I think it's important to separate reality and practice. I think in practice it would be nice if all consoles had indie development support, but that's ultimately a personal preference, most consumers of said consoles are wholly uninterested in that so I think in reality whilst I personally think that should be nice, we should not have an expectation of it from console manufacturers - I do not think it's fair to put that obligation on them, as they cannot be expected to be all things to all people.

I think if there was a market for a viable open console platform then that would come about naturally, or those existing manufacturers would tend towards that themselves, but so far attempts have been weak or failed, XNA didn't do a good job of producing great games, it was almost always crap, and for Microsoft it wasn't really therefore commercially beneficial either - the cost of maintaining the tools, libraries, and publishing platform almost certainly exceeded the profits gained from the program. Similarly platforms like Ouya just haven't worked out.

So that's where I stand on what I'd like to see happen, but why I believe it hasn't in practice and might not. Now on to what one can do if they wish to develop a console oriented game.

I would tend towards having some agreement towards your stated option b), but I would sell the game no matter how poorly it did and I do not see having a day job as a hardship. I say this because I've studied a degree full time whilst working full time, and I've done game development myself whilst working full time. To me time management is not an issue, and I do these things because I want to, not because I'm forced to or have an entitlement attitude that the world owes me a living from game development.

I think you should develop indie games because you want to and because you enjoy it. I think if your idea is good it will stand on it's own two feet just as games like Minecraft did- Notch didn't need a massive marketing machine or large publisher support, he built something unique and interesting, and blogged about it and people came to him, and eventually the publishers come to him.

I think many of the problems you're hinting at stem from those developers who cannot accept that maybe their game is not as good as they think it is and/or believe they deserve a living from their game no matter how unpopular it may be. These are false premises and are guaranteed to result in disappointment.

What OAP benefits have they slashed exactly? Winter fuel payments, free bus passes, free TV licenses are all intact regrdless of whether you're a pauper or a billionaire. The state pension has been increased in value, and ever more money has been poured into social care and the NHS to try and resolve the crisis that their failure to pay a fair share through their working life that covers the costs of what they expect to receive from the state now has caused.

All in all they've got it pretty good - the stats show that they're the only demographic whose wealth has increased on average throughout the recession and the failure to start taxing pension withdrawls or the wealthy pensioners or cut their benefits means that everyone younger is now having to pay for services for these folks that the state will never be able to afford to give the folks paying when they get older and that the folks receiving them refuse to pay for for themselves.

It's hard to see how they could reasonably have it any better given that things are currently massively in their favour due to being subsidised by everyone else and at everyone elses expense and to everyone else's long term detriment much less see how they've had any real kind of slashing of benefits.

The figures don't lie, it's a fact that those folks have profited through the recession whilst everyone else has suffered:

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/m...

Yes, I'll clarify because it is a little ambiguous, I'm well aware not all baby boomers read it, and I'm referring specifically to those that do, or those that at least have the same mindset of believing the world still owes them everything ever and everyone else can go screw themselves.

I absolutely agree that yes, there are at least some good baby boomers :)

Well it can, if all you want is something that lets you read books, in fact, if all you want is to read books then a kindle is a far superior device because you don't have to charge it as much and it's easier on the eyes.

Just like a Pebble smartwatch might happily replace an iWatch if all you want it to do is tell you the time and let you know if you've received an e-mail or text or something and be able to do so for more than just over 2/3rds of a single day without a recharge.

Not all use cases are equal. It's possible, that for the general population, a Pebble smartwatch can in fact quite easily replace an iWatch, because it's possible that people don't give a shit about fancy apps on their wrist when they have something superior for that in their pocket, it's possible they want a watch to be something they only have to charge once a week and that simply tells the time and gives them the odd useful notification.

Whether that's true or not is something only the market can tell us, we simply have to wait and see. My personal guess? I think we'll see convergence of the two, we'll see smartwatches that have superior power management to that available now and that drop to an extremely simple low power state most the time that looks an awful lot like the Pebble coupled with better batteries such that you end up with a hybrid approach and get maybe 3 days usage between charges in practice.

