re-evaluate what they’re doing with Windows and maybe back off or make optional some of what people hate about it.
Windows Phone 8 will rise to a respectable market share. I was wrong about this last year with Windows Phone 7 but my girlfriend is in love with WP8, as is everyone who buys a phone with it. There’s been lost of buzz slowly building about it and when the platform launched in China, it sold out everywhere in 2 hours, far outpacing the iPhone 5, even though it also set a record. Android is decimating all right now and that’s not going to change, nor are a sizable number of Apple faithful going to jump ship. But there’s still a big market out there of people who don’t own smartphones or who want to switch away from BlackBerry or older Android devices and I think there’s a big chance for Windows Phone there. After playing with my girlfriend’s Lumia 920, it makes my BlackBerry 9900 look last century and if I could afford a new phone tomorrow, it’s without question the one I would get.
The TV industry will make a new push from 3D TVs to 2K or 4K TVs. I said we would see no mention of 2K/4K TVs last year and I was right, as I was about 3D dying off. However, the Japanese TV manufacturers are bleeding out fast and they need something, anything to resuscitate their fortunes. I don’t think the market is ready for 2K/4K yet but damned if they aren’t going to try to make it ready.
Sharp will go bankrupt and Panasonic will have a massive restructuring. Whether Sharp goes the Japanese equivalent of Chapter 11 or Chapter 7 I don’t know but there’s no way for them to recover from the death spiral they’re in. Panasonic is already talking about shedding Sanyo and I think that’s only the tip of the iceberg for them. Sony is well underway with it’s restructuring now but Panasonic’s going to announce some kind of similar radical plan that will involve much deeper cuts due to them not being as diversified as Sony.
We will start to see more mainstream PCs come standard with SSDs or a combination of SSD and hard drive. SSDs have gotten so incredibly cheap that it’s becoming worth it for PC manufacturers to put them in medium-class models just to boast about how fast they are. There are even low-end SSDs that are so inexpensive, they could even make it into some of the cheap big box systems.

And after another epic length post, there’s all my predictions for 2013! There’s a lot of uncertainty in not only the tech and gaming industries but in the world in general. Still, I think there’s a lot to look forward to and I’m very curious to see what lies ahead. I hope your 2012 was good to you and yours and that your 2013 will be even better. I’m very stoked for a lot of things coming in my life this year and may only my good predictions be the right ones. Happy New Year once again!

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Revisiting My Bold Predictions for 2012

1 Comment Posted by Parallax Abstraction on December 31, 2012

The end of 2012 is upon us. Personally, it’s been a Hell of a year, not just in the industries I observe with interest but for me in general. My girlfriend passed the UFE and will be a Chartered Accountant in a few months, we moved from our small apartment into a house (still renting though), we got a puppy and my company reverse merged with another company, went public as a result and changed it’s 30+ year name in the process. And that’s just a bit of it. It was very good overall though and I think 2013′s going to be even better! Before I make my bold predictions for the new year, I must of course revisit those I made for the year that’s just ending. Go here to find them as I will only mention their titles here and more in-depth explanations are included in the original post. I’m going to ape a neat system the crew at Gamers With Jobs came up with and rate how accurate I was in terms of a score. I made 30 predictions (29 “real” ones and 1 joke) so that’s the total the score can be. If I was mostly or totally right on a prediction, I get 1 point. If I was half-right or had some critical information wrong but the gist was accurate, I get half a point. And finally, if I was dead wrong, I get zilch. I’m also only scoring the bolded parts which are the actual predictions, not the additional details which are just general thoughts. This is scored by me of course but hey, this ain’t scientific or nothin’. I will try to judge myself honestly.

Off we go!

Gaming

THQ will manage to secure additional investment or credit but this will be their last gasp at survival before they run out of cash (half point.) As far as I know, they didn’t get additional money, they were just able to tap a line of credit they hadn’t used. They still ran out of cash and declared bankruptcy just recently, being swept up by a private equity firm. Danny Bilson left but Brian Farrell’s still around and his long-term future there is still unknown.
GSC Game World’s upcoming news will be that the company is indeed dead (1 point.) The company still exists but has no staff so it’s basically dead. A new studio did in fact start up with the old staff but they’re making a free-to-play online game in a S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-like universe but not with the actual IP which they couldn’t secure. A bit of a battle has started up between the remnants of GSC and bitComposer Games over the IP.
The 3DS will continue to sell well at the current price point and the Vita will not do the numbers Sony wants but will do enough to keep the platform afloat (1 point.) I was right on about the 3DS and not fully on the Vita but I’m calling it a win because while it did underperform, Sony keeps saying they’re backing it going forward and there are games coming, though not many. I so hope the Vita can find it’s footing.
The successor to the Xbox 360 will be announced at E3 and the PS4 will be teased only (0 points.) No other way to say it, I was wrong, wrong, wrong. This is the year both will be announced but I won’t make a prediction on that specifically because it’s too obvious.
The WiiU will get a price and a ship date in the holiday quarter (1 point.) Bang on, though this wasn’t exactly a stretch. They also did solve the problem of multiple tablets but in a half-assed way that’s not close to ready yet. I think the launch lineup was OK and it’s been selling out but talk has been soft so it’s too early to tell how it’s doing.
The wonderful trend of analysts either talking less or the gaming press finally realising they’re not worth listening to will continue (0 points.) Why oh why couldn’t I have been right about this? It seemed like the enthusiast press was finally over leeching clicks off these hacks but they’re doing it as much as ever with even more analysts (and even purposefully obscure hacks like Dent and industry failures like Broussard) beaking off in the press all the time. This is a scourge that needs to stop.
This is the year where the realities of mobile development start to become clear in the development community (1 point.) This didn’t happen to the degree I expected it to but I’m calling it a win because it has already started. Multiple promising mobile developers have died this year, largely because they foolishly believed the mobile gold rush meant nobody could fail. I’ll flesh this out more with my 2013 predictions.
Many Facebook developers will continue to struggle or in the case of the big boys like Zynga, show themselves to be grossly overvalued and not as big a money press as once thought (1 point.) Nailed it! Zynga’s in a death spiral, Facebook itself has a disastrous fraud-filled year and we haven’t heard a peep in months about a big new social startup. A lot of this is because most Facebook games don’t work on mobile platforms and that’s increasingly where Facebook usage is going. This field isn’t going away but much like mobile, it’s getting kicked in the face by reality instead of hype.
AAA publishers that are not Activision will keep losing money and AAA developers will continue to be hit-or-die (1 point.) Nailed again but again, I wish I was wrong. Most of the few AAA publishers left are either losing money or just squeaking out modest profits whereas Activision is still sucking the marrow from Blizzard and Call of Duty. Numerous developers went under this year and almost all of those can be tied to the failure of a single title. This is a dark time to be in AAA and it makes me sad.
Diablo III will come out some time this year and it will be a huge hit but not as big a one as Blizzard or Bobby Kotick thinks (half point.) It did come out and was a huge hit but as far as I know, it’s done extremely well. It’s up to something like 7 million sales now and despite being basically broken, the real money auction house is generating revenue. I do think that part is doing worse than Blizzard wanted but I don’t think they’re disappointed with the money the game’s made.
Star Wars: The Old Republic will experience a sharp drop in subscribers (1 point.) Bang on. They flailed about trying out a trial model, then went to a horrible exploitive free-to-play system and by many accounts, this detonated the upper echelons of BioWare. I actually think it’s a good game, it just came out at the wrong time with a foolish business model.
John Riccitiello’s leadership at EA will be strongly challenged (0 points.) There were rumblings in the press that he was in trouble but nothing public happened.
Free-to-play will start to really shine this year in non-Asian RPG ways (1 point.) Oh yes! One of my top 10 games of the year is free-to-play and I’ve got like 5 or 6 of them installed on my PC right now. Not all of them do it right (particularly on mobile platforms) but those that do are making great games and best as I can tell, tidy profits too.
Half-Life 2: Episode 3/Half-Life 3 will not release this year (1 point.) Is anyone really surprised? I know Valve’s way of doing business means this won’t happen until they feel like it but seriously guys, enough is enough. This series made you a success and your fans are owed closure.
Highly intrusive DRM schemes on PC games will be scaled back, though DRM in general will still be an issue (1 point.) Ubisoft dropped their always-on DRM (though activations are still needed) but Diablo III embraced the horrible practice with both hands, which caused highly publicised launch nightmares. It’s definitely a lessening trend though which I am very happy to see.
I may potentially buy an iPad 3 to try out iOS gaming (half point.) I split a used iPad 2 with my girlfriend which is why I call this a halfsie because I did specifically say iPad 3. Overall, I’ve been very disappointed. iOS uses dated design and most mobile games that I’ve tried have been terrible. I was wrong about the iPad 3 having Retina too, they totally figured that out. If I even need a tablet of my own any time soon, it will either be Windows 8 Pro or Android.
SECTION SCORE: 11.5/16

