What are the reasons for why Microsoft wanted to lock down consoles to only run signed code? As a games console manufacturer, what are the business reasons for doing so? Thanks
Limiting piracy is the ongoing reason, but there is also the historical reason of the Video game crash of 1983 which led to Nintendo's Seal of Quality.
Essentially as the platform owner, you want to ensure games sold for the platform "just work", and if you have a bunch of third parties running bad software, consumers would lose faith in the platform altogether.
To add a little more color to this, it wasn't solely to ensure games worked. The lesson of the video game crash was that third party publishers would make knock-off games similar to popular titles and flood the market with them at much lower cost - sometimes as low as $5 vs for a $40 for a top title. These games were generally low budget and rushed to market to capitalize on looking like a top-selling title - while being just different enough to (hopefully) avoid trademark infringement.
These games usually "worked" (as in booting up and playing), the issue was more that that they were just bad versions of the title they were ripping off due to having little development time and minimal play testing along with poorer artwork and fewer levels (thus saving ROM memory). The flood of cheap, bad versions of more popular games is credited as the main factor that killed the Atari VCS.
Another big factor was that later console manufacturers charged game publishers a license fee for the proprietary library code required for a console to run a game. This fee could allow manufacturers to sell game consoles at cost or even below cost and recoup the lost profit over time in the per game license fee.
This wasn't always the case in the early days of hardware cartridge systems. Initially, some early console manufacturers didn't charge much more than a game publisher could buy blank cartridges for from a third party. Some other manufacturers chose to generate revenue simply by building more margin into the wholesale price they charged game publishers for blank cartridges. Of course, when console manufacturers started increasing their cartridge profit margin, game publishers were motivated to use third party cartridges - which led to console makers deploying "genuine hardware" checks or, later, disc checks and encryption. Nintendo popularized enforcing their business model both technically and legally (by requiring an IP license). Today, console manufacturer business models rely on 1) Collecting per game license fees, 2) Blocking piracy, 3) Limiting game supply.
I think it's also worth pointing out that the console makers (and developers) pour a lot more resources into ensuring that the products released for their platform are of a suitable quality than, say, phone app store gatekeepers.
A big draw as well is that people can't (within the economic viability timeframe of the games/console) hack the games on a console, meaning you get a much more predictable online experience than you might on PC.
Microsoft actually reversed course on this. You can make a one-time purchase to access "developer mode" and then run whatever you want. It's been suggested that this is the reason there's been less interest in hacking the Xbox. Ironically it also means you have more computational freedom on the Xbox than on the iPhone/iPad.
Not quite. You (were? I don't know if this is changed) limited in how much of the hardware you could access: it wasn't 100% access. Enough for most homebrew, emulators and so on, but it wasn't carte blanche "replacement for a dev-kit" access.
No it was quite different (again, unless they changed it? They might've, I'm long out of this scene). UWP apps had a lot more restrictions on them, the SDK was different, and you didn't have the full consoles hardware to use, compared to the "behind the NDA" SDK: it'd run slower, basically.
> Famously the reason no one ever used Microsoft Windows.
Microsoft in its early days invested a shit ton of money and effort into backwards compatibility testing and fix development. Up until Windows 7 you could be reasonably sure that any piece of software from the Windows 95 32-bit days would still work without major issues - even 16-bit software would run under a 32-bit W7 host, only W7 x64 finally dropped support for that.
They sell the consoles at a loss, so if you could port your own games to the consoles instead of buying the games that they could take a royalty from then they lose money. It doesn't have to be an effective circumvention to trigger the DMCA making it illegal.
If it were possible to go the wrong way on the expanding brain meme, this would be it.
Nobody is buying consoles for the hardware. 99% of the product is software. The accounting that you are using, a popular one, is so opppositely-informative that people who make consoles - and smartphones for that matter - clearly do not make decisions with it. It is 200% wrong to characterize it as dumping. Nothing is being dumped.
Here’s a simple idea for you: show me the vibrant market for Xbox 360 2005 era computer hardware. There isn’t any right? What about Xbox One 2013 era? And yet we still play games that were developed earlier than 2013, like League of Legends. The product is software. Nobody loses anything by being unable to run Linux on 2013 hardware today, and nobody loses anything by being unable to run Linux on the Xbox One in 2013 because, if they wanted cheap computers then, they had plenty to choose from!
Both the hardware and software are products. No one selling open platform PCs can compete with negative margin console sales, which is anticompetive. If antitrust prevented dumping consoles would be more expensive and consumers would buy PCs instead. In both software and hardware the open PC platform is far more competitive which drives value for consumers.
> No one selling open platform PCs can compete with negative margin console sales
This makes zero sense. Both have existed simultaneously forever, and hundreds of millions of people eagerly buy both for the same households. I cannot understand your point of view here, other than invoking a word "dumping" and "anticompetive" that you are using 200% wrong. Consoles and open platform PCs do not compete with each other.
> In both software and hardware the open PC platform is far more competitive which drives value for consumers.
The market for high budget single player games exists solely because of DRM protected consoles. So this category of product, that people eagerly have paid for for decades, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, would cease to exist if you required console makers to allow people to bypass DRM. Ask 20 people in the game industry and 19 would agree. I understand the core and spirit of what you are saying, but it is reflecting your aspirations for a world that doesn't exist. Markets aren't art exhibits!
That both exist does not make negative margin sales not an anticompetive practice. Dumping is the correct term for such anticompetive behavior. Consoles are just x86 PCs. They run the same application software.
The Witcher 4 is a high budget single player game and sold 30 million copies despite having no DRM. I don't think you're familiar with the games industry.
I’m not sure that’s a fair perspective, they built a proprietary product that’s intended to be a loss leader, the opposite of that is a desktop which costs substantially more.
business reasons, the console is sold as a loss leader and the real money is made in licensing the games. also serves as brand protection i.e. preventing poor quality third party games from tarnishing the reputation of the console.
A games console provided a platform where they could more effectively argue that “their” works “““needed””” to be protected so they could farm us (people who want to run their own code on hardware they purchased) for digital-jail technologies which would never otherwise have reason to exist. Then those technologies can metastasize fully-formed over to general-purpose computing in a way that's harder to argue against. They learned with Clipper and Palladium that trying to develop jail tech on PC would be vehemently opposed.
The opposition was pointless though, like everything has TPM/IME/etc. nowadays so we lost that war awhile ago. I don't see how consoles helped them win that war though.
When everything is locked down for good I'll go back to physical books. Vaporware games and media are not worth preserving anyway. And the games and media I do have free from prison can entertain me for a very long time.
Another possible (even worse) future could be cloudification of everything. Enjoy your thin client.
Of course software is bigger than entertainment which might represent a problem. We're increasingly societally locked into this digital shit.
