Half Life was not a walled garden before opening up to modders, and was not a walled garden after. It was just a game opened to modders.
If we get over ourselves, and allow that there's new category of thing, devices made of mechanical and digital parts both, that the maker may or may not selectively open for mods as a legitimate part of their business model they're within their rights to choose, then we'd be less religiously militant in ways that harm innovation and consumers.
I'm convinced this is the essence of the debate that has intensified as parts that move at the speed of light are devouring physical parts.
Switch, transistor, if statement -- a maker should be able to convert one type of part to another type of part without losing their rights, or accidentally triggering a "oh, look, general computing, therefore it's no longer up to you to decide!" flag of some sort.
Ease of reconfiguring electrons shouldn't change right to design and distribute a product with whatever blend of physical and digital one wants, facilitating whatever purpose one wants, and not being forced to facilitate other purposes.
Arguably, there has been. It’s harder to see because the interface is different in those cases. It’s not as public. Developers have been trying to get around game console lock out for as long as it’s existed. Nintendo’s licensing was very restricted with the NES, and it really annoyed a lot of software developers.
Same case with XBox and PS. You can’t willy nilly write a game for either platform.
For some reason the unlicensed cartridge that always comes to mind for me is the powder blue Bible stories game.
I feel like it was far more fair pre-OTA updates. EA for example famously strong armed Sega when they reverse engineered the Genesis allowing them the right to make their own cartridges (which is why EA games look different) and better terms than what they otherwise would have gotten.
These days if a company tried that Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft would just laugh and issue a firmware update "improving system stability" three weeks later bricking any unlicensed games in the process.
There was even a handful of unlicensed titles for PS2/GC.
And this is now also brought to vehicles, TVs and many other devices, more often than not to fix broken business models or extract more revenue or spy on users instead of to fix bugs.
It's a good point, but consoles were single purpose computers. They exist to play games. Now, I'll agree that the line is blurred these days, but they're still generally gaming machines. Nobody is buying an XBox to stream Netflix solely.
I think the difference is that Apple wants people to buy these devices as your primary computing device. Are you OK when Apple locks down the Mac line? What if you couldn't use Brew to install open source software? For a not insignificant portion of their buyers that may be OK.
I agree that consoles have their own anti-competitive issues, but they're not the same. Copy-cat games have always existed. The difference is that Sony's not going to pull a Rockstar game exclusively built for their platform to directly compete. So while I'm trying to see the parallel, it's not quite the same in my opinion.
> Nobody is buying an XBox to stream Netflix solely.
What if I want to? I don't particularly care what the manufacturer thinks, I bought the machine. Why does Microsoft gets a pass to dictate what I can do with the hardware I bought?
See for example people that bought PS3s for operating distributed clusters (because at the time the console WAS open) and then Sony locked down other OSes with an update. Why is this fair?
> How can a wristwatch be a primary computing device?
Oh it's not. But you don't have a choice. Last I checked Apple Watch required being locked into the walled garden [0] via ownership of an iPhone. Apple Watch is a feature, not a standalone product as it stands today.
It's not so much about copycat games per-se but about the ability to run whatever software you want on a device that you own, and in that respect those games consoles are quite good representations of the walled garden concept.
In fact, the 'general purpose computer' will historically be seen as some kind of very stupid aberration, who ever thought that giving end users that kind of power was a good idea? /s
Software is not different from hardware. Digital parts aren't magic, bring no magic rights, it's still just boring old parts someone invested in engineering into a product.
Even in digital, beige box server, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, FaaS, applications, devices, apps, screens... different waterlines, none of them magic. Which waterline do you have the right to "run whatever you want"? Which waterline is a business ok to say, from here down, it's my product?
Anti-circumvention laws saying DRM means hands off altogether are different from saying a maker must take extra steps to make it easier for you to mod the device they invested R&D in, must allow your mod at potential harm to other mods on the device, or a maker must change their business model to facilitate malware and benevolent app devs alike.
There's a market segment for beige boxes and Raspberry PIs. Not every device with digital parts supporting digital mods, plug-ins, add-ons, cartridges, apps, whatever you call them, has to be forced to be a Raspberry Pi.
