Google is developing its own Android game console - Report

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/195257/Google_is_developing_its_own_Android_game_console__Report.php

by drawkbox • 13 years ago

76 82 13 years ago

gamasutra.com

drawkbox13• 13 years ago

Apple and Google will most likely be the real 'new consoles'. Maybe this will make Microsoft allow self-publishing.

Looking forward to this.

Apple was always going to take their appstore apps/games to the TV and games are always a huge boon to that.

"Wall Street Journal sources suggest the move is motivated not simply by the recent launch of the Ouya and the upcoming GameStick but also on expectations that Apple will be introducing game support with an upcoming version of Apple TV."

They will also allow self-publishing like their appstores on mobile because unlike Microsoft/XBone they realize larger markets/economies sell more hardware and make more money, in the end they also allow and create games that are more fun. Even it 99% of games on mobile are below par the 1% from that set is better/bigger than any curated/controlled console market. Gonna be funny when Microsoft has to change tune on that one as well.

Also Apple TV and Google consoles will be micro and more like OUYA, less of a financial burden than powerful consoles like Xbone. Sony has it right with PS4 and is allowing self-publishing, which will in turn sell more hardware and get more games on there. Microsoft is just making poor moves on open storefronts.

throwaway20484• 13 years ago

Even it 99% of games on mobile are below par the 1% from that set is better/bigger than any curated/controlled console market.

I strongly dispute this point, while there may be a few decent mobile titles, the quality and number of quality titles is still nowhere near traditional platforms.

pandaman12• 13 years ago

Indeed, there are 850000 apps in Google Play store according to Wikipedia, if 1% had been better than any console market we'd had hundreds (hard to say how many of those are games, but I've heard it's a significant part of the apps there) of games better than such console titles as Metal Gear or Final Fantasy.

drawkbox13• 13 years ago

Gabe Newell on this point: “Economies get better the bigger they are,” Gabe Newell.

John Carmack on this point: “I was really happy that when mobile came along with the more ‘pure’ games, they didn’t have to be a $50 game that had man-centuries in them,” Carmack tells Ars Technica. “You can have these small things that cost people a couple bucks.”

“I don’t have a lot of free time and I don’t have 50 hours for Skyrim. That’s not to take anything away from the massive titles, but it’s great to have this broad spectrum of gaming,” Carmack added.

Yes there will still be blockbuster games that can't be made on the current devices (although I'd argue tablets and TV consoles will surpass game consoles not long after the 2013 refresh). The idea is that you have so much competition that games and innovation have to become more fun. On controlled environments that level of competition is not explored because of the high dollar amount needed to play or compete.

Game companies like Halfbrick, Firemint, and others wouldn't exist without the openness of mobile. If consoles were truly open there would be games that the bigger companies cannot even risk trying that are immensely fun. PC games allowed anyone in and companies like id software appeared, leading to PC games from Valve as one example. Market determination of good is better when bigger.

The internet itself is an example of this. Would Hacker News exist if there were only 10 publishers of content on the web? Bigger and more open always makes for better content. Even if not now, it will shortly. Games have gotten back to arcade level fun rather than trying to create movies. Controlled, top down ivory tower markets never create better content, the currents get too stagnant.

hkmurakami• 13 years ago

So the players are Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Apple, Google, and Vavle vying for living room media dominance through one strategy or niche play or another. I have my popcorn ready. This competition will be good for us consumers.

Steko• 13 years ago

"This competition will be good for us consumers."

Not sure how strong this point is.

For one the average consumer will miss out on more exclusives for the consoles you don't have.

For another you're going to get shitty ports on a lot of them.

Finally there will be an inevitable shakedown to 2-3 players and if you've invested in one of the losers well just ask the people that bought 3DO's and Atari Jaguars and all the other losers of the early 90's console wars how great that worked out for them in the end.

Game devs are already competing with each other for your time and dollars. Beyond that you only need 2 major consoles to put pressure on each other to keep prices honest.

