Ideas and applications for VR/AR/Social Gaming Interaction

[sol-alpha]

Boredom time again, let's talk about applications and ideas for virtual reality/augmented reality. Just quickly, I have used my brother's Oculus Rift development kit(the first version that was sent out, not later models that were improved), I couldn't play it for long, definitely got motion sickness from it and saw the gridlines in my eyesight after taking off the device because you could see it up close on the screen. Don't know how different it would be with the consumer models coming out this year.

Virtual Reality:
Devices and possible advancement:

• Games
• Simulations
• Designs

Augmented Reality:
Devices and possible advancement:

• Games
• Applications
• Designs

Footnotes at end of page.

Disclaimer: Any ideas are just hypothetical and don't take into account things that make device advancement impossible such as thermodynamics, etc.

Virtual Reality:
Devices and possible advancement: As we know, the devices that we use for virtual reality are in the form of Head-mounted displays with speakers to view things in 3D. Apparently if I remember hearing this correctly, Google are moving from their Cardboard VR to having VR be accessible with a headset that doesn't require you to have it hook up to a PC to process the graphics required. That's one possible advancement with VR, if there was any possibility of going further, then let's say hypothetically if we could make VR possible by having the screen in the form of contact lenses, then you could close your eyes and wear a mask to block out light, or just wear something to block out light and not have to close your eyes. This would make it easier for having something lighter on your head, I never did play with the Oculus Rift for that long and the headset is not designed the same way as a helmet, so I don't know if current VR headsets would require you to lie back if you wanted to play for long periods of time to prevent neck strain from the weight of the device.

Games: I don't have any ideas for games. I mean sure, one quick idea since we're here on an Umihara Kawase fansite. If a First-Person View Umihara Kawase game in VR was made, it'd be pretty cool, it wouldn't have to be stuck on a 2D plane and instead could use 3D movement and then more people would say it's like being Spider-Man, although I wonder about how many people would get motion sickness when swinging around.

Actually I just remembered a couple. Although one would be counted as game/simulation, there was the game shown by Namco Bandai called "Summer Lesson" and it's a Japanese game so there is a character in it who speaks English but, VERY SLOWLY. (Uggh...) Anyway, it would be awesome to have a game where you could interact with multiple characters who speak different languages allowing you to learn and practise conversation skills (or written). Obviously the biggest hurdle to that is having really good AI and voice recognition. Although again, I imagine whoever could come up with this the fastest would make money and probably make other learning methods obsolete. (Exaggerated)

Then the other idea would be that Visual Novel games would be pretty cool in VR because they are usually set in First-person View so being able to interact in the game which could allow the story to have multiple paths from the actions that you can do in game rather than just reading an option and selecting it would be pretty awesome.

Simulations: This is where I think money would be made more easily in the beginning compared to Video Games, because of selling products to businesses rather than consumers. I think it would take more time before selling games to consumers becomes profitable when it is known that the consumer base is arbitrarily large.

So ideas for VR Simulations, basically anything that can be replicated in real life which can be sold off as something for training such as:
- Training as a Surgeon, practising surgery in VR.
- Military VR, pretty much covered in one of the themes in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
- The list goes on applying it to most occupations.

One other idea I had, which I wonder if someone would make money off of is related to one little problem I've had in life which is trying to look for work and unfortunately I will rarely ever find a job vacancy that doesn't ask for 6-24 months job-related experience as a requirement.
There are places for example that sell short courses on hospitality in the workplace, so aside from having to get certified for serving alcohol, working in places that have gambling, or handling food. They will have short courses that you could waste your money on to learn how to make coffee, or how to be a waiter etc, for one day. However, that will not get you work even though you get a certificate for it because the people that post job vacancies don't post that as a substitute for job-related experience.

So the idea is, you create a Training course, where you have your own VR-setup for numerous people, the course is let's say Bar-related. You would need to create or license a simulation of a Bar where many numerous things would have to be experienced such as working under pressure, learning how to make numerous cocktails, how to serve customers, bar maintenance, cash handling etc.  It somehow has to be convincing enough to replicate real life that doing this course for say a month or more is credible enough to be able to get you a job because let's face it, there's no better alternatives for people with no experience, there's "work experience" where you could work at some place for free only if they provide it however it's for a short period of time and even that might not give you a job so we're back at square one.
Whether this is training or experience is one thing, whether it's taken seriously by job providers is another although again, there are simulation programs already for occupations such as pilots for passenger aircraft.

Let's say this is a failure, there is another option. You get an Engineering degree related to Mechatronics and AI. You create robots that would make the jobs you could never get obsolete and then the future to a Basic Income for everyone would occur much quicker. (Exaggerated idea, relax.)

Designs:
I'd have no clue how useful it would be to design for example buildings in virtual reality to recreate in the real world. Possibly it can become more in-depth than that.
For example, an architect can design a building and AI would be needed to simulate the physics and engineering involved for the building. This can involve simulating the material design of the building to understand what materials are needed to build and maintain the building. Then physics simulations involving say earthquakes, fires, erosion to determine what damage could occur. (This is where Microsoft could make money using their cloud computing servers)
You get the idea.

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Augmented Reality:
Devices and possible advancement: The tricky thing about Augmented Reality is that it is applying something virtual in the real world. We already have used it either through the Nintendo 3DS, or smartphone devices where there is an "app" that can translate signs that are of a foreign language into your language. Some cool ideas for applications of Augmented Reality I've seen are from Metal Gear Rising Revengeance where Raiden's visor can allow him to see information in his environment with the use of GPS which can tell him where there are people past his field of vision.

Of course, Google glass was going to be another Augmented Reality device unfortunately one of the known complaints are people's privacy due to how it can take photos/videos without you knowing. (Even though we went through this kind of phase already with smartphones)This kind of technology would probably make a return when instead of being a visor, it can be something in the form of contact lenses that you can put onto your eyes. (Sure, you can talk about the ethics about this if you want although that wasn't the point of this thread.)

Another device possible for Augmented Reality would be holographic devices and of course that holographic room people mention from Star Trek. (Because I've never seen it)

Games: It's difficult making games that aren't just a novelty because of AR. There are quite a few ideas that may have been made already such as pet simulators, Pokemon GO, that face blasters(?) game from the Nintendo 3DS... uhh I forget what else.

It's hard to come up with games for AR, because you'll have smartasses that say, "why can't you just play that on a regular screen?".
Although, there are some(?) advantages to AR that can't be done viewing on a regular TV screen.

So either viewing through a visor, Nintendo 3DS, smartphone or a holographic screen/projector. Let's just go with a holographic screen/projector because it can be viewed by anyone without needing a visual device, the games being played have a 3D viewing angle rather than 2D. This would allow you to determine the depth of something and you could just move your head to look around rather than pressing a button/stick to move the camera angle.

The best example of a game using a 3D viewing angle in a non-holographic, non-AR form is Super Mario 3D Land for Nintendo 3DS because the 3D Screen gives you depth to determine distance when you are jumping, one of the best stages that does this when where you fall down from the sky and there are enemies you can stomp on or coins to collect along the way but you can hardly make any errors because the 3D Screen allows you to perceive the distance.

So in relation to say a holographic screen/projector, 3D-platforming games which requires precision can take advantage of the 3D viewing angle.

Applications: One of the best ideas about AR is with the use of a visor, you could just look at something and get information about it. As mentioned before, there is a smartphone that can translate signs. Although one bad example I made to a person one time is I noticed a car registration plate, and said I could look at that car plate and find out who the owner of the vehicle is, (where the intent was finding information if you were involved in a hit and run however, it sounded bad like as if this is something that a stalker would use which if I remember correctly, this did occur on the news once in India I think where women would get harassed by men using an insurance service(?) where they would just look up a person's car registration plate on the internet and get personal information on the owner of the vehicle including their address and phone number I believe.) although again, this is nothing different to using the internet to find the information. It just involves looking at something which creates a different input method.

So once more, talking about the "good methods" of AR would be looking at buildings that could give you information about the building now, or the history of it. Eg. Empire State Buidling.

Then of course we have the more controversial version of AR which is like the x-ray vision of AR as seen in a game like Watchdogs which I never played but I heard the story was crap even though it could have told a good one with regards to the ethics involved.
The more controversial version of AR being that you could just look at a person and it would tell you personal information about them, for this to occur, you need that information from somewhere, so let's say that the government decided to stick all your personal information into one folder on a server, containing details pertaining to your occupation, medical records, gender, bank details etc. Say that someone hacked into that server and could then look at you with the help of biometrics which would then identify who you are and give out your personal information. This would lead to bad things obviously such as blackmail for one, or if say you were actually a transgendered person then you could be targeted by violent individuals.
(I think that was all I wanted to point out for any possible controversial methods. Moving on.)

Could devices using Augmented Reality help blind people see? If it can't give them vision, there are still things like GPS to help blind people locate places, if it's still not possible to give blind people vision, attaching a camera could help tell you in more detail what you are looking at in your direction by telling you. For example, you used GPS to locate a building but, how do you know the correct doorway? The doorway you are looking for could be on the side of the building, and the front entrance leads elsewhere so the camera could tell you (Aurally) what you are looking at in your direction.
Or maybe, a camera in combination with thin-layered gloves that help you identify things by telling you when you touch them such as a fork or buttons with no braille written on like on a microwave?
Maybe these are useless ideas in practice?

Designs:
Aside from the holographic room from Star Trek, if you had at least a holographic screen/projector. (I could be sounding contradictory in that last sentence.) You could use it to design your living quarters. You could design your room to make it look futuristic, primitive(caveman?), fantasy-like? <-- (You could have a wizard that stares at you in the room all the time and you just ask it for the time or calendar, lol)

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That's enough from me, feel free to discuss. Although I imagine some of the more controversial things (which I was only pointing out) could lead to emotional outbursts especially if this was a larger forum, this is just a discussion and an emotional outburst in my opinion is the most irrational way of disagreeing with something. If something triggered you that badly, calm down for a moment and think about it. Use your brain and give reasons to something you disagree about instead of just replying "They should get rid of <insert thing here>!"

Edit: http://kawasefan.net/forum/index.php?topic=53.msg720#msg720 Reply #16 contains the ideas I've posted regarding Social Gaming Interaction.

Footnotes:
Demonstration of Augmented Reality using a visor i.e. Microsoft Hololens at windows 10 event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3rNIxMlKmI (Try to ignore most of their blah blah blahing, it's just marketing fluff.)
Demonstration of Augmented Reality using a visor i.e. Microsoft Hololens at e3 2015 with minecraft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgakdcEzVwg
Apparently you can make your own holographic projection with your smartphone and this is the kind of thing I was referring to when saying Holographic screens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YWTtCsvgvg
How could I forget? Holographic Japanese Idols: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhl5afLEKdo

I could post videos of impressions of Virtual Reality headsets but that would be about it. Seems pointless posting any game footage of VR games when its not the same without having a VR headset.


Edit: Oh look at this, impeccable timing. http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1187231 --> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-17/vr-startup-mindmaze-raises-funds-at-1-1-billion-valuation

This shows exactly what I was pointing out that early on VR/AR would sell well to businesses before it becomes big as a consumer product.

[Alc]

So, disclaimer: I've never tried a VR headset, though I've been following the evolution since the Oculus Kickstarter started making waves. The below is nothing more than a bunch of observations from an outsider's perspective.

In terms of the size of VR as a consumer market, there are simply too many applications for it to fail. I've encountered, even among tech-savvy friends, pessimism about VR - that it's "a fad" like 3D TV was. I think this is basically just short-sightedness on their part - sure, the clunky headsets we've got right now aren't going to change the world, but the devices that follow will allow people to experience and interact with virtual worlds to a degree of realism that is not possible sitting in front of a 2D screen. Even if it never takes off for gaming (purely as a hypothetical), the potential "serious" applications, for human interaction, job training etc are just too numerous for VR sets of some kind to not play a big role in the future of the human race. This is why Facebook bought Oculus.

Even more short-sighted is the complaint that you need a "killer rig" to use VR. Yeah, hitting 120FPS and rendering two 3D scenes at once (one for each eye) does effectively quadruple processing overheads at a minimum by today's standards, but that's peanuts in tech terms, and Moore's law will kill it in no time. In ten years, probably fewer, a cheap phone will outpace the gaming consoles of today by an order of magnitude. We're already past the knee of the curve in graphical improvements in games, and this isn't a transistor limit, it's a human one - even with infinite CPU/GPU/RAM/etc resources, our games wouldn't look that much better than they do today, because the limitations are increasingly market forces and man-hours of work. The slowdown of increases in visual fidelity will continue, but raw processing power will continue to increase in the background. If I'm not wrong about all this, it means that the performance problem that VR currently has will continue to decrease as an issue as time goes on, because throwing more processing power to solve it comes more naturally than creating and engineering incredible-looking virtual worlds.

Having mentioned consoles, I do think Sony have an uphill battle with Morpheus, at least from a PR perspective. The average consumer will assume that they can buy the VR thing and play the Call of Duty and it'll be just like they're right there in the game, man! Whereas the truth is that there's no way any "triple-A" title will have anything other than heavily gimped VR support on Morpheus, because the sweet spot for performance and consumer acceptance is 1 scene and 30FPS for a PS4 game, and 2 scenes and 120FPS for VR. You can't have a game that pushes the hardware for the former look anything close to acceptable on the latter - not on a console with fixed technical specifications.

Also, I suspect (again, acknowledging that I have never tried on a headset) that VR represents a fundamentally different medium for gaming, and that the games that go with it and "work" will be nearly as different as videogames were to board games before them. Right now it seems rational to assume that we're at the "Chess on the Atari 2600" stage of VR gaming. The controller that works so well on the PS4 cannot be ideal for VR gaming; they're too different. I have no idea what an ideal future VR rig looks like, but I bet it doesn't involve a Dualshock 4.

AR is a tougher topic to talk about, because the term is much more vague and encompasses so many different forms. With VR you can say "something that covers the eyes and creates a virtual world", but defining AR is harder. I remember "AR games" from a decade ago in the form of ilovebees, which was a viral campaign for Halo 2 (which is a lot of Halos ago!) and that is completely incomparable to what's going on with the 3DS, or Vita's use of camera for games, or Microsoft's HoloLens, or Google Glass. I'll admit I find Google Glass kind of creepy, but then if you'd told me when I was a young nerd that we'd all carry around incredibly precise mechanisms that granted governments and corporations alike the possibility of tracking our movement to an accuracy of a meter or so I'd have been creeped out and would no doubt have been sceptical that I'd put up with it. Now I have a phone that, even if I turn off GPS (which I do most of the time, and the switch for which is irritatingly hidden behind at least 10 seconds of dicking about) will still betray that information via cellular network node triangulation, and I take that as granted in exchange for the utility of the device, i.e. I can communicate with my friends basically whenever and wherever we are.

Kind of got off topic there, but this post is long enough as it is so I'll leave it at that.

[sol-alpha]

I don't know if you want to apply Moore's Law because from what I could remember and I could be wrong here, we just had a difficult transition going from 28nm nodes to 14nm finFET because 20nm barely provided any improvement and some kind of leakage(heat?) was occuring regarding transistors.
Things will probably get better when we switch to having photon transistors instead of semi-conductor transistors although annoyingly that will still take some years to hit consumer products even though it's been proven to work now.

Sure, it's possible that mobile phones could get as powerful as the consoles of now considering how the Tegra X1(?) is apparently the equivalent of an Xbox 360. However, there is still the problem with battery technology and how I always hear how mobile phone games make the phone run out of battery in less than an hour, and even I hate playing them on my phone or tablet because of how hot they get when you hold them.

I wouldn't mind if the ceiling does get hit with regards to graphics, technically then I wouldn't have to keep hearing people whine if Nintendo's next console isn't as powerful as the competitors that have the money to subsedise expensively over-engineered consoles (e.g. PS3) and take multi-billion dollar losses repeatedly like it's nothing (i.e. Microsoft). Although, with regards to a patent that Nintendo is trying to get, its possible that their next console could use what's been termed as a supplemental computing device (SCD) which can give a processing power boost to the NX and also be used as a localised cloud computing device that you could share with other people locally by giving them a online access to it which is suppose to net you benefits which are ideas mentioned in the patent including the ability to hook up multiple SCDs at once.

Moving onto PS4, I haven't followed project Morpheus that closely but anyway, apparently the project Morpheus now named PlayStation VR has Sony asking for developers to at least render the VR games at 90fps minimum so 45 for each eye. Apparently the PlayStation VR will come with an add-on device to boost processing power because the PS4 isn't powerful enough. Also, that apparently then there could be a PS4.5 in the future where it's the PS4 incorporated with the add-on so you only have to get the headset.
Also, because you didn't mention, unlike oculus rift which just uses an Xbox one controller, the PS VR can use either the dualshock 4 or the PS Move controllers as the input method.

If anything, and its just anecdotal since I am just reading off other forum posters but, they think PS VR could be the most successful vs oculus and vive supposedly because you don't need to get an expensive PC rig, that supposedly the PS VR will be the cheapest of the three when you don't account for buying a PS4 I guess. Then the final part is that supposedly because of Sony's brand power and that they've been showing off the PS VR for the public to use at things like gamescom (I could be wrong on that part, I just remember someone posting a vid I think to do with a Eurogamer event in Portugal). So apparently cost, accessibility and brand power will be why PS VR will beat the other two.

Yes, you're right. Anything that is first-person view on VR at the moment is the Pong of VR gaming at the moment hence why I said Japan could hit it big with visual novel type games with the only game being close to that is Summer Lesson from Namco Bandai. On the other part to do with the gaming medium for VR, I don't expect if to replace gaming as it is now or even in the next 20 years. The other concern as I mentioned is if you can play these games for long periods of time without any harmful effects.

Of course I never bothered to mention is, what if someone dies because of a VR game? There are lots of scenarios that a person could die of shock if it felt real enough even though it wasn't. Scenarios such as falling off a cliff, horror jump scares(?), having someone stab through your chest from behind and seeing a bloodied knife come through your chest could cause shock. If Nintendo were doing VR, this is where their Vitality Sensor could come in handy because there could be some kind of shut-down or phase shift in visuals if the heart rate is going too high. (Now you owe me money VR industry, saving you from all your potential lawsuits. )

With Google Glass, I forgot to point that out how even though people don't like their privacy being threatened from it (which is mainly taking pictures/video without knowing) and yet, as you mentioned our phones can track us down with GPS and that because we have to register our personal information on a mobile phone/SIM card, that corrupt governments could just oh I don't know, track our daily movements if we happened to be saying something upsetting to them even though its true and then they just kidnap us from our bookstores in Hong Kong. *cough* *cough*

Moving on to AR, I looked at the first link I posted with Microsoft hololens which was just an alien version of Face Raiders for the 3DS, oh man, watching that microsoft game was so lame, because if there is one thing I hate at the moment, it's seeing scripted sequences in video games for their marketing. They even managed to do it in this by making some big alien boss appear and then que the "fade to black" even though there wasn't a literal fade to black, it was just as stupid. I really need to get around to making a parody video of these scripted game sequences or just pointing out how stupid they are on Youtube. (But, I'm probably too lazy to.)

I think, AR gaming is going to have a much tougher time compared to VR gaming because of how lame some of these games are. Again, I like AR because I want things like holographic projections/screens but that will still take who knows how many years until more advances in Optics for consumer products besides photon transistors (maybe?). So at the moment for AR gaming, what we have is the above mentioned and it's so lame because Microsoft went and made a serious dude bro shooter version of Face Raiders for 3DS.
Whereas I prefer my ideas for AR gaming using a screen that gives a holographic projection.

