Hardware And Software Industries Going To Crash.


Azalin

What was that? It sounded like a, a sound of some
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Note: Because my keyboard is being a bitch, É=question mark.

Alrighty, so i've been watching the trends in the Electronics hardware and software industries lately for a school project, and i've noticed some fairly disturbing trends:

In Hardware:
1. A newer, better component is pushed out at least every 3 months. In reality, this component has only minor enhancements over the previous one, but still has a doubled price.

2. Because of 1, the hardware industry has set itself up for failure. Why? Because there is going to come a day very soon when they will no longer be able to cram a few more mhz or gb of ram into a certain amount of space. Then they will either have to switch to a new hardware form factor, or cut back on production dramaticly. But because of the pace that they've been setting, they will not be able to do so without a crash. Sort of like a car thats speeding and tries to stop, but hits a telephone pole instead. This could also come about if the consumers ever wake up enmasse and realize just how hard they're being ripped off.

In software:
1. Games today are shorter, have less engaging storylines, generally take aroud 2 years to make, and are ridden with bugs upon release.

2. The reason for this is directly linked to point 1 in hardware: Because we have such a fast pace of technology, games must be created fast enough that the hardware they are based on does not get outdated before the game is released (at least, this is what the developers believe).

3. Developers in general are concerned only with having the best looking water and enviroments. This is true. Consider, when you last read a review of a game, what was the first thing they mentioned. Graphics. Because of this over-concern with graphical goodness, developers are negelecting storylines and essential programming.

4. Games these days are not utilizing the full potential of the hardware they run on. This one is big folks. Because games are being pushed out of the door so damn fast these days, they aren`t nearly taking full potential of the hardware the PC has to offer. Consider, do you REALLY think that some of today`s top-grade shooters and RPG`s need a video card THAT good to run themÉ Well they probobly don`t. If developers spent less time with ragdoll physics, and more time tightening up code and cutting out excess, the game would not only be smaller installation-wise, but it would also take considerably less pwer to run it.

And so we come to the conclusion: The hardware & software companies have sent themselves down a path of no return. Games are being pushed out faster and buggier than ever before (when was the last time you didnt have to patch a game on releaseÉ) to keep up with hardware that is becoming rediculous. Both industries are, quite likely, going to reach the proverbial `singularity` within the next decade, and we will see the equivalent of the Atari crash of the 80`s or the wallstreet crash of the 30`s, only terribly more far-reaching.
 
Garr, I be thinking this too, I'm very pleased, VERY PLEASED with Half-Life 2! For the past year I couldn't stop talking about it, and the efficient engine I think it uses. Valve to me, seems like the only company that puts forth some effort!
 
Indeed. For everyone`s bitching and whining, the fact that it took 5 years to make shows just how good the game is.

Hey, I've got that game, but I need a fucking crack to install it :angry:

(My PC that has internet connection is sub-par for this game)
 
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we will see the equivalent of the wallstreet crash of the 30`s, only terribly more far-reaching.
Let's not go crazy here, the 30's crash was horrible to a greater extent than what TV documentaries will have you believe. Ask Shikaku, he'll tell you.

I wholeheartedly agree with all your points though. All the specs on computers and home consoles are artificially demanded. How come they could pull off timeless classics on the Genesis with only 7Mhz of processing power, and now they need a thousand fog-generating coprocessors to get the job done?

It's absurd, it's a race that has no finish line, and no winners. The only thing they succeed is going deep into your pockets and squeezing every penny out, and quite frankly as long as they've done that there's no incentive for betterment.

I think that there are two in-your-face examples that back all of these things up. The first one is Apple pumping out a new version of the IPod every six months. As a consumer I would be disgusted by such practices, to know that a device I paid $400 for will be inferior in as little as a couple of months. Of course, if the "if it's not the latest, it's simply not good enough" mentality wasn't around, perhaps I wouldn't supposedly think that way. Thank god I'm not an Apple customer.

The second example consists of the 'next-gen' home consoles. There is absolutely no need right now for new hardware. The 'current-gen' consoles sport more than enough horse power to fuel anything that developers may want to throw at it. But that matters not, as manufacturers already got the majority of gamers hyped about next gen, and began dropping support for their current consoles. To top it off, the next gen gimmick justifies a price increase for games. I know that back in the 16-bit era video games were as expensive as they are today, but times have changed. Video games and computers in general are no longer a novelty one must pay top dollar for. Just like a decent computer doesn't cost $8000 anymore, neither should the software.

Quite frankly the only next-gen home console that justifies its push on the market at this time is Nintendo's Wii, at least it brings a new way of input to the table, expanding what developers can do with it. The rest however, are mere processor upgrades, upgrades to already powerful enough hardware.

