How long until Blizzard launches its own console?

[V3]

Intel and AMD are already investing a lot of money into their hardware. Console venture is just another valid way to get the most return of their investment. Like I said before supplying Sony, MS and Nintendo with chips gave them minimal return. They could have gained much more being one of the console player.

Intel and AMD do have development tools. As for games, Intel can start with that Project Offset that they acquired recently. AMD can start with their AMD powered ones. Others like online distribution, online service and the like aren't as difficult as many people think. Those services were available long before Xbox live. The difficult part is hardware and development tools, which are their core competence. And as most development are developed on PC, AMD and Intel should have advantage over whatever Sony, Nintendo or MS have to offer next gen. Beside they still have time before this gen ends, if they want to pursue.

The thing about console market is they reset every generation. There are no established players in the beginning of a console generation. It's a fair game for anyone capable and brave enough to enter. And the return is huge. Now Nintendo is reaping most of the reward. Next gen who knows. So as long as they are there in the beginning of the new generation with a console, they are on equal footing with brand awareness and the like.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Intel and AMD are already investing a lot of money into their hardware. Console venture is just another valid way to get the most return of their investment. Like I said before supplying Sony, MS and Nintendo with chips gave them minimal return. They could have gained much more being one of the console player.

What makes you say that? On the whole the console companies have lost money selling hardware, whereas the chip manufacturers have profited from their loss. Intel producing a console would shift their business model from one of profitable hardware to lossy hardware and profitable software - a complete paradigm shift!

Intel and AMD do have development tools.

They have coding tools, but they don't have the APIs. What they offer now basically runs DirectX. They could go with an OpenGL Box, and Intel have got Larrabee as a pet project with huge investment is development tools. This is the area that offers the least challenge IMO.

[As for games, Intel can start with that Project Offset that they acquired recently.

Call me a pessimist but I can't see one game being enough of a launch library to get an entire platform off the ground in the face of competition with guaranteed hundreds of games over it's life...

Others like online distribution, online service and the like aren't as difficult as many people think.

None of this is difficult in theory, but as the execution shows, putting it into practice is a long and costly process. How long do you think it would take for Intel to catch up with Live? 3 months with a handful of contract programmers?

The thing about console market is they reset every generation.

That's patently untrue. Do you really believe brand and previous experience counts for absolutely nothing??

There are no established players in the beginning of a console generation.

(Except for all the previous, established players...)

It's a fair game for anyone capable and brave enough to enter. And the return is huge.

If you are successful. Most console efforts throughout history have led to huge losses and bankruptcy.

Now Nintendo is reaping most of the reward.

Their reward is, IMO, unrepeatable. They managed to create a successful platform based on dirt-cheap hardware. If they had built a powerful platform like PS360, Nintendo's profits wouldn't look so rosy. If they hadn't gone with motion and had that resonate with the public, they wouldn't look so rosy. Look at other earlier Nintendo efforts, like Virtual Boy, that cost them. There are no guarantees that your Cunning Plan will work. So you can't take one rare and fortunate success as indicative of the entire sector being paved with gold! You can't expect a PS2-like console each and every generation, and you cannot determine before the generation starts who's going to have that ascendancy. It's cost MS billions to have a console presence, an undertaking which has yet to cover the costs in establishing the brand. SEGA couldn't cut it with years of experience. Atari folded. 3DO and the like never got anywhere. What convincing argument is there that Intel could enter with a new peice of hardware and generate billions in profit from it while competing with everyone else?

So as long as they are there in the beginning of the new generation with a console, they are on equal footing with brand awareness and the like.

It boggles my mind that you can say that!! A brand new, untested brand is going to be as strong next-gen as PlayStation or Nintendo??! If Intel launched a similar platform with similar games at a similar cost, they'd get crushed. They're only chance would be to compete on some particular aspect, either offering the same experience a lot cheaper, or offering a unique experience. The investment would be huge, many billions, and the chance of success very low.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

The thing about console market is they reset every generation. There are no established players in the beginning of a console generation. It's a fair game for anyone capable and brave enough to enter. And the return is huge. Now Nintendo is reaping most of the reward. Next gen who knows. So as long as they are there in the beginning of the new generation with a console, they are on equal footing with brand awareness and the like.

Tell that to Coleco Vision, 3DO, Jaguar, Dreamcast, etc... And that's just the high profile consoles that tried and failed with large amounts of funding. There's been a LOT more smaller players that have tried and failed even more miserably.

And in Japan during the 80's and 90's you could find failed console startups left and right pretty much every single year.

It's NOT easy. Your chances to fail are far FAR higher than your chances to succeed. What are you going to offer the consumer that is more compelling than either PS3, X360 or Wii? How many billions are you going to spend buying developers to code for your console with a non-existant user base?

Look at the startup and R&D costs for MS (original Xbox) who already had a strong relationship with game developers.

The hardware is the cheap and easy part. The software, OS, developement tools, and bringing on game developers is the hard part.

Intel and AMD have the easy part pretty much done. All they have left is the other 95% of launching a console, they aren't even remotely close to being able to successfully launch a console at the moment.

