Month: February 2008

Next-gen DVD Format War over

Posted by DarkJedi – February 19, 2008

Today Toshiba threw in the towel, formally declaring HD DVD a dead format, leaving Sony’s Blu-Ray as the remaining option for consumers. Everyone is happy – we can move on! All we need now is that Blu-Ray needs to grow up and mature. So Sony, instead of gloating over your first victory in a format war ever, here is a couple of suggestions on improvement that you might as well get started on…

In terms of maturity Blu-Ray needs to adapt its Profile 2.0 as fast as possible so that people doesn’t get burned any more than they already have. Regional coding is also a thing of the past, trying to keep the markets separated so that they can squeeze more money out of the western countries and offer richer content to the slower adapting markets, like USA, the same way it happened with DVD. Regional coding simply needs to go.

Then the content needs to go up in quality. Sony has for so long championed that 30 GB is not enough for the next-gen format – then why don’t you use more than maximum 18 GB on any Blu-Ray? Give the consumer a reason to buy these disc for the already far too high prices Blu-Ray disc are selling f0r – simply add more and better content! One might still remember the early days of DVDs, where almost no real additional content was put on the discs, the prices were high and the movies were poor conversions with almost the same low quality as VHS in terms of picture and especially sound. Sony has championed this format as crystalline in terms of quality so the content needs to be as well – or the money spent on the disc will again be wasted…

Then the loading times of Blu-Ray discs needs to go down. Choosing Java as a language might seem smart in terms of flexibility, but NOT in terms of speed. Customers doesn’t want to go from DVD with almost instantaneous loading times to a Blu-Ray disc with between 50 seconds and 150 seconds worth of loading time. This simply needs to go down! Way down … Computers are fast and we do not live in 1990 anymore… Loading times should be labelled on players to give buyers something to assess them by.

The question of upgradeability then comes to mind. A lot of early adapters have been seriously burned by the lagging maturity in the rushed-to-market Blu-Ray specification. This should not happen to common consumers. Players should be marked with a clear label that they are future-proof.

The prices need to go down. I know that Sony considers the DVD to be last-gen by now, but it is still the bar on which Blu-Ray is measured. Upscaled DVDs look good. Few normal consumers see real difference on medium quality flatscreen TVs combined with a standard HIFI-setup between upscaled DVDs and the Blu-Ray discs. When this is the reality the difference in price in terms of both content (discs) and players becomes an issue and currently Blu-Ray is too expensive on both accounts. This needs to be addressed.

Digital Rights are an important issue and copy protection on Blu-Ray discs are, like HD DVDs, appalling. On top of an already dis functional AACS Blu-Ray has BD-Java to further slow players down. This needs to go! Normal consumers will not accept their legally bought discs doesn’t play correctly. The explanation that copy protection is needed and fair will not be accepted by the common consumer. He wants the content he had paid good money for to play correctly or he wants his money back and heads back to DVDs where this is not an issue anymore!

Well, that should be enough for Sony and the rest of the group to keep them occupied for a while… Let’s not hope for their sake that they are too late in fixing this because digital downloads are coming – with Microsoft pressing harder each day for this alternative – an alternative that is not limited by size or production cost in the same way…

Follow-up: Lack of Games for Windows good for Linux?

Posted by DarkJedi – February 17, 2008

While Microsoft singlehandedly choose to abandon that platform they are earning all their cash on when it comes to gaming because of their failure with Vista and especially DirectX 10 others are not ready to put PC gaming into its grave. A PC Gaming alliance has been formed – mostly by hardware producers who earn a lot on hardcore gamers, who always buys the cutting edge of hardware again and again – which is started to preserve the PC as a viable gaming platform.

What astonishes me in all this debate on PC Gaming versus Console gaming is the three facts that everyone, including the game producers, seems to have forgotten:

  1. A lot of games are played best with mouse and keyboard, e.g. First-persons shooters (which is by far the most popular genre) and strategy games.
  2. What about the modding community? Have the producers forgotten how to keep an ancient game like Half-Life selling more than 14 years after it was published because of fans with spare time that keeps making great mods that adds free play-hours for their game, without them having to invest in it – only enjoy the increased sales over time?
  3. Sometimes you don’t want to play your games in the large LCD TV in the living room, but rather on your computer in a room by yourself or on your laptop while traveling by train.

Now we hear publishers like Epic coming out saying that they will shift their focus to consoles… Well, consoles may very well have a better starting sale, but what about the overall lifetime sales? The console market is a fast shifting one – If your game is a AAA game you would have spent a lot of money developing it and marketing it, but if it fails to draw attention at first you will only end up lowering your prices on the game and perhaps over time break even. If it were published on the PC, however, you might see the game suddenly going back in focus with a good-gameplay mod holding up the sales, like Epic has seen with almost all their Unreal Tournament games. They practically lived off the modding community! And now they are turning their backs to them – well, good luck with that! That is exactly what happens when you make a one-sided contract with Microsoft, who only has two things it wants out of a contract:

  1. To boost the XBox’s game selection compared to Sony’s PlayStation 3…
  2. To boost the appalling Vista sales by the promise of “beautiful, optimal” gaming on DirectX 10, which has already been shown to be the worst move Microsoft has made yet.

So naturally Epic has gotten a lot of cash from Microsoft for making “Gears of War” an XBox 360-only and then a “Vista”-only in terms of full graphics. The funny thing is that XP is fully capable of displaying it as beautiful as the Vista version, but Microsoft forced Epic to disable some graphical options on XP so that people would want to buy the crappy Vista. Naturally those restrictions could be avoided :)

So in the end we find that game publishers really doesn’t care about the many fans they have on the PC gaming platform – they care for Microsoft’s money and their first month sales… All I can say is: Go out and find a game on a console that has earned more money than that of “World of Warcraft” or “Half-Life”…