Technology

Apple will not release a branded television (1 point.) I can’t believe I’m seemingly one of the only people who didn’t think this was obvious. There is no market for a TV that will end up costing 30-50% more (which it will have to for it to have the margins Apple wants) but which just has the guts of an Apple TV box you can buy for $99. One line from Jobs’ biography where he says he “cracked it” means exactly squat.
This is the year Android tablets finally become competitive (0.5 points.) I’m calling this a halfsie because while Android tablet sales are up significantly (particularly with the introduction of the Nexus tablets), the iPad still dominates the tablet market and from what I can tell, most Android apps are still made for phones exclusively or primarily. It’s getting better but it’s still not the competitor it needs to be.
Research In Motion will finally remove Balsillie and Lazaridis from their leadership roles at the company (1 point.) BOOM! Most of my secondary predictions were right too. Their stock plummeted but is recovering well and by all accounts, BlackBerry 10 could be something special. I really hope so, I don’t want to see this company die.
More than 50% of laptop models released this year will not include an optical drive (0 points.) There’s no doubt that far fewer laptops have them but I’ve not been able to find a statistic that confirms whether I’m right or not. If I can, I’ll update this but I think if more than half were ditching the optical drive, it would have made the news somewhere.
Hard drive prices will return to pre-flood levels (1 point.) Checking a few places online where I can buy a hard drive, I’m saying this is right.
Microsoft will announce a scaling back or removal of the new Start Screen in Windows 8 or make it 100% optional (0 points.) I was so wrong about this, I should almost be deducting points for it. I think the hate for Windows 8 is overblown but I do have major concerns about what it means for the future of Windows and the Start Screen is still stupid on anything that isn’t a touch screen. It’s questionable how well Windows 8 is selling right now so I hope Microsoft is taking the negative feedback to heart.
Windows 8 will shine on tablets and will also start to compete with Android for a big share of the iPad’s market (0.5 points.) I’m calling this a halfsie because by all accounts, Windows 8 is killer on tablets but Surface has apparently been a sales flop and the app ecosystem is not taking off like many (including myself) thought it would. This could still change but so far, it hasn’t made a dent in the market share of the other platforms.
Windows Phone 7 will get a massive marketing push and gain a lot of market share (0 points.) Windows Phone 7 became Windows Phone 8 and while it looks like interest and sales are ramping up, it hasn’t gained a ton of market share yet, certainly not even to make anyone besides maybe RIM nervous. My girlfriend bought a Lumia 920 though and thinks the iPhone pales in comparison to it, as do many other people. Microsoft is traditionally horrible at marketing but if they can figure that out, I still think they could have a winner here.
Twitter will continue to grow in popularity but still won’t figure out how to make money (1 points.) Calling it a win because it’s definitely still growing but given how there have been no stories about the financial success this year, no IPO and how they’re clamping down hard on how much third party clients can bang on their servers, I’m guessing they still don’t have a long-term business model yet.
Facebook will remain insanely popular but each user will do less with it (0.5 points.) It’s obviously still popular and a ton of people I know personally are using it less and less but I’m not convinced that’s the overall trend. As they continue to test the limits and patience of their users with more invasive ads and terms of use changed though, this might change.
3D will continue to decline and possibly die off in the home entirely (1 point.) Most TV manufacturers are using 3D as a bullet point now but they’ve all run away from making that a reason to convince people to buy new sets. The big Japanese TV manufacturers are all nursing sucking chest wounds right now so they better figure something out fast. I was also right about how the idea of mainstream 2K or 4K TVs didn’t happen. 3D is still a thing in theatres but that’s about it.
Best Buy will announce a major corporate restructuring this year, closing underperforming stores and refocusing on providing high quality service (0.5 points.) If I allowed myself three quarter points, that’s what I would get because I was right about everything except the announced refocusing on high quality service. The company’s bleeding, stores have been closed and one of the original guys is trying to take the company private. Refocusing on service is the only thing that can save them but they’re still arrogantly convinced that the horrendous experience they currently offer is quality service.
Canadian third party Internet prices will rise but not as much as people fear (1 point.) Nailed it! Prices went up but only a little bit and as I understand it, the third party Canadian ISP industry is still squeaking out razor-thin margins. This makes me very happy to see, especially since more and more people I know are dumping the telecartels for them. They’re still fighting a tough war but I’m glad the fight’s being made.
I will continue to search in vain for a tech podcast that doesn’t spend most of its time fellating Apple or that realises tech news exists that doesn’t involve phones or tablets (1 point.) This was a joke prediction but I’m still right. I’ve tried me damndest to find one since dumping This is Only A Test after both the content and the attitude of the guys from that site finally drove me over the edge. I’ve yet to find another one that doesn’t continue to trumpet how Apple is our lord and saviour or that phones and tablets aren’t the only neat things in the world. It’s a shame but such is life. I don’t currently listen to any tech podcasts and I don’t really miss having one anyway.
SECTION SCORE: 9/14

TOTAL SCORE: 20.5/30

Overall, I’m still way more accurate than the majority of analysts that get quoted in the enthusiast press. That’s ridiculous and sad. I’m a guy with no knowledge of business or the inside scoop on anything and my largely uninformed guesses were better than guys who make orders of magnitude more than I do to spout this stuff. Insane. I’ve had better years but also worse years but to be honest, most of the stuff I was right on is stuff I would have been happy to be dead wrong about. I don’t like to be a prophet of doom but it seems like that’s my skill sometimes.

