Duncan e o fim das consolas

Alchemist

I'm cool cuz I Fold
Sandy Duncan acredita que as consolas desaparecerão num prazo de 5 a 10 anos.
“Há uma enorme convergência de outros dispositivos, como é o caso das set top boxes. Há muito pouca diferença em termos tecnológicos entre alguns gravadores com disco rígido e a Xbox 360, por exemplo. Na verdade, penso que dentro de 5 a 10 anos não teremos qualquer caixa debaixo dos televisores, a maioria destes dispositivos serão substituídos por serviços online criados pelos fornecedores de conteúdos”, declarou o ex responsável pela Xbox na Europa.
Fonte: Gameover
 
Engraçado, foi assim que apareceram os primeiros videojogos domésticos, através de um operador televisivo, e segundo esse senhor, é assim que no futuro irá acontecer. Os fornecedores de conteúdos irão fornecer o serviço. De volta ao génesis?
 
Mas um jogo em si precisa de hardware que o suporte, não é "conteudo" que possa ser corrido ás "três pancadas" como um filme ou musica, logo, isso não faz muito sentido.

Fikem bem!
 
Há muito pouca diferença em termos tecnológicos entre alguns gravadores com disco rígido e a Xbox 360
Só isto diz do que ele percebe do assunto...

Se ele dissesse que ia haver ainda mais convergencia entre consolas e pc, e que a xbox era um exemplo da aproximação entre pc e consolas, seria levado mais a sério..
 
Última edição:
Interview / YoYo Games CEO Sandy Duncan (Part I)

Sandy Duncan has been in the industry for a very long time. Throughout the years he has held a variety of positions, including spearheading the Xbox European business for Microsoft. His experience in the industry notwithstanding, Sandy is a self-proclaimed hardcore video gamer. “Video Games are in my blood,” he says.


In fact, when Sandy took a 2-year hiatus from the industry to try something new, he couldn’t keep up the facade for long. He ended up returning to the field, this time with a thirst to go above and beyond the norm. Thus was founded YoYo Games, a social platform that allows users to create casual video games to be played, judged, voted and showcased on the site. Within the first 8 months of launch, YoYo had surpassed over 10,000 video games uploaded, an immense feat in of itself.


We had a chance to talk to Sandy at length and get his views on YoYo Games (Part I), and the future of video gaming (Part II). Be forewarned however, insightful as Sandy is and impressive as his career may be, he has but one fundamental flaw: He is an Arsenal fan!

That VideoGame Blog’s Zee Salahuddin (TVGB): Your Linked-In profile states 16 years of experience at Microsoft, including handling the vice president’s role for Xbox Europe. What elements from your work at Microsoft precipitated the creation of YoYo Games in 2006?

Sandy Duncan (SD): I’ve always liked games. I really got into it heavily initially on PC when games started to use 3D graphics in an exciting way. My favorite games at the time were Descent and Doom (the very first, shareware version!) I got into console gaming with the launch of Playstation, though my favorite console of all time is Dreamcast … I still like to play the original versions of Soul Calibur and Crazy Taxi!
I set up and ran the Xbox European business for Microsoft. Although we launched in 2002 in Europe, I started on the project in 1999. It meant I spent a LOT of time getting to know the games industry, not just in Europe. I traveled a lot to Japan and the US as part of that. By the end of all of this work Video Games was in my blood. I tried doing other stuff for 2 years, but I always wanted to find a way back into Video Games…not as easy as it sounds when you’ve already had one of the best jobs in the industry in Europe!
In 2005 we were paid by a VC firm in London to do some research for them…we liked our research so much that we decided to “do something about it” and so I started working on the plans for YoYo in April 2006.


TVGB: What were some of the other factors that inspired you to create a social platform for budding casual game designers?

SD: To be honest we started out on a very different path looking to become a publisher of casual games. Then we noticed YouTube. In June 2006 YouTube was just starting to get big and people were starting to talk about “user generated content “and “Web 2.0” was becoming a buzz word. We could see the potential of the “YouTube” model in games …but couldn’t figure out how to make it easy to create games. Then by chance one of our Directors at YoYo (James North-Hearn) is also the CEO of Sumo Digital who are one of Europe’s top games developers. The top programmer at Sumo is a guy called Jacob Habgood who had just finished writing a book with Mark Overmars called “The Game Maker’s Apprentice”. It was a match made in heaven! This was early October 2006. We moved pretty quickly to close a deal with Mark and within 4 months the first (Alpha) YoYo Games website was up and running. We launched the full (Beta) site in late April 2007.


