Came across a guest post on TechCrunch today written by Michael Allaire, one of the creators of Flash. It summarizes the evolution of the web as an application platform (ie, all of those programs you use within browsers), and also gives a good sense on what’s driving all of the competition you see amongst relevent companies in this space. Here’s a nice quote:
Each of these companies seeks to create unique runtimes and APIs that provide a strategic wedge that can drive other aspects of their business. At one level this is a battle for the hearts and minds of developers and ISVs, but these developers are merely a means to an end. Gaining broad adoption for their runtime platforms translates into their ability to create massive derivative value through downstream products and services. For Apple, this is hardware and paid media (content and apps) sales. For Google, this is about creating massive reach for their advertising platforms and products. For Adobe, this about creating major new applications businesses based on their platform. For Microsoft, it is about driving unit sales of their core OS and business applications.
I won’t get drawn into deep discussion on Microsoft’s plans vs. other competitors in this space, but I do think the next few years are going to be very interesting to watch as we all work through what the optimal development environments should be across a new breed of connected devices. We’ve entered a world where being “online” is just table stakes to be in the game; the real competition will be driven by how you enable developers and publishers to easily create and sell their content across all of these connected devices, as well as enable them to take advantage of a new breed of web services.
As a gadget-encrusted geek gamer, the future is looking mighty bright to me!
Yep, I finally bit the Twitter bullet. Of course, Twitter’s namespace is pretty full at this point so you can follow me @gameozymandias should you be so inclined. Look forward to the conversation!
And yes, some of you already following on Twitter will no doubt get notified of this blog post announcing me on Twitter… at which point you should be able to click on the bit.ly URL and find yourself here, in an infinite spinloop of sociality. Sorry about that! 
Feels like the end of an era in some ways… but in a good way. As I mentioned just a few days ago, we’ve come a long way, and there’s a lot more opportunity ahead. This decision will allow Xbox LIVE to continue evolving in some really exciting new areas across a much wider surface area… though I can’t really talk about some of that goodness just yet. For now, I’ll point you at Major Nelson for all the details, in particular this quote:
While I can’t comment on the specifics, this change will allow us to continue evolving the LIVE service with new features and experiences that fully harness the power of Xbox 360 and the Xbox LIVE community. We did not make this decision lightly, but after careful consideration and review we realize that this decision will allow us unprecedented flexibility for future features.
23 million active members down; rest of world to go!
[Edit: updated Xbox LIVE member number to 23 million - Doh!]
Trying to set up a Wordpress plugin to aggregate all feeds to Feedburner. Was a typo in the redirect URL, should be fixed now. If you’re seeing problems, please try clearing your cache or in another browser. And please also let me know if you’re still seeing problems afterward!
Apparently there’s been a bit of buzz around Apple’s tablet recently. Few folks were wondering what I thought… which was a better question than they really knew since I was still trying to wrap my mind around it myself! There’s probably going to be more, but for now I think I’ve distilled it down to a few key points.
The first is that this is a classic Apple 1.0 product. It’s sexy, has appeal to a reasonably large market, and also has an annoying but obvious list of omissions which will be added to inevitable upgrades. No camera, no GPS, no connectivity to external displays, and likely CPU speed increases are all things we’ll see in the next few revisions. (On that note, be sure to check the MacRumor’s Buyer’s Guide before you purchase anything Apple; they’re on a pretty regular schedule, and the site will help you avoid buying something just weeks before a major refresh.)
The second is that Apple (with AT&Ts help) drove a huge wedge into the door toward opening up reasonably priced, ubiquitous connectivity. Although 3G isn’t on every device, WiFi is – which is pretty darn well ubiquitous at this point. I’m also sure you’ll see 3G (or successors) become standard in the next few years as well. In addition, the no-contract 3G plan from AT&T is a huge step forward toward enabling people to be constantly connected. (Although the new microSIM is a clever way to continue giving AT&T a limited time-exclusive on the iPad through hardware while being able to have a talking point about opening up the device to other mobile operators in the future.)
The third is that constant connectivity will likely help drive new genres of entertainment, especially for games. You’ve begun to see iPhone games (such as Words with Friends) and platforms (PlusPlus, OpenFeint) that try to take advantage of this capability. I’ve spoken before about the importance of Asynchronous Gaming; these games and platforms are just the first steps down that path. (The interesting question is what Apple will do about all of these different social gaming network platforms springing up on their devices. They’re still in the early stages of their game strategy, but keep an eye out for them to either build out their own cross-platform social network for games, or just purchase one of those guys as a jumpstart.)