Check back tomorrow where my new predictions for 2013 will be unleashed! There will definitely be plenty of them as well as this is shaping up to be an even crazier year in gaming and tech than 2012 was.

Business, Business, Computers, Coverage, Coverage, Mobile Phones, Predictions, Predictions, Tablets, Technology, Video Games 2012, 3DS, Android, Apple, Apple TV, Diablo III, Facebook, GSC Game World, Microsoft, mobile phones, Nintendo, predictions, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, Sony, Star Wars: The Old Republic, SWTOR, tablets, technology, THQ, video games, Vita, Windows 8, Windows Phone

How much more dumbed down can tech get?

Leave a Comment Posted by Parallax Abstraction on November 13, 2012

A couple of weekends ago, our Linksys E3000 router bit it. The wireless radio had gone bad and was causing terrible performance and disconnects. It was under warranty and I intended to replace it but we have too many devices in the house to go without a router so I decided to purchase a new one and sell the replacement E3000. Being frustrated with Linksys, I did a bunch of research and decided to get a Netgear WNDR3800. There was only one of these left in Ottawa and it was at a nearby computer store so I flew out to grab it.

After getting it all hooked up, I noticed something odd. The router had all the normal status lights for WAN, LAN and wireless but even when the router was busy, the lights stayed solid. They didn’t blink to indicate activity like proper networking devices do. Indeed, this functionality on our E3000 was partly how I determined it was bad. I restarted the Netgear, same result. I checked the setup to see if there was a light control option, nothing. I checked the manual and the setup’s help function, nothing mentioned. Eventually, I went digging in Netgear’s forums and discovered that on all their new models, the light flashing has been disabled because focus groups complained that the routers were too confusing and distracting when all the lights flashed. Rather than save money by just removing the lights entirely or putting an option in the firmware to enable flashing for advanced users, Netgear just locked all the lights and didn’t tell anyone, assuming no one would care. Loads of power users who use the status lights to diagnose issues were furious but Netgear said this was the path they were going down and while they would consider adding a toggle to the firmware, they promised nothing. Indeed, many other manufacturers like Linksys have removed many status lights entirely from new models. I returned the WNDR3800 and am now using the replacement E3000 which is working fine.

The more I look at the way technology is going today, the more I think that it’s becoming like this picture. Like so many other things in the world, manufacturers of all kinds of stuff, be it computer hardware, software, mobile phones or whatever have become obsessed with everything being designed to accommodate the most ignorant and stupid of us. Routers don’t have status lights, some laptops are ditching hard drive indicators and phones and tablets have become walled gardens where you can’t do anything outside of the designer’s carefully crafted vision because you know, you might break something! Everything has to have a UI that’s more about bubbly style than function and where nothing can be explained with the slightest hint of technical language because having to run a Google search on an error is time you could be spending watching Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. It’s becoming an epidemic and I’m so sick of it.

Now before anyone freaks out, I’m not one of those curmudgeon types who thinks everything should be back in the era before Plug N’ Play and that we should all be using command lines. I like my graphical user interface with its effects, I like drivers that install with a setup program, I like things that work and don’t break for ridiculous, unexplainable reasons. But none of that requires that useful functionality be stripped away because someone might have to use a few extra brain cells to figure out how to do something or be scared off by it. Simplicity does not equal stability and it certainly does not equal security.

Computers and modern technology are not and were never supposed to have been things that just any Joe Ignoramus could pick up without any effort whatsoever. It has a learning curve, you’re supposed to learn it. It’s not the job of any tool to make itself so easy to learn that anyone can become an expert with no effort, it’s the job of the user to learn what to do and then to learn more and even eventually master it if they so choose. Don’t know what all those blinking lights on your router do? Then look it up and learn something! Getting spyware on your PC all the time? That’s not Windows’ fault, that’s your fault for not paying attention to what you click on! Technology and the software that powers it should be stable, secure and intuitive yes but none of those things require it be dumbed down to the point where it excludes not even power users, but just users with more than the most basic level of knowledge. The power users are not the most numerous customers but they’re the most valuable. We’re the ones who replace routers every year instead of every 3, we’re the ones who evangelise brands and camp out in lines for upgrades. To exclude them (especially in completely unnecessary, correctable ways like Netgear is doing) is to shoot yourselves in the foot in the long term.

Being as much of a AAA prime cut “Apple hater” as I am, it would be easy for me to say this is all their fault. While it’s true that Apple in many ways leads the charge of making electronics less open in order to be moron friendly, they’re certainly not the only offenders and probably far from the worst as well. This is an industry wide problem affecting hardware and software makers alike and it’s one that needs to change. Technology can be intuitive and friendly without having to assume everyone who touches it is an idiot that can barely tie their shoelaces. Knowledge is not a dirty word and asking users of your products to either possess some going in or to acquire it if lacking isn’t a weakness, it’s a bonding opportunity. The know-nothing users of today are your future fanboys but not making them work for anything does nothing to tie you to them in the long term.

We as a society are not entitled to constant, instant gratification and learning solution to problems (even small ones) is what drives engagement, passion and makes us want to learn even more. When your default response to someone saying “This is too complicated.” is to remove the complication rather than go “You should learn more and here’s how you can do it.”, you’re ultimately failing your customers and the advancement of your craft. Let’s make technology simple but let’s also stop making it any dumber.

Predictions, Technology predictions, simplification, technology

Could the iPhone 5 be the beginning of Apple’s plateau?

Leave a Comment Posted by Parallax Abstraction on September 12, 2012

Breaking news here I’m confident you’ll not read anywhere else: Apple announced the iPhone 5 today. I know, hot scoop, though there was no sight of the iPad Mini or any of the other stuff that was widely expected to be there as well. I had to get a tire replaced today so I didn’t get a chance to watch any of the live blogging gushfests, electing instead to just read a couple of summaries after the fact. With Nokia stupidly bombing the intro of the otherwise impressive Lumia 920 with that camera scandal and Motorola’s new RAZR model dropping with a thud, Apple didn’t have to try very hard to impress. I had my suspicions of how the reveal of what the iPress claimed could be the biggest product launch in history would be received but I know my views are often coloured by my living in a reality where Apple can actually do wrong. Based on the stunning amount of “Meh” I’ve read since, it appears even many of the faithful have joined this reality.

