#console game development

Any company that wants to release a premium game console basically needs to make an enormous investment that will probably not pay off for years. There are three major requirements for this process.

First, the company must develop gaming hardware. This is generally an expensive process - building anything physical is costly, time-consuming, and is a moving target because competitors aren't stopping either. The hardware must be manufactured and factories equipped and set up for mass production.

Second, they must develop software development tools for both themselves and for external developers to use in order to build games for that console. This requires a significant internal development team to build drivers and software interfaces. Beyond this, they likely need to develop their own flagship game (or more) to launch with the console. That generally costs at least $50 million for a AAA-fidelity game and at least two years of lead time to build alongside the hardware development.

Third, they must secure investment from third party developers to build games for that console. Using that $50 million price tag for a game, we'd need at least four or five additional games to launch with in order to entice players to buy in - no one buys a game console without games to play on it. If they want four launch titles to go along with the console launch, that requires at least $200 million in investment from others.

There are only a handful of companies in the world that have the kind of money, technology, and resources needed to make such a thing happen and some of them already have game consoles. The others look at the market, at the cost of entry just to compete (not necessarily even to pull ahead), at the expected returns on investment, and it's no surprise they choose to invest their money in other opportunities that seem more likely to bear fruit.

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Is it plausible?

Of course it's plausible. The Nintendo Switch started development around 2012-2013, was unveiled in 2016, and was released in 2017. It's been six years since the Switch launched. If Nintendo started developing a new console shortly after the Switch's launch (2018), we're about due for a new console unveiling.

Is it common for console manufacturers to talk about the next console to developers privately?

Absolutely. How do you think the new console's third party launch games get made? We on the dev side get to work with the console dev kits before the public knows about them because new consoles need to launch with games to play or nobody will buy them. We need at least a year (preferably two or three) to build a whole game on new hardware, so you can do the math - if our game launches with the new console in holiday season 2025, that means we need the console dev kits to start building the game 2022-2024. How do you think we get those dev kits if we don't talk to the console manufacturers? We get the dev kits early and are all sworn to NDA Secrecy for that time.

I'll clarify to say that I can neither confirm nor deny anything that I am currently working on, nor can I confirm nor deny the existence of any next-gen Nintendo (or Sony or Microsoft or other party) console system. I am only speaking hypothetically as someone who worked on launch titles for the [PS4/XBOne generation and the PS3/X360 generation].

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It isn't terribly technical, but I don't have a dev kit at the home office at the moment so you only get some of my old photos of dev kits from my previous employer today. A console dev kit is a lot like a networked computer fused with a game console. It has beefier hardware than the retail console (because it needs to be able to hold and run debug builds of the game). It has USB ports for controllers/keyboards/peripherals, network ports to connect to the network, and the usual video outputs to display to TVs. They also have a different version of the console's operating system for development stuff - they allow us to do things like reset achievements, change locale, connect to PSN/XBL/SwitchOnline, and other various features. Dev kits physically look like this:

Because they act like remote PCs, we can do things like upload builds to them over the network, and we can remotely connect our debuggers to those executables while running for debugging purposes. Game consoles today typically have plugins for Microsoft Visual studio to handle the remote debugging process. Programmers will build the debug version of the game on their workstations, transfer it to the dev kit, and run it on that hardware. Their workstations then connect to the dev kit's running game process remotely and attaches the debugger to it so they can see things like breakpoints.

Most designers, artists, and QA don't usually have access to (or understanding of) code, so we don't get the remote debugger attachment. Instead, we're usually limited to in-game debug menus, tools, and displays built by the programmers to verify our changes. This is why so many have some kind of "developer console" within the game, some kind of text interface that can run a bunch of different commands. Those text interfaces exist so we can access debug commands. Before we could do that, we had to use controller button combinations. You may know of them with their more common street name - "cheat codes".