- Alex
 
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we will see the equivalent of the wallstreet crash of the 30`s, only terribly more far-reaching.
Let's not go crazy here, the 30's crash was horrible to a greater extent than what TV documentaries will have you believe. Ask Shikaku, he'll tell you.

Back in the days of the Stock Market Crash, it literally overnight created a new lifestyle and mindset for the people then. Think about it: your money is now permanently gone forever overnight. The value of common goods skyrocket. All of your assets, your goods, your possessions, worthless because of the lack of value of cash. You as a consumer, who was raised in a city where everything has to be bought and consumed, is now forced to live in a world where money has no meaning anymore. Can you imagine the insanity that ensued after such a catastrophic event?

... Wait WHY THE FUCK AM I KING PESSIMIST NOW?!
 
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we will see the equivalent of the wallstreet crash of the 30`s, only terribly more far-reaching.
Let's not go crazy here, the 30's crash was horrible to a greater extent than what TV documentaries will have you believe. Ask Shikaku, he'll tell you.

Back in the days of the Stock Market Crash, it literally overnight created a new lifestyle and mindset for the people then. Think about it: your money is now permanently gone forever overnight. The value of common goods skyrocket. All of your assets, your goods, your possessions, worthless because of the lack of value of cash. You as a consumer, who was raised in a city where everything has to be bought and consumed, is now forced to live in a world where money has no meaning anymore. Can you imagine the insanity that ensued after such a catastrophic event?

... Wait WHY THE FUCK AM I KING PESSIMIST NOW?!

Alright maybe i was going a bit to far with that one. But maybe not:
Think of how much our society is based around electronic devices, how many jobs there are in the industries, etc. Now imagine what would happen if the largest software and hardware companies just turned over and died. Chaos? i think so.


Yay! the ? is back!
 
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by this definition then does this make Nintendo visionary for using current (slight out of date) hardware and cheap manufactering costs while keeping the price of games still low?.
 
Actually, PC hardware is more affordable nowadays than only 5 years ago. In 2001, a full-fledged gaming PC would have cost me about 2300 DM (1150€). Now i can get a setup that is up to date for about 900€, a little more after the release of a new GFX card generation.

It is true that new Hardware versions get released much faster, but there isn´t the need to Upgrade after each release, if you have a good GFX card, you can skip the next generation without any problems. Maybe this is not true for American gamers, who always want the newest though.

Games are indeed getting shorter. But the stories also get better. I think the games are getting shorter because the gamer of today wants to be entertained in a different way. He wants the story being told more intensively, like in a movie. 10 Years ago, gamers were content if there was a text box telling them a tiny bit of the story after each level (except for RPGs of course), nowadays the story is being told during the actual gameplay in a way that is extremely involving. Also the gamer fastly grows tired of his ingame surroundings, which is why developers have to throw lots of different graphic sets, design styles, minigames, level types etc. at him to keep him entertained.
So, they thell the story more intensively, they present the gamer a multitude of surroundings and graphic content. So it´s no miracle the games are getting shorter in playtime.

But they have way more epic, graphical, and audible content.
 
I'm not 100% sure if you are trying to say the PC/consumer electronics industries are going to crash, the video game hardware industry, or both. Rather vague. At any rate, in the PC realm of things, the situation is not at all as you describe. The most important parts of any personal computer, CE device and game console are its core hardware, the processor, RAM and graphics accelerator.

CPUs about 1 year ago were advancing very nicely on AMD's side of things, with lots of room to grow. Intel's aging Prescott architecture had hit an Intel-described 'thermal wall' where their chips produced so much heat they were physically destroying themselves above ~3.8 GHz. This called for new direction in design, combining high-end desktop performance features with the low-power attributes of their mobile Pentium M processors, which are now being seen in the 'Conroe' line. AMD continues to crank out ever-faster processors on their own power/heat-efficient K8 architecture and are moving to the same 65nm process Intel is using shortly, which will increase heat/power-efficiency along with dramatic new architectural improvements. On the mobile front, ARM and MIPS continue to develop energy-efficient and increasingly powerful processing solutions for game consoles and portable consumer electronics.

On the issue of RAM, new memory technologies are being developed faster than CPUs are taking advantage of them. No problem.

On the GPU side of things, the industry is moving appallingly fast. Games barely have time to take advantage of the high-end GPUs being released before a massively faster new version, often 30-60% faster than the one that came before, is on the market.

