The PS4 is a loss leader. You might want to put Orbis on another system, but given that Orbis is specifically tuned for the PS4 hardware and hacking it to work on another much more costly system will likely lead to nothing of great value, in the end such a project will be just for the sake of a hobby.
Sony is trying to do some steps to get rid of the "Loss Leader" thing altogether, and it will be interesting to see if they can manage to pull it: they are attempting a large scale deployement of cloud rendered gaming via Gaikai. (Do you remember Gaikai? Its competitor Onlive perhaps?)
During the 20th February show Sony made clear that with cloud based gaming it could have been possible to have a subscription to Gaikai and play demos or even full PS4 games, via cloud, on PS4, while you waited for the console to finish download (they also announced the streaming download feature which allowed you to play the game with only parts of it fully downloaded, but it's not the same thing).
At E3 the first step was detailed: making PS3 games available via cloud in 2014 to PS3 and PS4 US customers. Leaving the door open to PSVita and unspecified "further platforms".
http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/02/20/playstation-cloud-revealed
This is a segment from the 10/6 E3 presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBmLGYi6fjI
I think PC was mentioned during the Feb 20, but now I can't find the videos on youtube.
If only there were an open platform with standardized, interchangeable hardware existing in a highly competitive ecosystem, your choice of operating system, and the ability to choose where you get your games and whether to participate in an online community.
Someone should make one of those.
Choice of operating system is difficult, as operating systems give out base services needed to software to abstract and decouple the underlying hardware from the software logic. You still need to either virtualize the game (risking too hard performance hits) or give it an operating system that does the necessary housekeeping.
Microsoft is a sinking ship, there is no salvage.
From this point of view (not allowing independent games) this is a very well reasoned observation.
Or maybe we can say
Xbone is a sinking ship, there is no salvage.
An ecosystem is done or killed by the software it delivers.
To be interesting for a publisher (or for a self-publshing aka "indie" developer) that ecosystem needs to have a big number of applications.
Take the iOS and Android ecosystems: they have been great for gaming[1] because they just brought software to millions of people, and publishing on either app store or google play wasn't neither hard nor costly. The console gaming market has been bleeding money either towards the zyngalike games[2] or the smartphone gaming ecosystem. If this were 2006, Microsoft could have positioned the xbone like PS3 without taking a big hit, but now with indies and the other dumb attempt to kill off the disk-as-content-key delivery model it's hard to believe the 'bone will have some relevance in the future home gaming market.
Note: in my opinion mobile gaming will never completely kill console gaming off, but Microsoft should rapidly scale its ambitions down and at least allow indie developers on xbone. I don't believe the other propositions given by xbone (being a media center without DVR functions) will ever matter enough for getting gamer money, but maybe I'm wrong.
[1] for some kinds of gaming: sporadic, easy to get in and to get off. [2] even if the Zynga fremium model does not grow with the userbase as hoped, so it is flawed.
The encrypted data needs to be passed to something that will decrypt it. This decryption module won't be cross-platform. So we'll achieve the goal of getting rid of silverlight (a platform-dependent, closed-source piece of code that decrypts content) and replacing it with a decryption module (a platform-dependent binary-only piece of code that decrypts content). Truly a victory for an open web...
Right. It will be a way that will advertise which decryption systems are installed and tell the server to serve content for Windows, Apple or even a future system with a browser based on linux, without leaving the browser ecosystem.
The object plugin is a terrible counter-example because objects and plugins are more free to bring havok on the target system, ready to open your machine to random security bugs via their runtimes, rather than just stream some media stream (and media streams hopefully have better and tighter, content not marked for execution) that will be able to be decrypted and ran by the OS.
Think about this, you can also cook up a page that will see that someone, as advertised by the browser, has installed a DRM system and serve them a stern talk by st. ignucius himself.
By removing video from the tag is one less step for me to open video: now I have to tell flashblock to go off and to re-enable the flash plugin on that page, to whitelist the plugin on some websites (like streaming sites) who still can't cope with the idea of users that keep flash off both for ads and for malware. On mobile system it will also mean one less need to install "yet another shiny app that you will have to keep updated" on a phone.
I don't want to be slave of plugins.
I don't want to be slave of browsers.
I don't want anymore to be slave of ECOSYSTEMS making me have three or four platforms just to be able to access content.
I prefer if HTML includes provisions to allow optional cross-platform DRM instead of having to rely on plugins/stores/apps.
Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?