To me it's not the long day that's the problem, it's that I've not had a single device ever that's hit it's advertised battery life in practice. Doesn't matter if it's Samsung, Apple, Dell, Microsoft or whoever else, I've never seen a battery last as long as it should and that's because such timings are given based on perfect situations - if you're in perfect isolation where there's no wireless noise, and the temperature is exact then you can hit it, but in the real world where there's wireless signals everywhere and where devices have to constantly decipher signals to see if it's meant for them the batteries just end up failing well before they should. This coupled with the fact such timings are based on "average useage" which is normally an arbitrary figure that doens't represent real useage and advertised battery life is normally a fairly useless metric.

So even if an 18 hour day was as much as I do, I'm skeptical that it'll last that long in practice - if past battery experience is anything to go by you'll probably get like 14 hours out the box, and then after a year or two be lucky to get more than 10 hours out of it.

Nowadays when I buy phones and such I try and get something that offers near enough double the battery life I actually need in practice or buy a spare battery if I can and need to.

I wont buy a smart watch until they can advertise something around the 32 - 48 hours battery life mark. I suspect I'll be waiting a while, but I'm sure I'll live.

Consider also that Cameron appeals primarily to the Daily Mail reading baby boomer crowd, because they tend to vote for and he's hoping he can get them all onside. As such he's bound to spout technophobic rhetoric because much of that generation and the Daily Mail crowd find technology and change scary as shit.

It was only a week or two back Cameron stood and said that benefits for the elderly should be protected regardless of wealth (i.e. free bus passes, TV licenses, and money for heating for millionaire retirees are acceptable). His argument was that these people have lived through recessions and fought wars for us. I couldn't watch it with a straight face, I mean, he is aware the last 10 - 15 years happened right? he surely can't have missed the whole Afghanistan and Iraq thing coupled with the worst financial crisis in living memory all of which were fought by and impacted non-pensioners the most?

His pro-pensioner, pro-Daily Mail rhetoric has reached farcical levels in his desperation to keep the pensioners onside because as well as his recent anti-technology views he's also got the gall to tell entire generations that those wars they fought, that financial crisis they've been suffering and dealing with cuts and job losses through? well those just don't matter and it's tough shit. It's not like the vast majority of pensioners alive today even saw, let alone fought in the war - on the contrary most enjoyed a period of unprecedented wealth growth and relative peace.

At this point anything Cameron says is beyond nonsense and UKIP panic induced Daily Mail pandering.

"Apple isn't relevant in the "Oh but Samsung phones are so bloated with Samsungs software" because regardless most people for whatever reason buy the Samsung phones."

Yeah and that's really my point - they don't buy them because they're more powerful, because no Samsung phones that are more powerful than iPhones outsell the less powerful iPhones. A large part of this is because the Samsung UI stuff is crap. When people blow £600 on a phone they go for the one that's most pleasant to use, not the one that's most powerful and okay, sure that's a generalisation, maybe some people do so because they perceive the iPhone to be a better status symbol or similar, but fundamentally all I was getting at was the fact that whilst many geeks focus on specs, the wider market most definitely doesn't, because technology products never win the market based on spec alone - it doesn't matter how powerful your system is perceived to be if no one likes it. The Wii is another fine example, it outsold the PS3 and Xbox 360, yet was far less powerful - the wider market didn't give a shit about specifications of the system.

That doesn't mean people are willing to accept the crappier UI on a cheaper phone, because at that point something like cost or maybe size becomes their overriding concern, and that's why Samsung normally sells more devices, because they offer choices that are far wider ranging than simply higher specs.

You're thinking of sharpness in terms of photography, where level of bluriness depends on focus, but we don't focus computer graphics, we render them. We're not dealing with capture and representation of real images, we're building them ourselves.

Detail will be lost between a natively rendered 1080p image an an upscaled 720p image, because rather than having the extra pixels filled with actual explicit detail, they're being filled with guesses based on one of many algorithms. Depending on the game some algorithms can get this pretty much exactly right (i.e. in a game with relatively simple graphics like Minecraft).

