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(This article first appeared in the May 23, 2005 issue of Jon Peddie’s TechWatch)

This past week in E3, three new game-capable entertainment devices were added to the existing roster of such devices. Seven, you ask? Well, let’s enumerate them:

1) PSOne
2) Playstation 2
3) Xbox
4) GameCube
5) Gameboy (all flavors)
6) Nintendo DS
7) PSP

And that doesn’t even include the dozens of 1980s-era retro games being reintroduced in smaller packages from Jakks Pacific and the reborn Intellivision Corporation – products which are selling in the millions of units.

Why I am lumping hand held, old generation and current generation devices in my count anyway?

Because these devices all compete, more or less, for the same entertainment dollars. Excluding our own well-equipped homes – I have every one of the seven devices above, and in most cases, more than one of them, plus two older generation consoles in my home – that’s extreme, no doubt.

It could be argued that a more average person who owns a Gameboy may well own a GameCube or other console as well, or may just own multiple types of consoles. I would propose that such people are in the minority. However, even for these people, it likely often comes down to spending money on a game for the Gameboy or other portable, or for the console.

The seven aforementioned devices appeal to people for various reasons – price, portability, additional features, and breadth of software support high among those. Why else would Sony still be selling the original Playstation in the same locations that it sells PS2s? Why would there still be hundreds of original Playstation titles being sold in your local Best Buy or Toys R’ Us?

I am hard pressed to believe that someone who owns a PS2 would still use a PSOne and be buying PSOne games – they will be buying PS2 games instead. That implies that there are still a fair number of people out there who own and still use PSOne systems.

Flash forward to mid-2006. The Xbox 360 has been out for a half year and is selling moderately well, even at its initial $349 price point. Dozens of new original Xbox titles have also been released (some of which won’t run on the Xbox 360 due to emulator problems), and new ones are still being released to take advantage of the millions of Xbox consoles in use. On-going Xbox game development is further spurred because the original Xbox’s price has been further slashed to $99, meaning people who had previously held off buying one have plunked down money for an Xbox.

The Sony scenario is pretty similar. The PS3 has just started shipping at a price of $399 (it’s technologically superior to the Xbox 360 in many ways), and many new PS2 titles have come out recently and more are on the way, and the PS2 is now selling for $99 (and Sony’s making money on it even at that price because of that great job they did miniaturizing the PS2 in the Fall of 2004).

The Nintendo Revolution still hasn’t been released, but will soon launch to much anticipation from die-hard-Nintendo-adoring fans. Again, GameCube games continue to be released and sell reasonably well. The GameCube price drops to $69 just to cost differentiate their console against the PS2 and Xbox.

However, the number of dollars available to be spent on game hardware and game software has not significantly increased from the year prior. So now the next generation consoles are competing for the same dollars that the now-old generation products are garnering. Sure, there’s a spike after release when the early adopters like us buy one of everything just to check it out, but the average gamer doesn’t have the gaming budget professionals like us have, so they have to be more selective.

To make matters worse, all these new consoles, and even the handheld devices to some extent, are multi-function, multi-media devices. They don’t just play games – they play movies too! And they require special media for optimal use – like Blu-Ray DVDs for the PS3 or UMDs for the PSP.

And they play music, which you can purchase on-line, spending more of your finite entertainment resources. And don’t forget the subscription fees and other extra fees to buy more levels for games, more gear for your characters, and everything else things like the Xbox Marketplace promise to offer.

And now that the identity of the game console has been morphed into being a general purpose multi-media hub in your living room, does game playing on the box actually lose significance? Will Xbox 360 owners be spending more time recording TV programs, mixing music, chatting on-line with friends instead of playing (and spending money on) the latest video games?

And meanwhile, older consoles will still have a healthy following among those who can’t afford the new consoles, and the HD TVs which really show off their capabilities.

This effort by Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo to take a specialized box like a video game console and make it a generic home appliance with many diverse multi-media functions is making video game industry members nervous because they are concerned that will dilute sales of video games. Doug Lowenstein of the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), during his opening address at E3 last week, was very clear on the point that the game industry competes with the film industry (and by extension the television programming industry). Money spent on DVDs, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray DVDs, or UMD movies for that matter is money not spent on video games.

And it’s not going to help that next generation games will likely be even more expensive – EBGames.com has already been listing some next generation titles for a price of $60, and that may not even be enough because of the increased resource requirement to develop better and more compelling visuals to justify the use of HD output, and better AI and physics and gameplay to take advantage of the advanced processors in the new consoles. And let’s not forget the improved on-line game dynamics and multiplayer scenarios that will need to be part of most next generation console titles.

