Comment by zanny | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zanny | Hacker News Reader

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To play devils advocate, you can sell games without building perfectly viable general purpose compute hardware and then locking it down with DRM to make it useless as such. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are not developing game consoles out of anything but an incredibly evil greed - they are wasting insurmountable amounts of raw materials making computers that cannot be used as computers.

The consoles that existed in the 70s and 80s were largely justified in being specialized hardware specifically for realtime rendering which had no realistic application outside the narrow scope of fixed function realtime interactive rendering they produced. In the 90s the PS1, N64, and Dreamcast were all computer adjacent with the next geration - PS2 / Gamecube / Xbox - all being perfectly functional general purpose computers that were simply crippled with proprietary software into being toys.

Since then their hardware has only gotten more generic and general purpose and the degree of their draconian platform lockdown grown to an insane degree to resist emulation and unlocking. Its a shame Valve only ever saw SteamOS as a hedge against Microsoft - if they had taken it seriously and put in the legitimate ridiculous amount of money it would have taken to breakout a console platform without the horrifying amount of proprietary bullshit going into the competitions products we might have seen that incredible amount of waste become as taboo as it deserves to be.

Honestly the worst offender is the Nintendo Switch - it is verbatim just the successor device to the Nvidia Shield Tablet, just with a grotesque proprietary operating environment and impenetrably locked bootloader. Every time I see one of those things I am struck by how absurdly wasteful it is to see someone carrying that thing and a regular tablet when Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft could all just be shipping their own proprietary DRM laden store apps on top of a freedom respecting software foundation. If you want to exploit people by depriving software freedoms while they pay you for it... I'd argue its a product of propagandized deception and manipulation, but its still people considered informed consumers buying that garbage. Its a lot less bad than entire computers, fit for a multitude of purposes, being reduced to toys.

> Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are not developing game consoles out of anything but an incredibly evil greed - they are wasting insurmountable amounts of raw materials making computers that cannot be used as computers.

I think this is a bit harsh. Is artwork a waste of good canvas?

(I guess to be fair to you here, at least canvas is a renewable resource)

There isn't an appropriate analogy for IP based DRM because the real world doesn't behave like intellectual property.

I was trying to come up with some convoluted analogy about making art on a gold plated easel that self destructs every decade and burns any canvas besides a specific size that is put on it, but just trying to formulate a physical analog hints at the absurdity of it all.

Actually, wait. You buy a tractor but you can only use it on certain days of the week and it permanently shuts off after 3 years and stops working if you try to attach a snow plow to it. Except that is already the reality of John Deere products being DRM locked and not owned by the buyers.

I thought the John Deere thing was only to the extent that they locked-down their users from tweaking their firmware - not that their firmware actively tries to frustrate use-cases like attaching a plow or disabling the tractor after 3 years?

Ever replaced a blown fuse? Air filter? oil? requires authorized service technician with special lets call the mothership to reauthorize tool.

Valves Proton enabled me to switch fully to Linux once and for all. The few games that wont run now are far more acceptable than not being able to play virtually any mainstream titles. Its surprising how well it works to me and reaffirms my support for Valve and the Steam store.

Have you used a switch? There is no commodity tablet on the market with the attachable controller form factor & dockable with HDMI passthru that the Switch has, at the Switch pricepoint.

Why would you make an open platform with custom hardware when you can make a proprietary locked down one that you can use as an app store % cut mill like what Nintendo does?

They take the air out of the industry with how much money they make operating the way they do. That doesn't make it right, ethical, or reasonable.

If consoles were sold at a profit what you say may make sense. However building an open platform means you need to devote resources to it both from a capital perspective and opportunity cost.

Driving demand towards the hardware, instead of software and licensing costs on a negative margin product is a pretty sure way to run a company out of business.

Why can't console hardware be sold at a profit? Make up for the increased sale price by bundling a rebate on the first X officially-published games the customer buys. Then everything after that is pure profit for the console vendor.

The more likely you are to buy the (cheap-ish) hardware, the more likely they are to sell you more games - at the regular price. Also, there is this balance which is unrelated to the cost of making the hardware, the balance between the buyer’s wanting to actually use the hardware, since it was bought not too cheaply, and not making the price of hardware too high and scare off the potential buyer.

This doesn't matter anyways, consoles haven't been sold at a loss for almost a decade.

This used to be called ‘pack-ins’, no? Like when Sonic was included with a Genesis?

Nintendo has always sold at a profit AFAICT

It has been over a decade since any console hardware product has been sold at a loss. That stopped with the Xbox 360 and PS3. Every Wii, Wii U, PS4, Xbox One, Switch, etc have all been sold at marginal profit.

Nintendo is exactly that, a toy maker. That their toys run on commoditized hardware is a side-effect, not a voluntary choice. They will never ship a general purpose computing device.

Are you saying we should force them with laws?

I would have loved SteamOS to be a general purpose Linux OS with Steam preinstalled instead of the... thing it actually was.

If the experience had been seamless I think it would have taken off.

But it wasn't, mostly due to the games. Many of them would require emulating a mouse just to get into the game, which meant emulating a desktop. Then the game would start and it would switch over to the controller mode.

Many games just didn't work well under it, and so forth.

I haven't installed it myself, but isn't it just a slightly tweaked Debian? I thought you could leave the Big Picture Mode-style UI and get to a desktop where you could install additional software.

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