Tools, and instructions for more easily installing and launching Windows games via Wine or CrossOver directly in the macOS Steam client. Rough edges abound.
ever heard of ActiveX? you know, arbitrary code installing and running in your browser and available to be scripted by javascript? sorry. I'm not solely responsible, there were many of us. but still sorry, pretty responsible. we were young. code-signing as a means of validating origin was a great idea. it needed additional infrastructure to keep track of originators and to prevent abuse, though, and that wasn't perfectly thought through or executed. live and learn.
ever heard of ActiveX? you know, arbitrary code installing and running in your browser on Windows and available to be scripted by javascript? like, instead of Java? sorry. I'm not solely responsible, but sorry, pretty responsible. we were young. code-signing as a means of validating origin was a great idea. though it needed additional infrastructure to prevent abuse and allow global revocation, and that wasn't perfectly thought through or executed. live and learn. :grinning-emoji:
Just like to say a big thank you for this. When ActiveX was no longer acceptable I wrote some desktop integration technology which replaced it for web apps with an http based background messaging protocol and activation via URL handler. This was sold to some large corporates. This made me a fuck load of money over the last decade or so. If you hadn't built ActiveX this wouldn't have been possible.
Teams started hogging my keyboard media keys last week just to play the ring tone twice when pressing play/pause. The media player won't react to these inputs anymore and I have to click with my mouse. Nice going, Teams devs.
It's the worst software in my PC by far. The only reason it is used by my company is because it's free with Office 365. Even ICQ was a better chat client in 2002.
I wonder if the Teams guys feel guilty about all the unnecessarily burned CPU time. Every time I'm compiling code my Teams experience degrades to a point where I wonder if I'm using a 133 MHz PC again and forgot to press the Turbo button.
> Teams started hogging my keyboard media keys last week just to play the ring tone twice when pressing play/pause. The media player won't react to these inputs anymore and I have to click with my mouse. Nice going, Teams devs.
Have also been experiencing this, call finishes so I press play to turn music back on, hear teams dialling tone. Annoyingly triggering
ActiveX had been EVERYWHERE in South Korea and it was the main reason behind IE being used even into early 2010s.
It feels surreal to come across someone who was responsible for something I hated so much back then. But now I’m just fascinated for some reason. I’d buy you a drink if I could :p
Early 2010s? Up until about 5 years ago if you wanted to do any banking you’d be doing it through IE and about half a dozen “security” activex plugins.
Except on mobile, which is what everybody preferred for obvious reasons.
I actually miss the parts of ActiveX that weren't tied to the web. Like the ability to write UI widgets in different PLs and then integrate them in one app. Or the ability to embed arbitrary documents into other documents, complete with a near-seamless rendering and editing experience. It's too bad that the idea didn't catch on.
That was pretty cool. I worked for a project that used ActiveX controls on webpages, via a private site you could only access through a private dial in number. Worked great.
yes, it would have to be a new Apple-TV with at least some more local storage. the current models have 8GB, I think. tweaking that up to 128GB or 256GB would open up a lot of possibilities without making a $199 price-point impossible. but hey, what do i know.
i'm honestly not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. if you are: heh, good one. if you're not: there's nothing wrong with putting some of your wood behind encouraging casual gaming and expanding your market, but putting ALL of your wood behind it? what else did they get accomplished in this time period? not enough other things if you take a look at how many people and how much money was being spent on R&D in that division.
Well put, and although I may be somewhat biased, I agree -- financial muscle only gave us the ability to get on the field, it doesn't help you win or have a long-term strategy. The original hardware profile (PC-like so tools were available) and including a HDD was what allowed us to get game developers on-board quickly. Including the HDD and the NIC were also the bets, and as I tried to say in my original post, these were the innovations and the bets on the living-room Trojan horse -- we could afford to include these things because the console business model involved an audience size, a higher bill-of-material and a payback model which things like set-top-boxes and WebTV did not.
Securing a few awesome first- and second-/third-party games exclusively to the console was also a critical tactic early on. I remain somewhat surprised that outside Halo there are no longer standout exclusive titles. I don't know why that effort has been dropped, that's stupid, too.
I think pursuing exclusive titles is a bit of a wild goose chase. They're necessary more to prop up a struggling console than to further benefit an already successful one. If the system is doing well then you don't have to convince anyone to target it. Especially in today's world where the big game engines target multiple platforms so easily, deciding to target only one is just leaving money on the table, even if your studio has strong preferences towards a specific console. Generally the only way to ensure an exclusive is to buy or pay off a game studio, but that can be self-defeating because that money offsets the increased game revenue.
But if you're relying on your console being a solid default favorite platform for games because it makes financial sense there's nothing wrong with that. It may not be as satisfying a "win" as exclusivity, but it's precisely the sort of win that you want. And it should still be flattering that developers are targeting your console merely because they think it's a good system rather than out of any backroom dealings.
Of course, you can change the equation with custom hardware, as the Kinect has done, and that has generated a few decent exclusive titles. We'll see what MS does with the hardware with the next console rev, maybe they'll be able to deliver more on the promise of the hardware and bring more major developer attention than it's gotten so far.
I think you are right, pursuing big name exclusives is often a fool's errand, and also that temporary hardware advantages like Kinect can cause exclusives to just happen, at least for a while.