You have a right to remove the warning label from your mattress, or root your phone, but Sealy doesn't have to perforate the tag and Samsung doesn't have to give you a toggle.
I don't see this as a "features" problem. I think the correct way to approach this is in terms of "control". By designing their devices that way (non-unlockable bootloaders, signature verification on every app or executable with hardcoded public keys etc) companies have essentially introduced a new paradigm in which the legal owner of the device has less control over it than its manufacturer. That is the issue here.
Yeah. What people are complaining about is cryptography to prevent them from using their thing as they wish. Nobody is demanding API documentation from Sony, people are happy to reverse engineer that. But it doesn't matter because you can't give the machine valid code and have it execute, for no good reason other than that you don't know a magic number.
The problem is that building platforms is expensive and if people can use your thing for whatever they want, that thing that they want is often not giving you money. My conclusion is that there shouldn't even be game consoles. They're just a tax on everyone that wants to play games.
> Are you OK when Apple locks down the Mac line? What if you couldn't use Brew to install open source software?
I’ve wondered about this for a while. After about 2015 when the MBP was steadily losing features and gaining problems I was certain that my next machine couldn’t be a Mac. I was certain that the Mac would be rapidly becoming a glorified iPhone.
The trick is, I don’t know where to draw that line. One thought about jumping ship to Linux full time, but I haven’t been able to trust the setup. I’ve heard Windows with WLS is good, but haven’t tried it.
I've been using Linux as my daily driver since 2004 or so and I haven't looked back. And the only reason I used windows as long as I did was because I had a business that depended on our ability develop a particular windows binary as well as some bookkeeping software. But bookkeeping can be outsourced and that windows application is long gone.
If you don't allow any third-party developers to make apps for your device, you have a closed garden and no anti-competitive conflict. If you allow all third-party developers to make apps for your device, you have an open garden and no anti-competitive conflict. If you allow some third-party developers, but not some others, to make apps for your device, you have a walled garden and a potential anti-competitive conflict.
As long as some developers are allowed to make apps for this device -- be it a watch, a safety needle, or a 60,000 sq ft rack-server center -- barring others is anti-competitive. And barring them just to launch a clone of their product yourself is an anti-competitive super dick move.
It's not about if devices are general computing devices or if the device maker can moderate third-party apps on its platform. Apple invited other developers to sell apps on a market it created and regulates. It also competes with those developers in this market. And in this case, it used its power as the market's regulator to remove a competitor and promote its own app.
Nintendo, Sony, etc also allow other developers to sell apps on markets they created, and they also compete with those developers. If Nintendo ever removes a platforming game for competing with the Mario series, we should also raise our pitchforks and protest against unfair abuse of power.
I'd wager a lot of it has to do with history. Gaming consoles were always proprietary hardware that could only do things approved by the manufacturer, and were purchased with that understanding, unless you did some hacking. Computers were always open platforms that you purchased and then could do what you wanted with, no hacking required. iOS was the first major market computing platform that broke this general understanding.
> iOS was the first major market computing platform that broke this general understanding.
I think the reason this worked, and the reason it’s still sort of confusing to people, is that the iPhone is a phone, and showed up at phone stores. People viewed as a super-powered iPod, not a computer.
Huh? Most console games today aren’t exclusives, developers have the freedom to release them on any platform they want with little restriction, and there is no risk in a console maker refusing to let you sell a game and then they go back and make the game themselves.
Consoles are very different from Apple’s walled garden.
1. Consoles are just as much computers as smart watches.
2. There isn't a horde of pitchforks because instead people's efforts with those consoles are focused towards jailbreaking them to run their arbitrary code instead of begging the company to do it - and Microsoft's Developer Mode on Xbox allows running of arbitrary code anyways, so the problems is basically solved there.
I honestly could not tell you, but that's a 'whataboutism' argument, we are not talking about Xbox, PlayStation or Nintendo here. But to the extent that they determine what can and can not be shipped on their platform they are - to me - just as much a walled garden.
