But what can you play on it?
So I saw this link to a new CrowdSupply campaign, for a new device called "Ink Console", which is designed for playing text games. It's got an e-ink screen and joysticks, they're gonna make a tool to let anyone make games for it... I like new hardware devices, I like text games, I like new tools for making games... why am I not excited for this?
Well, mainly it's that it doesn't seem like a serious attempt to do these things. The games look like they're made with AI, the organisation behind it is just one guy (I think), the page is light on details, the photos are random shots... all seems like a punt, to me.
But it provides a nice excuse to talk about making a games console. The thing about making a new console like this is that designing the device, whilst very difficult, is also one of the easier parts of the problem. Harder parts include:
- manufacturing and shipping it
- managing capital, cash flow and inventory
- actually having some games on it that people want to play
Let's focus on that last one, because it's the evening and that's the fun problem not one of the depressing ones.
If you invent a new device for playing games, where do the games come from? There's a few options.
Option 1) the games already exist. You make a device that's compatible with previous devices. Great! Sensible solution! The question now is... if the games already exist, and can already be played elsewhere, why do people want to buy your new thing? Maybe the answer is that it is more portable, or better set up for playing games, or doesn't involve having to deal with Microsoft Windows (the Steam Deck is all of these). Maybe it makes the games run better ("pro" editions of consoles, or every incremental PC hardware upgrade). Maybe the old thing just isn't made any more (so, lots of GameBoy projects, such as the Analogue Pocket). Maybe it just looks cool! (a bunch of weird hardware mods).
Option 2) you just make the games yourself. Look, it works for Nintendo. Honestly, this is one of the better options here, although any plan which has as a necessary step towards success "make multiple exceptionally good videogames on time and on budget" is... I mean, there's some risk involved, is all I'm saying. Even if you're Nintendo, and have the deep experience of making good videogames they've nurtured over the past forty years. And the rights to fuckin' Mario.
Option 3) people make the games because they want to make money selling them to people. The best way to convince people they might make money by making something for your hardware platform is to have a lot of people own it, and to have those people eager to spend money on games for it. This is unfortunately hard to achieve unless you already have a lot of games for people to buy, or a really good marketing team with a lot of money. Great position to be in once you're there, though. Especially if you can take a cut of every sale - a back of the envelope calculation estimates that Apple makes at least $15 billion per year from their cut of games revenue. That's a good business model!
Option 4) people make the games because you promise them some money if they do. Great, perfect, absolutely the traditional route to take when trying to establish a new games platform. This kind of thing was propping up the indie games industry for years! There was so much money available to put your thing out on a platform that a large corporation was hoping would some day be the monopoly player in how people obtain videogames. Or to put your thing on a service which would hopefully attract people to whatever non-games thing they cared a bit more about. A TV subscription package, probably.
Unfortunately then interests rates went up, and all those platform plays that were not really going anywhere at any particular speed suddenly lost their budgets for buying the rights to interesting but questionably popular indie games (the really popular games were out of their price range). And unfortunately, as I previously said, they were propping up the indie dev industry, and now that prop has fallen away, and no-one is particularly enjoying the consequences.
Option 5) people make the games because making games is fun, and your device is especially fun to develop for. Look, a lot of this post has been quite cynical but here I get to celebrate some fun stuff! Like, the Playdate - just charming, and the constraints make it more fun to work with, and the tooling was pretty great... Or, all the people making weird Gameboy stuff - a big boost from childhood nostalgia and that Gameboy is now a standard... but it's fun, hard hardware constraints, but they're well understood! Heck, even consoles that don't exist, like PICO-8, can be fun enough to develop for. I think the trick for pulling this off is to be very thoughtful and very charming. Difficult but quite possible! Of course, this does then mean the platform is full of enthusiastic hobbyist stuff, which obviously I'm a huge fan of, but doesn't necessarily attract millions of players. If that's what you're looking for. Maybe the hobbyists are the point.
I think that's all the good options right there? There's a few more I can think of that I just don't think work, let's quickly go through them:
Option 6: AI??? Okay, sure, you can generate the games with AI. But unless you've invested billions into training new and exciting AI models, then so can anyone else. So why are your AI games a draw, when people could just generate their own games. And anyway... I have not yet seen a game made primarily by AI, and I am sceptical that the technology exists to do it, or that it would retain a player's interest if it did exist.
Option 7: Ignore the problem, hope it solves itself, we're busy making this complicated device right now, we'll sort that out later. A surprisingly popular choice, but alas it works about as well as you'd think it does.
I think that's all the options? None of them are especially easy or cheap or reliable routes to go down, but then there's no reason that building a sustainable platform should be an especially easy thing to achieve.
I have spent a lot of time thinking about this kind of problem - it was the implicit background for a lot of the work we were doing at Sensible Object when we were developing Beasts of Balance (we were never quite trying to make a hardware platform for other people to make games for, but largely because it's as hard as it sounds). And then, while Downpour is not a hardware platform, it is a platform. I just deeply enjoy thinking about the way that play interacts with it's surrounding context. How does the business model shape the game design? How can the hardware affordances shape it? How does the social context people approach the game with shape it? Fascinating, chewy questions, but also ones where you can find surprisingly specific answers if you look.
Anyway, just to end this on a plug: if you are making a new hardware platform, I would love to chat about it. I spent some enjoyable time last year prototyping a new game for a hardware platform with novel interaction affordances. We made some good stuff and of course I can't talk about it - but I would love to do that kind of work again. Or frankly just hear what you're up to, I'm always curious about new takes on a crunchy problem.