"Consider the following statement, derived from the present status quo: "Platformers, fighting games, and platform fighters ought not to be moddable, and startup developers ought not to have the ability to develop original games in these genres." Do you agree? If so, why?"

Of course I don't agree, but I do agree that they don't necessarily need full unlimited access to all hardware to do it. They only need access to develop on a PC, and end per-system testing can be done with a dev kit, or through a program like Microsoft had with XNA. What you're putting forward is not an argument for complete opening up of every system and every bit of hardware, merely an argument for ensuring we have at least one open platform to develop on - the PC - and that if other platforms are willing to accept indie development that they provide tools to test and debug on that platform.

As I've noted before, Mario Maker gives you freedom to create platformers on the Wii U, and games like Farcry have typically had map editors even on consoles. But consoles aren't designed for modding for the most part, they're designed as a purely entertainment outlet first and foremost, not as a development outlet - that's purely secondary. In contrast, the PC is a wholly generic platform, it doesn't have one single specific focus so you should have the right to develop on it as much as do anything else.

But you're launching off into a tirade about company marketshare now and that's wholly irrelevant to the discussion at hand.

My point is simply that if performance was the ultimate metric by which people purchased devices then Samsung's flagship would outsell Apple's flagship, but it does not, because guess what? as you seem to indirectly have managed to point out, there's more to a purchase than just pure hardware specs.

Yes you're right, Samsung has more choice, and that's exactly the point, they recognise that people don't buy shit based on spec alone, they buy it on any number of different factors. That's exactly what I'm talking about. If it was wholly about spec people would buy Samsung's most powerful smartphone at the time because it's normally at the top of the market, but they don't, because there's far more too it than pure spreadsheet specs. I cited Samsung's poor software as but one example, you're right others include everything from price, to size, to style.

Oh god, your post makes me want to utterly facepalm. Please, I implore you, go read my post history since 2007 when the iPhone came out if you think I'm an Apple fanboy. Seriously, I beg you, you'll be so utterly embarrassed by that post when you do. You will find literally years of criticism of Apple and hype for Android, stemming back to a point in which criticising Apple and talking up Android got you regularly modded down here. I'm about as far from an Apple fanboy as you can get without becoming an outright anti-Apple zealot.

I hate Apple, I literally hate it, but just because I dislike something doesn't mean I'm going to pretend that there's no statistical metric by which the iPhone has done well. That's complete nonsense. It's been outshone by Android because Android offers a superior choice and that's ultimately what people want, but just because Android holds 85% of the market compared to Apple's embarrassingly low 11% doesn't change the fact that I'm able to point out that on an individual basis Apple clearly does something right, because it's flagships outsell Samsung's flagships and that something is the fact that Apple's experience is more polished than Samsung's because of Samsung's 3rd party crap thrown on top of Android.

I love Android, I've stood by Android since it's release, but I like vanilla Android, I like Android without the crap- I think vanilla Android is far better than iOS, but I'm not about to pretend that Samsung don't make the experience on their phones shit by sticking buggy unpolished crap on top that ruins the Android experience and gives iOS the edge against Samsung. I'm not criticising Android and I'm not supporting Apple, I'm criticising Samsung and using their shitty software and the resultant drop in sales they've faced in part because of it as an example as to why better specs don't matter if the overall experience is still crap.

If you can't get that into your head, then you're going to need to consider the fact that perhaps it's you that's the fanboy, you just haven't realised it yet. Just because someone is willing to look at something objectively and see areas where their preferred platform can see improvements, and their disliked platform has some advantages doesn't make them a fanboy, quite the opposite.

"I disagree that only "an incredibly small market" want to mod games."

You're changing the discussion now though, there's a difference between modding in general and modding platformers. Modding FPS on the PC works well because FPS games on the PC work well. That doesn't change the fact that platformers on the PC don't typically work well however.