Regards,
SB

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Let me interrupt for a minute... maybe I should have used "console" instead of, well, console.

When I talk about Blizzard's possible reasons for their own hardware platform, I certainly don't mean a machine that sits in your living room under your HDTV. It would be obviously silly to try to compete with Sony and Nintendo and Microsoft.

What I mean is that Blizzard is slowly becoming the largest player on the enthusiast PC gaming market, especially now that they're combined with Activision (although I don't know how strong franchises like COD are on the PC). So, they have the influence to standardize the PC hardware to some level, even without getting into manufacturing and distribution.

I believe that a lot of the problems associated with PC gaming today could be helped if there was a "Blizzard approved game rig level 1" sticker that 3rd parties could apply for.
The market for add-on hardware would probably shrink even further, of course, but this could drive PC manufacturers to increase the abilities of the baseline systems, by adding better graphics hardware - so in the end, AMD, Nvidia and others could benefit from this too. 10 million Wow subscribers, and who knows how much more they can grow, especially with another MMO, Starcraft and Diablo games...

On Blizzard's end, simplifying the possible configurations would spare some development costs, open up new possibilities - maybe even claim some gamers back from the traditional consoles. Oh, and there could still be a $5 licence fee for that Blizzard sticker.

But it really is just thinking out loud, putting it up for debate...

 

[Sonic]

Yes. The console world is effectively reset every generation, but that doesn't mean it would be easy for AMD or Intel to hop into the world that is consumer video game machines. It means that there will be a heavy bias towards the consoles that were successful in the previous generation and they are already guaranteed some sales of their machine.

AMD and Intel would need to buy development teams and have compelling 1st party software in order to get sales for their machines. I doubt this is an investment they would like to make considering the software side can be the more expensive of the bunch when it comes to launching a console.

They might have the tech but they do not have the brand loyalty.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I believe that a lot of the problems associated with PC gaming today could be helped if there was a "Blizzard approved game rig level 1" sticker that 3rd parties could apply for.

Same could be achieved by MS creating a "Gaming Rig level n" standard, and they spoke about it once upon a time. In essence the whole PC gaming world could get together to form an MSX/3DO standard for the 21st century. I don't know that any company is large enough to go it alone. Blizzard would work for the Blizzard fans, assuming they are happy to buy new hardware instead of expecting to run their favourite games on their existing PCs, but given the billions of PCs out there, even WoW's insane install base doesn't look too great.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Same could be achieved by MS creating a "Gaming Rig level n" standard, and they spoke about it once upon a time. In essence the whole PC gaming world could get together to form an MSX/3DO standard for the 21st century. I don't know that any company is large enough to go it alone. Blizzard would work for the Blizzard fans, assuming they are happy to buy new hardware instead of expecting to run their favourite games on their existing PCs, but given the billions of PCs out there, even WoW's insane install base doesn't look too great.

MS has transformed that into the game performance rating built into Vista and Windows 7. And your machine is given a performance rating.

If you go into the game browser, you'll see games have a recommended and required rating. Prototype for example has a recommended rating of 5.0 and a required of 4.0.

It's not perfect however. And not exactly the same as it doesn't set a standard, but rather tries to give the consumer a rough idea of whether their machine will run a game relatively well or not.

Regards,
SB

 

[Chris123234]

What makes you say that? On the whole the console companies have lost money selling hardware, whereas the chip manufacturers have profited from their loss. Intel producing a console would shift their business model from one of profitable hardware to lossy hardware and profitable software - a complete paradigm shift!

Intel already makes CPU's, now GPU's, memory products, and already can mass produce in their own fabs. They could even include an SSD harddrive, in place of a HDD like the other consoles have, at much less cost to themselves and be able to tout "the fastest loading games, ever", for games that are cached to the SSD.

It boggles my mind that you can say that!! A brand new, untested brand is going to be as strong next-gen as PlayStation or Nintendo??! If Intel launched a similar platform with similar games at a similar cost, they'd get crushed. They're only chance would be to compete on some particular aspect, either offering the same experience a lot cheaper, or offering a unique experience. The investment would be huge, many billions, and the chance of success very low.

Intel has the money and enough mind share to run a campaign like "From Intel, the people who already power your PC".

AMD I have no faith in being able to compete in the console market at this time.

 

[V3]

What makes you say that? On the whole the console companies have lost money selling hardware, whereas the chip manufacturers have profited from their loss. Intel producing a console would shift their business model from one of profitable hardware to lossy hardware and profitable software - a complete paradigm shift!

AMD and Intel would be able to produce cheaper consoles because their investments are mainly for their PC parts where PS3 and 360, need to be recoup over the generation. So console they produced would have that advantage from the get go.

This is the area that offers the least challenge IMO.

Exactly, it shouldn't be a problem for them to put out good dev kit. As long as they do it better than Sony, they should be alright.

Call me a pessimist but I can't see one game being enough of a launch library to get an entire platform off the ground in the face of competition with guaranteed hundreds of games over it's life...