What would be hilarious and probably be more fun than that microsoft AR game, is similar to that episode of Futurama where the cast plays video games. Applying it to the real world using visors like hololens, there should be a game where you are out in the real world and its basically an FPS PVP game where you encounter other people playing the same game like say at your bus stop/train station and while waiting for transport you are using gun gestures to shoot beams at them via the AR game although I imagine it would cause many accidents including if it was released in the US with how police are with mistaking anything for a gun including toy guns. (Exaggerated, relax US cops)

Footnotes:
- The Futurama episode referenced is A Bicyclops Built for Two, I just can't find a viewable youtube link so there are other methods to watch it but I'll just leave it at that.

[Alc]

I don't know if you want to apply Moore's Law because from what I could remember and I could be wrong here, we just had a difficult transition going from 28nm nodes to 14nm finFET because 20nm barely provided any improvement and some kind of leakage(heat?) was occuring regarding transistors.

We're coming up on some hard walls, yeah, but I figure it'll get engineered around somehow; stacked silicon (already a thing in RAM I believe), whatever. Intel and co will want to continue selling us the new shiny, so they'll have to figure out something.

Sure, it's possible that mobile phones could get as powerful as the consoles of now considering how the Tegra X1(?) is apparently the equivalent of an Xbox 360. However, there is still the problem with battery technology and how I always hear how mobile phone games make the phone run out of battery in less than an hour, and even I hate playing them on my phone or tablet because of how hot they get when you hold them.

I wasn't really suggesting that phones are a good fit for VR, or even for gaming (like you I've found them pretty universally terrible, in fact), though there's a big push at Oculus with their partnership with Samsung for Gear VR, using a mobile phone handset as the processing device, which... eh, Android was not designed for 120FPS and ultra low latency, so I can't see that being a good fit, even putting performance aside. Mobile phone CPUs are actually much closer in potential performance to decent x86 chips than people realise, though, but they have to be massively downclocked in mobile devices to mediocre performance to prevent overheating (ARM chips are becoming more common in the server industry, as they're extremely energy efficient and can be cooled properly there).

I wouldn't mind if the ceiling does get hit with regards to graphics, technically then I wouldn't have to keep hearing people whine if Nintendo's next console isn't as powerful as the competitors that have the money to subsedise expensively over-engineered consoles (e.g. PS3) and take multi-billion dollar losses repeatedly like it's nothing (i.e. Microsoft). Although, with regards to a patent that Nintendo is trying to get, its possible that their next console could use what's been termed as a supplemental computing device (SCD) which can give a processing power boost to the NX and also be used as a localised cloud computing device that you could share with other people locally by giving them a online access to it which is suppose to net you benefits which are ideas mentioned in the patent including the ability to hook up multiple SCDs at once.

Well, Nintendo did kind of fuck up with the Wii U by their own admission, and it's not the hardware that's to blame, it's that they failed to effectively communicate to the public that it was a new console whilst drastically underestimating how much extra work HD games take to create. I love Nintendo, but those failure are on them, frankly. They aren't lacking for money, either - I remember reading something along the lines that they've got enough money saved away after the runaway success of Wii/DS that they could lose hundreds of millions of dollars every year and still be around for decades.

I do have to question the wisdom of announcing the NX when they did. I can't read that as anything other than deliberately scuppering the Wii U - you can kiss any real third party support goodbye once that announcement is out. It's a shame, as there've been some great games on it, and I feel like with Mario Maker, Splatoon etc they were starting to really hit their stride.

They're a puzzling company in many ways. In some respects they're incredibly innovative, they've tried out something drastically new on pretty much every device they've made for the past few generations. In other respects they're mind-bendingly out of touch - it's taken them far, far too long to get up to speed on internet gaming and they keep doing crazy shit like this and this, which... I don't even know what to say, it's just so obviously dumb. But, they keep making great games, so...

Moving onto PS4, I haven't followed project Morpheus that closely but anyway, apparently the project Morpheus now named PlayStation VR has Sony asking for developers to at least render the VR games at 90fps minimum so 45 for each eye.

That'll be 90 for each eye, surely? 45 would definitely be too low.

Apparently the PlayStation VR will come with an add-on device to boost processing power because the PS4 isn't powerful enough.

I've not read anything conclusive about what exactly this means thus far; until I see some numbers it's hard to know whether it's really just handling I/O and driving the two panels or whether it's actually got a solid processing element in there, which would bump up the cost considerably (and I doubt developers are particularly enthused at further computational parallelism - it complicates development considerably). It'll almost certainly be both, though, because like you say, the PS4 as it stands is just not up to the task.

Pet gripe: I hate it when console manufacturers fracture the user base like this, it's like they never fucking learn: it's a headache for the less clued-up consumers, it's a nightmare for developers who have to decide which iteration of the platform to target and to what extent, and it generally leads to poor quality games. It was shitty back in the 80s/90s with all the upgrades to the PC Engine, Sega CD etc, it was shitty on the N64 with the extended RAM pack, and it was shitty with Kinect for the 360/One. When will they learn?

Also, because you didn't mention, unlike oculus rift which just uses an Xbox one controller, the PS VR can use either the dualshock 4 or the PS Move controllers as the input method.

Well, the Rift is a PC device so it can use what it wants, and it's going to ship with these funky looking things:



But yeah, who knows which or what will wind up being the default input device for VR.

If anything, and its just anecdotal since I am just reading off other forum posters but, they think PS VR could be the most successful vs oculus and vive supposedly because you don't need to get an expensive PC rig, that supposedly the PS VR will be the cheapest of the three when you don't account for buying a PS4 I guess.

Even if you account for buying a PS4 it'll almost certainly be cheaper, Oculus is launching at $600 and Vive at $800 and the computer to run either is about twice that, so it really is purely enthusiast gear right now on the PC side.

Then the final part is that supposedly because of Sony's brand power and that they've been showing off the PS VR for the public to use at things like gamescom (I could be wrong on that part, I just remember someone posting a vid I think to do with a Eurogamer event in Portugal). So apparently cost, accessibility and brand power will be why PS VR will beat the other two.

I think they'll coexist. At least, I hope they do; a bit of competition is usually a good thing.

Of course I never bothered to mention is, what if someone dies because of a VR game? There are lots of scenarios that a person could die of shock if it felt real enough even though it wasn't. Scenarios such as falling off a cliff, horror jump scares(?), having someone stab through your chest from behind and seeing a bloodied knife come through your chest could cause shock. If Nintendo were doing VR, this is where their Vitality Sensor could come in handy because there could be some kind of shut-down or phase shift in visuals if the heart rate is going too high.

You're putting on a very heavy blindfold that tricks your brain into thinking it's in another world and you're flailing motion tracking devices around; you can bet there'll be disclaimers all over the place. From a legal perspective I'm confident all involved will make damn sure they're not liable for any injury caused.

there should be a game where you are out in the real world and its basically an FPS PVP game where you encounter other people playing the same game like say at your bus stop/train station and while waiting for transport you are using gun gestures to shoot beams at them via the AR game although I imagine it would cause many accidents including if it was released in the US with how police are with mistaking anything for a gun including toy guns. (Exaggerated, relax US cops)

When I was a kid I had older friends who'd run around town stalking each other with paintball guns (they only wore goggles and thick jumpers, so I imagine it was both extremely tense and quite painful). Definitely one of those changes in society where you just can't do that kind of thing any more, I live in Britain and even here you'd be lucky not to get an armed response team thundering down on you if you played that game in any major city.

[sol-alpha]

We're coming up on some hard walls, yeah, but I figure it'll get engineered around somehow; stacked silicon (already a thing in RAM I believe), whatever. Intel and co will want to continue selling us the new shiny, so they'll have to figure out something.

I was going to post my doubts about stacked transistors however, it looks like Intel already made 3D transistors a few years ago.  http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/silicon-innovations/intel-22nm-technology.html

Well, Nintendo did kind of fuck up with the Wii U by their own admission, and it's not the hardware that's to blame, it's that they failed to effectively communicate to the public that it was a new console whilst drastically underestimating how much extra work HD games take to create. I love Nintendo, but those failure are on them, frankly. They aren't lacking for money, either - I remember reading something along the lines that they've got enough money saved away after the runaway success of Wii/DS that they could lose hundreds of millions of dollars every year and still be around for decades.

Their decisions on the hardware are partly to blame. Iwata mentioned in one of his Iwata Asks that he wanted the console to be the same thickness as the Wii was (3 stacked DVD cases) and that the GamePad had to be the face of the product and the console was backstage so the hardware engineers couldn't have creative freedom with the design. (Which is astonishing considering how I liked the design of the Wii, and then they regressed on its successor?)
Note: "Iwata Asks: Wii U" - http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wiiu/console/0/0

Also, it was his decision to make the console low-wattage for the Japanese consumer base which is amazing considering how that turned out because consoles have heavily declined in Japan and, it was amazing hearing the reasons why customers in Japan didn't want to buy the Wii U because they looked at the GamePad and they thought it was heavy! So the GamePad had to be put in peoples' hands for them to change their minds especially playing the games it has.

I can't claim that if the Wii U wasn't restricted in its design and it was possibly more comparable to the Twins, (which again is funny because the PS3/360 were called twins because they mainly had the same games but now, it makes more sense to call the Xbox One and PS4 twins because they are practically the same hardware too.) that the western AAA 3rd party developers wouldn't have jumped shipped because it would possibly be easy to port games to Wii U however with the current Wii U fanbase not most of their tastes overlap with the AAA 3rd party games.

Going off-topic here but, I'd love it if Sega or a company similar to companies in the past came back and Microsoft dropped out. I only had a SNES and Sega Megadrive as a kid but, back then there was also the PC-Engine and the Neo Geo which meant that there was a lot of variety with games, now though? It really sucks that Hudson Soft went bankrupt and sold their IPs to Konami considering what Konami is now, SNK is seemingly making a comeback on games because they are now owned by a Chinese company.
So many studios closed down last generation thanks to Sony and Microsoft's decision to go in HD game development with their consoles that basically the only 3rd party publishers at the top are EA, Ubisoft and Activision because the mainstream consumer has been conditioned to being marketed games that have to have "GRAPHICS!" which then regarding the Wii U is partly why it makes it difficult for them to market their games on that system. I remember seeing people post trailers of 3rd party games like call of duty and watch dogs and no wii u versions of the game were shown, only xbox,ps4,pc,360 and ps3. Console games are still marketed with "graphics", I can't remember which E3, it was most likely last years or 2014 and all you'd see is trailers with the disclaimer "In-engine footage" which is a fancy way of saying "a trailer with a pre-rendered cutscene that is not gameplay footage made on our engine!"
Note: List of studios closed down since 2006 http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=459131

I'm saying too much so I'll get back to the quote, apparently NCL is a very conservative company so, I guess they didn't want to lose money on risks even though they had more of it. Also, probably need an opinion of someone that knows the stock market well but, even if they made losses for decades, I imagine their stock would devalue because investors would no longer feel confident in investing in NCL if that happened. Which means their net capital would be low as well, which means they would get bought out by someone else. Similar to say AMD, AMD has been making losses for years and can't get a break against Nvidia, hence the rumours that Microsoft or Samsung were going to buy out AMD because their market value is low.

I do have to question the wisdom of announcing the NX when they did. I can't read that as anything other than deliberately scuppering the Wii U - you can kiss any real third party support goodbye once that announcement is out. It's a shame, as there've been some great games on it, and I feel like with Mario Maker, Splatoon etc they were starting to really hit their stride.

Assuming you didn't see the DeNa partnership announcement live, Iwata stated that he had to announce that Nintendo were making a next-gen console because it was to reaffirm to investors that video game hardware is still their bread and butter and that they were not going to focus on Mobile Phone gaming as the core. It also didn't even matter at that point because there wasn't any 3rd party support anyway. Also, Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony are always using R&D on the next console as soon the previous one comes out. It's been mentioned many times in interviews with various figureheads by game journalists when they ask when will there be a next console blah blah blah -> response: we are always developing the next console.

In other respects they're mind-bendingly out of touch - it's taken them far, far too long to get up to speed on internet gaming and they keep doing crazy shit like this and this, which... I don't even know what to say, it's just so obviously dumb.

I can't remember if they pulled down other videos when they made the Nintendo Creators Program. All I know for that instance which you posted in the kotaku article is that they were within their rights to remove the videos because the game was a rom hack that infringed on their IP. I haven't experienced anything as bad, all I had happen was when I put up a video for the final boss fight in Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen was that I infringed on music that was copyrighted so some agency that works for the songwriter/whatever would get money off my video. Hence I just turned off the music for anytime I recorded that boss fight now.

(About Nintendo) Of course I said, it was within their rights. I didn't say it was the right thing to do, maybe they were concerned that people would use that rom hack instead of buying Mario Maker. Things like this have happened far beyond Youtube vids, I remember fan-made games in development receiving cease and desist letters.
Note:
"Microsoft sends GAF a Cease and Desist notice over Mass Effect 3 Spoilers" - http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=451257
"Square Enix sends cease and desist letter to FF Type 0 translation group" - http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=857470
"Square Enix reportedly sent C&D to Dragon Quest 7 3DS fan translation group" - http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1068764
"Bad day for ROMhackers, SE goes ape**** on Chrono Trigger personal projects." - http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=361226
"Streets Of Rage Remake shut down by SEGA (lol goodluck)" - http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=427265

Pet gripe: I hate it when console manufacturers fracture the user base like this, it's like they never fucking learn: it's a headache for the less clued-up consumers, it's a nightmare for developers who have to decide which iteration of the platform to target and to what extent, and it generally leads to poor quality games. It was shitty back in the 80s/90s with all the upgrades to the PC Engine, Sega CD etc, it was shitty on the N64 with the extended RAM pack, and it was shitty with Kinect for the 360/One. When will they learn?

I don't know about that, I don't know too much of the PC-Engine's history but the only game I played from that is Castlevania: Rondo of Blood (via the Wii Virtual console) and I definitely wouldn't call that game poor quality. Being more on point, I am very certain the reasons for the CD add-ons for the PC-Engine and Sega Megadrive were to extend the lifetime of the consoles, they most likely hit their peak in sales Year-on-Year hence the add-ons were released to still keep the products on the shelves. Remember that even the SNES was supposed to have a CD add-on: the PlayStation. Oh and I shouldn't forget that this is similar for the Neo Geo as well because the prices for the hardware and software were ridiculous that it only began to sell well when the Neo Geo CD came out.

With regards to the N64 expansion ram pak, that only affected a few games. Donkey Kong 64, Perfect Dark and Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask are the only ones I remember. This is was a mistake on their initial decision on how much RAM to use, which is why apparently it affected their future consoles by making sure they had enough RAM and also a split pool of RAM with faster memory. Even they made losses on the ram pak it because they bundled it with Donkey Kong 64 because of a bug that couldn't be figured out that would crash the game however, it wouldn't occur when using the expansion ram pak.

Again, with the Kinect or the PS Move, that was to get Nintendo's audience and they were trying to prolong their product lifecycle which definitely occurred considering how long the console cycle had been, also because they were dominated by the Wii that both Sony and Microsoft made billions in losses hence they had to recoup the costs.

Well, the Rift is a PC device so it can use what it wants, and it's going to ship with these funky looking things:

I should have said that the Oculus Rift was shipping with an Xbox One controller when you pre-order. I didn't know about the Oculus Touch.

[Alc]

So many studios closed down last generation thanks to Sony and Microsoft's decision to go in HD game development with their consoles that basically the only 3rd party publishers at the top are EA, Ubisoft and Activision because the mainstream consumer has been conditioned to being marketed games that have to have "GRAPHICS!" which then regarding the Wii U is partly why it makes it difficult for them to market their games on that system.

That's a bit of a stretch... it was Nintendo who decided to go with previous-generation hardware with the Wii rather than going with something cutting-edge, and whilst it obviously didn't hurt Wii sales, you can't blame Microsoft and Sony for providing more powerful hardware, or for courting consumers with it.

Games development has always been a volatile industry with endless casualties along the way, the NeoGAF link with the list of developers who went under during that period is mild when you compare to the bedlam of the 80s and 90s. Putting the blame on powerful new hardware is putting the the cart before the horse.

You also seem to be down on the 360/PS3, but both have plenty of great games that aren't your typical big-budget CoD/Gears of War/grimdark shooter of the month, and made by smaller dev houses. The PS3 in particular had some wonderfully unique Japanese games, the 360's Live Arcade section had some real gems and their Xbox Live Indie Games program (which allowed anyone to create and publish games on their platform, curated by the community rather than Microsoft - pretty remarkable for the day) also produced some surprisingly solid, innovative games that you couldn't get anywhere else (and it was still running last I checked, all these years later). With respect, saying it was all graphics, graphics, graphics on those systems is just wrong.

It's been mentioned many times in interviews with various figureheads by game journalists when they ask when will there be a next console blah blah blah -> response: we are always developing the next console.

Absolutely, but the whole framing of the announcement just led to confusion. Of course you've got a new console in development; why are you telling us about it in such a cryptic fashion? It just led to speculation that it's right around the corner, which it isn't, and fed into the "Wii U is a dead platform" narrative that's already so prevalent in the press and gaming discussion forums. It's a shame.

I can't remember if they pulled down other videos when they made the Nintendo Creators Program.

That program was what I was meant, not ROM hacks. There are people are providing free, potent advertising for your games to literally millions of viewers, and you want to piss off these video creators by forcing them to mess around signing up to some scheme of yours dictating which games they can and cannot advertise for you, and then demand a cut of their ad revenue? The community blowback should've been obvious, it's just such an Old Business way of thinking about things. Times have changed, the dynamic of power has shifted, and it's worryingly myopic of them not to have noticed.

I don't know about that, I don't know too much of the PC-Engine's history but the only game I played from that is Castlevania: Rondo of Blood (via the Wii Virtual console) and I definitely wouldn't call that game poor quality.

No, it's a great game.

Being more on point, I am very certain the reasons for the CD add-ons for the PC-Engine and Sega Megadrive were to extend the lifetime of the consoles, they most likely hit their peak in sales Year-on-Year hence the add-ons were released to still keep the products on the shelves.

Sega launched the CD in 1991, only a couple of years into the life of the Megadrive and mere months after the release of Sonic 1, to give you an impression of just how early into the console's life that was. Over the years the Mega CD was generally considered an expensive disappointment, and then Sega launched the 32X as another add-on, a few years later, ostensibly to prolong the lifetime of the system, as you mention. They did this whilst simultaneously launching the Sega Saturn. I lived and breathed Sega in those late-Megadrive days, and take it from me, it was an absolute clusterfuck. The resulting market chaos and loss of consumer confidence played a lead role in killing their brand in the mid to late 90s. At one point they had no less than six active target platforms for developers to have to choose from (Megadrive, Mega CD, 32X, 32X-CD, Saturn, and Pico, the latter being yet another unique console, aimed at young kids).

NEC pulled a similar thing - the PC Engine, then SuperGrafX, Super CD, Super CD2, the different flavours of expansion Arcade Card carts with varying amounts of RAM in them, all of which confused the shit out of consumers and irritated developers/retailers, and then they launched the PC-FX as their equivalent of the Sega Saturn. RIP.

Nintendo had either the good sense or cold feet to stay away from the CD/external add-on fad at this stage and rode out the tail end of the 16-bit market in much better shape than any of their competitors. It didn't go so well with the N64, but that's a different story.

Oh and I shouldn't forget that this is similar for the Neo Geo as well because the prices for the hardware and software were ridiculous that it only began to sell well when the Neo Geo CD came out.

The NeoGeo as a home platform was so niche back in the day that it's hardly worth mentioning. It's remembered fondly now because some of the games are absolute classics, and did very well in the arcades, but the home system/carts sold in numbers multiple orders of magnitude lower than their competitors; it was real cottage industry stuff. The NeoGeo CD was just another flawed CD system (ports of good 2D arcade games but with unbearable load times... eh) that was slaughtered by the Playstation.

With regards to the N64 expansion ram pak, that only affected a few games. Donkey Kong 64, Perfect Dark and Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask are the only ones I remember. This is was a mistake on their initial decision on how much RAM to use

With the exception of the pad, just about everything about the N64's hardware was a mistake.

