Do
you foresee a future with one console, or one locus of gaming?
NB: Yeah. It's going to be the PC. Really,
what the answer is, whether you talk about software solutions, like the Media
Center PC or what have you, all you have to do is have a PC with a good
graphics card hooked to the internet, hooked to the living room TV, with good
user interfaces, and boom, you're there. That's starting to happen more and
more.
There are huge benefits to open platforms,
as opposed to closed platforms. The PC is open, so it's going to have another
interesting part. A lot of people haven't woken up to the fact that you now
have hardware encryption, and hardware encryption allows you to actually sell
games that if you have a license for it you can play, and if you don't have a
license for it, you can't play.
Most of the consoles have existed because
of the inability to monetize software on the other consoles. Imagine actually
having a game that you can sell in China
and earn money from it. Because of the hardware encryption, the TPM chip that's
now on virtually all motherboards, that's going to happen.
You
don't think they'll find a way to get around that in China?
NB: Nope.
I'm
skeptical of that. They always find a way.
NB: We always say that all of us are
smarter than any of us, but when you have a private secret that is more than
just a number -- that's an actual algorithm, in which the secret that's held in
hardware -- you really can't get around it. Remember, games are a whole
different ballgame than movies or music. If I can hear the music, I can copy
it. If I can see the movie, I can copy it. Games, you're down into the bowels
of code. You can maybe copy the concept, but you have to rewrite the game. And
that is, in general, not a really doable thing.
But
with hardware encryption, if your motherboard goes, so too do all of your
games, unless there's something set up there.
NB: Well, key management is actually one of
the areas that a lot of people are talking about, but in terms of monetizing
your software investment, I think the thing has changed. I mean, software has
always... you're always going to be able to crack it. Once it's cracked, it's
cracked once and cracked for all, so there's an opportunity to it.
But when there's a different secret in
every hardware system, crack once doesn't mean crack for all. I just think it's
a really different thing. Remember, the reason you believe that China
can crack any code is that up until now, it's been all of these software straw
men who have said, "My system is crack-free." That's just not the
case anymore.
It
seems like maybe online registration keys are more feasible, in terms of being
able to still have your game, if everything is connected online. If things are
just stored locally, then developers or publishers...
TL: It also circles back to the whole idea
of the whole advertising model of games. You're going to see more of that, and
it lends itself to the PC and the combination thereof. You're going to see
games that were being sold, six months from now, tests and trials of
free-but-with-advertising-supported models with them.
NB: Yeah, there are a lot of games right
now that were perfectly dreadful games last year and have zero market value,
whereas if you play them for nothing or on an ad watch, all of a sudden there's
some... the bad games are not quite so fail-hard.
In
terms of having the PC be the future console for people, I think there's still
a lot of consumer education that needs to happen for that to be possible.
NB: Absolutely.
My
mom still asks me how to attach a document to an e-mail, because she can't
figure it out.
NB: It's even worse than that. We've got
one of these wire octopuses behind our television set, from the stereo system
around it, the surround sound, three different kinds of video games, a DVD
player, and this and that.
And I say to myself, "Okay, there are actually households
in the world in which one of the members is not an electrical engineer. What
the hell do they do?" (laughter) I spent a half an hour the other day just
to get my DVD working again, because the kids have been messing around. I said,
"There's got to be a better way, here."
TL: Hence the Geek Squad was born.