Nintendo been doing it forever. Beside most developments are done on PC. Games are pretty much guaranteed given their obvious choice of hardware architecture.

None of this is difficult in theory, but as the execution shows, putting it into practice is a long and costly process. How long do you think it would take for Intel to catch up with Live? 3 months with a handful of contract programmers?

They don't have to be like MS and botched their execution costing them lots of money. They can do it better, far better.

That's patently untrue. Do you really believe brand and previous experience counts for absolutely nothing??

Absolutely nothing. I'll explained below.

(Except for all the previous, established players...)
If you are successful. Most console efforts throughout history have led to huge losses and bankruptcy.
Their reward is, IMO, unrepeatable. They managed to create a successful platform based on dirt-cheap hardware. If they had built a powerful platform like PS360, Nintendo's profits wouldn't look so rosy. If they hadn't gone with motion and had that resonate with the public, they wouldn't look so rosy. Look at other earlier Nintendo efforts, like Virtual Boy, that cost them. There are no guarantees that your Cunning Plan will work. So you can't take one rare and fortunate success as indicative of the entire sector being paved with gold! You can't expect a PS2-like console each and every generation, and you cannot determine before the generation starts who's going to have that ascendancy. It's cost MS billions to have a console presence, an undertaking which has yet to cover the costs in establishing the brand. SEGA couldn't cut it with years of experience. Atari folded. 3DO and the like never got anywhere. What convincing argument is there that Intel could enter with a new peice of hardware and generate billions in profit from it while competing with everyone else?

Sega, Atari and 3DO are not AMD or Intel though. Consoles are not their main source of income. They are like Sony and MS. They can support their console business with their other ventures. They are in better position than Sony and MS because they're in the business of investing in processor, fabrications and software technologies. Critical for survival in console world. Again don't look at MS for example. They're just doing things the expensive way. You can look at MS and see what to avoid Like their RROD problem for example.

It boggles my mind that you can say that!! A brand new, untested brand is going to be as strong next-gen as PlayStation or Nintendo??! If Intel launched a similar platform with similar games at a similar cost, they'd get crushed. They're only chance would be to compete on some particular aspect, either offering the same experience a lot cheaper, or offering a unique experience. The investment would be huge, many billions, and the chance of success very low.

None could survived on brand alone. In this fast moving world, new is better than old. Brand like a product have their lifecycle. They go into declined and death eventually.

It's not like Intel or AMD are noob when it comes to branding. Look at Intel CPU lineup and their branding strategy. Look at how they moved from Pentium, 2,3,4 to Core now to i7 or i5. One day Sony and MS need to change their Playstation and Xbox brand.

True most company will try to leverage as much as possible from their brand, but even Nintendo abandoned their classic Gameboy brand in favour of DS. Gameboy, GBC, GB Pocket, GBA, GBA SP, GBA Micro are no more, now they have DS Lite and DSi. Sony has PS, PS2, and PS3 and MS Xbox and Xbox 360. Eventually they need to think up of a new name and start with fresh brand. They can't keep leveraging those old brands.

So by next gen probably only Nintendo that will try to leverage their Wii brand. It would be wised for MS and Sony to have new brand instead of leveraging their old.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Sega, Atari and 3DO are not AMD or Intel though. Consoles are not their main source of income. They are like Sony and MS. They can support their console business with their other ventures. They are in better position than Sony and MS because they're in the business of investing in processor, fabrications and software technologies. Critical for survival in console world. Again don't look at MS for example. They're just doing things the expensive way. You can look at MS and see what to avoid Like their RROD problem for example.

Uhhhh... That just lost a lot of credibility with me.

A VERY large part of Atari's revenue was originally due to consoles. The Atari 2600 basically set the stage for all other consoles to follow. However, despite the experience they had with that their follow ups were never able to gain traction. Despite them being the dominant player (puts PS1 and PS2 to shame when considering market share versus opposing consoles) their follow up Atari 5200 didn't gain any traction.

Sega again had a very large part of their revenue stream entirely due to consoles. Rivaling and even besting Nintendo at times. Yet they could get nowhere with Saturn and Dreamcast. Developers were abandoning the platform making the platform less attractive.

3DO was spearheaded by quite a few industry giants at the time. And Panasonic at the time one of the largest electronics giants in the world was producing it. Intel compared to even Time Warner at the time was just a little minnow in pond. And yet even with their vast consumer entertainment experience couldn't get much traction. Electronic Arts lending some game developement insight into it couldn't get it much traction.

And you somehow think Intel with almost zero consumer electronics experience is going to automagically make a console that...

1. People will want to buy when faced with a choice of X360, PS3, Wii, or Intel box?
2. Developers will want to spend hundreds of millions on a console with no past userbase? And no past history. Just look at how difficult it was for MS with Xbox and they had far more pull with Devs than Intel does.
3. Trust that Intel, which focuses almost entirely on the business sector, can make a console be attractive and stand out to consumers in a VERY crowded market, in a VERY slow economy?

I can pretty much guarantee that if Intel were to embark on this, it would end up being yet another Intel commercial failure that they'll abandon fairly quickly.

Regards,
SB