Nintendo also released the N64 DD for in Japan, an add-on disk drive, and it tanked so hard they never bothered to release it elsewhere.

Again, with the Kinect or the PS Move, that was to get Nintendo's audience and they were trying to prolong their product lifecycle which definitely occurred considering how long the console cycle had been, also because they were dominated by the Wii that both Sony and Microsoft made billions in losses hence they had to recoup the costs.

Yeah, fair shout. I shouldn't have mentioned the Kinect really, it's a control peripheral, and whilst Kinect didn't exactly set the world on fire, peripherals have been plenty successful over the years (Guitar Hero, arcade sticks, etc etc).

We've got quite off track here, eh?

[sol-alpha]

That's a bit of a stretch... it was Nintendo who decided to go with previous-generation hardware with the Wii rather than going with something cutting-edge, and whilst it obviously didn't hurt Wii sales, you can't blame Microsoft and Sony for providing more powerful hardware, or for courting consumers with it.

Games development has always been a volatile industry with endless casualties along the way, the NeoGAF link with the list of developers who went under during that period is mild when you compare to the bedlam of the 80s and 90s. Putting the blame on powerful new hardware is putting the the cart before the horse.

Just posting a few quotes here.

Q: Where do you think costs need to be stemmed?

Mark Cerny: I was talking about the actual product cost. There has been a number of highly-publicised titles that have cost $70-80 million. It is rather hard to spend that money in an efficient fashion. What typically happens when you're up in that budget range is that you are not quite sure what sort of game you're making. And so you have a seven year development period, and it changes, and your burn rate is very high because you have a large team. Those budgets can come down much more easily because there's a high degree of inefficiency built into them.

Something like God of War III is a bit trickier because that has been revealed to have cost in the neighbourhood of $40 million by the director of the studio, and to try and take something like that and reduce it is very, very tricky. It's an epic experience, it's already only a single player experience. Presumably, we see how everything is growing, these experiences grow broader in the future.

It could also be that for the top couple of games you don't have the same imperative as you do for other games. If you came out of your big budget game with $100 million profit you're probably fine in a softening market. The question is a bit more critical if you've just broken even with your costly title.

"We've had ten years where every year that went by the industry got bigger and more successful. But the natural growth has now gone. In fact, now that we're in decline if you want to add a person to your team to make the local industry economics add up, someone else has to layoff something like a person and a half.

"And there aren't many of these high budget games. Last year there were only about 50 or 60 games that sold over a million units - that's multiplatform and international. And only half only sold two million. Of course if you spend over $20 million you want to sell a million units. And if you spend over $50 million you want something well north of two million unit sales."

"It's really not healthy at the moment," Sundberg said when asked to give his assessment of the AAA business today. "Games have evolved, technology has evolved but as businesses we're still stuck where we were 15 years ago. As budgets grow, risks increase."

"The publishers are nervous because they have to project a game being a massive hit three years into the future and the developers are frustrated because they need to be flexible to every move the publishers make," Sundberg said. "It's impossible to make everyone happy in the current equation."

"Very few traditional $60 games make any money, and what used to make sense doesn't any more," he said. "Publishers and developers very rarely see a return of investment from a 5-8 hour long game."

In film, the difference between AAA and everything else is largely in the abundance or lack of computer graphics, explosions and other graphical effects that cost a great deal of money to create. So-called "B" movies may have fewer well-known stars, but are typically just as well produced and look similar to AAA films, minus the dinosaurs and rocket ships. In games, it's all computer graphics. The general consumer metric of quality is the pinnacle of graphical technology, which in games represents 100% of what is seen on the screen, as opposed to film, in which that percentage is much, much smaller.

The rising competition to mainstream, AAA games from the mobile and social sectors is creating a market for "B" level games entirely outside of the scope of traditional development. EA and Ubisoft are investing heavily in this sector for the express purpose of getting a foot in the door of what they believe will be the next big audience, but for core gamers un-interested in this market, the choices are slim. In video game development, there is nowhere to save money without sacrificing quality. "B" games look, to the consumer, like bad games. There is no market for "straight to DVD" or "second run theater" titles. There is no "made for TV." In games, If it isn't AAA, it's bargain bin. There is no middle ground.

This is why Ubisoft, which is concentrating heavily on the low-end market with Wii games and games designed for children and families, is pulling in revenues higher than Activision, which is focused almost exclusively on AAA development. This is why the iPhone, for which games are sold for under $10 and cost merely hundreds of thousands to develop, is currently the most popular gaming platform. This is why the MMO industry, which a half-decade ago employed close to a million game developers, is now shifting to a "free-to-play" model, where consumers pay only for premium extras, at a few dollars a piece.

This is also why the AAA developers are also looking at premium or "freemium" models, in which consumers may still pay for a game off the shelf, but will also continue to pay the more they play. If you think Call of Duty Elite and EA's online pass programs are a flash in the pan, think again. The next generation of consoles (and the one after that) will rely heavily on online distribution, and once that happens, the control of the market will shift from retailers to console makers, and then directly to publishers.

Okay, so let's say for the moment that it isn't Microsoft or Sony's fault for providing more powerful consoles. The causation is somewhere here, currently, we do not have buying a US$60 game as a norm because now its, US$60 for a game, plus pre-order dlc, plus US$40 season passes, plus microtransactions (Oh, and let's not forget that before the HD Transition, that games use to cost US$50). The fact that these are occurring is evident from the quotes above how some games don't even break even because of what has become of the gaming industry. Most of the big budget games, have an even bigger budget set for marketing because the publishers can't even take a risk on games any more. It's why we have yearly titles of Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed,  <Insert Big Budget FPS from EA here  - Titanfall, Battlefront, Battlefield, etc>.

There are even less AAA games being made each year because of the above mentioned, less and less risks are being made hence there is less of a variety of games and the mainstream consumer would only notice the big-AAA game because of the multi-million dollar marketing behind it.

Okay, I may have made a mistake. Maybe the causation isn't with the transition in HD game development, rather the causation for all the problems mentioned above with the gaming industry is because of AAA-Publishers. Surely you can at least think that that isn't a stretch because

Games development has always been a volatile industry with endless casualties along the way, the NeoGAF link with the list of developers who went under during that period is mild when you compare to the bedlam of the 80s and 90s. Putting the blame on powerful new hardware is putting the the cart before the horse.

the average video game budget just for developing (not market or licensing) a game http://kotaku.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-big-video-game-1501413649 wasn't that high in the 80s/90s compared to the last 15 years.

Notes:
"Cerny: Blockbuster game economics no longer make sense" - http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2011-02-11-cerny-blockbuster-game-economics-no-longer-make-sense
"Mark Cerny Interview" - http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2011-02-16-mark-cerny-interview
"Just Cause developer says AAA game development unhealthy, unprofitable" - http://www.gamespot.com/articles/just-cause-developer-says-aaa-game-development-unhealthy-unprofitable/1100-6417519/
"Capcom developer: next-gen games take 8-10 times more work to develop" - http://www.gamespot.com/articles/capcom-developer-next-gen-games-take-8-10-times-more-work-to-develop/1100-6417090/
"THE STATE OF GAMES: STATE OF AAA" - http://www.polygon.com/2012/10/1/3439738/the-state-of-games-state-of-aaa

You also seem to be down on the 360/PS3, but both have plenty of great games that aren't your typical big-budget CoD/Gears of War/grimdark shooter of the month, and made by smaller dev houses. The PS3 in particular had some wonderfully unique Japanese games, the 360's Live Arcade section had some real gems and their Xbox Live Indie Games program (which allowed anyone to create and publish games on their platform, curated by the community rather than Microsoft - pretty remarkable for the day) also produced some surprisingly solid, innovative games that you couldn't get anywhere else (and it was still running last I checked, all these years later). With respect, saying it was all graphics, graphics, graphics on those systems is just wrong.

I have both 360/PS3 and over 30 games on each system. Of course there are smaller budget games on those systems however, you are forgetting that I linked the correlation between "GRAPHICS!" with AAA-Budget games from Ubisoft/Activision/EA.
Of course Xbox Live Arcade, or other indie titles were successful on 360/PS3, because the games didn't cost US$60 to buy. If a mainstream consumer looked at a game that they were interested in but had crap "graphics" and found out it cost $60, they would be less likely to buy it and look for something else.

Look at the state of the indie developer now where they have to keep justifying the price they want to set because gamers don't feel like paying $20 for an indie game. -> "Brigador dev responds to question about pricing" - http://neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1189004
Or for another example, the backlash against The Witness being US$40 over a game that was in development for apparently 7 years and cost US$6 million http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/02/witness-40-experiment-worked-creator-reports-5-million-first-week-revenue/

Keep in mind, it was probably an A-budget indie game, not AAA-budget, because I doubt Jonathon Blow had money to spend on marketing and advertisements to sell his game when I remember hearing they spent all the money they had to make The Witness.

That program was what I was meant, not ROM hacks. There are people are providing free, potent advertising for your games to literally millions of viewers, and you want to piss off these video creators by forcing them to mess around signing up to some scheme of yours dictating which games they can and cannot advertise for you, and then demand a cut of their ad revenue? The community blowback should've been obvious, it's just such an Old Business way of thinking about things. Times have changed, the dynamic of power has shifted, and it's worryingly myopic of them not to have noticed.

I've read someone argue this before but, it should be called "free exposure" because watching a video of someone playing a game (Generally a Let's Play) is not exactly an advertisement, just like watching a video game review is not an advertisement. The funny thing is both those things I said are similar that you may end up purchasing the product or not based on what you think of the 2nd-hand source. (If it was called advertising, then technically we would have had court cases where YouTube celebrities would be suing for money because they can claim they should be paid for their "Free Advertising", this is where any people who are actually lawyers related to Business and Copyright could chime in.)

It's too bad I've forgotten where I saw this from but, AAA-Publishers don't need "free exposure" for people to buy their games because they already invested the money in marketing the product. It can have an affect but, it is usually minor (for the outcome of products sold) because people would have already been exposed to the product before via the AAA-Publishers marketing. Compared to indie developers, it can be a god-send having free-exposure from a YouTube celebrity because indie developers don't usually have the money to market their own games.

This can easily be seen from Mobile Phone games, you don't need a YouTube celebrity to play Clash of Clans or Candy Crush Saga to get people to play the games because it is insane how I've seen ads everywhere for them. Whereas something like "controversy" over paying $2 for a mobile phone game could cause a game to get more exposure because people have been conditioned into only playing free-to-play games. (Oh, I said that word again 'conditioned', it must be very important.)
Note: "Revered iOS game Monument Valley "bombarded" with 1 star reviews after paid expansion" - http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=932338

Anyway, from what I remember reading this argument before. If YouTube celebrities decided to sue Nintendo or other companies to get money for their free advertising, they probably wouldn't have a chance of winning because they do not own the IP. Then apparently, things would get worse because it sets a law precedent which would allow any publisher to set up similar programs to make money off of YouTube creators, hell even YouTube creators could have it worse by having to pay to license the games to be able to make money.
You can get mad about it, but that is the difference between YouTube creators and corporations, legal teams.

-----
I've read the rest with the add-ons, I've got nothing to argue there.
-----

Edit: I should note that there have been problems with YouTube and Fair Use at the moment which have definitely been going on for a while, this video has an explanation and its 20 minutes long but, I don't have the time right now to double check if the uploader has stated anything that could be misleading.  "Where's The Fair Use? - Nostalgia Critic" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVqFAMOtwaI

[Alc]

let's say for the moment that it isn't Microsoft or Sony's fault for providing more powerful consoles.

To clarify what you're suggesting here -that videogame consoles could all have halted in processing power to some arbitrary point in the early 2000s, along with the Wii- as a thought experiment, what do you think would've happened? The development of computer hardware would have marched on. Do you think we'd be anywhere different, now? Would it make any difference if it was Valve, Apple, or Atari, or whoever else pushing game budgets up and inadvertently making publishers risk-averse instead?

Maybe the causation isn't with the transition in HD game development, rather the causation for all the problems mentioned above with the gaming industry is because of AAA-Publishers.

You can't point the finger of blame solely at any one party (consumer, developer, publisher); you are looking for a culprit when you should be looking for a reason. It boils down to teething issues with a nascent, rapidly evolving industry that is figuring out how to create content, at varying degrees of scope, that's popular and profitable at the same time. There will continue to be shakeouts, businesses big and small that cannot find a way to profit, which will no doubt be painful for those involved (as the comments from developers in the articles you linked show).

You might want to blame the publishers, but they're the ones who bankroll the whole thing. Of course they are cautious; you'd be cautious too if it was your hundred million dollars on the line. Hell, if I was a publisher, I'd publish fuck all but Madden, because I like having money more than not having it. I'm only half kidding here. I'm just quietly appreciative whenever a big new IP gets the green light, even if it's not my kind of game.

And even if you ignore the increase in development costs - as you mentioned

the average video game budget just for developing (not market or licensing) a game http://kotaku.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-big-video-game-1501413649 wasn't that high in the 80s/90s compared to the last 15 years.

Yet developers were still going under every month. A volatile industry has a lot of casualties. So it goes.

let's not forget that before the HD Transition, that games use to cost US$50

Ha! Forgive me for grumbling away here, but I remember the days of $90 N64 games being something the Nintendo crowd just had to swallow as standard. I remember in the UK, Virtua Racing for the Megadrive costing £90, and Street Fighter 2 costing £60, and this was in the early 90s - adjust up for inflation, and those games cost multiples of what an equivalently high-profile game costs me new from a supermarket today. Here's an Ars article on the topic that's worth a read if you want to know more about why.

I've read someone argue this before but, it should be called "free exposure"

I'm happy to call it free exposure. It remains counter-productive to actively curtail it in that fashion. Pissing off your biggest fans has rarely been a solid business decision.

Anyway, from what I remember reading this argument before. If YouTube celebrities decided to sue Nintendo or other companies to get money for their free advertising, they probably wouldn't have a chance of winning because they do not own the IP.

Yeah, I doubt it's legally murky. Nintendo own the IP and they can issue takedown requests and they'll get them every time. Doesn't make it a good idea!

This can easily be seen from Mobile Phone games, you don't need a YouTube celebrity to play Clash of Clans or Candy Crush Saga to get people to play the games

No, you just need to build the Skinner box and paint it the right colours. And get very, very lucky. For every Clash of Clans/Candy Crush there are untold thousands of others who could just as easily have hit that point of the network effect, the critical mass, but who weren't quite in the right place at the right time with the right product. On that note, the tides of console gaming may be fickle and volatile, but man, mobile is so much worse. The metrics and logistics of those marketplaces are some of the most depressing you'll ever come across in gaming; so much development effort expended by so many most of which goes completely ignored, the race to the bottom in pricing that practically mandates predatory monetisation schemes (pay-to-win, "catching whales", etc), endless derivative regurgitations of the same tired game designs... oh well.

I've read the rest with the add-ons, I've got nothing to argue there.

Likewise.

[sol-alpha]

To clarify what you're suggesting here -that videogame consoles could all have halted in processing power to some arbitrary point in the early 2000s, along with the Wii- as a thought experiment, what do you think would've happened? The development of computer hardware would have marched on. Do you think we'd be anywhere different, now? Would it make any difference if it was Valve, Apple, or Atari, or whoever else pushing game budgets up and inadvertently making publishers risk-averse instead?

No, I was just saying if it's not the platform holders. Then what is the cause of all these studios that closed down since 2006. It was to see if there was an underlying cause.

You can't point the finger of blame solely at any one party (consumer, developer, publisher); you are looking for a culprit when you should be looking for a reason. It boils down to teething issues with a nascent, rapidly evolving industry that is figuring out how to create content, at varying degrees of scope, that's popular and profitable at the same time. There will continue to be shakeouts, businesses big and small that cannot find a way to profit, which will no doubt be painful for those involved (as the comments from developers in the articles you linked show).

There was someone knowledgeable about this whom I think said that the gaming industry in the 80s/90s were more like the wild west (assuming it meant that success was unpredictable) but now, the western AAA-Publishers especially EA/Ubisoft/Activision have the 14-35 year old male demographic locked down. So they know what they need to sell to this demographic except the problem is that demographic isn't growing, it's going to start becoming a niche like comics. If the userbase doesn't grow, and they keep making more and increasingly expensive AAA games with rising development costs over the years, its going to be worse compared to where we are right now with having to take more money out of those consumers with season passes and microtransactions.

You might want to blame the publishers, but they're the ones who bankroll the whole thing. Of course they are cautious; you'd be cautious too if it was your hundred million dollars on the line. Hell, if I was a publisher, I'd publish fuck all but Madden, because I like having money more than not having it. I'm only half kidding here. I'm just quietly appreciative whenever a big new IP gets the green light, even if it's not my kind of game.

I don't know if I would link being cautious with spending a hundred million dollars on a game/marketing that could make a publisher sink or swim.  Being cautious definitely means being risk-averse, and for these western-AAA publishers, they are risk-averse with making new IP because they can't expect that the game can deliver hence they spend millions on marketing because that's what they bank on to make the money. They push pre-orders because they want retailers to order as many copies of a game as possible, they push season passes because the margin they make out of every physical copy sold after accounting for shipping, retailer and licensing fees is not enough even if they make 2 million in sales, and now because of influence from mobile phone games, microtransactions are just another method put in to get more money out of the consumer.

Of course there can be good DLC/Season passes however that isn't always the case and the consumer is usually the one taking a risk on season passes because they don't usually detail what you'll get for paying almost as much as you bought for the game and I heard people were pretty peeved about say the Arkham Knight Season pass being lacking in content.

Oh and I should point out that I think even these publishers know they can't keep sustaining this model to keep showing to their investors their profit margins hence why EA went into mobile phone gaming and I'm assuming it hasn't been finalised yet but, Activision-Blizzard are buying out King (The company known for Candy Crush Saga).

Anyway, I guess I can't prove anything with what I was saying with regards to those studios closing down since 2006, where some of them closed down by their publisher for just even having one game failed because said publisher could no longer see a return on investment. I'm starting to remember how THQ screwed up badly by trying to bank their success on UDraw and we all know how that ended, and recently with MadCatz failing hard with Rock Band that their CEO and Chairman resigned before their investors meeting for the financial quarter.

The problem I was having with Publishers like EA/Ubisoft/Activision is how I mentioned most games are sold now and that they pretty much have a monopoly on the market that there isn't any 3rd party publisher that can compete with them and make things cheaper while still having the quality of a AAA-title and, AAA games already get assets outsourced from developing countries, so the western publishers are already trying to make development cheaper just like with all the Ubisoft development studios in Canada because they receive benefits from the government.

I don't see indies having a shot either by becoming bigger because consumers now would rather wait for indie games to get cheap to buy rather than buy it at $20. Even if they did become big like say Mojang, they still need to get people to expand the business instead of just having staff in games development otherwise they would just end up being bought out by Microsoft, etc.

So we either wait to see the AAA-Publishers crash, although that's unlikely to happen. Even though there have been gamers complaining about broken games at launch, it still hasn't made a difference in product sales outcomes.
Or someone can disrupt the current AAA-market model and even that is unlikely to happen.

Ha! Forgive me for grumbling away here, but I remember the days of $90 N64 games being something the Nintendo crowd just had to swallow as standard. I remember in the UK, Virtua Racing for the Megadrive costing £90, and Street Fighter 2 costing £60, and this was in the early 90s - adjust up for inflation, and those games cost multiples of what an equivalently high-profile game costs me new from a supermarket today.

Yes, I should have specified the generation before the HD transition because of the high costs of ROM cartridges compared to CDs/DVDs before the HD transition.
I imagine one of the reasons that standard physical game copies today haven't gone higher than $60 to match closely with past prices that were adjusted for inflation is because the market is bigger now than what it was in the 80s/90s hence having more consumers to sell to.