I’ve said for a long time that Apple’s current growth is a fashion trend, that it’s unsustainable and that while they’re going nowhere any time soon, they are in a bubble that’s only going to pop faster with Steve Jobs now gone. This view has largely been met with rolled eyes but I believe I’m one step closer to being proven right today. The first sign of this was the iPhone 4S. It’s only big new feature aside from a spec bump (which is always expected) was Siri. It launched in beta (which Apple never does) and while other phones already had voice recognition features, none had the theoretical capabilities of Siri. After the initial lustre wore off though, people realised that Siri didn’t actually work very well and most stopped using it. Apple omitted it from the next iPad that followed and has kind of neglected to talk about it since. Apple loves to toot their own horn so when they don’t talk about something recently introduced, it means they aren’t pleased with how it’s done. I predicted that the iPhone 4S would be the beginning of a cooling off period for the Apple fashion trend and that it would sell well but would be the first phone to not trend as well as the previous one. I’ll admit it, I was dead wrong. The 4S is the best selling iPhone to date. There is no doubt whatsoever that the iPhone 5 will sell many millions and continue to make Apple buckets of money. However, I do believe this could be the tipping point and I’ll tell you why.

The overwhelming view expressed which I agree with fully is that the iPhone 5 offers literally nothing new. Siri was new in that like Apple often does, they took an idea someone else came up with and evolved it into something neater, at least on the surface. The iPhone 5 is in every single way, a spec bump. It has a faster processor, a slightly bigger screen, 4G LTE and it’s thinner. That’s it. That size screen (and larger) as well as LTE have been available on Android phones for years now. There are even Windows Phone 7 devices with them, forget the Windows Phone 8 ones around the corner. Those are not new features, they’re playing catch-up at best. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a spec bump but the generally accepted rule is that every second year, that’s when the big innovations come to the iPhone. The second one added 3G and third party apps, the fourth changed the design and added the Retina screen. With the iPhone 5, we arguably got less innovation than the 4S, just features that the competition’s already perfected. None of that is going to make anyone but the hardcore iCult break a contract to upgrade early and it’s certainly not going to convert anyone who wasn’t just waiting to buy an iPhone regardless of what it had. They didn’t even improve the camera, the one thing where the iPhone has solidly stepped on the competition’s throat for 2 years now. It looks like the Lumia 920′s camera will be the top dog this generation far and away, something that was enough to sway my girlfriend from being sold on the iPhone 5 to waiting for reviews of the 920 and likely going with that if the camera fares as well as it appears.

What this tells me is that Apple is running out of big innovations to make to the iPhone. They undoubtedly have an R&D superteam with a virtually unlimited budget crunching away on new ideas but there is a limit to what can be done right now and I think mobile phones are coming up on it, if they aren’t there already. If the best they can offer with the iPhone 5 is matching features others already have, that will start to take some of the sheen off the fashion trend that they’re carefully balanced on. If they can’t outspec the competition, they might have to start competing on price or offering things like more than 16GB of memory in the base model, eating into their precious high margins which remain an abberation in the tech industry. When those margins see even a small dip, expect their nearly $700 stock price to take a big hit as investors no longer see Apple as the new hotness.

Now, some of the smartest people in the world work at Apple and I believe they knew this long before I did. I also believe this is why they decided for no good reason to change the dock connector on the iPhone 5 to a new design ironically called Lightning. There was nothing wrong with the old connector. It was a bit large but it wasn’t obtrusive, it worked fine and it was on millions of accessories and cables. The new connector requires either the replacement of everything you used your iPhone with before or that you purchase a $30 adapter which Apple is rumoured to be selling exclusively. There is no benefit other than being smaller because this “Lightning” connector doesn’t even support the new USB 3.0 standard, meaning it’s probably not even much faster. This makes Apple’s partners happy because they get to sell the same thing to everyone over again and it allows Apple to hedge their bet a bit because if the iPhone 5′s sales don’t outpace the 4S, they can pad out those margins by making the new buyers pay for a $30 adapter that probably costs them $1.50 at most. If sales are lower, the new customers get the privilege of subsidising the drop and if the sales are higher, Apple just gets to make even more money. It’s the kind of scummy, disrespectful move that few other companies have the brilliance, gall and blindly ravenous fan base to pull off. I truly believe that this move has a shot at making Apple the same amount of money, even if the iPhone 5 ends up falling short of the sales bar set by the 4S. That will keep investors happy but it’s a move that will only work for a year. Lightning is something they’re going to be stuck with for a while.

I’ve insisted for a long time that Apple could only maintain the momentum they have for so long before they simply ran out of ways to milk it. Sure, they have the iCult that will blindly buy whatever Tim Cook tells them to and the success of iOS devices has grown that membership immensely in recent years. Much as I despise this company and the pretentious douchebags that ran before and run it now, they’re here to stay and I think it’s partially good because it forces everyone else to work extra hard to compete and make things better for everyone. As with all my predictions, I could be totally wrong on this but I think this is where their growth goes from stratospheric to merely atmospheric and where the other phone hardware and platform makers can really step up and show what they’ve got. Apple’s growth is wholly dependent on that ultra-high margin and if they can’t find a reason to get people to keep paying $200 + $80/month for an iPhone every year, the only way to keep the sales numbers up will be to join the “race to the bottom” that everyone else is in. When that happens, it’s no longer Apple and everyone else, it’s Apple with everyone else. That’s the way it should be and I won’t lie, if this is the first iPhone that sells less in the first month than the last one, I will take great pleasure in watching iCultists squirm as they try to spin it as a good thing. Apple’s done some great things but they need a shot of humility and I think this might be the start of it. In my house, they’ve now gone from a guaranteed sale to a 75/25 shot of losing to a Windows Phone made by Nokia. More people than just my girlfriend are thinking that now and that should be keeping Tim Cook awake tonight.

Coverage, Mobile Phones, Predictions, Technology Apple, iPhone, mobile phones, predictions, technology

DayZ: A Wonder Impossible In the Cloud Future

3 Comments Posted by Parallax Abstraction on June 25, 2012

A couple of weeks ago, I got wind of the DayZ mod for ArmA II from some friends at Gamers With Jobs. This has been out for a little while now. A single guy from New Zealand decided to take this hyper-realistic military game and write a zombie apocalypse survival mod for it. Check his site if you want more details but basically, your goals are to stay alive as long as possible in a world where you have to scavenge for everything while surrounded by a ton of zombies and other human players, most of whom want to kill you on sight and steal your stuff. You can be ended very easily and if you are, you have to start all over again with nothing. The average person’s lifespan in the game is less than an hour. Did I mention the mod is also in very early alpha? It’s incredibly hardcore, brutally difficult, tense, buggy and frustrating as all Hell.

And it’s awesome!

Many prefer to play DayZ by themselves but that’s not really my thing. When I manage to meet up with a group of friends though (which is often hard as most people rarely have maps and have to navigate the massive island by landmarks), this is some of the best multiplayer fun I’ve had in years. Collaborating with a group of people over Ventrilo is incredible because though the challenges are many, the satisfaction of going on a successful raid or fighting off an attack by human bandits or a horde of zombies is unlike what you’ll experience in almost any other game. DayZ makes you work for every little thing but you feel on top of the world when you get it. Its popularity has taken off and in addition to having a growing and thriving community, it’s actually sold thousands of new copies of ArmA II as new players buy in to be able to try it out.