Finally, it’s pretty obvious Apple is in the early days of their gaming strategy, but definitely have their eyes on a cross-platform, unified development platform target. Lots of hints like the extension of the iPhone OS to the iPad, iPhone app compatibility, iTunes as the content aggregator/distribution point, lack of sideloading capability, the stagnation of Apple TV (and the eventual reboot as yet another connected platform to play these games on) all point to a clear direction. (The eventual Apple TV reboot could also be the reason there’s no way to connect the iPad to a television right now – why create competition for yourself?) Don’t look for a lot of investment in enabling traditional “PC” games on Mac, but definitely watch as they extend the ability of their development partners to target the widest possible audience across devices. This is also one of the reasons I’m quite sure there’s a cross-platform social backend (with support for gaming) coming from Apple – it’s low-hanging fruit (no pun intended).
Really excited to see the new numbers are now public! I remember watching Xbox LIVE when we first fired it up internally. We literally had tens of people on the service. That’s when I grabbed my Ozymandias Gamertag (and Andre as a backup; sorry to all you French guys!) Then the service fully launched and we started hitting some great milestones along the way… hundreds, thousands, now millions of concurrent users. That’s literally the audience for many major network shows! And that’s primarily on the Xbox 360… really think people are going to be intrigued by what we do in the near future!
Title says it all! As I’m spinning the blog back up, I’d like to find a way to replace the top banner with some sort of combination Ozymandias logo/font, and then use the “O” of that logo as the icon on the right side of the page.
Does anyone know of good logo design resources available on the web?
Yep, just a quick note to say that I’m back. I’ve been overwhelmed the few months with work, and just haven’t had a chance to really dedicate any time to the blog. Although still busy, I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel and expect to be able to do some semi-regular posting.
As a part of relaunching I’m moving to the Wordpress platform. That should help a great deal with spam as well as make it much easier for me to update with the latest toys. However, I’m sure there are areas to polish up. I know the Gamercard needs words, and for some reason all of the migrated comments from earlier posts aren’t showing up in this theme. If you see anything, please comment and let me know! (And we’ll work on making those comments show up! Don’t worry, though, I can see them from the control panel no problem.)
Finally, I want to send huge thanks to Mark Deloura of Satori.org for his help in migrating over all of the old posts from Ozymandias. I honestly couldn’t have done this without him. And I owe him a very nice dinner sometime soon. Thinking GDC at the latest! Thank you Mark!
Few folks have wondered why I haven’t posted anything on the recently announced PS3 Slim. Honestly, it’s mostly because there’s not all that much to say. For one, it’s been pretty much a certain thing for many months and indeed, when finally announced, there weren’t really any surprises. And second, I don’t think it really changes the overall scheme of things all that much.
On the positive side the slim is less expensive at $299, and is a great Blu-Ray player. There are finally some interesting games coming out this holiday (Uncharted 2 being highest on my list). And it’ll definitely sell more than it would have at previous price points.
All that said, it’s still the most expensive console out there in a recession. The brand has taken a beating and I just don’t know how much pent up demand there really is – especially with limited, interesting exclusive titles. (I think Tycho put it well today over on Penny Arcade: “It can’t be seen as anything but a concession to a market that has consistently chosen their competitor’s products – an act of contrition, the purest evidence possible that this brand is no longer sufficient to sway consumers.”)
Online features continue to chase LIVE, and key features like cross-game chat and invites simply don’t exist. Home continues to be ignored by anyone who actually wants to play a game (and I doubt the promised game-launch functionality will be sufficient to draw people in). Even the new 3.0 XMB update is disappointing – you know you’ve got problems when rabid fan forums such as NeoGAF focus on the clock fix as being of the most interest.
Those are the facts as I see it. I purposely didn’t talk about visual styling because that’s much more subjective and frankly, pretty irrelevant to the discussion. We’ll certainly see a sales spike, but it’ll taper off in a couple of months. Next big inflection point might be their version of motion controls – we shall see!
Keep meaning to point people to this. I love this sort of quirky art style and animation. It’s hard to tell what the gameplay will be like, but I’m crossing my fingers!
Note that you can also watch the HD feed off of YouTube.