[sol-alpha]

Keeping on-topic with the thread I just heard about this. "Oculus teasing a VR card battle game" - http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1189916
Palmer Luckey is teasing a VR Card Battle by mentioning if anyone remembered the Virtual World in Yu-Gi-Oh! and part of me just went "Nooooo!" Because I wanted Yu-Gi-Oh! (or any other card game) with AR using holographic projection.
Oh well, if they can recreate this scene in VR where I can play it I'd love it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9NBvsmQ2Ik

[sol-alpha]

Sorry for the bump although this is for what's new in the world of VR and AR.

VR-related:

This is pretty good. Leap Motion: Orion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnlCGw-0R8g&feature=youtu.be

I know Leap Motion have made a few things with their hand gesture technology and this one involving VR is pretty neat and I wouldn't be surprised if this could also be applied in AR too.

AR-related:

This is the equivalent of DmC reboot Dante but with Conker. Microsoft HoloLens: Young Conker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQeOYi3Be5Y&feature=youtu.be (Oh, don't forget to look at the number of likes/dislikes on the video)
This was Chris Seavor's repsonse seeing that trailer for the first time. https://vine.co/v/igOYKHMYTg2
Chris Seavor is the voice actor of Conker and he didn't even know they were using that as the character model, he was also the director for Conker's Bad Fur Day on Nintendo 64.

I seriously don't understand why Microsoft even bought Rare in the first place. Sure, Rare had success with the Kinect games and that's about it. The Killer Instinct game for Xbox One/Windows 10 wasn't even developed by Rare, Microsoft killed off any future Perfect Dark games because they didn't want it competing with Halo and, I'm curious to see what is going to become more successful, that Pirate-themed MMO game Rare is developing, or the spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie "Yooka-Laylee" from former Rare staff that was kickstarted.

Microsoft HoloLens: Skype https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QiGYtd3qNI
This seems okay, it seems like they are trying too hard to make a communication program seem amazing on hololens.

Microsoft HoloLens: HoloStudio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRIJG0x_We8
This seems pretty neat. Mainly because you have the option of 3D printing your design.

Microsoft HoloLens: Fragments https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6Wndguve8U
Ehh, the game needs to have a compelling story and characters for this to be good. If this was made using the Zero Escape series, I'd definitely be interested.

Microsoft HoloLens: Mixed Reality Blends Holograms with the Real World https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ic_M6WoRZ7k
This seems to be a general advertisement for the product. It's just a little disappointing notice how the field-of-view at the moment is the equivalent of having tunnel vision. This is why I prefer holographic screens/projection at the moment because they don't require a room full of people to have a head-set on to see the same thing but, we are obviously still far from having such a technology being available for the consumer.

[Alc]

No, I was just saying if it's not the platform holders. Then what is the cause of all these studios that closed down since 2006. It was to see if there was an underlying cause.

One underlying cause that we haven't discussed is that many of them were attempting to make games that could compete with games made by dev houses with bigger pockets, which isn't really a stellar plan and probably came from incompetent management ("make one of those GTA games, they're popular") rather than the developers themselves. Some smaller devs succeeded in carving out their niche (like From with their Souls franchise, as we've discussed elsewhere here) whilst still seeing respectable sales figures, others... didn't. Especially with the less well-known, and less well-funded developers, one dud can spell death. Making big games is hard, risky, and expensive.

There was someone knowledgeable about this whom I think said that the gaming industry in the 80s/90s were more like the wild west (assuming it meant that success was unpredictable) but now, the western AAA-Publishers especially EA/Ubisoft/Activision have the 14-35 year old male demographic locked down. So they know what they need to sell to this demographic except the problem is that demographic isn't growing, it's going to start becoming a niche like comics.

I find that kind of hard to swallow when you look at the list of the best-selling games ever - Minecraft is way up there, and the kids today can't get enough of that shit. I think it's fantastic, because those kids are going to grow up not just demanding games that provide them with great experiences, but also games that allow them to create their own great experiences.

This gross over-targeting of the teen/adult white male "core gamer" is a passing phase and I for one am happy about that. Games that may not appeal to that demographic - Everybody's Gone to the Rapture; That Dragon, Cancer; The Stanley Parable/The Beginner's Guide; Her Story; Life is Weird; whether you like these games or not, their existence (and popularity) show that the medium is diversifying and that not everything has to conform to the generally narrow appetite of that one group. Granted, there has been/will continue to be some kicking and screaming along the way from certain quarters, as a minority of today's self-identified "gamers" become accustomed to the fact that they're not the only ones who deserve to enjoy the medium, but again: teething pains. This will pass. Sooner or later the publishers are going to figure out how to monetise the absurdly under-represented "everyone else" market - these people have money and are willing to part with it for games that appeal to them. Game developers are predominantly young, white and male, which does regrettably tend to skew game design somewhat, so this is a process that might take a while longer yet.

If the userbase doesn't grow, and they keep making more and increasingly expensive AAA games with rising development costs over the years, its going to be worse compared to where we are right now with having to take more money out of those consumers with season passes and microtransactions.

I rather suspect it'll become more like Hollywood; there'll be a number of truly high-profile blockbusters each year, and a whole milieu of games smaller in scope that cater to more niche audiences who know what they want - the gaming equivalents of romcoms, biopics, horror movies etc etc. We're remarkably close to this already.

I don't know what role microtransactions will play in the future but given the attach rate on mobile (~3%) I doubt they'll make meaningful inroads into long-form gaming - at least, not any more than they already have, in the guise of optional DLC purchases (horse armour and so on). People hate "pay to win", and are especially insulted by it on games they've already paid good money for; it's just not good business sense to build that into an essential component of your $60 story-driven game.

Of course there can be good DLC/Season passes however that isn't always the case and the consumer is usually the one taking a risk on season passes because they don't usually detail what you'll get for paying almost as much as you bought for the game and I heard people were pretty peeved about say the Arkham Knight Season pass being lacking in content.

Caveat emptor, man. But really, in the end the publisher/dev who fail to deliver on customer expectations are the ones who suffer, because they lose consumer faith. I've had pretty good experiences with DLC over the years, but then I check it out before I buy it. I've never bought a season pass, and it's a very rare thing for me to preorder a game, because the potential pitfalls are too obvious. You make the game/content, and if it's good I'll buy it. So far this has served me pretty well.

Oh and I should point out that I think even these publishers know they can't keep sustaining this model to keep showing to their investors their profit margins hence why EA went into mobile phone gaming and I'm assuming it hasn't been finalised yet but, Activision-Blizzard are buying out King (The company known for Candy Crush Saga).

Yeah, everyone's scrabbling for a piece of the mobile pie (it has been especially disheartening to watch Konami lurching toward mobile so hard these last few years). I can see the allure - a potential install base of billions of customers, rather than millions - but I've made my feelings on the dire state of mobile known already, so I won't repeat myself.

I don't see indies having a shot either by becoming bigger because consumers now would rather wait for indie games to get cheap to buy rather than buy it at $20. Even if they did become big like say Mojang, they still need to get people to expand the business instead of just having staff in games development otherwise they would just end up being bought out by Microsoft, etc.

Natural company growth isn't a bad thing. Most of the big publishers today started off as small companies with noble intentions, EA especially - their history is fascinating if you've not looked into it.

Even though there have been gamers complaining about broken games at launch, it still hasn't made a difference in product sales outcomes.

Last year Steam started offering refunds on games, and by all accounts it stung the publisher of Arkham Knight pretty fucking hard when the refunds started coming in in droves. This is good business practice: it's obviously good for the consumer, but it also provides a powerful incentive for the developer to do things right. I want to see this elsewhere in the games industry, it's just obviously The Right Thing.

Before getting onto VR/AR, I just want to return to a previous topic in light of this last week's news - I couldn't help shaking my head at the comments made by Microsoft's Phil Spencer about the potential of releasing new hardware for the XB1. Current units are obviously not upgradable, so he's talking about an entirely new SKU. I'm sure developers are going to love having two hardware targets for their games - essentially having to make two ports of the same game instead of just one (and this now that they're finally starting to get away from the 360). Customers are going to be thrilled, forking out for biennial hardware upgrades for what amounts to a walled-garden, gimped PC! I mean, what's not to love? Sigh...

Young Conker

Judging by the comments section most people are just pissed that they're using the Conker name for something that's clearly nothing to do with BFD, and that's absolutely fair - that game has an absolutely rabid fanbase and shoehorning their character into something so toylike is just dumb, so I'm not surprised it got downvoted so hard. Poor character choice aside, I thought it looked interesting - I'd like to have a play, anyway.

I seriously don't understand why Microsoft even bought Rare in the first place.

Rare kept Nintendo alive in the N64 era, and they made the SNES thrive in its later days, way beyond anyone's expectation with the Donkey Kong Country games. What I don't understand is how Microsoft have managed to fuck up Rare's output so badly. They went from defining console platforms, to making barely anything of note since the acquisition - a decade and a half now. Congratulations, that must have taken some really impressive mismanagement.

Leap Motion is the kind of thing where I'll wait and see, I'm a bit cynical and suspect the tracking is not as responsive/accurate as the video implies. I feel the same way about the more ambitious Hololens productivity stuff, creating your own 3D shapes etc - so much of this is reliant on excellent, intuitive and wholly original UI/UX, it's impossible for me to watch these videos and come away with anything other than scepticism. Nobody ever gets a novel interface right the first time.

I have similar reservations about Fragments. It's going to have to do accurate real-time speech recognition, which is really just the start of a much bigger computer science problem - it's going to have to process and understand what you're saying, and integrate that across to the game world. That's a massive AI challenge, so again, consider me a sceptic. I like the general idea, though.

Palmer Luckey is teasing a VR Card Battle by mentioning if anyone remembered the Virtual World in Yu-Gi-Oh! and part of me just went "Nooooo!" Because I wanted Yu-Gi-Oh! (or any other card game) with AR using holographic projection.

Did you ever hear of Eye of Judgement for the PS3? I picked it up cheap a year or so ago, it had some major technical issues and the card game itself was pretty bad but I had to give them credit for the idea. Got rid of it pretty quickly, though...

[sol-alpha]

I find that kind of hard to swallow when you look at the list of the best-selling games ever - Minecraft is way up there, and the kids today can't get enough of that shit. I think it's fantastic, because those kids are going to grow up not just demanding games that provide them with great experiences, but also games that allow them to create their own great experiences.

Okay but, you can see I was talking about the 14-35 male demographic with reference to the publishers mentioned, while Minecraft is as you said popular with kids and is an outlier for an extremely successful game that doesn't have much in common with what those publishers mentioned mainly produce. There have also been clones of Minecraft but they haven't been as successful as Mojang's, far from it.

This gross over-targeting of the teen/adult white male "core gamer" is a passing phase and I for one am happy about that.

I don't see it as a passing phase since the publishers mentioned are constantly relying on that demographic, as long as Sony and Microsoft are around, they will keep using that demographic because that audience on their consoles mainly buy those games.

Games that may not appeal to that demographic - Everybody's Gone to the Rapture; That Dragon, Cancer; The Stanley Parable/The Beginner's Guide; Her Story; Life is Weird; whether you like these games or not, their existence (and popularity) show that the medium is diversifying and that not everything has to conform to the generally narrow appetite of that one group.

Not sure if you were specifically asking me, I haven't play any of those games listed. I would have played Her Story in December but I mentioned in another thread having to refund most of the games bought on steam to be able to buy the umihara kawase games when they were delisted off of 3rd party sellers - playism, gmg etc.

Since you're listing indie games the only recent one I remember playing was Undertale and if I had money I would get Stardew Valley since that seems to be labelled as the game that is better than Harvest Moon.

Also, I had backed a crowdfunding project for a game inspired by a niche JRPG and Metroid https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/indivisible-rpg-from-the-creators-of-skullgirls#/ where it's been mentioned that this kind of game wouldn't get funded by most publishers based on the fact that the majority of the characters are not white. (It's hard for me to find the quote from this 120 page thread http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1120466 where the member Ravidrath whom is with Lab Zero Games recounted how they were shopping around for publishers to help fund the game and mentioning how one publisher suggested that the main character should be white. Again, I can't remember the exact quote but, it sounded bad that someone photoshopped the main character Ajna to look like a white blonde-haired girl with blue eyes as a joke.)

Granted, there has been/will continue to be some kicking and screaming along the way from certain quarters, as a minority of today's self-identified "gamers" become accustomed to the fact that they're not the only ones who deserve to enjoy the medium, but again: teething pains. This will pass. Sooner or later the publishers are going to figure out how to monetise the absurdly under-represented "everyone else" market - these people have money and are willing to part with it for games that appeal to them. Game developers are predominantly young, white and male, which does regrettably tend to skew game design somewhat, so this is a process that might take a while longer yet.

The only publisher that has been doing that is Ubisoft since the Nintendo Wii with Just Dance and there isn't much ground that has been made unless you can sell stuff that is licensed like the Lego video games.
Plus, I did mention Ubisoft before in the beginning of the thread. -->

This is why Ubisoft, which is concentrating heavily on the low-end market with Wii games and games designed for children and families, is pulling in revenues higher than Activision, which is focused almost exclusively on AAA development. This is why the iPhone, for which games are sold for under $10 and cost merely hundreds of thousands to develop, is currently the most popular gaming platform. This is why the MMO industry, which a half-decade ago employed close to a million game developers, is now shifting to a "free-to-play" model, where consumers pay only for premium extras, at a few dollars a piece.

----

I've never bought a season pass, and it's a very rare thing for me to preorder a game, because the potential pitfalls are too obvious. You make the game/content, and if it's good I'll buy it. So far this has served me pretty well.

I pre-order, when it's usually a week out from release. By then, I'll know if I want the game from game footage and impressions. I can't follow reviews because some game journalists are really horrible at playing games so I can't take their word if they're terrible at The Wonderful 101 or Monster Hunter. Why I pre-order a week from release is because A) I am importing the game since it's cheaper, B) To make sure I get the game on release or C) Getting it locally on release because it is as cheap as importing which is the only best time to buy otherwise I have to wait 6 months+ since I don't have the convenience like in the US how people can wait 2 weeks minimum for a game to drop in price.

I read threads for people from the US that claim Nintendo keeps undershipping their games which is ridiculous because I am sure that they would like to ship as many copies as possible however considering how they have forecasts to meet on software sales however, these people that complain are the ones that didn't take a pre-order, so one example was Bayonetta 2 being out of stock quickly because I would hear that some store only stocked like 2 copies of the game aside from the pre-orders at Gamestop. This is why there's always hundreds of copies of COD and only a few copies of some niche game because pre-orders make the difference for what corporate orders and from what I heard, Nintendo doesn't allow unsold stock returns or whatever other insurance for retailers to get money back. Hence why it becomes an inventory risk for the likes of Gamestop. This leads to hearing how people still spot Sin & Punishment 2 and Metroid: Other M at Best Buy or maybe it was Wal-mart 6 years later because those games haven't sold and can't be cleared unless the retailer is willing to take a loss.

Edit: Off-topic: Now I am a little peeved about missing out a chance to pre-order the Fire Emblem Fates Special edition that comes with all 3 campaigns in one cartridge. For where I live, pre-orders opened up back in November(?) when Nintendo confirmed the release date and what versions of Fire Emblem Fates are available in the US but, those games/versions were not confirmed for Europe/Aus with regards to versions/release date. However, EB Games which is owned by Gamestop decided to open up pre-orders with a ridiculous placeholder price back in November and I wasn't certain if I had to pay the whole price online before any confirmation of things. Fast forward to March with the recent Nintendo Direct confirming things for Fire Emblem Fates in Europe/Aus with regards to the normal versions and the special edition and it turns out I am too late to pre-order the special edition. Retailers closed off any chance for pre-orders because they did this stuff 4 months too early. So now I have to wait and see if Nintendo will confirm another wave of pre-orders available for the special edition otherwise I have to end up buying one normal version and download the rest when I wanted the convenience of having all games on one cartridge. Plus, it is suggested not to own both Conquest/Birthright as separate physical copies because some data doesn't get shared which is possibly minor, not too sure.

Most of the big publishers today started off as small companies with noble intentions, EA especially - their history is fascinating if you've not looked into it.

That would have to wait for another time, I had already seen two documentaries for Ocean Software and Nintendo/Sega Video game rentals (war?) in the US recently and I am busy with a few things which is why I shouldn't have stopped now to post.

Last year Steam started offering refunds on games, and by all accounts it stung the publisher of Arkham Knight pretty fucking hard when the refunds started coming in in droves. This is good business practice: it's obviously good for the consumer, but it also provides a powerful incentive for the developer to do things right. I want to see this elsewhere in the games industry, it's just obviously The Right Thing.

Anecdotally, I kept seeing people post that they ended up buying Arkham Knight on PS4 after refunding it on steam. Since Arkham Knight wasn't broken on consoles, they would have suffered heavy losses if it was. Considering the difference is that Warner Bros. has to pay shipping and other fees to retailers for physical copies whereas on Steam they only lost money on sales.

The other problem is, you're only highlighting people who had the game refunded on steam. It's so much easier to get that data because it's available publicly. However for games that are sold in retailers, we don't have the convenience of access to NPD for finding any games that were refunded.

Edit: To expand on what I was saying, it wouldn't matter seeing if the console versions were refunded or not since the game wasn't broken on consoles. However, one example is Assassins's Creed Unity was a broken game at launch on consoles, so we if we had NPD figures for what refunds were recorded that would help. However, we also don't know if people would have just traded the game into Gamestop for them to resell second hand copies. Also, I don't know if Microsoft/Sony allowed refunds for that game if it was bought digitally.

I couldn't help shaking my head at the comments made by Microsoft's Phil Spencer about the potential of releasing new hardware for the XB1. Current units are obviously not upgradable, so he's talking about an entirely new SKU. I'm sure developers are going to love having two hardware targets for their games - essentially having to make two ports of the same game instead of just one (and this now that they're finally starting to get away from the 360). Customers are going to be thrilled, forking out for biennial hardware upgrades for what amounts to a walled-garden, gimped PC! I mean, what's not to love? Sigh...

You do know that Nintendo are going to do that with the NX? It's been hinted at for a long time with regards to trying to follow Android/iOS with regards to keeping software more easily backward and forwards compatible(?) due to trying to keep the architecture as similar as possible like the SoCs that Apple use with PowerVR etc. I don't know how often the incremental upgrades would be, it could be the same as all their portable hardware and consoles have been.

Edit: For anyone that isn't aware, this is what Satoru Iwata had spoke of years ago with how bad things went with the Wii U and 3DS that they couldn't keep resetting the install base to zero everytime a new consoles launches, so they want to move away from tying videos game to consoles and instead have an account based approach like Android/iOS so that say if you have the NX 1 and 3 years later the NX 2 comes out, you could still play games on the NX 1 until developers stop supporting the old version due to newer versions iterating. So say by NX 3 or 4, you'd have to upgrade however, enough years for a console cycle should have passed by then for you to afford to upgrade.

Judging by the comments section most people are just pissed that they're using the Conker name for something that's clearly nothing to do with BFD, and that's absolutely fair - that game has an absolutely rabid fanbase and shoehorning their character into something so toylike is just dumb, so I'm not surprised it got downvoted so hard. Poor character choice aside, I thought it looked interesting - I'd like to have a play, anyway.

Yes, the game looked interesting aside from Conker.

Leap Motion is the kind of thing where I'll wait and see, I'm a bit cynical and suspect the tracking is not as responsive/accurate as the video implies. I feel the same way about the more ambitious Hololens productivity stuff, creating your own 3D shapes etc - so much of this is reliant on excellent, intuitive and wholly original UI/UX, it's impossible for me to watch these videos and come away with anything other than scepticism. Nobody ever gets a novel interface right the first time.

They've been doing this for years so I don't know how far along their tech has come with regards to latency. Yes, I have heard one person say it was jarring when something didn't register while using that VR Tech Demo.