As I played the other day, a thought occurred to me. Lately, many in the games industry have been hyping up “cloud gaming” as the primary future for the medium. Basically, the idea is that most gaming will be done via streaming services, where you don’t actually run the game on a computer or console on your side but access it on someone’s server and have the video streamed to you as you play. Companies like OnLive and Gaikai have been experimenting with this and the tech is rocky but improving. Recently leaked internal documents from Microsoft show they are positioning the next Xbox to become a cloud system later in its life and Sony has openly said they believe cloud gaming is the future. There are definitely advantages to it, such as only needing a basic, low power computer or console to play on as all it’s really doing is decoding a video signal while the heavy lifting is done elsewhere. This means you could buy one box and theoretically play technologically evolving games on it indefinitely. That’s kind of where the benefits for the consumer end though.

Let’s leave aside for the moment that Internet service providers are already going out of their way to try and stop this kind of thing. If cloud gaming is indeed the future, there’s a lot of powerful lobbyists that will have to be silenced first, and that’s only in the relatively few parts of the world where fast, reliable broadband is commonplace. What concerns me more about this future is the lack of ownership, control and freedom consumers will have over the games they buy. Official mod support has become less and less common these days, with a few companies like Valve, Bethesda and Bohemia Interactive (makers of ArmA II) still embracing and encouraging it. In all cases though, modding a game involves well, modifying existing game assets and code in order to create something new. In the cloud future, where no one owns anything they purchase and the game you play lives entirely in an instance on a server, modding would be largely impossible. How would people like the makers of DayZ get access to the code, scripts, artwork and server infrastructure necessary to make their creations? How would they be able to test and quickly update it in a virtual environment that’s being tightly controlled by a large publisher, distribution service or platform holder? Indeed, how would amazing new experiences like DayZ ever get a chance exist in the cloud future?

Sure, there are ways that such things could be done in this environment but really, how likely are they? Mods generally enjoy only small user bases, not enough to even be a rounding error to a large publisher. In the cloud future being prophesied, small companies like Bohemia Interactive couldn’t afford to create their own mod-friendly cloud services from the ground up and the big boys who would be running them don’t care about mods as they see them as a threat to paid DLC. This future has the potential to stamp out one of the greatest independent creative outlets in gaming, possibly ruining the future for a great many innovative ideas before they even have a chance. Some of gaming’s greatest successes like Counter-Strike, Team Fortress and Day of Defeat began their lives as mods and new projects like DayZ are showing that when developers and publishers embrace modders, a single guy can take an existing game, turn it into something incredible and make a pile of extra money for the developer at the same time. It’s win-win for everyone but the cloud future that the big companies want would end that.

Maybe DayZ isn’t for you but if you’re a PC gamer at all, chances are you’ve played and enjoyed at least one mod in your time. When you’re next hearing about the cloud future and thinking about all the ways that’s going to make gaming easier and better, stop and think about what it could mean the end of. DayZ is a wonder and there are potentially many more like it to come, but only if we still get to control our purchases after making them. The cloud future isn’t for our benefit, it’s for the benefit of the big games industry and the big guys don’t want DayZ, they want more Call of Duty and overpriced map packs to go with it. That’s definitely not what I want.

Business, Predictions, Video Games ArmA II, cloud computing, computers, DayZ, mods, predictions, video games

On Gaming’s Future: Mobile Reality Check

2 Comments Posted by Parallax Abstraction on April 4, 2012

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve had the launch of the iPad 3 and a slew of rumours about what we may see in the next-gen home consoles. As usual, the growing Apple-centric members of the enthusiast press were quick to chime in on how the iPad 3 is somehow revolutionising games yet again, how Apple are the only ones that get the future of games and how iPad specs are accelerating so rapidly that in a few years, it will not only have rendered dedicated handhelds obsolete but now home consoles as well.

Never mind the inherent dangers of Apple controlling the industry, this is where all gaming is going they say and somehow, a monopoly is now a good thing. I think the predictions as they lay them out are very much a result of the Apple reality distortion field that still permeates the press today. However, they’re not entirely off base and to say that the current AAA industry doesn’t have major problems that currently don’t have a clear path to being solved is also false. I think AAA games as they are today are in very real danger but I don’t think mobile games on your TV is where things are going either. As usual, the answer lies somewhere in the middle. I think if we’re going to answer the question on where gaming is going to be in a few years, it’s important to have a reality check of both sides of this debate as both are overstating their benefits and understating their weaknesses. Each have a lot of challenges both now and going forward and many of these are more similar between them than either would like to admit. This post is going to focus on the mobile space and the next one in a couple of days will focus on the AAA space.

When we hear the enthusiast press and Apple crusaders talk about mobile gaming (which is largely dominated by iOS, this can’t really be disputed yet), the talk is how it’s ushering a return to a golden era when games were less complicated, cheaper to create, the developers and not publishers controlled the content and innovation was encouraged and praised. Indeed, these are all generally good things. Games on iOS right now are low risk and every week, we hear stories about a small team having their project make a killing which leads to massive riches. Every time there are layoffs or departures from AAA studios, there’s usually a story the next day about how those people have gone off and formed new teams in the mobile and social spaces. Games on iOS are cheap to make, cheaper to buy and come with a massive and growing install base right out of the gate. It seems like the sector is in a stratospheric rise that has no limit and which will mean great things for innovation and new gaming experiences in the future.

That’s the reality for right now but the sad truth becoming more evident all the time is that mobile game development is quickly becoming as risky as other parts of the industry and will only get worse as the technology improves. There are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of games alone on the iTunes App Store right now and hundreds more being added every week. The better part of 90% of these offerings are garbage and not worth a second glance but the sheer volume makes it impossible to determine what’s good and what isn’t. iTunes has user reviews but like most other places, they often aren’t trustworthy and are dependent on personal taste. Even with many games selling for as little as a buck, people are being choosy because those bucks add up fast with that much choice and poor quality content out there.

So how does the average consumer decide what to buy? Usually by looking at the top seller or staff picks list, which are almost always dominated with the same few titles and rarely change. Unless a new game becomes a viral hit, has publisher and PR backing or gets co-promotion from Apple through one of these lists or placement in a TV ad, the chances of it becoming a huge seller are almost lottery-win thin. Apple has always thought of gaming as a red-headed stepchild and the revolution many say they started was something they fell into by accident and which has been perpetuated largely with their indifference. Steve Jobs believed computers were tools and that gaming was a waste of their potential and that’s still very much part of Apple’s culture.

The reality is that while we may always hear the press talk about runaway hits like Angry Birds or Draw Something, they are actually flukes and do not at all represent the norm. The makers of both of those titles had a string of releases prior to their seminal hits, most of which were flops. In fact, the often unspoken truth is that a tiny group of developers make almost all of the revenue on iOS and many respected developers are now seeing the platform becoming just like the rest of the industry it’s supposedly revolutionising. In other words, in only a few short years iOS has become almost entirely hit driven and dominated by a few key players who are following the money and not focusing on innovation or new ideas.