Most of these components and their constituent architectures from companies such as nVidia, ATi, IBM, ARM and Intel bleed over heavily into the console market. As for prices, generally they come down very rapidly, and the components are introduced in tiers. You can always buy the fancy new processor from the top of an architecture, for $1000 .. then the budget line that is 90% as fast, but 80% cheaper. Combine that with bulk purchases and the price can be brought down even more.

I *do* expect a game industry crash for different reasons, it's a matter of time. Graphics are improving all the time, but the quality of gameplay and innovation continues to drop. Sales of consoles by Microsoft and Sony that are more expensive for the company to make than the consumer to buy, mean the costs are passed off to developers in huge licensing and SDK fees, providing an enormous cost of entry to develop any titles for the systems. This forces small, innovative studios out of the market, while producers of shovelware are piled on with wheelbarrows of cash in tow. The fact that huge multinational corporations are designing these consoles means that there does not need to be a significant profit or degree of financial success to keep them being produced, either. Eventually, we will reach a point where graphics achieve photorealistic quality, and gameplay ceases to improve. At this point the non-gamers who are attracted only by graphics will see little reason to put down their hard earned money on the next expensive console iteration. It is my hope such a crash, like the one in the 80s, will bring about a revolution in the industry to include a complete paradigm shift of the software entering the market and the efficiency of system design.

The issue of cost in the current generation, on the part of MS/Sony (Nintendo's projected Wii pricing falls in line with most console releases from previous generations) are resultant primarily from the following. The XBox 360's cost is raised significantly by the use of 3 processor cores that accomplish practically nothing compared to one CPU for most tasks, but dramatically increase costs, heat emission, power consumption and cost of power supply and cooling apparatus... and as for the PS3, the use of an expensive, failure-prone 'Cell' processor that is poorly designed for games, has very low yields, the use of expensive Rambus memory (this is a company that has had legal action against it for exorbiant pricing and suing legitimate companies to attempt a takeover of the memory industry), and inclusion of an unneccesary Blu-Ray drive whose only function is to force Sony's proprietary new media format into the market to get a jump on HD-DVD-- a drive that, like the unusual-at-the-time DVD-ROM drive in the PS2 and the similarly-faulty PS1 CD-ROM drive (also unusual at that time) will no doubt be the source of countless mechanical failures and returned units.

I can't say I am pleased at all with how the industry is being run right now. Nintendo has some ideas I am happy with, and I don't think the portable industry's gone to shit as badly yet, though the PSP is a step towards the "make lots of pretty 3D, forget gameplay" standard home consoles have driven toward. My DS Lite is at least a reminder of just the sort of innovative, creative games that can be produced without millions of polygons, useless and expensive extraneous processors, and a total lack of imagination.
 
My concerns is that while efforts have been made to create faster hardware. Not as much effort has gone to ensure that this new hardware consumes energy more efficiently. The NES was passively cooled. So was the SNES. We arer needing larger heatsinks and more fans... it's rediculous.

I'm not sure games are getting shorter... Or at least I've still got lots of games I have yet to finish. Maybe the people that say they are getting shorter don't explore as much of the game as possible...

I'm glad some focus is being shifted from GFX with NDS, and from what I can see the Wii. I hope this is an indication of things to come, because I'm getting increasingly worried about the general direction of an industry I intend to have employment in...
 
It will be people like me that will cause a crash.

When I was in my early 20's I bought a new PC game every week. Never completed any of them. Got bored or the next raved game came out. Same with hardware. Got myself in to a lot of debt too. So experience and lack of brains tought me to fuck the lot of them. I rarely buy games, music or DVD's now and very selectively. Can you imagine what would happen if a million people did that? So if anything it will be people like me that cause a crash.

At the end of the day the consumer drives the economy, supply and demand and a touch of Keep up with the Jones'.

As long as consumers keep buying this shit then they'll keep putting out more of this shit. As long as consumers believe and get suckered into what they are told by manufacturers regardless of what industry then it will never change. Take fashion victims for example. They're told brown is the colour of the day so they go and buy what they are told and ditch an entire wardrobe. Same with hardware and software. Look at Itunes. What a pile of shit. I got free itunes vouchers of other people's cola addiction. I got a couple of tunes, found that I couldn't do anything with them and they are shitty 128Kb quality anyway, what a con but people are suckered into it for some dumb reason.

I don't buy EA games, I don't drink Coca Cola products. If lots of people did that these companies have to change tactics. Companies are not there to service you. They don't care about you, certainly not EA. Shareholders and CEO's,etc just want money and I'm not saying I'm any different.

Good news is the ice caps are melting and the weather is fucked up so we're all gonna die anyway.