"would there have even been a Counter-Strike?"

Probably yes, because CounterStrike was just an evolution of Action Quake and Special Forces Quake.

"Locked-down tablets did kill off 10 inch laptops, at least until the Transformer Book came out."

So they didn't then? Netbooks were still selling in the many 10s of millions, that's not killing off in anything other than media rhetoric. Mostly though Netbooks have now been rebranded in a few different ways mostly because manufacturers knew they were going to keep selling small laptops but didn't want the stigma of selling something the media was incorrectly saying had been killed off. Certainly tablets cut into the laptop market, because they did some of the things people were buying laptops for better, but they definitely didn't kill it because you can still buy small laptops, just as they didn't kill PCs.

"I work on hobby coding projects on my 10 inch laptop while riding the city bus to and from my day job. (Outlier yes, liar no.)"

That's a laptop with a keyboard, not a tablet. I don't really know what your point is here.

"The problem here is that some platforms and input methods have historically been associated with cryptographic lockdown to play only games from established publishers and even then only vanilla versions of them."

Right, and I'm worried about TPM type affairs as much as anyone - I believe the PC platform must stay open because that it's speciality and that's what makes it thrive, but I'm not RMS style crazy where I think the whole world is going to bend to my notions of freedom. I realise that whilst the PC must be protected, that that doesn't mean we can expected there to not be locked down platforms. For many, the fact consoles are locked down and hence see inherently fewer cheats the lockdown is actually a bonus for that specific platform. I believe locked down and open platforms can coexist, and whilst I'm fully accepting of the fact that DRM does nothing more than stall hackers at best, sometimes that's good enough. If an AAA shooter can be mostly free of cheats on a console for it's first few months of release before the next game comes out then that's good enough for that platform. On the PC I don't care if people cheat, it's a price I'm happy to pay on that platform for that platform to retain it's openness.

Again, it's entirely about the best tool for the job, we can't expect everything to do everything and still be able to do it well. Consoles are different for a reason and whatever you think of that reason, it works for consumers and ultimately if they're happy with that it's not really anyone's place to change it. If they weren't happy with that there'd be no market - something Microsoft learnt when they initially tried to make the Xbox One just a little bit too locked down for people's tastes.

It's still useful feedback for them, it's just not necessarily overriding or representative of total feedback (although the opposite is also possible, that it is representative and the are full of shit- just playing devil's advocate and suggesting their may be a good reason for their claims!).

You're being disingenuous now, ignoring the fact that you're probably wrong (Apple looks to have taken the crown again given latest trajectories: http://www.idc.com/prodserv/sm...) we're not talking about all phone sales, we were talking about comparative smartphone sales- i.e. Samsung's high powered models vs. Apple's high powered models, like for like you get more power with Samsung, yet Apple shifts more units.

You can't simply throw some random extra figures in the mix to try and make a point when in fact it just makes no sense. Samsung has a range of phones, but their phones that are more powerful that Apple's never outsell Apple's - the additional power you get with the Samsung phone just isn't a selling point when the phones are riddle with crappy Samsung software that ruins the Android experience and leaves the Apple experience a superior option in terms of ease and pleasantness of use.

So before screaming hypocrisy you might want to try and understand the discussion you're entering. You don't get to just reframe it by muddying the waters with figures irrelevant to the discussion just because you don't like the facts being put forward and want to disagree with the general point just because.

"Simple fact is the screens is running at one resolution and up-scaling a lower one will bring artifacts and less sharpness." ...and better FPS, more polygon detail and greater responsiveness.

It's a trade-off, it's not a one way thing like you're implying. You can't simply up to 1080p native without a cost and that cost isn't always inherently a negative - it's entirely dependent on what you're doing.

Though I don't know why you suggest less sharpness and artifacts are a given of upscaling, the whole point in upscaling is to increase sharpness, and artifacts aren't an inherent flaw of upscaling. What upscaling does is reduce per-pixel detail and whether that even notices depends on the game- you'd never notice it in a game with simple graphics like Minecraft for example.