Game consoles have always had red tape to deal with when it comes to games getting official certification. Ed Fries, consulting on the open-source Android powered Ouya and one of the creators of the original Xbox, says that Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo will have to streamline their licensing process.
“It’s getting harder and harder for the traditional consoles to ignore the Apple kind of experience,” said Fries. “Anybody can develop for the platform, certification is a relatively cheap and painless thing, and in the old days of consoles there are all sorts of myths and legends that say that’s a bad thing to do. That’s why the game business melted down in ’84, there was too much junk on the market, but now you’ve got guys who make games like Fez who can’t do an update to their game because it costs too much, if that game was on iOS that wouldn’t be a problem, but because it’s on XBLA it’s a problem.”
“Those kinds of ideas have to go away in the next generation,” he added. “They’ll go away in Ouya, they’ll go away if Apple brings some kind of product into this space, the console makers like Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, they have to respond to that, it’s just the future. Likewise they have to respond to the free-to-play game model, the world is changing, people want this free-to-play experience, game developers want to build free-to-play experiences and the console ecosystem has to adapt to that. It can’t just be $50 product in a box all the time.”
Source: GameInformer
