Sony and Microsoft are sooo screwed!
Well, no, they won’t collaps tomorrow or anything like that, but if you take a step back and look at the bigger picture, this is what this year’s E3 has shown us: Sony and Microsoft have ceded control over where the game industry is headed to Nintendo.
Meet your doom
Think about it: In 2006 Nintendo turned the gaming world upside down with the Wii. Everybody assembled had a good laugh at the silly name and declared that motion control was a gimmick and a fad.
Four years and a couple of millions sold Wiis later, Microsoft and Sony spend an entire E3 to huckster their versions of motion control (no one’s calling Natal Kinect a fad, right?) while Nintendo quietly unveils The Next Big Thing: 3D gaming without glasses. On a portable. With a new Resident Evil, Solid Snake and Kid Icarus.
You get the picture.
In fact, this scenario reminds me somewhat of the phone industry, where you have one company out-innovating the rest of the industry while the other guys are playing catch-up to last years concepts.
All this certainly doesn’t mean that Microsoft or Sony will die – but they have relegated themselves to the position of follower. You don’t need to expect any paradigm shifts from either company for at least five more years, while Nintendo can use that time to grab mindshare from a new generation of gamers. When nobody remembers Marcus Fenix any more there will still be kids who love Mario.
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(And before you get the impression that I’m a Nintendo fanboi who hates the other consoles: I just pre-ordered Killzone 3. So there.)
Steam, Steam, Steam.
Unlike me in my unfocused rant from last week, Dan Wineman actually took the time to write a concise post about what’s wrong with Steam on the Mac. He even managed to keep a civil tone, whereas I would be foaming at the mouth by now …
dwineman:
I knew this would be a love-hate relationship from the start.
You see, Steam for Mac, I love your games. Well, some of them. A lot of them are crap. But the ones your parents, Valve, made, like Portal and the Half-Life series, are unparalleled. Team Fortress 2 seemed like great stylish fun when I tried it briefly (under Windows), although it’s not really my thing. And you distribute some unbelievably great third-party titles too, like Braid and Machinarium.
I love how everything seems to perform better and crash less under OS X than under Windows, even on the same hardware. And I love the way I can switch from a full-screen game to any other app instantly via ⌘-Tab, and then switch back with no delay or funky redraw problems. That’s something I’ve never seen under Windows.
But I think you have some really bad ideas about how Mac apps should behave. Here are just a few of the things you’re doing wrong:
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You have a “Run Steam when my computer starts” preference which is unchecked by default, while “Open at login” for Steam.app is secretly enabled as Steam installs. That’s downright deceptive, and no way to win friends.
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You’re putting the software I download in my Documents folder, which is inside my home directory. That’s an incredibly bad idea. Documents is for, well, documents. I might keep my homedir on a second drive, for one thing. I might have a different backup strategy. There are tons of reasons this is the wrong choice. What’s the right choice? Authenticate and install into /Applications, like every other OS X vendor does (yes, even Adobe). Keep your data files inside the application bundle they belong to. If you have data files common to more than one game, they can go in a Steam folder in /Library/Application Support. The only things that should go in my home directory are things pertaining to my own user acccount, such as settings and save files. (That’s what ~/Library/Preferences is for. Not ~/Documents.) This isn’t Windows, where you can just ejaculate files all over C:\ and no one cares.
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When I choose “Create an application shortcut” during an install, you put the shortcut in an Applications folder inside my home directory. This makes so little sense I don’t even know how to respond to it.
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If I also ask you to create a desktop shortcut, what you create isn’t a proper shortcut (we call them “aliases,” by the way): it’s a full copy of the app bundle you stuck in ~/Applications. That’s nothing but a pointless waste of disk space.
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Speaking of wasted space, you’re also inexplicably installing the Windows executables for some games. I hope you’re doing something really clever with them.
We could talk for hours about how awful the Steam app’s user experience is — how your tooltips deactivate your main window, how you won’t stop bombarding me with ads for games that won’t run on my Mac — but all that is secondary, and besides, it only hurts you when I decide not to shop at your hideous store. But the issues I listed above are all demonstrably bad practices that make my computer harder to use.
Please, Valve, hire some experienced Mac developers who care about doing things right. And fix your shit.
The Valve is leaking
Everybody was excited when Valve announced that Steam would (finally) be coming to the Mac. Now it’s here and I have to say … uhm … wow! Great job, Valve.
This is what happens when a PC company (Valve was founded by ex-Microsoft employees) starts coding for the Mac and makes stupid assumptions. Like hardcoding Tahoma as the UI font in Portal and not specifying a fallback in case people have wiped this atrocity off their harddrives. <Sigh!>
Now I remember why I left PC gaming for consoles. Stuff usually works over there.
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That being said, it’s great to have the Mac be a viable gaming platform again. I’m not sure how porting houses like Westlake or Aspyr feel about this but it’s certainly good for the end user. So I guess I shouldn’t bitch too much …