TVGB: It was announced on January 21, 2008 that in a mere eight months, the website reached a record 10,000 game uploads, making it the premiere repository of user-generated games. What were the critical success factors that contributed to this unprecedented level of achievement?

SD: Our first challenge was to win the confidence of the Game Maker Community. Game Maker has been around since 1999, so there were already thousands of people using it. Luckily for us there wasn’t any truly great place for the community to post the games they had developed and get them reviewed and most importantly played. I won’t say we didn’t make any mistakes, because we did. But getting a site with a simple method of uploading your games and making it easy for casual visitors to play them was the key. We added the “Instant Play” feature to Game Maker in September 2007, which meant you didn’t have to download the game before you could play it and from there on the number of visitors took off. If you have almost 1 million people coming to the site every month, then there is plenty of incentive for the Community to keep writing and uploading new games as they have a readymade audience.


TVGB: Technology has advanced tremendously over the years. Video games are becoming increasingly sophisticated across all verticals including storyline, innovation, graphical eye-candy and intuitively original game play. Since Game Maker allows users to do as they please, could this result in a flood of mediocre, half-thought-out games that may reflect poorly on YYG?

SD: Not every video on YouTube is a “LonelyGirl15” and not everyone on Facebook has 10,000 “friends”. One of the well-understood “features” of social networks is called “The Long Tail”, which means that even the less popular content gets an audience. Even the 5000th ranking game on YoYo gets more than 20 plays every month. For a lot or developers that’s very, very rewarding. Like all social networks our community contributes not just the content, but also makes a very significant contribution by rating and reviewing games…so people who come to the site who just want to find the best games will not be disappointed as they are easy to find.


TVGB: What are some of the measures in place to counter such issues, if any?

SD: Much of the work that we will put into the site development in the next few months will be focused on making sure that the best games are even easier to find. At the same time we have ambitious plans to offer more free packages of development content (Sounds, Backgrounds, Sprites etc) which will be available to anyone. This will help ALL of the developers. We will also offer the best guys some personal support later this year and ultimately we will spend money on the best games to help “polish” them ourselves. None of this has been formally announced, but we’re working on it.


TVGB: Game Maker is in its seventh release. What is planned for the near and distant future for YoYo Games? Will you offer much more advanced platforms that add several additional malleable layers of complexity for gamers to mould into content? Are there any plans to release commercial games at this stage?

SD: Game Maker will develop in 3 ways.
Firstly we are working on a version for the Apple Mac. This will be available in Beta around April time.
Secondly we are re-writing the “Runner” in C++ (currently GM is written in Delphi) which will give us several advantages, primarily portability. Our vision is for Game Maker games to be running on non PC platforms such as phones, portable devices and Consoles. For example, Apple’s announcement of the iPhone SDK last weekend was very exciting for us.
Finally we will start work on Game Maker 8 this summer. You won’t see it until 2009, but multi-platform support will be a key feature. We may also do something about a compiler around the same time.


TVGB: Who do you see as your primary competitors?

SD: Today there is really only one other website who are in this space. They’re a bit bigger than us, but they are purely a flash site which means that you can’t play the games offline and there is little prospect of seeing the most successful games being played on other platforms.
http://www.thatvideogameblog.com/2008/03/19/interview-with-yoyo-games-ceo-sandy-duncan-part-i/




Interview / YoYo Games CEO Sandy Duncan (Part II)

You might recall Part I of this interview from March 19. This second part concludes our conversation with Sandy Duncan, CEO of YoYo Games and the man who set up and ran the European Xbox business for Microsoft. He talks about the videogame industry, its past, present and future, and gives some remarkable insight into the world of videogames. Sandy is a Pinot Grigio aficionado, and that is only one of the many reasons we like him. Plus his middle name is Charles, you just can’t go wrong with a guy called Charles.


We know Sandy is an absolute geek when we fired an existential question at him. “What came first, chicken or the egg?”, to which Sandy replied: “I thought pong was the first video game…”
Touché sir! Touché!


That VideoGame Blog’s Zee Salahuddin (TVGB): I know this question is horribly clichéd, but it’s always interesting to see what an industry veteran has to say on the subject. Where do you see the videogame industry in 5 years? 10 years?