VikingCoder• 13 years ago

For one the average consumer will miss out on more exclusives for the consoles you don't have.

Exclusives are not good for consumers. If the companies that make them are punished accordingly, maybe they will learn.

steve19• 13 years ago

I love Android, but Google has a terrible record with these kind of devices. Google TV is a pretty poor system, it really should be more simple and look more like XBMC, and the (original) Nexus Q speaks for itself.

Lerc• 13 years ago

Google TV, Nexus Q etc are trying to crack a different nut, and one of the hardest ones out there. The fact that these things are called set-top-boxes in an era where TV's aren't big enough to put anything on top of them is an indicator how long people have been trying to make it work.

XBMC has been most successful because They have focused on providing people what they want. Every company has delivered something that they would like people to have (and ideally pay them lots for content).

Consoles on the other hand seem to be marketed by Black magic, Hype, and dodgy stats. That does seem to be more Microsoft's game than Google's, but they are gaining ground.

rogerbinns• 13 years ago

I figured they are making a combined TV and game device. Heck some Rokus come with Angry Birds and games for purchase, so it wouldn't be the first time.

andrewstuart• 13 years ago

Does that mean games built in Java?

drawkbox13• 13 years ago

Android is Java and the SDK is but the NDK (native) allows C/C++ since Android 2.3. Most games are built using that now with Java wrappers where needed for UI if any needed. Most are straight C/C++ using OpenGL ES. Also tools like Unity convert to C/C++/Java for Android and C/C++/Objective-C for Apple/iOS.

But yes you can do a game in Java since is will be Android and the SDK supports it. Most games though are C/C++ for porting reasons, that can get you desktop and all mobile platforms. Windows Phone 8 also recently allows native finally (they really messed up not allowing this in Windows Phone 7 and lost lots of market share due to difficult ports).

pjmlp4• 13 years ago

However C and C++ developers are forced to either reach for a middleware solution, or spend quite some time wrapping Android APIs.

For anything outside graphics, sound, hardware sensors and sockets wrapping Java APIs via JNI is required.

The new Games API released at this year's Google IO is Java only and the bug request for providing a NDK version of it was closed.

Also at the same Google IO, Google was advocating using Renderscript for CPU intensive tasks.

The NDK bug tracker is full of broken code generation issues and the move for Android Studio still does not offer a path for C and C++ developers.

Developers targeting iOS, WP8 and Blackberry have a much better vendor support in terms of C and C++ tooling.

asperous• 13 years ago

There is an android native interface. http://developer.android.com/tools/sdk/ndk/index.html

Games could be written in Java. Just intelligently schedule garbage collection and in return you get to use a very fast safe, well-optimized JITed virtual machine.

They won't be, of course, they'll be written in NDK because the culture of the game industry is a powerful one, and one that takes pride in their ways. It would be like telling a race car enthusiast that continually-variable transmission is better for racing because even though it's less efficiant it allows the driver to focus on driving and is always in the exact gear needed. The driver would never except this because in their mind they are an amazing driver and manual makes them faster because it is more efficient and makes them feel cool.

pcwalton3• 13 years ago

They won't be, of course, they'll be written in NDK because the culture of the game industry is a powerful one, and one that takes pride in their ways. It would be like telling a race car enthusiast that continually-variable transmission is better for racing because even though it's less efficiant it allows the driver to focus on driving and is always in the exact gear needed. The driver would never except this because in their mind they are an amazing driver and manual makes them faster because it is more efficient and makes them feel cool.

The problems of concurrent garbage collection in games are not imaginary, as you seem to be implying. Keep in mind that 60 FPS allows a maximum of 16 ms of GC per frame, and that's assuming the game has no work to do at all. Turn on the GC profiling sometime in your browser of choice and look at the numbers sometime; then extrapolate that to the slower CPUs and RAM on mobile and you can see why this can be a cause for concern.

shock-value• 13 years ago

pcwalton already explained that you're underestimating the burden of garbage collection (and I'd add to that that the speed of execution matters more than you realize too). But another real factor is the fact that mountains of code, including complete game engines, have already been written in native languages. Why throw all that out just to program in a language like Java (itself certainly not without its warts)?