Below are demonstrations of the product rather than the trailer from earlier.

Blocks Playthrough - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ_53T2jBGg
Orion: Pinch Draw Module - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LVVpl9tCNE

Did you ever hear of Eye of Judgement for the PS3? I picked it up cheap a year or so ago, it had some major technical issues and the card game itself was pretty bad but I had to give them credit for the idea. Got rid of it pretty quickly, though...

I know of it, never played it. Definitely saw people bring that up in response to the tease.

Edit: Edited my post with a few new things.

[Alc]

This gross over-targeting of the teen/adult white male "core gamer" is a passing phase and I for one am happy about that.

I don't see it as a passing phase since the publishers mentioned are constantly relying on that demographic, as long as Sony and Microsoft are around, they will keep using that demographic because that audience on their consoles mainly buy those games.

They'll learn to appeal to broader demographic, or someone else will. I don't particularly care which, as long as the resulting games are different and interesting, and aren't just Clash of Clans/Candy Crush clones. Maybe I'm being too optimistic.

Not sure if you were specifically asking me, I haven't play any of those games listed.

You in the 18-35 male gamer demographic?

I'm just teasing, but they are interesting games that deviate quite a bit from the norm. I find that encouraging. Check them out if you get a chance.

Since you're listing indie games the only recent one I remember playing was Undertale

I was kind of underwhelmed with that game (except for the ending, which was novel and well executed), but then I never did really "get" Earthbound. What I don't really understand is that the folks who have been going nuts for Undertale seem to be too young to be nostalgic for Earthbound, which means they should like it even less than me, but whatever. Joking aside, I'm glad that a game that subverts the norms of a very stale genre has become a runaway success.

from what I heard, Nintendo doesn't allow unsold stock returns or whatever other insurance for retailers to get money back. Hence why it becomes an inventory risk for the likes of Gamestop.

I've heard similar and it doesn't surprise me. Nintendo are definitely keen on retaining high prices on their high-profile games, and they manage it one way or another. They got pretty sleazy in the late 80s/early 90s, with their sales teams trying to underhandedly persuade retailers not to stock competing platforms, and they eventually got called out on it by the Federal Trade Commission in the US, with Atari taking the lead on unlicensed games in an antitrust case. The settlement that was reached was an absolute joke[/quote] - Nintendo were forced to give all their customers a $5 coupon off another (Nintendo-only) game. These arrived just before the holiday season. That was their "punishment", if you can believe it.

That would have to wait for another time, I had already seen two documentaries for Ocean Software and Nintendo/Sega Video game rentals (war?) in the US recently

Oh, interesting! Can you let me know the names?

Anecdotally, I kept seeing people post that they ended up buying Arkham Knight on PS4 after refunding it on steam.

That's assuming people have both a powerful gaming rig and a console and the inclination to buy a potentially broken game a second time. I'm guessing that's relatively niche group, but I dare say it happened quite a bit with the more tech-savvy. Not enough to cover the catastrophe of the PC launch, though.

Since Arkham Knight wasn't broken on consoles, they would have suffered heavy losses if it was. Considering the difference is that Warner Bros. has to pay shipping and other fees to retailers for physical copies whereas on Steam they only lost money on sales.

Making money on sales is kind of their business, though! It was bad enough that they had to remove it from the store. That's a colossal fuckup by any measure, but especially for a "triple A" game.

However for games that are sold in retailers, we don't have the convenience of access to NPD for finding any games that were refunded.

If you buy physical copies, it depends on the retailer, but the vast majority most won't accept a return once it's opened, unless there's a fault with the disc. They certainly won't refund you just because you played an hour of the game and thought it was broken garbage - they'll want you to trade it in as second-hand, and you'll get a pittance. This is the Bad Old Days way of doing things, not least because the retailer (who put no work into making the game) then puts the second-hand copies just under the new ones, knocks off a few bucks and takes all the money. Seems pretty parasitic to me, but hey ho.

If you buy digitally on consoles, all sales are final, end of conversation. Steam went a consumer-friendly route instead and I hope we'll all be rewarded for it. It really has the potential to change game development/publishing strategies - instead of having a hard date and shipping broken game with day 1 patches and all that nonsense, they'll need to get their shit together beforehand or face mass returns.

You do know that Nintendo are doing that with the NX? It's been hinted at for a long time with regards to trying to follow Android/iOS with regards to keeping software more easily backward and forwards compatible(?) due to trying to keep the architecture as similar as possible like the SoCs that Apple use with PowerVR etc. I don't know how often the incremental upgrades would be, it could be the same as all their portable hardware and consoles have been.

That's a terrible idea and I hope the don't go down that route. Personally I'd like to see x86 and a half-decent GPU in the base unit, they can put an ARM/Mali SOC or some shit in the removable bit. Honestly I don't fancy their chances with this one but I've been wrong about Nintendo in the past. When they were about to launch the DS they showed a roadmap at a developer conference that included a beefed-up GBA - a backup plan in case the weird-ass dual screen with a microphone thing didn't work. Gamers thought Nintendo had lost the plot when they heard about the DS, it was a laughing stock in gaming forums... then it came out and the games were great and it went on to be the best-selling handheld ever. With Nintendo you can never be sure.

[sol-alpha]

Oh, interesting! Can you let me know the names?

Nintendo vs. Video Game Rentals - Gaming Historian - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3xuy5YALl0

The Story of Ocean Software: "The Biggest Games Company in the World" - Kim Justice - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0TE927j4cs

Keep in mind that no people are interviewed in the videos, so it is mainly a retelling of events.

That's a terrible idea and I hope the don't go down that route. Personally I'd like to see x86 and a half-decent GPU in the base unit, they can put an ARM/Mali SOC or some shit in the removable bit. Honestly I don't fancy their chances with this one but I've been wrong about Nintendo in the past.

You did see the edits I made? Nintendo can't just keep releasing a new console/handheld with an install base of zero because it has been disadvantageous for them compared to the likes of Sony. Every time Sony launches a new console, they'll always have the backing of third parties which the PS3 showed that and the PS Vita in Japan even though Sony doesn't support it themselves while almost every time that Nintendo has launched a new console, the sales of said console have done worse than its predecessor that they progressively kept having a smaller third party presence. (You don't need to mention about how Nintendo treated third parties in the past.)

The point is, they want to follow the Android/iOS model of keeping games on accounts hence why we have Nintendo Account which came out last month and in this week or the next the My Nintendo Account. By keeping software tied to accounts and not hardware shows they are following through on what Iwata mentioned back in 2013/2014 (Can't remember the exact date) on having the NX be a platform that comes in multiple formats which could be a home console, handheld, tablet, watch etc. I just threw in the last two, no form factors have been confirmed, the point is that they would be able to make multiple form factors from not using wildly different SoC on each form factor.

This is why (and I forget where it was mentioned) due to the above mentioned that the most reasonable speculation so far is that the NX is a platform which contains a home console unit and a handheld unit, where the software between both will be shared but not at a ratio of 1:1 as some games may not be ported to the handheld vice versa. This would help Nintendo to alleviate their software droughts since they would not have to support two platforms like 3DS and Wii U where they would each get a different Mario Kart game and 3D Mario etc and instead free up resources to make new games.

I don't understand why you think it's such a horrible idea considering the circumstances that lead them to this: failure of Wii U, struggles of developing on new hardware which causes software droughts.

Oh I also remembered that it was rumoured that some(?) developers are using a virtual SDK that they don't need the NX hardware to develop for the NX however, we have to wait for confirmation of that until Nintendo reveals the NX since NDAs are still going.

When they were about to launch the DS they showed a roadmap at a developer conference that included a beefed-up GBA - a backup plan in case the weird-ass dual screen with a microphone thing didn't work. Gamers thought Nintendo had lost the plot when they heard about the DS, it was a laughing stock in gaming forums... then it came out and the games were great and it went on to be the best-selling handheld ever. With Nintendo you can never be sure.

When I was on a different forum years ago and the Wii Remote was revealed. I thought it was brilliant and that Nintendo would succeed with the Wii however, I had to deal with that crap of people laughing off that Nintendo lost the plot with the Wii remote etc. It's too bad that forum went down before the Wii even released because I would have wanted see what the naysayers thought when the Wii dominated the market.

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Keeping on-topic, Sony revealed the prices for the PSVR at US$399 etc etc with a release date of October. However, Sony are doing their tactic like with the PS Vita in which they make the product appealing by keeping the price as cheap as possible by removing peripherals that are needed. So where the PS Vita was cheap because they would offset the costs with the use of the Vita's (expensive) Memory cards which are Sony proprietary instead of SD cards. Here the PSVR does not come with the PS4 camera which I am reading is mentioned as being required and the PS Move controllers are mentioned as being optional.

PlayStation®VR Features | GDC 2016 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lulzi9LmNSM (You can see the camera at the end which does suggest it is required with the PSVR along with the PS4)
The thread where I am mentioning the PS4 camera is required since I don't have other sources - http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1197512 (You'll also see the processor unit I mentioned before that the PSVR needs.)

I remember my brother mentioning he'll probably get the PSVR because it would probably get the most games/support even though his PC can run the Oculus Rift or Vive just fine from having a GTX 980ti.

Edit: I am shocked, at http://www.digitaltrends.com/virtual-reality/oculus-rift-vs-htc-vive/ where there is comparison for technical specs. The vive and rift only have a refresh rate of 90Hz while in that video I posted from sony, the PSVR has a 120Hz refresh rate.
Although the vive and rift have 2160 x 1200 resolution and the PSVR has 1920x1080, the PSVR uses RGB while the rift/vive I read uses pentile for the screens where apparently the screens on the PSVR will look better because of more sub-pixels per area and someone mentioning you wouldn't see the screen door effect like I have. I'm not aware of any other advantages Vive/rift have over PSVR other than vive/rift have 110 degrees of vision while PSVR only has 100 degrees.

[Alc]

Oh, interesting! Can you let me know the names?

Nintendo vs. Video Game Rentals - Gaming Historian - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3xuy5YALl0

The Story of Ocean Software: "The Biggest Games Company in the World" - Kim Justice - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0TE927j4cs

Keep in mind that no people are interviewed in the videos, so it is mainly a retelling of events.

Thanks man! That's tonight's viewing sorted, assuming I can put down Salt and Sanctuary.

You did see the edits I made? Nintendo can't just keep releasing a new console/handheld with an install base of zero because it has been disadvantageous for them compared to the likes of Sony.

Well, no. Ideally they'd release a console and actually advertise it and pay third parties to create exclusives, just like "the big boys". They aren't hurting for money, they're just stubborn.

The point is, they want to follow the Android/iOS model of keeping games on accounts hence why we have Nintendo Account which came out last month and in this week or the next the My Nintendo Account. By keeping software tied to accounts and not hardware shows they are following through on what Iwata mentioned back in 2013/2014 (Can't remember the exact date) on having the NX be a platform that comes in multiple formats which could be a home console, handheld, tablet, watch etc. I just threw in the last two, no form factors have been confirmed, the point is that they would be able to make multiple form factors from not using wildly different SoC on each form factor.

1/ It's about fucking time they tied games to accounts, that has been standard everywhere else in the industry for a decade or more and Nintendo only got around to it this last year. Shameful - there's no other word for it.

2/ Multiple hardware targets are a headache for developers and eliminate one of the main advantages that consoles have - a single fixed platform that can be squeezed for every ounce of performance. Yearly/biennial upgrades to the NX are, in my opinion, a pretty effective way to kill the console. It'll confuse the shit out of their main demographic and will dissuade developers from committing to the platform.

I don't understand why you think it's such a horrible idea considering the circumstances that lead them to this: failure of Wii U, struggles of developing on new hardware which causes software droughts.

The failure of the Wii U had little to do with the underlying hardware and everything to do with Nintendo's boneheaded lack of consumer communication and commitment to third-party support. Both of these can be fixed without changing the hardware every year or two.

Oh I also remembered that it was rumoured that some(?) developers are using a virtual SDK that they don't need the NX hardware to develop for the NX however, we have to wait for confirmation of that until Nintendo reveals the NX since NDAs are still going.

Eh, that's pretty standard, before the PS3 came out IBM developed an emulator for the new Cell CPU so that developers could try and get their head around it. That could also suggest that the NX is using x86 and the devkit is virtualising the CPU.

Edit: I am shocked, at http://www.digitaltrends.com/virtual-reality/oculus-rift-vs-htc-vive/ where there is comparison for technical specs. The vive and rift only have a refresh rate of 90Hz while in that video I posted from sony, the PSVR has a 120Hz refresh rate.
Although the vive and rift have 2160 x 1200 resolution and the PSVR has 1920x1080, the PSVR uses RGB while the rift/vive I read uses pentile for the screens where apparently the screens on the PSVR will look better because of more sub-pixels per area and someone mentioning you wouldn't see the screen door effect like I have. I'm not aware of any other advantages Vive/rift have over PSVR other than vive/rift have 110 degrees of vision while PSVR only has 100 degrees.

They have much better panels, and more expensive and accurate tracking hardware (if they didn't, they'd be $400 too). Take it from Ito, vice president of the Playstation division at Sony: "If you just talk about the high-end quality, yes, I would admit that Oculus may have better VR. However, it requires a very expensive and very fast PC. The biggest advantage for Sony is our headset works with PS4. It's more for everyday use, so it has to be easy to use and it has to be affordable. This is not for the person who uses a high-end PC. It's for the mass market."

You will never hear a company head admitting the technical superiority of their competitor unless it's absolutely undeniable. PSVR is just not going to be as good as the Vive or the Oculus, but then it's not intended to be; it's in a different class and at a very different budget. I may still end up getting one as it's affordable and my PC could only just barely meet the requirements of the more expensive headsets. I'm also leery of getting a V1.0 Vive or Oculus - they are going to be putting out improved models pretty regularly, because they're selling to the enthusiast PC space, where regular upgrades aren't just tolerated, they're celebrated. It'll be interesting to see how frequently PSVR put out new models with nicer panels etc, because their consumers do not have that mindset at all.

(On the 90Hz/120Hz thing, most PSVR games will actually be running at 60Hz with reprojection to smooth things out. Google's your friend if you want more info, but as a simple summary: some visually simple PSVR games will hit 120Hz but most will cheat; Vive/Oculus can't perform the same trick because they don't have the low-level access to the hardware right now. True 90Hz > reprojected 60Hz. I'd expect Oculus or Valve to get a 120Hz headset out within a year or two of the release of their first model, anyway.)

[sol-alpha]

(On the 90Hz/120Hz thing, most PSVR games will actually be running at 60Hz with reprojection to smooth things out. Google's your friend if you want more info, but as a simple summary: some visually simple PSVR games will hit 120Hz but most will cheat; Vive/Oculus can't perform the same trick because they don't have the low-level access to the hardware right now. True 90Hz > reprojected 60Hz. I'd expect Oculus or Valve to get a 120Hz headset out within a year or two of the release of their first model, anyway.)

I just learned about the reprojection some time after my post but couldn't be bothered editing since I haven't kept up with things regarding VR.

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Keeping on topic, I edited the thread title because I didn't want to end up making a new thread.

I was bored, bored, bored! So, the news just went that Sony finally revealed price and release for PSVR, what's next? Well, as seen earlier people are still speculating as to what the NX is considering Nintendo have been giving NDAs to developers at around the same level as it was for the Wii back then with regards to the severity of breaking the NDA hence no developer wants to talk about NX, and the ones that do don't even know what it is because they haven't been given an SDK.

So I spent time thinking and thinking what could Nintendo's next big thing be? However, it's too difficult to figure out. There are things I could look at from the past to predict the future, however no one I know predicted the Wii Remote or Glasses-less 3D.
I first ignored the Wii U seeing as that the failure of the system does not guarantee the tech will be reused other than possibly the wireless streaming module that can be applied to their handhelds for streaming video to the TV via the home console.
However, what was pointed out before about the Nintendo 3DS is that the DSi's technology did somewhat hint as the what the Nintendo 3DS was going to be. This includes things such as purchasing games from DSiWare, to the camera that faces you, use of SD cards for memory, and facial tracking from some software such as Face Training and this 3D like game.

So, looking at the New Nintendo 3DS, one of the new features is the Super-Stable 3D where the camera facing you can track your face/eyes to make sure the 3D doesn't become blurry with the use of an IR-Sensor. So I tried thinking up new ways that could be used because a patent also recently appeared from Nintendo in which they were using light projection to recognise hand gestures with the use of the IR-Sensor/camera similar to the kinect.

I still couldn't think of what Nintendo's NX is going to be however, it lead me to think of what would be the next big thing after VR/AR in gaming, and that is Social Interaction. With the way we interact with Video Games as a whole, we mainly press buttons to make things happen. We can also use devices that have motion sensors to manipulate things in game when moving/swinging our wrists/arms however there is a lack of realism since say, hitting a ball with a baseball bat requires the laws of motion while in video games you wouldn't feel the kinetic energy from impact when swinging a Wii Remote through thin air.

VR at the moment has us feel like we are actually in a virtual world however, the interaction methods are still somewhat primitive that I bet we would need to be in a lucid dreaming state that when we touch things in virtual reality, we would think it's real even though we are dreaming compared to touching the air.

So the next step would be interacting with the game using facial and voice recognition. This is probably what I think Nintendo would want if they wanted to get into VR considering how Miyamoto thinks that VR is anti-social because you are wearing a HMD in a room by yourself. However, I am just applying the idea in a non-VR situation to make this easier to explain. You sit in front of your TV with a Camera/Microphone facing you similar to the Kinect or let's say this was somehow the Nintendo NX handheld in your hands with a Camera/Microphone facing you, you are playing a game with an avatar and you are interacting with an NPC in-game. When you are responding/interacting to the NPC you can smile/frown/laugh etc and the NPC would respond accordingly. Another nifty little feature would be eye-tracking but, that is already being used/developed in VR so we know that is also something that can help interacting with NPCs in-game.

Expanding this to online multiplayer with other people, we can already communicate outside of games using Skype for example and it is pretty good for face-to-face interaction. In video games, we don't have that yet. We can communicate with microphones but, it is similar to talking on the phone while other games that communicate with text like MMOs lack knowing the emotion/intonation behind a word being said. If we could interact via avatars that can show our facial expressions, I'm certain this would be the kind of "Social Gaming" that companies have been looking for.

Of course it's not all sunshine and roses, there are bad sides to it too. This is why as I said it would be great if the tech worked well interacting with NPCs because it'd be awesome because, if we don't have it with NPCs, it would be unpleasing for some people in online interactions other people. The worse thing that can happen is cyber bullying, we still have anonymity in video games but when you remove anonymity for how a person is feeling from seeing their facial expressions and even where they are looking with regards to eye-tracking. You could turn facial recognition and eye-tracking off but that would probably give more ammo for people to bully you then. (Oh and even cyber-stalking would be on a whole other level.)

Could facial recognition be applied in VR? Possibly? I am not too sure, the problem is that the HMD is obscuring part of your face so your facial recognition is limited. You can have a camera facing you however it will only record your mouth, so even if you smiled at someone, your avatar would probably look like a psychopath doing it unless the game automatically crinkles the skin around your eyes in your avatar to make it look like a genuine smile. This is why I gave the earlier example of interacting with your TV/Handheld.

This could be big for playing video games outside of VR which is why I am predicting it to be the next big thing in gaming, it can even be big outside of gaming because this is probably what Facebook wants for it's social interaction apps for the Oculus Rift.
However, I was mainly talking about the medical space like mental illnesses.

One of the responses that may come up is about the Project Natal - Milo Demo from Peter Molyneux's studio. As you can see, this isn't a new idea, that project failed. Similar to VR given time this can come back and become the next big thing. However, it probably won't be from Microsoft seeing as they shelved the Kinect because it wasn't popular with gamers on the Xbox One.

