Cory Doctorow understands proprietary technology. He’s been on the front lines in the fight against strict copyright laws for several years, and he has been openly critical of corporations continuing to introduce and control their own closed standards and push them onto unwary consumers.
Sony’s recent confirmation that the PS3 will not come packaged with expensive HDMI cables has earned Doctorow’s ire and sparked a vicious rant against their attempts to control the industry and corral users into their own technology.
No community gives more to vendors than gamers. They go back to the store to buy the latest and greatest hardware, they buy games, they buy t-shirts, they see terrible movie tie-ins, perform game-music with their school orchestras, make additional fan-levels for their favorite games, dress up as game characters, buy the comics and the toys. They evangelize games, form guilds and hold tournaments, read, live, watch, talk and breathe games.
But the console people have a hard time coming to grips with this. Practically any other industry would lop off an arm for this kind of devotion, but when it’s someone tweaking their Sony consoles, Sony is so blinded by its fear of losing control of the ability to restrict games-publishing for its platform that it pushes these fans away.
Cory has it right on the money. The game console industry as a whole–not just Sony–tends to treat its audience as a bunch of snot-nosed children, giving us all a collective “father knows best” patronizing pat on the head as it goes about its business of fashioning separate silos of gaming experiences that cannot be intertwined in any conceivable way. Each corporation defines its own standards and forces consumers to accept them.
Have you ever heard of a DVD player fanboy? One who solidly and religiously supports his preferred DVD player manufacturer on message boards and internet chat rooms? No. They don’t exist. Why? Because I can purchase any DVD player from any manufacturer and play any DVD in it. There are standards in place, and corporations don’t have the ability to partition their content onto consumers using a proprietary format of their own. At least, not until the next generation of media formats comes along.
It’s time for change. Console manufacturers need to come together and decide on a standard and allow global electronics manufacturers the ability create their own gaming system based on that standard. Only then can we truly move forward on creating valuable content, as opposed to simply attempting to convince the consumer of the ideal user experience through superior marketing.
I know. I laughed as I was typing that.