Microsoft in particular is in a hard place – they need to do whatever they can to not discourage developers from supporting the original Xbox, at least until such time as the Xbox 360 ships in volume, but they also cannot guarantee that all original Xbox games will play on the Xbox 360 because software emulation is rarely perfect, especially when it comes along as late in the game as it appears to have for Microsoft. Certainly current Xbox game developers will try and ensure their titles run on the Xbox 360, but I suspect it will be messy.

No doubt Sony and Nintendo are doing software emulation of older systems as well because their new architectures are (or will be) drastically different from the current generation, but there have been no indications that there will be significant compatibility issues running PS2 (or PSOne) titles on a PS3, and Nintendo has even taken the bold step of guaranteeing compatibility with all Nintendo content, ranging back to the original Nintendo Entertainment System. Such guarantees (or at least implications) of backward compatibility should give comfort developers of current PS2 and GameCube titles that they will not be abandoned, and in fact will have an even larger market to sell their titles into.

So, where does this leave the industry? With ten devices fighting for the revenue of seven devices, and worse yet, competing with earlier models of themselves.

Admit it – you’re in love with, or at least heavily enamored of, your portable communication devices. Be it a PDA, smart phone, or ordinary cell phone. And, if you are like most of the rest of the world’s mobile communicators, your mobile device is your lifeline to the rest of the world.

It gets worse if you have a truly smart mobile phone device, such as T-Mobile’s Sidekick II – a GSM/GPRS/MMS device I became a proud owner of a few months ago. The Sidekick II [see photo] is a small engineering marvel – with a nice, big screen which can be swiveled out to access a full keyboard. The device can be programmed to check and download mail from a regular POP3 mailbox, and is amazingly easy to type on. Applications for purchase include an SSH terminal program which allows folks like myself to securely sign into our Linux servers to perform management tasks. On top of that, you can synchronize it with your Outlook address book, task list, and calendar. And, it even takes photos (crappy ones, but photos nonetheless).

The Sidekick II has become a pop icon of sorts, with pop tarts Jessica Simpson and Paris Hilton openly flaunting theirs (mind you, Paris did have her Sidekick content hacked recently, revealing star’s phone numbers, topless photos of herself, and a variety of other personal information revealed). The device has also been featured in music videos. But even non-cool people such as myself own them and love them.

With the Sidekick II I found I no longer had to lug a notebook computer around with me everywhere, as I could deal with a majority of my e-mail via the keypad. My only trauma would occur when traveling to places where the GPRS connection was unavailable (such as roaming on AT&T in San Juan, or back home on the island of Bonaire). But when that trauma occurs, it results in twitchy fingers, constant checking of the phone to see if maybe it was just a bad signal, etc.

So imagine my surprise when Sunday night in San Francisco, the night before the Game Developers Conference (GDC), and ironically the GDC Mobile conference as well, when I lose my data signal – my connection with the world. I go back to my hotel room, pull out my notebook and try to connect to the Desktop Interface for my Sidekick – no-go. Panic starts to set in. I contact T-Mobile support. They tell me to wait a little and try again. I do, and no change. I decide to let the issue sit overnight, but in the morning, no change.

I arrive at the GDC, and I see a number of people with blank, glazed looks in their eyes – all of them are trying to get data out of their Sidekicks. Some are shaking the devices, and others just stare forlornly at the screen, as if the device might take pity on them and thus start to work again.

There was no change on Monday. T-Mobile advises clients there is a problem, but it is being worked on, and tries to placate Sidekick users by telling them that they can still use the Sidekick to make or place calls and do SMS messaging. The fact that if that’s all we wanted to do we would have gotten a more mundane phone is lost on them.

Tuesday – still no data. Finally inquiring with Danger (the maker of the Sidekick and operator of the Sidekick data servers) indicates that their servers crashed in a big way, and that they would definitely have them operational by Wednesday. Wednesday rolls by and still no joy. The tone of message posts by fellow Sidekick devotees on the HipTop web site run by Danger turns decidedly nasty. Depression has set in among many users.

Statement from Danger’s PR Department:

Danger engineers have put fixes in place, and expect data performance to improve throughout the day on March 8th; and full service to be restored by tomorrow morning, March 9th.

As I write this it is now midday Thursday, and I can now finally get into the web site to view the data which is supposed to be on my phone, and can synchronize that with Outlook.

But my phone still won’t connect to the server, so I am still in a data black hole when it comes to my Sidekick II. So, maybe later today I will find data Nirvana again. Or maybe not. One can only hope…

Fortunately, I have had my notebook as a back-up solution – it’s not nearly as convenient as the Sidekick, but at least it works, and San Francisco is raging with free WiFi. I also made sure years ago to set up redundant mailboxes on mail servers I control and manage, so unlike countless other poor sods who had tossed all devices but their Sidekicks (and were bemoaning that fact on-line), I was not locked out of four or five days of e-mail.