The one major advantage iOS has over home consoles and to a lesser extent PC is that the cost of entry is very low. One of the great things it has done has allowed the “bedroom programmers” to sweep back in and have a strong creative voice again. An individual or small team that would never be able to develop on a console can make an iOS game in their spare time, put it out there and maybe get rich from it. While there’s certainly a chance of that, the hard truths above make it a rare chance at best. Mark Rein, Vice-President of Epic Games who have released the very successful (and co-promoted by Apple) Infinity Blade series said on a podcast earlier this year that the average iOS game grosses $700 over its lifetime. Granted, he just threw that out with no citation but I’m going to assume given his position that he knows what he’s talking about.

$700 is nothing and makes even a part-time development endeavour a big financial risk. Even if we assume Rein is low-balling and the average return is ten to twenty times that, it’s still not enough for even one person to make a living on, let alone a team of people working full-time. For a lot of hobbyist developers, the risk may be worth it and I say more power to them. Some of the biggest successes and innovations in the world came from people with only a shoestring and a dream. But as a supposed new revolution that will bring with it a whole new facet of the industry, the picture is not super rosy. The press has people believing that the cost to get into iOS games is super low and because of that, it’s virtually a guarantee that you’ll get your investment back if not make a sizeable profit. That’s simply not the case and while the low cost of entry may allow a newly funded team to survive a flop or two, they can’t do so indefinitely until they get lucky enough to find their golden goose. Most of these people who are fleeing AAA development to make mobile games are going to fail and don’t have much greater a chance of success as they do in AAA, though getting funding to try is certainly easier. As tablets and phones get more powerful, it will only get worse.

The press is talking about how powerful the iPad 3 is and how it can rival the power of an Xbox 360. That’s actually not true at all right now but as these tablets continue to increase in power, there’s a good chance that in a few years, they will have similar graphical and processing capabilities as even the next-gen consoles. At that time, you could put your tablet down on a wireless video dock, pick up a Bluetooth game pad and play a AAA experience on your TV with a console you can pick up and take with you. Sounds pretty good from a user experience point of view and honestly, I really like the idea.

The danger is that the technical arms race is what made AAA games so incredibly expensive and risky and with iOS being fairly risky already, it will get even more so as power increases. This will quickly lead to the small developers being marginalised and forced out and the larger ones to need bigger and bigger budgets (and by extension more marketing which means even more money) to ensure that their games succeed. See where this is going? Right to where AAA games are now. Long development times, huge budgets and teams and few creative risks being taken. $1-$5 games won’t be possible anymore when they go from costing thousands to millions and then tens of millions to make and market. As prices go up, so do the apprehensions of customers to try out a bunch of games in succession to find out what they like. The marketing for these larger games will also drown out indie developers and push them back from the mainstream to a low-profit niche for enthusiasts only. Different form factor, same problems. This isn’t good for developers or gamers.

The raw fact is this: Publishers are desperate for new sustainable revenue streams right now and with a couple of exceptions like Electronic Arts, none of them have gotten behind iOS gaming in a big way. Some might say they’re just dinosaurs stuck in old ways and not embracing new things but these are large companies that are run by smart people in one of the most dynamic, rapidly changing industries in the world. They know fortunes in gaming can change overnight and how to latch on to things that have big success potential. With their resources, it wouldn’t be hard for them to try a few iOS games out and see what happens. Yet they largely aren’t and most of them are tie-ins to other properties, not original titles. Why is that? Is that because they simply don’t see them as big enough for their league or could it be that perhaps they don’t see the long-term potential in the segment and that it stands to be more of a fad than the wave of the future? The AAA industry is hurting right now but it still makes far more money per year than iOS gaming and it’s foolish to discount their knowledge and decisions. If they are lining up to back the Wii U but aren’t paying much attention to iOS, I think that says something significant.

So what needs to happen to prevent this platform from burning out and becoming like the AAA industry it’s trying to avoid? I honestly have more thoughts on this from the AAA side, only because that industry has been around much longer and isn’t in such a state of flux. I think the first and biggest thing is that Apple needs to take some pages from the book of Steam. They need to stop thinking of gaming as an afterthought and start embracing it. Rather than just letting games exist on iOS and having Darwin rule the ecosystem, they need to start showcasing titles and really giving attention and promotion to indies. Don’t just let the best selling or viral titles get noticed, start showing off the unique and creative experiences offered on your platform and show why sometimes the smaller games can be just as good or better than the technical show pieces like Infinity Blade. Steam is its own platform and owned by a company that makes games too but Valve don’t shy away from promoting the work of others and giving great projects from all levels of development the spotlight. If they want iOS to take over living rooms and become the next great force in gaming, they need to show everything that makes the platform great and ensure that it doesn’t just become about flashy graphics and big marketing budgets.

Even Apple must realise that iOS’s current growth is a fashion trend and is going to slow in the next couple of years. The platform’s not going anywhere but sales of new devices will taper and their user base will begin to plateau. If they don’t step up and start selling the benefits of their hardware as a gaming platform for all kinds of different experiences, they risk handing the keys of gaming back to the console makers before iOS gaming truly has rubber hit road. The small developers are fuelling the growth of iOS gaming and they’re the reason the enthusiast press is so infatuated with it right now. If it simply becomes about flashy graphics and style over substance, it will lose its lustre and the renaissance will fade. There’s great opportunity for creativity to shine here, Apple needs to get off the sidelines and start backing that. Otherwise gaming may go roaring right past them.

By the end of the week, I’ll have my next post up which will tackle this same issue but from the AAA side.

Business, Mobile Phones, Predictions, Tablets, Technology, Video Games business, iOS, iPad, iPhone, predictions, technology, video games

The Worries of An Apple Led Post-PC World

4 Comments Posted by Parallax Abstraction on March 8, 2012

So the iPad 3 was announced yesterday (yes I know it’s just called the iPad but it’s the 3rd one so it’s the iPad 3) and as usual, the press tripped over themselves to give them free PR. The mainstream news media which wouldn’t give any other tech launch more than a cursory mention practically live blogged the event and well, the fanboy driven tech press did what it always does with Apple launches, gush like teen girls at a boy band concert, much like the legion of practically religious level Apple enthusiasts who clogged my Twitter feed during the reveal. It’s still gross and in the press’ case, the opposite of journalism but it’s also par for the course now and my getting mad about it is pointless. Truthfully, I was paying closer attention than I usually would because my girlfriend and I were strongly considering splitting the purchase of an iPad 3. She wants it to surf and do e-mail easily when she travels for work and I want it to see if it’s possible for iOS games to hook me in (which they haven’t to this point). Something unexpected happened after work that may result in us moving soon and thus delaying that money being spent for a while but we’ll see.