Sandy Duncan (SD): The industry is fundamentally driven by technology. I think dedicated games devices i.e. consoles (and handhelds) will die [out] in the next 5 to 10 years. The business model is very risky and the costs associated with creating new hardware are incredibly high. (Microsoft have lost billions of dollars with Xbox. Ed: And Sandy would know, he worked for the Xbox Europe division!) There is a definite “convergence” of other devices such as set top boxes. There’s hardly any technology difference between some hard disc video recorders and a an Xbox 360 for example. In fact in 5 to 10 years I don’t think you’ll have any box at all under your TV, most of this stuff will be “virtualized” as web services by your content provider.

TVGB: Wouldn’t that require a lot of convergence from a lot of disparate elements? Where do you feel the process will start (and possibly stick?)

SD:Nowhere is convergence more likely to continue to happen than with mobile devices (just look at the iPhone…and iPod touch and ask yourself if these will still be different devices in 2 years, never mind 5 or 10). The next generation of “handheld” devices will integrate game play with other technologies like GPS, digital cameras, high speed mobile broadband services (at affordable prices) and phones. [The] gating factor for almost all of this is battery technology. [Nothing] significant has happened here in the last 20 years… which means this is overdue!
High speed broadband is a key factor, both in the home and on mobile, [which is] why everyone in the industry is so excited about and investing in Online Games. [Game] publishers will/are having to change rapidly to adjust their business models… in 5 years the top publishers may be different companies than the ones you know today. [Look] at how quickly Popcap or Oberon are growing, or look at what has happened to World of Warcraft in the last 3 to 4 years as so many more homes have easy access to decent broadband services. Maybe you’ll see YoYo Games competing with EA in 5 years… [and] why not ?
Tying this thinking together I think that the concept of “Cloud Computing” when applied to games, and to MMORGS in particular is potentially pretty mind-blowing. If you look at the number of nodes, cumulative raw compute power, total storage etc. of just the people playing on Xbox Live at any one time, combined with very high bandwidth connectivity and add to that potentially millions of people playing on their mobile devices added to the cloud… then I think it might be time for the Blue Pill/Red Pill discussion and I’ll jump out of my skin if someone calls me up and says “Hello Sandy, my name is Morpheus!”

TVGB: In the same vein, do you feel that by giving development power to the people, you may be going against the grain? For instance, giant gaming corporations are acquiring more momentum and resources by the minute. Blizzard just melded with Activision, EA has offered $2 Billion to buy out Take Two. Do you believe that the future of game development lies in a highly structured and team-work oriented corporate environment? Or does it lie in the hands of a few innovative minds that have the tenacity and originality to take it to the next level?

SD:You raise a bunch of issues here. With Video Games costing up to $20M+ to develop for the current generation of consoles, consolidation is inevitable. [Smart] mergers are not just the ones that achieve large scale. [Smart] mergers are the ones where you see “old world” creativity merging with “new world” technologies. [This is why] the Activision/Blizzard merger makes tons of sense to me if they get it right. (Remember AOL buying Time Warner? AOL was the biggest name in online, the “new generation of online media companies” had arrived, right? Now TW is selling AOL). EA buying Take Two on the other hand is just an expensive way for EA to get its hands on more IP and further corner retail distribution of video games… that is a waste of money and a short sighted strategy. If EA were really smart they’d be spending their money on companies like NCSoft or looking at merging with Yahoo! (Ed: we better remember where we heard this one first!)

The top video games will require bigger and even more sophisticated teams and the existing publishers don’t have people or business models that allow for “risky” innovation. Today’s video games publishers (Nintendo are the exception) are risk averse, formulaic and predictable. The vast majority of publishers are also seriously restricted by their distribution channels. Retail doesn’t take risks and makes no identifiable contribution to the value chain, so you’ll need to pay a lot of money to get something new and innovative into the shops. For sure online retailers can offer more of a “long tail” approach to retailing, but the real innovations are being driven using the internet to drive innovation, not distribution. If Activision and Blizzard can figure that one out they will lead the next generation of publishers… if they don’t, then this merger will be a very expensive mistake.

TVGB: It sounds like you feel the videogames industry is in a quagmire of rehashed, predictable content. Talk to me more about that.