I've only just given the basic premise and I'm tired so I probably missed some things, if I have any more ideas to add to it I will.

Footnotes:
Nintendo DS Commercial: Face Training https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ_UrGFvYZU (Japanese commerical)
Face Training - Launch Trailer - DSi - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81HfmpTArHE (English version)
DSi「立体かくし絵　アッタコレダ」PV - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5QSclrIdlE (Nintendo DSi puzzle game that uses head tracking)
E3 2009 - Project Natal - Milo Demo with Peter Molyneux 720p HD - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDvHlwNvXaM
This Is What Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto Thinks of Virtual Reality - http://time.com/2881482/interview-nintendo-miyamoto-virtual-reality/

Annoyingly I can't remember the article I read years ago that talked about and showed what the camera was seeing in the Nintendo DSi face training game for facial recognition. However as you saw, that game originally appeared on the Nintendo DS with the camera being attached to the cartridge long before the camera got added to the Nintendo DS with the Nintendo DSi.

[Alc]

So the next step would be interacting with the game using facial and voice recognition.

Both of these have significant technical hurdles that need to be overcome before they can become platform-defining. Notably, Microsoft found this out with the Xbox One's speech control part of Kinect. Despite putting in tremendous amounts of work and advertising it heavily (at least at launch), it didn't function particularly well, and this stuff needs to work damn near 100% of the time or it's just frustrating. But that was merely a secondary feature - frustrating controls are death for gaming. The trouble is that processing and understanding speech has hit a wall, where you now need to make major advances in the intelligence of your speech recognition system in order to see minor returns in accuracy. In order to correctly analyse a sentence, the computer needs not merely to analyse the waveform and make a guess at what word it is, but to understand the sentence structure and overall context. That last point is a killer for locally-processed speech recognition; some companies (including Apple, Google and others) attempt to solve analysis by sending the sample back to dedicated server farms using neural networks and big data set analysis to help processing, but this adds extra latency to an already high-latency process, which again makes it a poor fit for gaming. (And anyway, this sort of stuff is definitely way out of Nintendo's area of expertise.)

I'm not as clued up on facial recognition, I understand that for criminal investigations an extremely high degree of accuracy can be delivered with very noisy data, but that's not real-time - I suspect real-time facial mapping and recognition is much harder. It shouldn't be too difficult to do comparatively simple stuff like smile/frown/laugh recognition like you suggest, though, so sure that could be a feature. How accurate it would be (knowing the difference between a person laughing and yelling, for instance) is another matter, but as a minor aesthetic feature it wouldn't be a deal breaker.

Another nifty little feature would be eye-tracking but, that is already being used/developed in VR so we know that is also something that can help interacting with NPCs in-game.

The sooner eye tracking can become accurate and mainstream the better! Imagine being able to ditch the mouse and use a computer/phone purely with your gaze... it's a ways off, sadly. It'll happen, though, it's not insurmountable. There are systems for it today, they're just not very good and tend to be inflexible and cumbersome to use, not to mention expensive.

Expanding this to online multiplayer with other people, we can already communicate outside of games using Skype for example and it is pretty good for face-to-face interaction. In video games, we don't have that yet. We can communicate with microphones but, it is similar to talking on the phone while other games that communicate with text like MMOs lack knowing the emotion/intonation behind a word being said. If we could interact via avatars that can show our facial expressions, I'm certain this would be the kind of "Social Gaming" that companies have been looking for.

That's a pretty interesting idea if it could be made to work. Clever facial representation through 3D mapping via something like the Kinect's 3D IR projector/camera array is probably possible, but I'd wager it'd step into the uncanny valley when it came time to render your facial animation onto your avatar.

Of course it's not all sunshine and roses, there are bad sides to it too. This is why as I said it would be great if the tech worked well interacting with NPCs because it'd be awesome because, if we don't have it with NPCs, it would be unpleasing for some people in online interactions other people. The worse thing that can happen is cyber bullying, we still have anonymity in video games but when you remove anonymity for how a person is feeling from seeing their facial expressions and even where they are looking with regards to eye-tracking. You could turn facial recognition and eye-tracking off but that would probably give more ammo for people to bully you then. (Oh and even cyber-stalking would be on a whole other level.)

Eh, I'd call that "coming with the territory". Don't play those games if you don't want other people to see your facial responses.

One of the responses that may come up is about the Project Natal - Milo Demo from Peter Molyneux's studio. As you can see, this isn't a new idea, that project failed.

It failed for a variety of reasons... not least Microsoft getting cold feet about the potential bad PR associated with making what the gutter press could brand a "child grooming simulator" or something vile like that. But really, it was just technologically infeasible. I've been watching Molyneux promise the impossible (and of course fail to deliver) for at least a decade and a half, so when he promised to solve real-time, authentic human-like AI on a consumer box back in 2006 I was highly sceptical, and entirely unsurprised when it got quietly cancelled. It's no more practical today, really; convincingly human-like AI, capable of sustaining conversations for more than a few sentences, is just a really, really hard problem to solve.

As an anecdote, Sega had the tenacity to try this way back on the Dreamcast with Seaman, a "game" in which you could talk to a fish with a human face and the voice of Leonard Nimoy (no, I'm not making this up). I tried talking to that fucking fish for hours. It was hopeless.

Returning back to the topic, I spotted this the other day:
http://www.polygon.com/2016/3/16/11247288/playstation-vr-processing-unit-ps4
So I guessed wrong, all it's doing is some binaural trickery for 3D sound and video multiplexing but not much else. Everything else will have to be handled by the PS4 itself. Good luck with that, PSVR devs.

[sol-alpha]

That's a pretty interesting idea if it could be made to work. Clever facial representation through 3D mapping via something like the Kinect's 3D IR projector/camera array is probably possible, but I'd wager it'd step into the uncanny valley when it came time to render your facial animation onto your avatar.

Yes, basically so far through the list of ideas that are feasible to do in the present aside from eye-tracking and hand-gesture tracking from the Leapmotion tech I showed earlier is from what I think are the most feasible to least feasible are, Facial Mapping/Biometric Scanning for person-to-person interaction via gestures and voice chat, Facial Mapping/Biometric Scanning for person-to-AI interaction via gestures, Facial Mapping/Biometric Scanning for person-to-AI interaction via gestures and voice recognition.

I was thinking then that the person-to-person interaction can happen in any game online even if the game you are playing doesn't have you playing a person on foot because you could have something like this video for Star Fox Zero at 3:24 https://youtu.be/SUm3FiTx7zA?t=204 to show another method of facial/voice chat.

With regards to the uncanny valley though, I wasn't thinking of facial animation being 1:1 with what you are doing. It can be filtered in a sense, so say a 2D anime game has a style to it that your facial movements wouldn't be highly detailed on the avatar's face. It would just show your lips moving and parts of your facial structure like your chin so you don't look like a sock puppet talking, then of course your eyes, eyebrows the only other things moving in detail. This is the difference between photorealism and what I just used as an example because the facial animation doesn't have to highlight all your crows feet on your avatar when it just can just show minimal detail on your face when smiling. So in a sense I am mentioning that the avatars are already made with these emotions before hand and the camera tech is just for seeing what emotion you use which is one way to avoid the uncanny valley.

Returning back to the topic, I spotted this the other day:
http://www.polygon.com/2016/3/16/11247288/playstation-vr-processing-unit-ps4
So I guessed wrong, all it's doing is some binaural trickery for 3D sound and video multiplexing but not much else. Everything else will have to be handled by the PS4 itself. Good luck with that, PSVR devs.

Yeah, I didn't mention that because it wasn't going to do anything for helping the games look better. However, with regards to something earlier which was how you were talking about the xbox 1.5 and I mentioned Nintendo were going to a similar thing with the NX, I assume you had heard about the ps4.5/ps4k as well? Now it seems all 3 companies are in on it.

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In other news to do with AR, I mentioned how Microsoft were trying too hard to make Skype in AR look amazing when it wasn't in a video posted. This one came up recently, "holoportation: virtual 3D teleportation in real-time (Microsoft Research)" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d59O6cfaM0   and it's done a better job at showing something cool for AR without trying too hard and it's already better than what Skype did. Only downside is again is that it requires cameras to be setup and that it is restricted to people who are wearing the hololens. Which I bring up again that holographic projection would be better than this when it allows more than one person in a room to see people from another room even though that tech is far away.

[Alc]

Yeah, I didn't mention that because it wasn't going to do anything for helping the games look better. However, with regards to something earlier which was how you were talking about the xbox 1.5 and I mentioned Nintendo were going to a similar thing with the NX, I assume you had heard about the ps4.5/ps4k as well? Now it seems all 3 companies are in on it.

I've heard rumblings about the PS4.5, yeah.

With Microsoft, they've got this grand unification of services thing that they're trying to pull off, Making Windows a rolling standard with various hardware platforms supported, and they're dragging their Xbox division into it, so whilst the potential Xbox One upgrade cycle still has all the issues I've mentioned before, at least I can see where the idea is coming from; to be clear, I still think it's a horrible, anti-consumer mistake. Sony don't have anything like Windows 10, though, so adding a second hardware target halfway through their console's life would be an even worse idea. Most games on PS4 struggle to maintain 1080p/30FPS (some don't even hit 1080p, and most games have some degree of framerate dip at times), the idea that they'd leap to 4K with relatively minor changes in an affordable unit (just a slightly upgraded CPU/GPU chip, for instance) is flat-out impossible. The hardware for running games natively in that resolution is going to be prohibitively expensive for a consumer box for a long time to come, and even if hypothetically Sony did release some monstrous powerhouse it still wouldn't make current PS4 games run better without them being patched by their developers, because all standard PS4 games are tightly designed around the original fixed PS4 hardware platform. It's hard to imagine developers being particularly keen on expending that effort on games that are no longer selling new in any significant quantity.

I suspect that a new PS4 with full 4K output support will exist at some point, and this will be the PS4.5 (with much fanfare about 4K TV support), but it'll be somewhat like the 360 and HDMI upgrades. The first 360s had no HDMI port and were limited to 1080i on component, as time progressed newer models added the HDMI port and 1080p output, but it was kind of a moot point as most games had internal rendering resolutions significantly lower (usually in the region of 720p) which were then upscaled prior to output. Same was true on the PS3 - neither platform had very many native 1080p games, and those that were tended to be simple/2D games.

Current PS4s and Xbox Ones can potentially output 4K, but not at 60Hz (limited in bandwidth by their HDMI hardware) - I'm not that clued up on this but apparently it could work for movies and still images, but it's a no-go for games. With the boom in 4K TVs (and emergence of 4K blu-rays) it's not surprising that Sony want to jump on the bandwagon, but that's a very different thing to upgrading their console's computational specifications significantly.

(Until we know what the NX is I think it's separate from that conversation.)

In other news to do with AR, I mentioned how Microsoft were trying too hard to make Skype in AR look amazing when it wasn't in a video posted. This one came up recently, "holoportation: virtual 3D teleportation in real-time (Microsoft Research)" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d59O6cfaM0   and it's done a better job at showing something cool for AR without trying too hard and it's already better than what Skype did. Only downside is again is that it requires cameras to be setup and that it is restricted to people who are wearing the hololens. Which I bring up again that holographic projection would be better than this when it allows more than one person in a room to see people from another room even though that tech is far away.

Yeah, exactly. Holographic projection would be nice but it wouldn't solve the capture issue, which is sort of intractable. If you want to capture someone's complete physical dimensions in 3D, you need multiple reference points (i.e. cameras) - that's just the plain physics of it.

5.1 sound systems have made significant inroads in the consumer market, it's possible they could accommodate the same kind of system but with cameras, but I don't see this kind of tech taking off - except in board rooms for companies with more money than they know what to do with.

[sol-alpha]

With Microsoft, they've got this grand unification of services thing that they're trying to pull off, Making Windows a rolling standard with various hardware platforms supported, and they're dragging their Xbox division into it, so whilst the potential Xbox One upgrade cycle still has all the issues I've mentioned before, at least I can see where the idea is coming from; to be clear, I still think it's a horrible, anti-consumer mistake.

Assuming you are talking about the restrictions on things you can do on the PC side, I concur. With regards to xbox 1.5, they are already getting windows 10 on the xbox one I just read off gamespot just to check so I don't get why they need an xbox 1.5. I thought when they revealed the xbox one, they claimed that it would be the most powerful console because of cloud computing. I guess because developers aren't making use of it, and I assume it can't be used to help make their 900p/30fps games become 1080p/60fps then I guess I see part of the reason why.

Most games on PS4 struggle to maintain 1080p/30FPS (some don't even hit 1080p, and most games have some degree of framerate dip at times), the idea that they'd leap to 4K with relatively minor changes in an affordable unit (just a slightly upgraded CPU/GPU chip, for instance) is flat-out impossible. The hardware for running games natively in that resolution is going to be prohibitively expensive for a consumer box for a long time to come, and even if hypothetically Sony did release some monstrous powerhouse it still wouldn't make current PS4 games run better without them being patched by their developers, because all standard PS4 games are tightly designed around the original fixed PS4 hardware platform.

Aside from watching videos in 4k, I assume having better graphical quality games on psvr may be a reason for the ps4k. I don't know what differences developers are going to go for for regular AAA games, the ps4k would have to be almost (I assume) as powerful as the high end pc GPUs to run at 4k resolution and would be need a better CPU at the same time too.

Not knowing much else, the only important tidbit about all this PS4K stuff is this little thing that was important when speculating about the NX.

"AMD designing an x86 and ARM chip... to be introduced 2016" - http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=959539

The design wins are interesting because the funding, the R&D dollars for customizing the parts for the products to our customers is precisely pre-funded by the customer and like I said the workload is started and we are spending the money and the resources and the work to go ahead and design the parts to be introduced sometime in 2016.

We didn't say at which space it is in. I'm not going to give too much detail. I'll say that one is x86 and one is ARM, and atleast one will be on gaming, right. But that's about as much as you going to get out me today, because the customers from the standpoint to be fair to them. It is their product. They launch it. They announce it and then just like the game console or the parts you find out that its AMD's APU that's been used in those products.

Difficult to look at the article it came from "seekingalpha.com" since you need a registration. this link

This was at the end of 2014, before people even knew about the NX because it wasn't announced yet. It's problematic that it says for their design wins that the guy says x86 and ARM but doesn't say which one is for gaming. Could be hinting it is ARM because he could have just said x86. However, I also remember from an article older than that in the same year that an AMD exec was interested in the handheld business which meant that AMD would be interested in the portable NX.

So there are 2 scenarios:

1) The design win for a gaming console was x86 which ended up being the PS4K

2) The design win for a gaming console was ARM which ends up being the portable/console NX

The annoying part is having to wait. If scenario 1 is true, that means Nintendo has went to someone else for the chip design, hearing once on Neogaf about people from PowerVR showing Nintendo their stuff, but that could have just been a rumour.
Or scenario 2 is true, which somehow the details of a design win for the PS4K happened later in 2015 but we never heard the news about it. (Could be unlikely for this to have happened right? Occam's Razor.)

Or Scenario 3) Both designs are for gaming consoles because of the wording in the quote "at least one will be on gaming" not at most, so at least one means there could be two.

Yeah, exactly. Holographic projection would be nice but it wouldn't solve the capture issue, which is sort of intractable. If you want to capture someone's complete physical dimensions in 3D, you need multiple reference points (i.e. cameras) - that's just the plain physics of it.

5.1 sound systems have made significant inroads in the consumer market, it's possible they could accommodate the same kind of system but with cameras, but I don't see this kind of tech taking off - except in board rooms for companies with more money than they know what to do with.

Well, maybe you could somehow make use of 1 camera with mirrors like some interferometer (Just throwing out very wild suggestions here) to take care of that. (I don't know.)

[sol-alpha]

Sorry for the double post, had to bump this in case anyone doesn't notice if I just edited after 24+ hours.

PS4K information (~2x GPU power plus clock increase, new CPU, price, etc) - http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1202462

For context, the poster was verified by the mods long ago, he/she has a significant position within a company to know this (I'd rather not spell it out assuming that this information was supposed to be under NDA and he/she assumed it was okay to spill the beans.)

Related info from a meeting we had yesterday was waiting for it to be approved before posting.

Price is currently $399.99 they were discussing a better CPU which would raise the price to $499.99 we were guaranteed the price will be no higher than $499.99 (He mentioned the CPU upgrade quite a bit almost as if they haven't really decided on a final spec could be a pricing issue.) also there is currently no plan for any type of trade in program for current PS4 users but that could change.

They stated that the GPU is twice as powerful as standard PS4 and much faster. They did not say exactly how fast but that is was running at a higher clock speed while being much smaller than the original.

It will have a 4k blu ray player and will upscale games that are not natively 4k.

Also there was talk of some sort of VR lounge for the media player app which is supposed to be getting a substantial upgrade.

It was stated plainly and with no room for interpretation that there are developers that already have development kits for the PS4K and that they are making games that will directly target and take advantage of the higher specs of the PS4K. It was also stated that these games will in fact work for the PS4 but with considerable sacrifices made to performance.

It was also made very clear that current games would not be getting any type of performance upgrades by being played on the system and any benefits to older games would come via patch per game and per developer. When asked if this was going to happen the response was "Its a possibility but doubtful with the exception of a handful of games."
We were also given a list of games that will be available at launch that will directly take advantage of the PS4K where the differences are and I will quote him "Significant."

For the PSVR

Eve Valkyrie
Robinson
GT Sport

For the PS4K

Deep Down (Thought this was dead)
GOW4 (This was the exact abbreviation on the sheet I can only assume its god of war 4)

There were more games on the list but these are the ones that stood out to me.



That's all I can remember off the top of my head I'll see if I can get any more information.

So now that we have information that is clear about some things for the PS4K we can assume some things about it.

So, considering the possible upgrade to the CPU and 2x power upgrade to the GPU. This could help PSVR games look graphically comparable to any versions of the same game on Rift, Vive. Devs wouldn't need to increase the framerate as they can just keep it locked at 60fps and take advantage of the reprojection technique. (I don't see any reason why not.)

Considering that it can upscale games that are not rendered at 4k resolution makes me think that the AAA devs will prefer rendering the game at 1080p and then upscaling it so they can take advantage of adding more intensive graphical effects and/or allowing the game to run at 60fps, if they just rendered the game at 4k it may mean that the ps4k game will not look that much different compared to the ps4 version.

The fact that developers already have development kits for the PS4K adds credence to my previous post about how AMD got a design win for an x86 APU for a gaming console at the end of 2014, dev kits would have been around since some arbitrary time in 2015 etc and the console would be coming out in 2016 as mentioned for when the tech gets introduced.

You can infer from the rest about some games looking better on ps4k and some already released games needing to be patched to look better on ps4k etc.

So again, with regards to the on-topic, this is significant mainly for PSVR to succeed because in a sense, the "gamers" can upgrade to this although this was most likely designed for the mainstream that want a 4k blu-ray player and a console to use the PSVR with which happens to be better for it.

-----------

Now the speculation is, if AMD didn't have any other design wins for a gaming console reported in their investor meetings etc. Did Nintendo choose someone else (PowerVR?) to be their vendor for their SoC for the NX? I mean it could be possible, we have to keep in mind that their Hardware departments for portable and console that were separate became merged around 2014 I think. Hence, there would be new plans for how they would make a new system going forward that is suppose to make it easy for developers to develop for both a handheld and console if they chose to.

Anyway, no reason to speculate for too long. Just have to play the waiting game for at least 1 to 3 months more.

Edit:

Update from the OP on his thread - http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=199662492&postcount=2766

Yes I do care about my job and I generally do the firing =) . To clear up a few things though he did not make it sound like all games would be native 4k just that they would be scaled to 4k and we do have a tentative placeholder date for late Q1 next year.

Tried to keep my personal thoughts out of this thread but I really believe this move is all about the PSVR trying to look a bit better when compared to its direct competition.