EpicEng2• 13 years ago

I'm curious; how many games have you written? I mean, real games which really push the hardware? Non-deterministic GC sweeps are a non-starter, and not being able to tweak out that last bit of performance to boost your frame rate when needed is a massive technical hurdle.

It's just unnecessary. You can write "safe" C and C++, you just have to know what you are doing to begin with. Also, don't forget about the massive amount of native frameworks that have been developed already. Why rewrite an engine which already exists just so you can use Java?

asperous23• 13 years ago

Here is a source that talks about this issue in more detail:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.66....

kayoone3• 13 years ago

Theres alot of game engines targeting Android, Unity3d for example where you code in C# or some Javascript dialect, Shiva3d where you use Lua for scripting and several others.

mh-• 13 years ago

cool, this can sit next to the Nexus Q from I/O.

vladikoff• 13 years ago

If you do not like your nexus q, maybe donate it to an education facility where students can hack on it

frozenport2• 13 years ago

I can't think of many fun games for Android. What are we paying for? Old Final Fantasy and GTA3? I don't see a market for this until their games improve which is nontrovial given the poor graphics performance of these so called consoles.

benologist• 13 years ago

I've pretty much settled on just buying Humble Bundles to get new Android games. On iOS I'm much more willing to take chances especially on trusted sources like toucharcade.com that I haven't found an equivalent for.

For graphics performance I really think we reached a point years ago that these devices are capable of that are more than enough for most people.

gohrt2• 13 years ago

Are you comparing an XBOX to an Android phone? Android is an OS, not a hardware platform. It can be deployed to arbitrarily powerful hardware, so long as the graphics drivers are written.

frozenport2• 13 years ago

There are few games and the hardware is crap compared to a console. Doesn't look like it is changing.

michaelpinto2• 13 years ago

Sometimes Google feels unfocused to me, and this is a good example of this. This reminds me of the Nexus Q which came out a year ago — and was never backed a real national (or international) ad campaign. Is Google really ready to make a real game platform, or is this just another android thingie? In the same way that Apple struggles with software services Google really has a way to go with hardware. And I don't mean just making good hardware, but marketing it to a mass audience.

gohrt2• 13 years ago

The Nexus Q feels like Google realized it was a dead product as soon as the first shipment left the factory, before it was publicly announced.

mrtron• 13 years ago

The Nexus Q feels like the Nexus One. An experiment paving the way into a market. A hardware beta test.

I expect to see an amazing Samsung gaming+streaming machine running Android.

michaelpinto2• 13 years ago

If you see an announcement from Samsung they won't mention Android!

shmerl• 13 years ago

Only Valve works on a real glibc Linux console though.

_pmf_• 13 years ago

I'll just take this as another of Google's side project that generate some buzz but ultimately lead nowhere.

tjbiddle• 13 years ago

If it 'generates some buzz' but in doing so helps push others to follow suit and help build the market - Then I'll count it as a win. Also, if it ends up being enough of a threat - Maybe it will push Microsoft into allowing self publishing.

Pxtl• 13 years ago

Finally. They should've been on this over a year ago.

ensmotko• 13 years ago

I've been anticipating rumors such as these ever since Google announced Google Game Services. I just hope said services get improved before the actual console launches.

pandaman12• 13 years ago

I doubt they are aiming at the PS4/X1. Making hardware was never Google's forte and you need to be very good at that to compete with either system.

My guess they want another pass at Google TV.

dman3• 13 years ago

Yet they make the best non apple laptop out there in the market right now.

pandaman12• 13 years ago

I thought their laptops are off the shelf hardware, are not they? If not I stand corrected.

riquardo0• 13 years ago

Google has taken a jab at games before (Google plus Games anyone) but unsuccessful, not sure if they'll be able to get into it ever.

Google is developing its own Android game console - Report

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