That's my rant done with. Now who's king pessimist ? ;)
 
Sales of consoles by Microsoft and Sony that are more expensive for the company to make than the consumer to buy, mean the costs are passed off to developers in huge licensing and SDK fees
What proof do you have that the console manufacturers do not see a profit from every hardware sale? I'm sorry, but when your console costs over $500, it's pretty obvious you're lining your pockets quite nicely. Say what you will, but common sense will override corporate propaganda any day of the year. They're not doing us a favour by selling their hardware 'cheap' and at a loss, it's all a niche marketing gimmick meant to attract those who look into these figures and are easily influenced by them.

I am also fond of the current gen of handheld gaming, although I do not own any except for the GP2X. I follow the scene from time to time though, to see what GamePark's XGP's future competitors are pumping out (;)) The DS is definitely a great peice of hardware/software innovation, kudos to Nintendo for that. The PSP, while having obvious flaws like the very low battery life and cheap screen, is misused software-wise. It sports great power, which could be used for the creation of great experimental games, 2D or 3d, does not matter. Anywho I couldn't care less what the commercial games industry has in store, it's homebrew or nothing baby :)

- Alex
 
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My concerns is that while efforts have been made to create faster hardware. Not as much effort has gone to ensure that this new hardware consumes energy more efficiently. The NES was passively cooled. So was the SNES. We arer needing larger heatsinks and more fans... it's rediculous.

...

I'm glad some focus is being shifted from GFX with NDS, and from what I can see the Wii. I hope this is an indication of things to come, because I'm getting increasingly worried about the general direction of an industry I intend to have employment in...
There is more efficient hardware available-- PCs with processors multiple times more capable than those in the PS3 and XBox 360 encounter less concern for heat and noise. My Athlon 64 X2 4200+ runs at a native 2.2 GHz, overclocked to 2.8 GHz, yet it still runs appallingly cooler than a similarly-clocked "Xenon" processor in the XB360 will, and no doubt the 'Cell processor' as well-- and its power consumption isn't appalling, it's around 85-100W at maximum load. Intel's new series of 65nm processors like Core or the rather-powerful dual-core Pentium M chips ('Yonah') run even cooler, and AMD's new architecture will as well. The XB360/PS3 are full of poor engineering decisions where marketing took precedence over common sense. The XB360's 2 extra cores do little for games, but produce lots of heat and necessitate much fan noise. The PS3's CPU is back-asswards for game tasks so most of it will go unused, while it creates loads more heat and noise. And the remaining usable CPU componts that do get used will be slower than PC hardware generations older, probably about on par with the Wii's fractionally-clocked CPU, because of the miserable multiprocessor hype designs on MS/Sony's part.

If you worry about the direction of the industry, look at the Wii's processor and what it's capable of with minimal cooling, look at ARM's accomplishments with 1 GHz processors that still use just fractions of one watt, or their clockless architecture... but if you just want big numbers and marketing hype, you're always going to get a cheap, hot-running, power-sucking, inefficient piece of shit CPU. Just the way it goes.
 
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The hardware industry has set itself up for failure. Why? Because there is going to come a day very soon when they will no longer be able to cram a few more mhz or gb of ram into a certain amount of space. Then they will either have to switch to a new hardware form factor, or cut back on production dramaticly. But because of the pace that they've been setting, they will not be able to do so without a crash.
Not quite true, I have seen at least 3 form factor changes and the hardware industry didn't bat an eye lid, it's just called progress. The industry has always been a fast evolving monster, and will continue to be just that.

I agree though that it's possible for us to reach the limit in certain areas, such as the speed of our present technology of CPUs. But the nature of technology means that it evolves, lets take the systems storage for example. We presently use Hard drives, optical media and solid state memory in our "modern" computers. And I agree that there is a limitation on how much we can eventually do with this, but then a new innovation in technology comes a long and all the above is redundant.
Am I mad, nope! Here's why: There is a technology being developed at the moment which is holographic memory. It will eventually replace all our storage and internal ram in a machine, and being a hologram the capacity is limitless. It's access time is is as fast as you will ever get being that it is light based, and as soon as you turn the machine on it will be ready to use, as there's no boot time as ram and HDD etc are now a single unit. Oh and how safe is your data? Well you can't smash it, as if you snap a hologram in half you get two identical copies :D.

Okay not all the above analogy is 100% true, but you get what I mean. I have learnt that you cannot base your future views on technology based on what we presently have.
 
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The electronics industry is not about to keel over and die in the near future. There will be huge shifts in power I'm sure, but there won't be a crash. People aren't just going to stop buying electronics if they realise they're being ripped off, because, as you say, it's a part of lifestyle now. The market will change, be it for better or worse, but it won't collapse.
 
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