We usually have two kinds of kits - the more expensive dev kits with more memory and hard drive space to handle the development process, and the less expensive test kits that are closer to retail hardware specs but use the development software provided by the platform (Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo). Neither of these can play retail games, they only play development builds. They also require a developer account and license from platform to actually do anything, so obtaining one without platform's permission won't really do a lot of good to anyone.

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Both Sony and Microsoft have demanded "exclusive content" for their versions of the game ever since Microsoft's first Xbox. Third party publishers got around this primarily by giving each platform the equivalent of launch DLC (a single platform-exclusive skin or weapon or something) in order to obey the letter of the law. This was also similar for other console-specific hardware that platform demanded we support, like the Playstation Move controller. Developing a title to ship on the Xbone with its Kinect requirement was little different.

Most third party publishers want to devote their development resources to systems and content that is reusable across platforms because that's the best return on investment, so console-specific stuff like Kinect support is usually whatever is the least resource-intensive while still sufficient to pass certification. The lowest bar for this usually meant something like the Kinect could be used to navigate menus via voice commands or via hand motions. That was what it took to pass MSFT cert and could usually be done fairly quickly by an engine programmer, so that was what many games ended up doing. Since it was low-investment, it usually didn't affect development much at all.

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My very first shipped title was for the PS2. By then, we had a development kit (called the Dev Tool) that ran Linux and had a sufficiently large hard drive that we could copy PS2 binaries onto and run. One of my coworkers would run an Unreal Tournament dedicated server on his dev tool for team network games after hours. I really can't say what the PSX environment was like, nor anything before that. It was way before my time.

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Some random dev kit trivia:

Dev kits can’t play retail games at all.

Dev kits have much bigger system specs because we have to be able to run debug builds. Debug builds are much less optimized because of all the debug information that’s kept in memory.

Dev kit software can do a lot of things like simulate online and/or disc latency, handle remote network connections, record game screenshots/video and controller inputs, and profile resource usage.

Current gen dev kits require you to provide Sony/Microsoft with a whitelisted IP address. They won’t work if you aren’t connecting to the dev network without a recognized IP address. This has caused a lot of problems due to everyone working from home. Before the PS4 gen, this wasn’t the case - we could take our dev kits home if we wanted (and the company let us).

There’s the beefy (and expensive) dev kit, and then there’s the less beefy (and cheaper) test kit. Dev kits have more features and better hardware.

There’s a separate developer’s version of PSN and Xbox Live networks. This is so we can do things like test network stuff, locale, achievements, etc. without them going live

Most of the time, the company is very careful about dev kits because they cost a lot. I’ve had dev kits chained to my desk before.

When we had family events at the office like Halloween trick-or-treating, we had to cover up all of our (still under NDA) dev kits so children and family members could not see them.

The Xbone’s Developer Mode Activation does not actually turn your Xbone into a dev kit. It still has the retail hardware specs and it doesn’t have all of the features or access to the special dev network.

Last gen dev kits are a lot cheaper than the newest ones. You can probably get a PS4 or Xbone dev kit for under $2000 now.

Cheers!

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It’s time for another lightning mailbag, because I’ve accumulated a bunch of questions with suitably short answers.

Which dev kit is easy to use & which one is your personal favortie?

Microsoft traditionally has the easiest and least painful dev kits to develop for. 

Multiple save slots for a game seem to have fallen out of favor as compared to the past. Any thoughts on why this is?

Most games without multiple save slots are probably actively discouraging players from save scumming.

What is the current purpose of a lives system?

Having a limited number of attempts gives the player’s actions a greater sense of urgency and weight. If you know you have to risk something (progress made), you’ll play more carefully. It can be a double-edged sword if gameplay requires a lot of trial and error to learn though; it multiplies the frustration if the requirements aren’t properly communicated to the player.

You say curation is the holy grail of a storefront, but hasn't GOG been advertising a fully curated collection for a while now?