So, the PS4K may not be releasing this year and that I speculated right about not many games would actually render in 4K, just taking advantage of upscaling it. Oh, and of course the speculation regarding who the PS4K is targeted towards.

[Alc]

I thought when they revealed the xbox one, they claimed that it would be the most powerful console because of cloud computing.

Cloud compute is hard to integrate into games for a number of reasons, chief among them latency. Cloud compute as a module inside a game that's otherwise being processed locally will never be a true substitute for e.g. a substantially better GPU, because there's just too much time in between the console sending off the data to be processed and it being received. The one game I've read about that uses the cloud on XB1 is Crackdown 3, and it's used purely for physics calculations on deformable city terrain, which is kind of an ideal-case scenario for that kind of number crunching - you can level a city but the presentation is in the order of a second or so, not a single frame like e.g. performing antialising on the edge of a polygon.

Aside from watching videos in 4k, I assume having better graphical quality games on psvr may be a reason for the ps4k. I don't know what differences developers are going to go for for regular AAA games, the ps4k would have to be almost (I assume) as powerful as the high end pc GPUs to run at 4k resolution and would be need a better CPU at the same time too.

Well this is the issue. If Sony release a PS4K now/soon they won't be able to put out an affordable machine that's truly 4K-capable. The bottleneck is primarily the GPU, though the CPU in the PS4 isn't anything to write home about.

I'm going preface the rest of my post with a note here that I've read far more untrue rumours on NeoGAF over the years than true ones. So if I seem cynical, well...

This was at the end of 2014, before people even knew about the NX because it wasn't announced yet. It's problematic that it says for their design wins that the guy says x86 and ARM but doesn't say which one is for gaming. Could be hinting it is ARM because he could have just said x86. However, I also remember from an article older than that in the same year that an AMD exec was interested in the handheld business which meant that AMD would be interested in the portable NX.

Base unit x86, portable unit ARM - yeah, could be NX, but it could be innumerable other things.

1) The design win for a gaming console was x86 which ended up being the PS4K

2) The design win for a gaming console was ARM which ends up being the portable/console NX
...
3) Both designs are for gaming consoles because of the wording in the quote "at least one will be on gaming" not at most, so at least one means there could be two.

Scenario 4 - it has nothing to do with the NX or PS4K and is some hybrid PC/Android detachable laptop-tablet with a game controller, or something. It could've been designed for some other company and never came/will never come to market. Or they're just full of shit. Rumours and hearsay, man.

Well, maybe you could somehow make use of 1 camera with mirrors like some interferometer

Big mirrors, small cameras, it doesn't really matter. Historically that kind of thing has not been broadly compatible with most people's living rooms/spouses, but there need to be reference points in 3D space.

I'm increasingly hearing that the amount of space required for "room-scale" VR is surprisingly small. If you can swing your arms you're pretty much there, depending on the game design, of course.

So now onto this PS4K stuff:

They stated that the GPU is twice as powerful as standard PS4 and much faster. They did not say exactly how fast but that is was running at a higher clock speed while being much smaller than the original.

My first thought is that this doesn't make any sense. The CPU and GPU are one chip on the PS4 so saying that the GPU alone is "much smaller" sounds like they don't understand how the PS4 was put together, and "twice as powerful and much faster" is sort of saying the same thing twice..? Anyway, for the sake of debate, I'm going to assume everything said was true and that there is an upgraded PS4K in the pipeline exactly as the poster says. I hope they're wrong, but let's discuss.

So, considering the possible upgrade to the CPU and 2x power upgrade to the GPU. This could help PSVR games look graphically comparable to any versions of the same game on Rift, Vive.

The PS4 essentially has an AMD 7850 in it. I remember this because, as it happens, I had a 7850, ~4 years ago, and it was a mid-range card that cost me £100 or so. Having twice that power does not come near to the recommended specs for the Oculus and Rive. Don't get me wrong, it would help PSVR - and would obviously be preferable to that hopelessly underpowered PS4 GPU on its own - but it's not going to make it comparable to what Oculus and Rive demand. What it would do, and this does make some sense, is that it would allow developers to go "ok, we're going to develop a 60HZ game for regular PS4s, and throw in a VR mode using the extra power for the second scene for PS4K/PSVR".

Considering that it can upscale games that are not rendered at 4k resolution makes me think that the AAA devs will prefer rendering the game at 1080p and then upscaling it so they can take advantage of adding more intensive graphical effects and/or allowing the game to run at 60fps, if they just rendered the game at 4k it may mean that the ps4k game will not look that much different compared to the ps4 version.

They couldn't render the game at 4K. A couple of 7850s are not even remotely 4K-viable for modern games. Adding a few bells and whistles for a PS4K version, sure - but that whole situation sucks for everybody. Apologies for repeating myself, but: the developers have to split resources on making two versions of the game, the publisher bankrolls that, and the consumer pays the bill, whilst getting a shittier version/mediocre upgrade, depending on which SKU they own. I just don't see who this benefits.

In terms of upscaling regular PS4 games to 4K that literally means it'd take the 1080p the PS4 would normally put out and scale it to 4K. This is a clean doubling in both dimensions so no image degradation should occur (unlike the "bad old days" last gen, like where games had whatever weird internal resolution being scaled to 720p output from the PS3 and then being scaled to 1080p by whatever junk chipset your early HD set had in it - to its credit, the 360 did the output scaling for you). But for regular PS4 games it certainly won't look better; as you later point out, it'll look exactly like 1080p (at least, where the games are running in 1080p natively, which is far from universal).

Did Nintendo choose someone else (PowerVR?) to be their vendor for their SoC for the NX?

There are two games in town these days, ARM and x86. PowerVR are one possible ARM SoC vendor, but it doesn't really matter that much which.

[sol-alpha]

Base unit x86, portable unit ARM - yeah, could be NX, but it could be innumerable other things.

Which is why I am waiting for the reveal or if somehow a leak could occur which can confirm the CPU architecture.

I think it would possibly be ARM-based for both Console and Handheld because Iwata stated in the past how that they wanted to move away from having the actual hardware define the platform because of resetting the install base to zero each generation and instead wanting a platform which is software based like iOS/Android. He also stated that the hardware would not be a hybrid (for those that think there's going to be an NX hybrid) and stated that there would be multiple form factors that are like brothers.

In that sense, I would think that both the NX home console and handheld would both use ARM especially to keep backwards compatibility and forwards compatibility for future iterations (if the iterative cycles are true, referring to how some old Apple phones can still play new games optimised for the latest models). If the console was x86 and handheld was ARM, it sounds as though they would be half-brothers so it would seem like Nintendo isn't doing anything new at all to change their platform and are just continuing to make things complicated.

Again, it's not going to matter if I am wrong. It's just reading something like this http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=200129094&postcount=601 gives some reasoning why they would go ARM-based for all hardware.

For the record, I don't 'want' NX to be ARM-based, but ARM is by far the most logical path forward for a new gen console ecosystem coming out in 2016 (i.e. a console + a handheld + god-knows-what-else). For the game devs the ISA won't matter 95%* of the time. For the platform privder the ISA will matter a great deal - they have to double their efforts in a good deal of the HAL, last but not least, the security of the sandbox/VM. It's much easer and robust to have one ARMv8 hypervisor across the entire ecosystem**, than N different hypervisors.

* the remaining 5% being inline assembly and/or intrinsics - both things which are normally performance-tuned to the uarch, where things can differ across different x86's as much as they can across x86 and ARM.
** something trivial across ARM's bigLITTLE implementations.

Here's an informative post about what options Nintendo would have for the CPU in the sense that Nintendo were releasing the NX console this year.
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=200252918&postcount=1968

It's too long a post to quote, you may read it, at the end of it he states that Nintendo would either be using Puma(x86) or A72(ARM) due to the reasons he stated in the post especially at the end.

My first thought is that this doesn't make any sense. The CPU and GPU are one chip on the PS4 so saying that the GPU alone is "much smaller" sounds like they don't understand how the PS4 was put together, and "twice as powerful and much faster" is sort of saying the same thing twice..? Anyway, for the sake of debate, I'm going to assume everything said was true and that there is an upgraded PS4K in the pipeline exactly as the poster says. I hope they're wrong, but let's discuss.

I'm guessing it was meant for how people refer to FLOPS as the measure of power now and Hz for the speed. I guess you're right though that it did sound redundant.

The PS4 essentially has an AMD 7850 in it. I remember this because, as it happens, I had a 7850, ~4 years ago, and it was a mid-range card that cost me £100 or so. Having twice that power does not come near to the recommended specs for the Oculus and Rive. Don't get me wrong, it would help PSVR - and would obviously be preferable to that hopelessly underpowered PS4 GPU on its own - but it's not going to make it comparable to what Oculus and Rive demand. What it would do, and this does make some sense, is that it would allow developers to go "ok, we're going to develop a 60HZ game for regular PS4s, and throw in a VR mode using the extra power for the second scene for PS4K/PSVR".

Hence why I was saying they just keep using 60 fps and make use of the reprojection mode.

There are two games in town these days, ARM and x86. PowerVR are one possible ARM SoC vendor, but it doesn't really matter that much which.

Yes, I was referencing PowerVR because they are an ARM vendor since AMD sold their mobile division to Qualcomm years ago, I thought this meant it'd be better for Nintendo to find someone that's ahead of AMD with regards to ARM processors. Apple apparently has the best ARM processors now, just unfortunately obvious then that they wouldn't license out their designs.

[sol-alpha]

The following vids should just be treated as fiction or worst case scenarios

So I read another thread where someone was talking about a video about AR called HYPER-REALITY https://vimeo.com/166807261

Basically it's not the kind of world I would want to live in if it were real. It doesn't even make sense for someone to live using that daily, there's too much information cluttered everywhere and it has pop-ups that aren't controlled by you like advertisements.
It seems to be taking the worst parts of the internet and putting it into AR. Including apparently the ease of stealing someone's identity and a social credit system.

Then somebody else posted a fictional video about AR called Sight: Contact Lenses with Augmented Reality - Futuristic Video https://youtu.be/GJKwHAvR4uI

This one seems to be okay and brings up interesting ideas, it just lacks one of the things I mentioned it could have done like using GPS to go to a location and that the AR could show that someone is behind a wall because of that information using GPS or an ID signal being emitted from using radio waves for wireless internet etc

Anyway, it's nothing new what they are showing because its the kind of typical thing you would have for Sci-Fi storytelling when there is going to be a futuristic technology that is under R&D to highlight what kind of dangers it could cause.

Edit: Just to add to what I saying, if your AR could help identify people within the vicinity, it can keep you aware of things. For example, you are at home having a shower and you hear the front door close. You think it's your roommate but your AR is not identifying the signal as coming from your roommate. Hence, if it was a burglar or something else, you would at least be aware and contact the police using the AR.

[sol-alpha]

Where do I begin. It took me a while to get around to posting this.

As probably anyone would know, Pokemon Go is having an exceptional launch. It keeps breaking many records such as daily active users compared to other mobile games and even Twitter. It's out now in over 30+ countries at the moment (if I remember correctly) and is #1 in top grossing charts meaning that people are spending money on the game. The successful launch has broken records for Nintendo's market value as well. The only odd part is not hearing much news in how this affects Niantic as they're the ones who would benefit the most from the success of Pokemon Go.

Note: The following is a description of the game and how to play it, ignore it if you already know these details.

Let's start with the game. I tried it out a few times, Pokemon Go is an Augmented Reality (AR) game that has some of its gameplay based on Ingress; Niantic's other game they are known for. You travel outside to places to find Pokemon and catch them. To do so, you have to use GPS and an internet connection on your smartphone. You'll have a notification status on the bottom right of the screen that states nearby Pokemon, hints from other people have revealed that if you are looking for a particular Pokemon, you can track it by turning on the compass tracking with your GPS in-game and then select that nearby Pokemon and the notification status will pulsate depending on the direction you are facing.

So you'd turn around in a circle to see which direction you have to go. Once you have found a Pokemon your camera will activate the AR mode, you will see a Pokemon on your smartphone and you have to throw Pokeballs using sliding gestures to catch the Pokemon. Tricks to improve catching the Pokemon include: Spinning the Pokeball before you throw it and when you see a targeting circle on the Pokemon, you can get a "Nice" effect if the targeting circle is at its maximum size when you throw the Pokeball. Once you catch the Pokemon it is yours and you will get to do whatever with it including evolving it.

Other parts of gameplay include Pokestops which are based off of Portals in Ingress, you go to a location that has an icon on the map and when you are close to it you can tap the icon and then spin the circle to receive free items. The current method of fighting with Pokemon in the game is Gym Battling when you reach level 5. You choose 1 of 3 teams and then you go about defeating Gym Leaders to take over a Gym for your team and apparently you get game currency for it as well. (I haven't won a Gym battle so I wouldn't know)

End description

Now, the amazing thing about this game is that. Based off of impressions of the game's showing at E3, "gamers" thought it would be crap especially when seeing the game in action. It is insane though how popular the game is considering it became instantly successful and didn't have any marketing aside from that announcement trailer last year.

The most notable thing for me was not realising the social interaction this game was allowing. As you know, in this thread back in March 16th I stated,

"I still couldn't think of what Nintendo's NX is going to be however, it lead me to think of what would be the next big thing after VR/AR in gaming, and that is Social Interaction."

Link to post: http://kawasefan.net/forum/index.php?topic=53.msg720#msg720

To which I stated later in that post:

"So the next step would be interacting with the game using facial and voice recognition. This is probably what I think Nintendo would want if they wanted to get into VR considering how Miyamoto thinks that VR is anti-social because you are wearing a HMD in a room by yourself. However, I am just applying the idea in a non-VR situation to make this easier to explain. You sit in front of your TV with a Camera/Microphone facing you similar to the Kinect or let's say this was somehow the Nintendo NX handheld in your hands with a Camera/Microphone facing you, you are playing a game with an avatar and you are interacting with an NPC in-game. When you are responding/interacting to the NPC you can smile/frown/laugh etc and the NPC would respond accordingly. Another nifty little feature would be eye-tracking but, that is already being used/developed in VR so we know that is also something that can help interacting with NPCs in-game.

Expanding this to online multiplayer with other people, we can already communicate outside of games using Skype for example and it is pretty good for face-to-face interaction. In video games, we don't have that yet. We can communicate with microphones but, it is similar to talking on the phone while other games that communicate with text like MMOs lack knowing the emotion/intonation behind a word being said. If we could interact via avatars that can show our facial expressions, I'm certain this would be the kind of "Social Gaming" that companies have been looking for."

The point I am trying to show here is that I never looked at social interaction while outside, all I thought about was in relation to how it could work while playing video games at home and/or using VR.
Of course, I could have realised this earlier if I had played Ingress and followed the scene, I knew of the game when it released years ago but I never even looked at it to play it.
So we look at how social interaction is occurring in relation to Pokemon Go as an AR game. I have seen countless recordings on Twitter where there are crowds of people, at a location looking for Pokemon. This brings attention, it makes people wonder what they are doing and it easily spreads by word of mouth that they are playing Pokemon Go.
I've read articles where people have described their experiences playing Pokemon Go at 2am in the morning, greeting other people at this time of night playing Pokemon Go because they happened upon a Pokestop and are looking around for Pokemon. Some of them are comfortable to make friends because they are all enjoying playing the same game.

Can you see what I am getting at? This is the kind of thing mobile game companies would want. The game is causing so much exposure because of social interaction that some business either welcome Pokemon Go players into their stores or ask them to leave due to their discretion. This game hasn't released in Japan yet where Pokemon is most popular, it is expected to release by the end of the month and I can't wait to see how it goes.

Not knowing how the game will fare in the future, Niantic have mentioned they will do fortnightly updates to the game to keep content coming so people have something to do.
So let's pretend that Pokemon Go is a long-term success, because I want to make some predictions.

One of the things I am concerned about is, it is great that this game is causing social interaction that people have organised walks in which hundreds gather to catch Pokemon, it is amazing it has that kind of draw.
What I worry about, is all it takes is one person to ruin it all because of said person's beliefs, that they can't just let people live their lives, that they'll do what they can for their holy war.
I am imagining it as a worse-case scenario, I don't think that it is likely to happen in most countries however. I can't get the idea out of my head considering what happened in France last week and even the massacre in Orlando, Florida that there is a person out there who just can't handle life and believes that committing massacres contributes to something...

Enough of that. My other predictions. Assuming long-term success with Pokemon Go, Niantic would probably be committed to the game and would have to hire more staff if they want to create any more projects. It is probably unlikely that they would make any games from rival competitors of the Pokemon Company like Level 5's Yokai Watch for example. This would be a good thing because Niantic would get new competitors who would try to make the next big thing as big as Pokemon Go. Technology and game development could possibly improve to make better AR games with a smartphone. Although it doesn't have to be a smartphone. A dedicated portable device for AR games would be good as well, although it may not be as accessible depending on the price.

To go on further, the AR tech present in Pokemon Go is pretty basic, the game is essentially 2D when you think about. The map is 2D, and so Pokemon appear on a 2D map. The Pokemon do not interact with the environment, this is why I said the tech needs to improve. What would improve AR further is for the technology to process data via the camera(s) to enable rendering objects in a 3D world that it can interact with and not overlaying a 2D object in the foreground of a 3D world. It's difficult to explain further and the fact is, it could take years to see something like that unless of course competitors pull an arms race to get there first.

Anyway, as it stands for Pokemon Go. There are mobile game companies that could copy the game however, they need to get location data like the Pokestops to input features. As you may know, the location data in Pokemon Go was provided for from Niantic's previous game Ingress in which players provided the location data themselves rather than the staff at Niantic having to travel the world and map out these locations themselves.

Finishing up, as I said earlier I predicted that Social Interaction would be the next big thing after VR/AR gaming. I haven't proven that yet because Pokemon Go is only one game but, it is setting the foundation for my prediction to bare fruit with how things expand in the future in relation to gaming and social interaction.

I am trying to imagine in the future, although it is very fantasy like. How awesome would it be, to play an AR MMORPG outside, where I can form parties with random people in public and do dungeons at real world locations, that is already partly what Pokemon Go is, I am trying to imagine it further where the AR tech is better so that rendered objects look like they fit in with the environment and not looking like they are floating in the air unless they are a flying object.

[sol-alpha]

The realisation of what I posted has hit me like a ton of bricks. I'm thinking to myself, why did I predict that social interaction in gaming would be the next big thing?

I predicted that it would be the next big thing but, I didn't predict what would cause it. This isn't the same thing as some guy I know that was bragging that he got right that Shenmue III, FF VII Remake and The Last Guardian would appear at E3 last year. This is more than that.

I'm laughing because this sucks, again I was long-term unemployed due to circumstances from losing my job that if I still had it while studying at university. I could have had some money saved up and I would have done more with my prediction.

Think of it this way, as pointed out in my previous post. I predicted back in March 16th on this thread that social interaction would be the next big thing after VR/AR when I was trying to figure out what the NX would be. If I had money saved up, I could have done more by trying to figure out what are possible causes and determine whether it is something I could make money off of.

Some people probably knew that Pokémon Go would be successful but, no one knew it would be this big so quickly. There are people now calling Pokémon Go lightning in a bottle just like with the Wii but that is incorrect. Most people saying this just mean that it was luck or a fluke, this isn't that since I was able to predict it what would cause it to be successful.

Yes, I am stating that social interaction is the driver of Pokémon Go, it is contributing to its success. It has now made Nintendo worth more in market value than Sony. Yes, this kind of game already existed with Ingress but it is Pokémon Go that popularised it. There are examples of this happening before where the inventor doesn't gain the most success. Microsoft were the first ones to release the electronic tablet however, it was Apple that were the ones that popularised it. Now lots of companies manufacture tablets.

This is the same problem for me here, I pointed it out in the previous post. Pokémon Go is popularising social interaction games with AR, there will be competitors for this and there is no way I can just invest in the competitors because brand power was a very big factor in Pokémon Go just like the tablet with regards to Apple.

