“I expected Apple to act like a first party and function that way,” says Neil Young, founder of iPhone game developer ngmoco. Instead, the company decided to focus on the marketplace and on the phone's OS, and has subsequently created tens of thousands of people who can develop for the platform. The iPhone currently can access 6,000 games on the App Store distribution service.
Young would ditch the console in favor of a really sleek OS supported by cloud computing that would constantly evolve and shift, and make sure that there were thousands of developers who could make games for it.
That spurred Perry to shoot back that he was tired of firmware updates. The problem, says Young, is that Sony never introduces a substantial update. Based on the number of system updates, we should all be playing on drastically different consoles, he says. “Those companies have a lot to learn...and sometimes companies go away.”
Sims creator Will Wright believes that long term, there will be more opportunities to create games across platforms—similar to what former hardware developer Sega does today. He says more console makers will go that route.
Sega's former hardware rival Nintendo has managed to find big success in the console business. The thing that made Nintendo Wii successful is its input device, says Rob Pardo of Blizzard Entertainment. That's what allows new games to be made. Otherwise, there's really no reason to have more powerful hardware. New consoles have to allow for new experiences.
When people think of Nintendo, they think of their intellectual property says Wright. “Nintendo can do Sega better than Sega.”
And so far, no one has heard of hardware manufacturers approaching developers for input into their next consoles. Console makers are so focused on owning the living room that they aren't worried about what games will appear on their new consoles, he says.
What, asked Perry, if the new next console was just a controller? A really innovative control device that plugged directly into your TV and accessed the cloud?
In fact, Perry has already shown his hand in that area. Following the announcement of cloud-based games-on-demand service OnLive, the entrepreneur told VentureBeat that he is actually working on a similar service that would compete with OnLive. Such services essentially would cut consoles out of the interactive entertainment equation.