When I say “curation”, I mean an automated system that suggests offerings to customers with a high degree of accuracy. It’s something companies that Amazon, Netflix, Google, and Facebook have sunk millions into improving, because we all want to offer you things you’ll want to spend your money or time on.

To allow existing owners to download the game, all 13 episodes of Minecraft Story Mode have been temporarily relisted on the Xbox 360 store at $100 an episode. If someone were crazy enough to buy an episode, where would the money go?

It would probably get divided up the same way. Microsoft gets their 30% platform cut, then the rest would go to whoever owns the rights to Minecraft Story Mode. Any other standing agreements like the owners of the Minecraft license (which I believe is a different division of Microsoft) would take their cut from the 70% that wasn’t taken by platform.

So the announced Avengers game includes Avengers who look almost nothing like the actual Avengers. Since you've talked about copyright and game developement budgets a lot, do you have any insight on how much it would cost to get the actors actual likenesses in the game rather than... whatever that is we are getting instead?

Probably too much. I suspect that it would entail some flat fee to each actor for his or her likeness, and possibly a percentage of each sale. That said, I suspect the part would come from Disney’s cut for the licensing fee, which is probably why Disney didn’t do it.

How hard is it to get famous actors for stuff like motion capture/voices etc?

There’s two main issues with getting A-list Hollywood actors for video games - cost and scheduling. Cost should be obvious - Robert Downey Jr. can demand practically anything he wants for payment. Scheduling is a bit less obvious. Famous actors are often extremely busy living their lives - they get to choose what work they do and when they want to do it. If their availability window doesn’t match our production schedule, we can’t get them no matter how much we pay.

I've noticed in a console multiplayer game that the match loads quicker when I'm backfill in an ongoing match than when it's loading the beginning of the match. It feels significant, like a 30-50% shorter wait. What kinds of things might be causing that?

The matchmaking system is prioritizing backfilling existing matches over starting new matches up. I’d do that too, since an ongoing match that fails (especially in a team game) is often super unfun for the losing team, so it generates a lot more overall frustration than a player waiting in the queue for a fresh match.

Why do you think so many new developers have a trouble with adjusting the scope of a project? Would you attribute it due to lacking experience within development, thus believing that it's possible to do everything in one go?

Everybody has trouble adjusting the scope of a project. Even us veterans who have been doing it for ages have trouble adjusting the scope of the project. It’s worse for new devs because they have no context by which to gauge their estimates. They look at a game developed over years by a team of dozens of full time professional experts and think “That doesn’t look so hard. I could probably do that with my friends”. That’s why scoping down is really hard for newbies, it’s hard to gauge scope if your only reference points are games you’ve played and not things you’ve made.

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There are some pretty big benefits to having an established platform like that. Players have become accustomed to a certain set of features - friend lists, the ability to invite friends to play together, sending messages back and forth, automatic patch updates and DLC installation, achievements, etc. Somebody has to build and maintain all that, and that takes time, resources, and a commitment to maintenance.

The biggest benefit to third party publishers is that they don’t have to spend a whole bunch of resources building all that stuff for themselves. If we want to patch a game, we build a working patch and send it to Nintendo, who certifies it and then their system handles the distribution and installation to all of the players on the platform. It’s on Nintendo to make sure all of the players are running the most recent version of the game, that players can invite each other to play, etc. 

Building and maintaining an entire platform can be really expensive - we need to keep track of a lot of user data, financial data, and do a lot of work on the back end making sure that it’s secure, reliable, and running 24/7. To do all of that, you need UI/UX designers and artists, server programmers, database programmers, security specialists, database administrators, and a 24/7 maintenance crew to keep everything running.It makes a lot more sense for the platform guys to do it themselves, since they also get to keep everything on the platform consistent and all of the games running on that platform can reuse the same technology and features that are provided. It keeps the user base from getting fragmented (i.e. you don’t separate the players between an EA launcher, a UPlay launcher, a Steam launcher, etc.).

The FANTa Project is currently on hiatus while I am crunching at work too busy.

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