I like to call it “Interoperability”
By john on Feb 24, 2008 in featured
Friday night I was hanging out with my friend Trevor when we got to talking about game consoles, and gaming in general. I’m a (former) hardcore PC gamer. I grew up with PC’s being my gaming platform MOSTLY because my parents were smart and never let me have a game console. Instead of spending all of my time playing games on a console I spent all my time playing them on computers. In the process I taught myself a LOT about computing and computers, and so it’s no surprise that I’m a computer scientist now.
Anyway, back to Friday and the conversation with Trevor. I thought then, and still think now: wouldn’t it be nice if everything worked together, instead of the opposite?
So, what exactly do I mean by that? Well, it’s simple really. Games these days are either PC (and in some cases mac), Xbox 360, or Playstation (3), or Wii. I can’t buy a game for PC and play online multiplayer with people playing on an XBox 360, or PS3, or Wii, etc. Essentially I have to buy a game, the console, and then can only play with other people who have that console.
Why is this a problem? Well, I don’t have any consoles (nor do I really feel like shelling out a few hundred bucks for one), but I do have some games that my friends have for THEIR consoles. It’d be NICE to play online with them, but I can’t because of interoperability, or lack thereof.
So, my thought was how cool it would be if I could buy a game, let’s say “Guitar Hero 12″, on one platform. My friend who has a different platform buys the game for that platform. We fire up the respective multiplayer and …. are able to play the game together.
Game makers will never do that, though, as the console makers don’t want them to. Why? Because if you make it so you can play your PS3 games with people on XBox 360, there’s no reason for the people with the XBox 360 to buy a PS3.
Yes, I’m aware that I’m (probably) oversimplifying the situation a bit, but I don’t think I’m really that far off the mark.
Anyways, I just felt (and still do ) that the world – especially the gaming world – would be a bit better if the consoles could all learn to play nice together.
A guy can dream, cant he?
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Test Drive Unlimited is another such example.
For online play, the consoles each have their own server and the PC has another.
When the game was being developed, all the games forums were talking about how great it’d be if everyone could compete against each other on one server, but sadly it wasn’t to be.
sayerbloke | Feb 25, 2008 | Reply
Yep, It’d be great, and is probably 100% possible, but nobody is willing to do it. They think by NOT doing it they’ll entice us to buy their console instead. What they don’t understand is that I’m not GOING to buy the console, I’m going to buy the game on PC. I already OWN a pc, why would I want to buy a console to do something I can already do with what I already own (and at higher resolutions )
john | Feb 28, 2008 | Reply
One thing that comes to mind is that the same game is *not* necessarily the same across all consoles. Each version has differences in gameplay, etc that might make interoperability impossible.
Just my too scents…..
Phil | Mar 4, 2008 | Reply
@Phil:
You are right that the same game is not necessarily the same across platforms, but that’s also part of the problem – game designers don’t treat it as one cross-platform game, but rather as different games with the same name that happen to be on separate platforms.
I can see only a few valid cases where a game couldn’t be truly cross platform and where interoperability wouldn’t be possible.
I know this kind of behavior won’t change, and that interoperability is not and never will be a priority for developers, but as I said – a guy can dream can’t he?
john | Mar 5, 2008 | Reply