Among all the gushing comes the usual talking points about the “post-PC world” tablets are supposedly ushering in, points Apple themselves trumpet whenever they can. They are quick to point out that the term doesn’t mean the end of traditional computers (an area where they still make a lot of money) but it does mean a reversal of the current roles where the desktop or laptop is a person’s primary means of computing and the tablet complements that. Tablets don’t really fit in with how I do my day-to-day computing, mostly because I am usually either at home or the office, type at a blistering speed an on-screen keyboard simply can’t keep up with and I’m used to a heavy multitasking environment where I can do and monitor several things at once. You put two copies of myself on a couch with stuff to do and the version of me using my HP ProBook will leave the tablet version of me in the dust. However, I’ll be the first to admit that the way in which I use a computer now is not at all mainstream and this is most certainly a vision based around the mainstream. If my girlfriend and my Mom found themselves using a tablet first and foremost, that’s cool by me as long as I can still have my laptop and gaming desktop too.

Tablets require less material to make, can arguably be priced to be much more accessible than traditional computers (though Apple is trying their damndest to avoid this), can be carried around as easily as a pad of paper and can do most day-to-day computing tasks without even breaking a sweat. I’m not denying the benefits of the “post-PC” world and many elements of it I will welcome. What I do have many concerns with is Apple being the leaders of this world. The original iPad kind of came from nowhere and virtually everyone trying to compete with it has been stumbling over themselves to catch up, while also thinking they can charge similar prices for devices that are simply inferior. As tablets go the iPad is virtually unchallenged and barring some major missteps by Apple or a roaring comeback into the space from Microsoft (whose missteps with Windows 8 will be the subject of a future post), it stands to be that way for the foreseeable future. And this is not good for anyone.

Having a single dominant player in any market is a bad thing because it discourages innovation and leads to higher prices because of reduced competition. One need look no further than when Microsoft Windows was basically your only real choice for a desktop operating system. Poor performance, gaping security flaws, massive product delays, tiny incremental updates and bullying of OEMs were all the orders of the day back then. Apple is still a distant minority in the traditional computing space but they gain ground on Windows every day and the iPad led post-PC world could put the writing on the wall for Microsoft’s key rainmaker. When Apple put their feet to the fire, what we ended up with was Windows 7, arguably the most polished and solid version of Windows ever and a product which I happily use every day and firmly believe is superior to Mac OS. However, even when Microsoft Windows was at its flattest and most stationary, there were a number of key differences of PCs compared to Macs which Microsoft embraced and still does to this day. Apple does not share these values and should they become the dominant player in the market, their continued adherence to them doesn’t do good for the future advancement of computing. Here are some examples of what I mean:

Apple likes closed platforms: The original incarnation of iOS didn’t allow third party applications of any kind. This was the way Steve Jobs wanted it because he believed these external influences destabilised the user’s experience and he was right, they do. But after screaming demand from users (and Android right around the corner who embraced third party software), he relented and it was arguably the smartest thing Apple ever did. Apple nonetheless still holds the keys to the kingdom and while they’ll let anyone write apps for iOS, you have to get their permission to make it available and they can refuse you for any reason, including for things like making an app that’s better than one of their stock ones or making a game that raises awareness of their supplier’s factory conditions. The biggest innovations have come from people breaking the mould and disrupting trends with new things. You know, exactly like iOS did. On Windows, you could write any program you wanted and put it out there with permission from no one. In an Apple post-PC world, only one entity has control of what you get access to and they have an agenda that doesn’t always favour innovation. That only benefits them, not the innovators and not the users.
Apple hates user choice: Want an iPad? There’s three different memory sizes and you can have it with cellular capability or not. Want an iPhone? There’s 3 of them and they aren’t expandable. Want an iMac? There’s 4 of them. A MacBook? 8. Want a gaming system? Sorry, there isn’t one. Don’t care so much about having a lot of disk space but want a faster CPU? Can’t do that, you pick a template. Want a desktop PC but also use your own monitor setup? You can only do that with a Mac Pro that starts at $2,600. And since the Mac and iOS aren’t open platforms where you have different manufacturers offering different products and competing on price (someone tried to do this with Mac OS and Apple destroyed them for it), you either go with their options at their prices or stay out. For your average mainstream end user, this probably isn’t a big deal but the enthusiast and professional markets are massive and growing and Apple doesn’t care about those. With Windows PCs, you have all the choice you could ever want from a bare bones netbook to an $8,000 gaming rig that will dim the lights on your whole block. There’s something for everyone and it’s easy to find something that will do what you want for the price you’re willing to pay. Which brings me to the next point.
Apple products are purposefully overpriced: This is less of a problem than it used to be but it is simple fact that at least when it comes to desktop and laptop computers, Apple products cost substantially more relative to the technical capabilities you’re getting. You show me an iMac and I will show you a PC with similar specs that costs way less. Apple makes something like $200+ on every iPad sold from day one, an utterly obscene profit margin by modern tech industry standards. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a company charging what the market will pay and at least right now, Apple has managed to convince many people that paying hundreds more than a similarly speced competitor’s product makes economic sense. However, the only reason they’re able to do this is again because they have no competition in their space. Yes, we do still have Windows PCs that are fiercely competing on price but remember, we’re talking in the context of a post-PC world where tablets are the de facto standard. Right now, inferior Android tablets are going on sale for the same $500 price as the iPad because Apple has wrongly got it into the heads of the mainstream public that any tablet under that price isn’t worth considering. If we enter a post-PC world that Apple largely controls, the cost of computing will go up substantially, making it harder for less wealthy people to get into and thus, reducing the number of people using what is now a fundamental part of everyday life. Competition is key to lower prices, innovation and accessibility and with Apple running things, there would be no such competition.
Apple believes they still own the products you buy: If you have an iPad, iPhone or iPod and want to load media or apps on it, you do it through iTunes. Period. A Mac App Store is already available and many believe software on Mac OS will eventually go the same way. On Android, there are multiple app stores that compete to offer the best products and prices and on Windows, you can get software in literally thousands of different ways to suit your preference. On iOS, there is no such thing unless you jailbreak your device (which of course voids the warranty and locks you out of future updates). Apple claims this is in the interest of making sure the user experience is always seamless and reliable but that’s a thin smokescreen. In reality, it’s structured this way to make sure anything you do with that device has to be approved by and more importantly, purchased through them. Apple takes a substantial cut of every single thing sold through iTunes and as with hardware, it’s not in their interest to let you shop elsewhere where they can’t control the experience and more importantly, their slice of the action. So after paying a minimum of $500 for your new iPad, Apple still believes they have the right to tell you how to use it and if you don’t agree, you don’t get to play in their sandbox. This is incredibly arrogant and despite what their carefully curated marketing tells you, this isn’t about ensuring a great experience for you but about how much they steer you into exclusively giving them more money, even after you’ve already given them a lot of it. In other words, they still believe they have a right to control your device, even after you’ve paid for it. As anyone who has used Windows 7 on a capable PC will say, you can have an open platform with choice and still have a rock solid, pleasing experience. You don’t have to wall it up for things to work well.
Apple is becoming a patent troll: There’s no denying that at least right now, Android based tablet competitors can’t hold a candle to the iPad. Frankly, Google and their partners need to get their act together and fast because every month they don’t bring out an iPad killer, more Android loyalists get fed up with waiting and go to the Apple camp. Windows 8 is also a long way off and we have no idea how that’s going to go. Beyond that though, there is another darker reason for this. Apple has been on a patent bender for the last several years, locking down everything they can and threatening Android partners with potentially bank-breaking lawsuits. They are already locked in many such fights across Europe. One of the main reasons Google bought Motorola Mobility for billions of dollars a while back was just to lock up their patent portfolio in order to use it to stare down Apple. Yes, lots of companies are doing this and yes, much of this is a result of an American patent system that’s broken to the point of absurdity. I don’t deny that but one also can’t deny that Apple is a company with $100 billion in cash with no end in sight, they don’t need the money and patents aren’t like trademarks, you don’t lose them if you just sit on them and don’t sue everyone. They’re doing this to bleed their competitors dry and trying to stop other, potentially better devices from entering the market alongside theirs. This isn’t an innovating marketplace of ideas, this is Apple trying to use their massive cash reserves to bully out anyone who can mount a threat to them. If they truly stand behind their products, then they should be able to stand on their own and if someone uses a slightly similar case design or the magnetic charging connector, they should have nothing to worry about if their stuff is still better. Using the courts to stop competition is manipulating the market and that doesn’t serve consumers.