SD: The Video Games industry has been stuck in a rut for the last 10 years. Until Nintendo came out with the (amazingly low tech) Wii last year, nothing exciting had happened since the launch of PS1 and the era of 3D games had come to the masses. [In] the meantime games have been reaching out to a new audience online by being simpler, easy to engage and quick to play and that [is] where casual games starts to kick in. Accessibility. [Not] everyone wants to have to learn all of the moves in games like FIFA or spend 20 hours playing through GTA. Many people just want short bursts of entertainment. Wired magazine called this “Snack Culture” in an article last year. More and more people just want to spend 5 minutes being distracted, [and for that purpose] Zuma or Bejeweled [are] more appropriate. That’s why 10% of the games business is now made up of “casual” games, and that’s one of the 2 main areas that have been driving the real growth in the games industry for the last five years.
The next generation of games whether casual or otherwise will be heavily influenced by new talent. The next Miyamoto or Molyneux is around somewhere. The problem is, with games costing so much to produce how will we find him? Or her for that matter? The next industry heroes probably won’t emerge, as in the past from small indie developers with great ideas since the small guys generally can’t afford even to prototype a video game. [Three] years ago I would have said “look at casual games as the path to enlightenment”, but the industry has become besotted with copying other people’s ideas (how many Bejeweled clones have you seen? Ed: We did a quick research, and came up with at least 22 that we could identify in the first 5 minutes…) and is in danger of a creative implosion. There is more hope in the area of Flash games. Sites like Miniclip have some great and original content and there are a few new, talented developers emerging. The caveat with Flash is a) It’s expensive at about $800 for a full dev suite and b) it [is] severely limited in the types of games that you can create (Flash is not designed for games development).

I think that Silverlight looks much more promising, but it’s still aimed at people with programming skills, so the best creative talents need to team up before they can attempt to break through. Hence the beauty of Game Maker. The “Pro” version is only $20, no prior programming experience required and it was created specifically for people to make games, unlike Flash. There’s a game on the site called “Twister”, check it out, the guy who wrote it, GreyPea is a graphics artist in the games industry, not a programmer.
There’s another way that YoYo comes into play. There are no “rules” for creativity. Even the programming barrier is low or non-existent. The number of games on the site is growing every day by almost 100… and every day we see 20 or more new developers submitting content. You can submit your game whenever you want and it’s immediately available to anyone visiting the site. If you don’t think your game is [not] completely finished, then you can upload it to the “Beta” or “Work in Progress” sections where the reviewers and the community are more understanding of you as a developer. Many of the games on the site are incredibly innovative and engaging; look at guys like 2dCube, who won our “Winter” competition with “Frozzd”, and last month he released an incredibly innovative puzzle game called “Karoshi” where you need to kill yourself on each level. “Virtanen” is a Finn… and his games are simply… [different]. [Take] a look at “Seven Minutes”, it’s a game that lasts Seven Minutes, that’s original. RyGuyDavis is only 17, but take a look at some of his games, especially Lux, it fits superbly in the easy to learn, easy to play genre that makes casual games so compelling. These are only 3 examples of the tens of thousands of developers who have written and shared their talents on YoYo in the first 10 months!

TVGB: Product placements have infiltrated literally every aspect of our digital and analog loves. What is your take on advertising in videogames?

SD:People who write games are generally looking for reward. For some people this is just the joy of people playing their game… but for many the real motivation is to make money and maybe even earn a living from their games. At YoYo Games we will introduce the option of in game advertising for the developers later this year.

TVGB: Innovation is central to any creative process. What do you feel are the best innovations in the videogame industry (concepts, games, products, software), that have really redefined or revitalized the industry in the past two decades? In the interests of impartiality, we ask that you not list YoYo or GameMaker.

SD: In no particular order:
  • Sinclair ZX-81
  • Playstation 1
  • The Wii controller
  • HDTV and Broadband.
Very personally: the aiming/control mechanism in Goldeneye… it made it possible to really enjoy playing FPS on console and Halo would never have been an FPS without it. Dreamcast should have been on the list, but we all know how that turned out!

TVGB: What advice can you give budding game developers?

SD: [It’s] not about programming skills, there will always be plenty of people who will enjoy taking great ideas and turning them into lines of C++ and the hardware will less and less be a limiting factor in the gaming experience. Think out of the box; don’t just try to copy what other people have done. The next generation of stars will be founded on their creativity and not how many polygons they can push. Think about how you can creatively use the fact that almost all of your game players are connected to one another and don’t be constrained by a single device.

http://www.thatvideogameblog.com/2008/03/28/interview-with-yoyo-games-ceo-sandy-duncan-part-ii/




Fazer um resumo duma entrevista tao longa em tem pouca coisa nunca é positivo, lendo a entrevista dele entende-se o que ele quer dizer.
 
Só admito uma coisa. As consolas da próxima geração serão mais que simples leitores de jogos, serão cada vez mais verdadeiros media-centers e onde teremos a escolha de comprar um jogo ou um filme pela net ou através do suporte físico, mas sempre com as duas soluções, para não descurar os coleccionadores e aqueles que têm velocidades reduzidas.
Tudo o resto é especulação.
 
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