Microsoft published to their blog a story about “Xbox’s father of invention.” The lengthy post goes into the mind of Boyd Multerer as he was designing and preparing for the Xbox One’s launch.
Xbox One needed to incorporate mobile apps and devices.
Along with describing in very fine detail the motives for Multerer’s many choices that he has had to make in the past months the post also says some pretty important things about the state of developers and how technology is changing the relationship between them and gamers. In the interview Multerer talks about the ever-expanding mobile market and how game designers find it difficult to cope with the revolving market.
“When Xbox 360 shipped, there were no smartphones, laptops were expensive and rare, there were no tablets. You didn’t have any of these things, and you didn’t do anything other than play the game you were playing,” Multerer says.
Game designers spend years developing games and with the fast rate of technological advances it is hard to cope with that level of change in a console.
Designers need stable, Gamers need evolving…
Muterer says that the designer wants to know “exactly how much RAM they can use, and exactly how much CPU, and exactly how the graphics are going to work, and that should never change.” He says the reason that they did two operating systems with the Xbox One was because of the fact that gamers want a mobile market catering to the next big social media network while designers want a more stable and less evolving type of system that will help them to create the best possible game.
“The needs of the gamer and the needs of the game developers are at direct odds, so how do you serve both at the same time? That’s the real reason why we did two separate operating systems. One is more static, aimed letting game developers ability to deliver the best games, and one is aimed at the gamer to give them an evolving, changing, updating console that will be able to support the next big social network that hasn’t even been invented yet.”
He realizes that most people won’t understand the “complexity behind Xbox One’s dual-operating system,” but that it is okay because “if [they] did it right, it [would] just feel natural.”
The every changing market that is technology has affected every industry and it looks like these industries just need some time to adjust to the new demand. Adjusting to the new “mobile first” market is the best thing, in my opinion, for any company right now. I think developers and gamers will be able to close the gap pretty quickly once everyone know what to expect from this type of market.