But I also think that a thriving indie dev culture, as the OP is calling for (or rather, chastising MS for thwarting) can do the same thing: it can give a platform exclusive titles (games, but the same could be said of non-game apps) at least for a while, just because small indie devs can often only target one platform, at least until their indie title is a hit bringing in the cash to target other platforms.
(Had a little bit more but will have to leave it there as my laptop's reserve battery power warning is getting very insistent.)
I honestly don't know if Apple will enter this market, but I'm not quite as pessimistic as you are about the profit margin as the reason not to.
I think they could build a next-generation-console-capable Apple-TV and sell it at or below $199 while keeping their 40% margin. They would sell you each additional wireless controller (and it would be sweetly designed, I suspect) for the standard $79 peripheral cost.
The primary contributor to their bill-of-material cost savings vs. competitors is that they already own and/or license at huge volume their CPU and GPU cores and know how to fabricate them in multi-core formats with high-speed cross-connectivity. They can also buy RAM and flash for SSD storage at better costs than anybody else. These are the primary cost drivers (basically money flowing to IBM, nVidia, etc for CPU/GPU and money flowing elsewhere for RAM/SSD/HDD) for xBox, PS, Wii.
Apple would have dramatically lower overall startup costs versus the original xBox/xBox360 and PS2/3 given they already have a toolchain and SMP operating system with sandboxing, an App Store and its back-end, user-accounts and payment infrastructure, and numerous other costs shared with the rest of the Mac and iOS ecosystems.
Apple wouldn't have a lot of work to do to train developers: tell us the screen resolution, how to interact with the controller and any other new hardware capabilities, tell us anything special about the GPU's and let us go to town with the existing toolchain we are using for iPhone and iPad.
So, again, I have no idea if they'll do it, I just think it would be a very profitable business for them.
With Tim Cook's track record of world class supply chain management it will surely be profitable for them.
When the iPod was introduced it didn't compete on tech specs with the other music players. "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." - the famous last words dismissing the iPod.
When the iPhone was introduced it did have innovative tech but it was secondary to the overall experience.
I'd say when, not if, Apple really wades into the TV market, they should be able to achieve the same kind of disruption. TV's are an obvious choice for Apple, because the TV is one of those consumer electronic devices that occupy a sweet spot between status symbol and the everyday always connected lifestyle.
Thanks for the article. Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo better watch out!
It would be absolutely revolutionary if Apple could do it, and it almost seems too good to be true. If that supply chain was opened to anyone else it would be like getting the power of an xBox 360 at $99, forget the raspberry pi.
Now I am not too keen on the video games industry and an insider might have differ, but I've tried to do my fact checking. In a way the device you described for Apple's target specs is what Nintendo did the Wii - and were hugely successful for. They sold 100s of millions of units, and it wasn't sold at a loss so they minted money. However, despite their huge shipments, only Nintendo enjoyed success. The people who bought the Wii, only bought 1 or 2 games (like WiiFit and WiiSports) and it became incredibly hard for third parties to market big budget games to them. Effectively the 3rd party abandoned Nintendo.
Secondly, if the system is not powerful enough, I believe gamers will reject your platform. I believe this is more important than the "No wireless" issue because gamers are the only ones who will spend $59.99 on a big budget game, and as a result 3rd party companies will suffer. You can't sell Call of Duty at 99 cents, and gamers don't want to play a Call of Duty that looks like it was made in 2002.
So the market, I believe splits into 2 groups -
1.) Average folk, who want the box.
2.) "Gamers", who want the software.
We can already see this today. There are Netflix Machines like the Roku (1.) and consoles (PS3). However I believe that the the console guys (Nintendo/Sony) will eventually win out, because they provided the hardware (the hard part) first. Its relatively simple to get the indie devs on your side - open up the platform. But to get the big budget guys on your side you have to convince them that they won't waste 50 million producing the next CoD because it will be drowned out by the likes of Angry Birds and Temple Run.
Lastly, I am not sold on the fact that Apple will be able to push the same numbers as Sony on Apple TV without "big boy" support. If EA is not going to support your system I don't think the Apple Box will sell as much. (the Apple TV only sold 2.7 mill while PS3 sold 10 times as much). While Apple is known as the company that can sell a brick to the masses, I am not sure they can sell 25 million consoles without some big franchise names at launch.
Apple has never shown itself to have the wherewithal to correctly interface with game development, and I doubt they have any appetite for doing so. They're already doing gangbusters on iOS without any particular help offered, but the market realities of consoles (and, to a certain extent, PCs) are very different.
Microsoft's huge win on both PC and Xbox has been their active and aggressive devrel for games, which was where Sony stumbled hard on the PS3 (Cell processor development difficulty abound).
Maybe I'm wrong but my impression was that Apple never understood or cared much about gaming and largely lucked into their ios game success due to being a popular portable mobile device with opengles and a decent virtual application marketplace at the right time. I have a hard time seeing them get into consoles.
I'm vaguely imaging a scenario where they don't sell anything resembling a console, but expect you to own some sort of iDevice to go a long with your AppleTV, or maybe sell it with a iPod touch?
But yeah, I could see your scenario happening. It would probably be amazing either way
I'm sorry I didn't mention Valve's steam as a competitor in the post, I am very very excited to see what they come up with. I <3 Valve. I do think Apple and Android have a little more indie developer momentum right now, but not sure how that will play out long-term.