But still, this was (and still is) a real eye opener. We have come to count on most technology as dependable and stable, and forget that all systems are inherently unreliable (Windows helps remind of this – not sure whether we should be thankful for that though). So when an event like a multi-day data black out occurs, we go into shock, followed by withdrawal.

So what can one do to mitigate such future, and inevitable data black outs? Here are my suggestions:

- Don’t put your data communication eggs all in one basket, and allow for multiple ways to contact others, check your mail, and be reachable by others.
- Use redundant mail boxes and redundant communications devices (like remembering what your long distance calling card number is)
- Don’t get rid of your notebook computer just yet.
- And keep pens and paper at hand for when all technology fails at the same time

The final lesson I learned from this experience is that even a cell phones have a soft reboot function (affectionately referred to as the three-finger-salute on PCs) – for the Sidekick II, hold done the “@”, “0”, and “1” buttons all at the same time.

Ironically, just as I finished this column, my data service came back. Would it have come back if I hadn’t written this? Next up, conspiracy theory and causality…

In a move which went mostly unnoticed because it was brought up in a general discussion about the new IBM/Toshiba/Sony CELL processor, but is a dramatic shift in strategy, Sony disclosed at the GDC that the next generation of PlayStation (the so-called “PS3”) will adopt open, or at least popular, APIs as part of its architecture.

Sony will be using OpenGL ES for the 3D graphics API, NVIDIA’s Cg shader language, and the development tools will also incorporate support for the COLLADA format for art asset interchange so that developers can share 3D art among multiple platforms.

Sony Computer Entertainment’s (SCE) manager of developer relations, Mark DeLoura, in describing the software components of Sony’s implementation of the CELL processor, indicated that Sony wanted to enable the use of familiar APIs, and provide tools which run on “popular operating systems”.  Presumably that means Windows, but might also include Linux – he wouldn’t elaborate.

DeLoura explained that Sony chose OpenGL ES over straight OpenGL for a number of reasons, key among them that OpenGL is top heavy and includes a lot of baggage which game developers don’t need. OpenGL ES is also specifically designed for interactive 3D applications, games key among those, and it offers a much smaller memory footprint. Most importantly, according to DeLoura – OpenGL ES is an industry standard. He also stressed that SCE is working closely with the Khronos group to position ES as a good choice for real-time interactive graphics.

DeLoura did leave open the option to provide or use other APIs for other applications of the PS3. Again, no further details on what applications.

In terms of Sony’s choice of Cg as the shading language for PS3 development, DeLoura explained that NVIDIA and SCE are partners in this effort, and that Cg was chosen because it is widespread in use, there are many samples of how to program Cg, and of course, there are a number of books which describe Cg programming. It doesn’t hurt that Cg is similar to other shader languages, nor that Cg offers an extensive standard library.

Those items, combined with the announcement that the same API would be available to program both the PPE and SPE components of the CELL processor, were well received by the programmers in the audience.

For artists, especially game artists, Sony’s support of COLLADA should be very welcome. As next generation game development progresses, the sheer amount of 3D art required for such titles will be incredible, as will the number of tools needed to work such art. It’s unrealistic in terms of manpower and resources to create each separate but similar pieces of art for multiple platforms, or even maintain multiple instances of the same art. Thus, the idea behind COLLADA is to have a core set of 3D art assets which can then be shared collaboratively between users and applications, and converted as needed to the target platforms and uses.

COLLADA is open source, not proprietary, and it is also cross platform. Several major tools vendors, including Alias, Discreet, and Softimage, have already indicated that they supporting the COLLADA effort, meaning that they will or are already providing COLLADA importers and exporters. DeLoura stressed that Sony has supported COLLADA since its release at SIGGRAPH last summer.

This move to open standards and popular APIs is a dramatic change for Sony, which has traditionally espoused proprietary efforts and interfaces – the ATRAC codec and the PS2 programming interfaces among them. However, it’s potentially a brilliant move too, as many developers already have extensive familiarity with OpenGL, and increasingly OpenGL ES, as well as NVIDIA’s Cg shader language. This reduces the learning curve.

Further, it opens the possibility that after the PS3’s launch, the platform could be opened to general development to anyone, not just game developers. This is in marked contrast to Xbox, which looks likely to be a closed system to anyone other than licensed game developers.

When DeLoura was asked about this possibility, he expressed his hope it would materialize, but added that he thought it was even possible in the near term to see PSP development opened up to the masses.

Licensed PS3 developers get an out of the box compiled, debugger, and integrated development environment (IDE), and performance analysis tools are available too. Sony predicts that extensive middleware will be available to assist developers with key functionality, and faster to-market times.

Whether Sony’s new philosophy on open standards will extend to open development remains to be seen, of course, but by making this commitment, and shifting away from proprietary APIs, they give OpenGL ES a tremendous boost, potentially to the detriment of Direct3D and D3Dm.