You’ll notice one common theme in all those points: Choice or in Apple’s case, lack thereof. Everything Apple has built their impressive and continuing success on is based around restraining user choices which keeps prices high and ultimately, limits innovation only to their own and the ones they permit. So far this strategy seems to be working for them and probably will as long as they can string out the fashion trend that’s fuelling their current growth. But competition is what made the PC strong and it was a need to compete in new and creative ways that made Apple invent iOS and all its associated devices in the first place. Now that they are ruling the roost (at least as far as tablets go), their objective is about shrinking the scope of choice down and that’s something that only benefits them, not the customers and not the high-tech industry as a whole. Microsoft was accused, tried and heavily fined and regulated in Europe and almost in the US for doing far less nefarious things than that what I listed above. They were considered an evil predator but Apple does the same and in some cases worse and is considered a pioneering innovator.

Is a company who does all of what I’ve written and more the one you want having dominance of the post-PC world? I don’t know if I am. If you’re a hardcore Apple fan, you’ve likely blown off what I’ve written as me just being another hater who dislikes the top dog and that’s not what I am. Keep in mind, I almost bought an iPad 3 today and the only reason I didn’t was because of an unexpected event that should it not pan out, will have me considering the purchase again. I don’t want to see Apple fail, I just don’t want to see them being the only ones who have a say in the post-PC future.

Apple has done one thing exceedingly well: They took a very bloated, arrogant and stagnant high-tech industry and shoved a massive wad of humble pie in its face, almost overnight. That’s damn impressive and the shake up is exactly what the industry needed. I thank them for bringing about that change. However, I believe the tides have changed too quickly and even when they were almost down and out, Apple and their devoted fans were still incredibly arrogant. If they control the post-PC world, the same problems we faced before could be faced again, only with a different company at the top and no one in a position to challenge them. That’s bad for the industry, bad for consumers and bad for innovation. I truly hope that some of Apple’s competitors who are still scrambling to find their feet manage to do so and mount a proper fight. And I really hope that as consumers get more tech savvy, that they start to realise that Apple is supposed to work for them, not the other way around.

The post-PC world has the potential to be awesome and revolutionary but for it to realise its full potential, user choice must be at the forefront of it. In their current form, that’s not what Apple wants.

Business, Computers, Mobile Phones, Predictions, Tablets, Technology Apple, computers, electronics, iPad, iPhone, mobile phones, predictions

The THQ Drama Continues – Is there really any hope left?

1 Comment Posted by Parallax Abstraction on January 25, 2012

I’ve said before that I like to not only follow creative mediums but often the businesses behind them as I think it’s valuable to know where the stuff we enjoy comes from. One of my early posts here was about THQ, specifically taking the piss out of Danny Bilson and what I believed was a botched strategy that attempted–and largely failed–to revitalise the company. Since then, THQ’s fortunes have gotten markedly worse with their one potential saving grace of Saint’s Row The Third selling well but not as well as they wanted and rumours of dwindling cash reserves, massive cancellations and the possible sale of the company, which were promptly denied and followed up by a statement that they are dumping licensed games and refocusing on core products. Their stock price is well under a dollar and they will be faced with delisting if they can’t turn things around fast. In short, things are dire at what is still the world’s fourth largest publisher.

This morning, NeoGAF posted a lengthy (and I must say very poorly written) letter from an anonymous group claiming to be made up of ex-employees and shareholders. You can read it for yourself but if its contents are true, it paints a very unflattering picture of the top management and a trend of poor decisions and leadership that goes back many years. It shows that the company’s problems are historically rooted and not just a result of bad luck over the last couple of years but of someone running the show who doesn’t really seem to understand the business they’re in. I still maintain that many strategic and creative decisions made under Danny Bilson’s watch (like turning away Respawn, Homefront and Red Faction Armageddon) were bad ones and hurt the company big. However, it also appears as though many of those bad decisions and many past ones were influenced by an overall poor strategic vision employed by Brian Farrell, long-time CEO. I’m not sure if Bilson’s ideas are what THQ needs to save itself but in light of this new information, I will admit that I was probably harder on him than I needed to be. Plus there’s that whole uDraw things which even before I admitted he had nothing to do with. That facepalmingly dumb project was all Farrell.

Despite a plummeting stock price, botched initiatives, massive layoffs and studio closures, the top echelon’s of THQ’s management still took home millions in compensation, millions the company desperately needs to stay afloat. Yet for some reason, shareholders don’t seem to be fighting for a change. Whether or not Danny Bilson should be there is debatable but at this point, I think there’s no question that the CEO and other members of the company’s leadership don’t know what they’re doing and don’t know how to carry the company forward in a new direction. They need to be kicked to the curb and soon if they want to have any hope of recovering. With so many stories in the news of ruthless shareholder rebellions at other companies just for failing to meet a quarter of two’s expectations, I don’t know how Farrell & Co. have survived this long without being overturned.

As I’ve said before (and will say again), the triple-A video game industry is in a bad way right now and it needs more competition, not less. This is a brutal industry and it requires adaptive leadership with razor-sharp business wit and a pulse on industry trends. Brian Farrell is not providing that and if the open letter is true, hasn’t been for a long time. There are a lot of employees, shareholders and gamers who want to see THQ succeed and grow. They clearly can’t do that with the current team at the helm. They gotta’ go.

Business, Predictions, Video Games business, Danny Bilson, predictions, THQ, video games

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THQ’s Demise & Why There’s Plenty of Blame for Gamers Too

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How much more dumbed down can tech get?

Could the iPhone 5 be the beginning of Apple’s plateau?

On Gaming’s Future: Mobile Reality Check

The Worries of An Apple Led Post-PC World

The THQ Drama Continues – Is there really any hope left?

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