So the main point was, if I had money, I could have done more to determine if the game that would cause social interaction to be a big thing was from a publicly traded company, in this case Nintendo is benefitting from the success because The Pokémon Company is privately owned. Nintendo's shares were pretty cheap and now they have doubled in value apparently.

I didn't get anything good out of this, it feels pointless to brag. I didn't have the money to take a shot to invest in something and fail if I was wrong, I'm saying I missed the event, which is much worse than saying, I tried to get to that event and succeed but I failed.

Should I bother trying to invest money now in Nintendo?
No, I don't have any money saved up still as I only got out of unemployment recently but not with something using my degree yet as I haven't had my graduation yet.

Pokémon Go is expected to release in Japan at the end of the month. The country where Pokémon is most popular and where the most revenue is made worldwide in mobile phone gaming. You can take a risk now and invest while the stock price has already doubled because it could go even higher when Pokémon Go releases in Japan but, I can't guarantee that the value will go even higher. Invest at your own discretion and be aware of the risks.

Edit: I have now just seen news that Pokémon Go is launching in Japan tomorrow. I seriously don't know if you would be able to buy stocks at the current price while it is closed before it opens tomorrow morning. So yes, anyone that did want to have a chance to invest before it launches in Japan may have missed it because it launches tomorrow and not the end of the month.

Let's see now how high their market value goes when Pokémon Go launches in Japan tomorrow.

[Alc]

Should I bother trying to invest money now in Nintendo?

Well, plenty of other people certainly thought it would be a good idea.

Nintendo becomes most traded Japanese stock in any one day this century.

Thing is, it isn't a Nintendo property, and it isn't on Nintendo hardware, so from what I understand Nintendo don't actually stand to gain much money directly from the game (they do own stakes in Niantic, who developed the game, and The Pokemon Company, who licenced it out, but it's not a "Nintendo game" as so many people seem to assume). They get significant brand cachet, admittedly, and I'm sure they're delighted that this has landed not long before the launch of their new hardware. This does assume that the Pokemon Go craze lasts long enough for that to make a difference, of course - Michael Pachter, an "analyst" with a notably poor track record of predicting videogame market trends but who, for reasons that are beyond me, seems to get quoted whenever something like this comes along, gives a sour outlook - "I give this four months at the top of the charts, then it will fade" - so it's probably going to last forever. I've never cared for the Pokemon games and certainly don't have any interest in running around catching them, so I'd be happy with either outcome, but the one thing we can be certain of (as you mention) is that this will spur an explosion in AR games. Let's hope that produces something interesting in amongst all the shamelessly derivative cash-in clones.

(As to your actual question, I wouldn't claim to know much about stock market investment, but I know enough to know that buying during a sudden boom is running a serious risk of being part of a bubble. And bubbles burst.)

Back to the previous discussion, I'm somewhat dispirited to acknowledge that we're getting both an upgraded PS4 and an upgraded Xbox One. I really wish this wasn't the case, but c'est la vie.

[sol-alpha]

Yes, you brought up everything I knew at the time. As you said, the stock price has surged as people have described. So  it technically would have been a bad time to invest, just however pointing out that the last opportunity was before Pokemon Go's launch in Japan. I saw an article last night saying all markets around the world are down except for Japan because of Pokemon Go. Someone was calling it "Pokenomics" which was hilarious to hear.

I don't want to bother with the semantics of how much of a Nintendo game is this, apparently Iwata along with Ishihara(From The Pokemon Company) were involved with the initial concept/planning, this is why Nintendo are making those Pokemon Go accessory which hasn't even released yet.  http://www.pokemon.com/us/pokemon-news/news-from-the-pokemon-go-announcement/

Again, Nintendo were the only ones investors could invest in since Niantic and The Pokemon Company were privately owned. If Niantic was publicly owned, I imagine their share prices would have been a fraction of what Nintendo's were (due to market value) and I could have made huge gains.

(As to your actual question, I wouldn't claim to know much about stock market investment, but I know enough to know that buying during a sudden boom is running a serious risk of being part of a bubble. And bubbles burst.)

It doesn't seem too hard to learn, this is just going off learning financial maths. Actually, I just went over my notes and it might be hard to explain, like noting what a european put and call option is easy, or the american version or asian version.
But then, there are different kinds of market models you have to apply it to, so you have to do a little more with equations to solve things. (Single-Period Market Models, Multi-Period Market Models, Cox-Ross-Rubinstein Market Models, Black-Scholes Model, etc)

Edit: of course you could just get a stock broker to do all of that for you.

Point is, if I had invested, there was 1 of 2 things I was going to do. Short-sell if the price was so high that the bubble could burst as you mention or, hold onto the stock until it stabilises at a higher price than what I bought it for and just wait for dividends.
Technically, with the surge in price, and expecting the price to go down, I would have short-sell to make a good profit. (The stock price pretty much doubled.)

------------

A random thing, I've seen on twitter that employees of Santa Monica Studio, (I am guessing they created invizimals) are bitter about Pokemon Go's success. The studio tweeted an article downplaying the success that it wouldn't last, and from their studio and one of their producers, they tweeted about how they were the first ones to come up with this AR game.

They seem to have the wrong idea though about what is causing Pokemon Go's success, as I said it's not the fact that it is an AR game, it is the fact that social interaction is driving the game's success and, as said before, that means the closest thing to Pokemon Go before it would be Ingress because I doubt that a PSP game had GPS and 4G wireless internet as features for the game.

Back to the previous discussion, I'm somewhat dispirited to acknowledge that we're getting both an upgraded PS4 and an upgraded Xbox One. I really wish this wasn't the case, but c'est la vie.

I'm not bothered because, I just want to play on PC. Now, maybe I would have to buy an upgraded-PS4 if it becomes impossible to play certain VR games because of exclusivity. For the moment though, I doubt that 3rd-parties would do that when they've always been going multi-platform but, a few exclusives were shown at E3 if I remember correctly. Just have to wait and see I guess.

Yes, I would probably get whatever is OpenVR compliant, so HTC Vive or anything better.

[sol-alpha]

I wanted to round up posts to build a stronger argument for my prediction in case someone happened to live under a rock for a few years, came around, saw this and said to me, "How is this even true?"

So first, I link to my post http://kawasefan.net/forum/index.php?topic=53.msg720#msg720 where in March 16th I made the statement:

I still couldn't think of what Nintendo's NX is going to be however, it lead me to think of what would be the next big thing after VR/AR in gaming, and that is Social Interaction.

When I got this idea, I ended up changing the thread title to include social interaction. I even have posts on my twitter account pointing to this thread months before the release of Pokemon Go. The other good thing is that my linked post isn't edited so what I predicted in March 16th was made that long ago without revision. Of course, as I said in a recent post. I predicted it, but I couldn't figure out what would be the cause in case the prediction did occur. I was looking at Social Interaction at home with consoles or with VR so I was coming up with ideas that probably would have taken years and instead, Social Interaction with AR in the outside world was one thing I didn't stop to think of, and if I did. I definitely would have noticed it with Pokemon Go because I have seen The Pokemon Companies' history where there was either a video or an Iwata Asks where the explanation for the mainline Pokemon series being on handhelds is because of the social factor like trading Pokemon. Hence, social interaction. The result happened months after I predicted it, not years.
Of course I've been tweeting this and I haven't heard anyone else make this same claim or try to dispute my claim. (Which I repeat is, not that Pokémon Go would be a success, just what would drive its success.)

Anyway, I put the summary again about my prediction, so the question is: Did I correctly predict Social Interaction would be the next big thing in gaming? Currently as it stands, yes. This will be explained by the success of Pokemon Go and the consequences of it as mentioned in an earlier post.

We have to look at whether things other than Social Interaction is driving the success of Pokemon Go. One factor people point to, is the fact that it is a Pokemon game, hence it has lots of brand power, plus it is on smartphones, it is available to many consumers around the world. Surely those two things are enough? Nope.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=210537912&postcount=254

This is a post by JoeM86 who runs that serebii.net site, he has summarised every release of a Pokemon game on smartphones and I imagine the only one you probably would have heard of is Pokemon Shuffle because it was on the Nintendo 3DS. I'm sure some journalist has been looking at Pokemon Go and would have compared the revenue on how it did compared to the other Pokemon games on smartphones.

Next, http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1249446

A summary from that thread about Pokemon Go:

- $35 million in revenue
- 30 million worldwide downloads
- iPhone owners in the U.S. alone are spending approximately $1.6 million every single day
- top-grossing app in the $36.9 billion mobile-gaming sector and the entire iOS and Android app market

There is also an image in that link showing that Pokemon Go is the fastest mobile game to get to 10 million downloads worldwide. Taking only 7 days, beating Clash Royale which took 9 days.

What other arguments could be made against social interaction being the driver for Pokemon Go? It'd be hard to argue that the gameplay is a bigger factor than the social interaction. There have been plenty of people stating that they have friends who never play video games and are suddenly playing Pokemon Go.

I think this is a good article just showing my points for social interaction: http://www.news.com.au/technology/home-entertainment/gaming/how-pokemon-go-is-helping-people-with-social-anxiety-and-depression/news-story/bdf546cd7979d0c11480fcb596e61538
There is video footage include of a Pokemon walk which is usually organised by people to go and catch Pokemon. The article also highlights people who claim that Pokemon Go has helped with their social anxiety because they could converse with other people that were doing the same thing they were, playing Pokemon Go.

I wanted to find another one where I mentioned it was written by a woman detailing her experience playing the game at 2am with her partner and how they ended up grouping with a couple of other people at a pokestop who they never met before just because they were playing pokemon go. (I can't find that article)

Then of course, if you need more footage of pokemon go crowds:
https://youtu.be/H57rzPeoNms
https://youtu.be/Kw05SZ3cPjo
https://youtu.be/p-XnTDcQZjY

So, I'd need an argument that disproves that social interaction is the driver for the popularity of Pokemon Go. Otherwise, my claim stands.

So then finally, why do I care so much about this other than having predicted it? Because of the consequences.
I stated this in an earlier post in much more detail http://kawasefan.net/forum/index.php?topic=53.msg866#msg866  . Predicting that social interaction is the next big thing in gaming, competitors have now seen how much money Pokemon Go is making at such at rapid pace as shown above. They will want to make something to compete with it, this could mean a few things, 1) improvements to AR technology so that there is much better games/interactivity with AR in the future, (I have given my reasons as to why AR games have much to improve upon in smartphones as explained in the linked post in this paragraph).
2) Improvements with social interaction, I'd say social interaction with AR games have made a huge leap already in progress, now it is probably going to be applied at home on PC/Consoles and/or with VR as I stated in my initial prediction from March 16th where I had the right idea but didn't determine what would cause it first.
3) A lot of competitors coming up with the wrong ideas of what made Pokemon Go successful and try to come up with clones of it or Ingress clones. (Again I detail a lot of speculation about that and the future of AR games outside in the msg866 link above.)
I have shown on my twitter account already that Santa Monica Studio are getting the wrong idea of what made Pokemon Go successful, claiming that they were the first to make this type of AR game with the game Invizimals, but not noticing how the PSP lacks GPS and wireless 3G/4G internet to go outside and interact with other people.

Then finally, the last thing to point out of course is any console warriors that decide to label Pokemon Go as lightning in a bottle, or a fad, just like with the Wii. Most people using that idiom just mean that it is a fluke or luck that this happened. They never try to mean that it is a great but fleeting success. As pointed out many times, the consumers that Nintendo were trying to get were people that didn't play games, but would consider playing them. They got those people on the Wii, it became a success, they only lost them due to smartphones, a competitor, so it's not a fad because those people never went away, they just moved to games on smartphones then, these people that aren't gaming fanatics. Is motion gaming a fad? No, that didn't die either, it exists in smartphones and now in VR headsets, and of course in the Wii U and 3DS currently.

So, pointing out Pokemon Go as a fad, fluke, or luck to me is pointless. If this game has long-term success and only loses consumers years down the line, it will be to another competitor that has appealed to them with their form of Social Interaction outside, at home, or in VR rather than AR gaming. This is something that won't go away just like motion controls and consumers who'd consider playing games but aren't enthusiasts.

In a sense, I am trying to point out that social interaction in gaming will be the next industry standard, just like online gaming and motion controls for the most recent to occur.

[sol-alpha]

May as well post this since this thread went off-topic with next-gen console discussion many times.

Finally, after so long. After all the fake photoshops and the 3D printed "NX controller" lifted from one of their patents explaining buttons/sticks placed on top of a touch screen.
We have possibly credible leaks about the NX from "game journalists" rather than rampant Reddit and questionable NeoGAF insiders. (Doesn't make things immediately better, just pointing out how leaks were correct about PS4K and Scorpio from sites like eurogamer and kotaku.)

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-07-26-nx-is-a-portable-console-with-detachable-controllers

http://kotaku.com/report-nintendo-nx-is-a-portable-console-1784314749

Keeping this concise, according to the article the NX is a portable device that can also act as a home console to play games on your TV. The dev kits are running on Nvidia's Tegra X1 which is an ARMv8 SoC. The portable has detachable controls, and a docking station to place the device into for playing the system connected to a TV. The device has reportedly no hardware backwards compatibility and it uses physical cartridges where Nintendo reps suggested that cart sizes would be 32GB. Specs like RAM and memory storage are not known. Lastly, apparently the NX will be revealed in September.

Now to give my thoughts. First off, we still do not know the whole extent of the device. The people who claimed NX was going to be a Hybrid-device are jumping for joy. I have no qualms with that. I thought all along that there wouldn't be a hybrid as stated by Iwata because he wanted partitioned devices that were like brothers. This suggested that they would have similar SoC designs like Apple devices which Iwata referenced.

Going off these rumours, I would have to analyse it as a Hybrid-device. (Portable/Stationary)

As a portable device, it sounds very powerful because it is running off of an Nvidia Tegra X1, I thought I found it in the relevant NeoGAF threads but, I couldn't find a source which backed up that supposedly the NX dev kits have cooling fans because the Nvidia Tegra X1's are overclocked which, people are suggesting that the final hardware may use a more powerful X1 that is customised including lower heat output so that it should be able to run with passive cooling rather than a fan. Other speculations suggest that NX will use the Nvidia Tegra "X2" which is the Pascal-based ARM SoC which Nvidia will apparently be revealing at the Hot Chips conference from August 21st-23rd (US Time Zone) according to this article. http://www.pcworld.com/article/3097641/hardware/nvidias-next-generation-tegra-mobile-chip-is-on-its-way.html

Who knows, it's problematic I can't find a source for the supposed claim that the dev kits are using fans because the Nvidia's X1 is overclocked.

Moving on to controls, it is suggested that the controls are detachable. So, I have no clue why they didn't speculate that there could be variations of controls? If you saw the image in the eurogamer or kotaku link. The NX could look like a tablet with dual-stick controls attached to the sides of the device. This makes me speculate a few things.

- The NX portable should have a touch screen, I imagine they could be moving on to multi-touch capacitive screens so that you no longer need to use a stylus. (There was no mention of a stylus with the dev kit device.)

- The NX portable should have motion controls: accelerometers, gryoscopes, etc (Like the Wii U gamepad). This, along with the touch screen would be to accommodate mobile phone developers in that they can just port their games over to the NX rather than making an NX-exclusive game. Notable examples are the 3DS versions of the Puzzle and Dragons games and Monster Strike. They originated on mobile phones but, 3DS exclusive games had to be developed. With the device as I described so far, Nintendo just has to make things quicker with microtransaction payments on the eShop as I know with even the New 3DS, it takes time for it to connect to the eShop when I am downloading DLC in-game with Fire Emblem Fates for example.

- Speculation: Could the device have wireless internet? i.e. 4G. Or GPS?
If the NX is accommodating mobile phone developers, it would probably help to have wireless internet available to do microtransactions or playing mobile phone games that make repeated connections to servers when you complete a stage for pay for Gacha stuff. With regards to GPS, Ingress and Pokemon Go are the only games I am aware of that use GPS to be able to play those games. If GPS and wireless internet is not available, it is very likely that Ingress and Pokemon Go will not be on NX then.

- Following from that, the device could have cameras on the back and front of the system. This would help with regards to software emulated backwards compatibility of 3DS/DSi and Wii U games. Remember that 3DS had AR games at launch and the DSi had Face Training which used facial recognition. In the same post that I was predicting that Social Interaction in gaming would be the next big thing -> http://kawasefan.net/forum/index.php?topic=53.msg720#msg720 I also talked about whether the NX would use hand gestures or facial expressions for inputs which are read from the camera because they have used this technology before but, the tech has probably has advanced so they can create better features for games using these kinds of inputs.

- Now, the detachable controls. Eurogamer drew what the device could look like and stated that apparently either in that article or a video from Digital Foundry that the controls work even when detached (If I heard correctly) and that apparently you could do local multiplayer with said detached controls. (That part didn't make sense.)
If the detached controls work in wireless mode, that means it requires batteries to work so it may add bulk to the size, although that could be okay if the ergonomics are designed well so that your hands don't get cramped.
This would also mean, say if the device were attached to it's "docking station" the controls work via bluetooth and hence local multiplayer is possible during stationary play. (I don't know if it would work during portable play.)

- If the device has bluetooth, that means all Nintendo related bluetooth controllers from the Wii Remote to the Wii U Pro Controller (Excluding the Wii U Gamepad) should work when connecting to the NX.

- The device having detachable controls suggests that there could be new control inputs that can be added to the device, let's say for ridiculousness because I can't imagine any new control inputs with buttons. That you get to attach analog joysticks all over the device, that was one complaint with the 3DS in which an add-on had to be made so that you could use dual-slide pads for 3DS games like Monster Hunter. So with NX, you can get all the analog sticks you could ever want! They appear on the shoulders! On the back of the device! On the face of the device! On your face! (What I even just said should give you some ideas about where they can put things on the device.)

- What does the docking station do? Unfortunately, all that was stated was that you'd be able to play games on your TV. Nothing more. It is not known if the docking station is "dumb" there has been speculation that either the docking station is "dumb" or "smart" or something else. Dumb as in, it doesn't have any components in it to increase the processing power of the NX. Smart as in, it has components inside to increase the processing power of the NX, a notable example of this was one of the Windows devices revealed earlier in the year that is a tablet that can act as a laptop. The tablet connects to a dock that looks like a laptop keyboard and the dock contains an Nvidia GPU and extra battery power(? I forget.)
Or something else, as in speculation that the NX portable is underclocked but, when it is docked. It will increase its processing speeds for better output of resolution for example by increasing its power (Watt) outage.
Dumb is cheap, Smart is expensive, something else is probably doable and possibly won't change costs.

- We don't know what Nintendo is trying to hide. There have been statements before, that Nintendo want to avoid revealing the NX early because competitors will copy their device. I don't know if this is it for the device or if there are features that are only known to Nintendo's 1st party developers. Also, it was reported last year when dev kits were first reported that they had a console and portable unit, the console unit couldn't be revealed as a docking station until now? (I guess because of NDAs and all)

- The device using physical cartridges that are suggested to be 32GB in size is somewhat of a problem. Nothing is revealed about the storage memory that the device can use so that you can have a digital software library with games from the eShop like virtual console or indie games. Other than SD cards, will the device have SSD memory like smartphones and tablets? Will it be bigger than 32GB? Say 64GB or 128GB?
What about being able to buy High Capacity SD cards up to 2TB? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsIKDfrUXLo (Someone in the comments from 2 years ago said 128GB just came out.)

- So maybe, the docking station or Nintendo's patented (or soon to be patented) Supplemental Computing Device will be able to use External HDDs. Although, that means your digital software library is limited as a portable but, at home you would have no problems being able to use your digital software library with an external HDD attached.

I think that was all I needed to cover. We may as well wait for the reveal which is apparently during September. (Which I predicted too, in the statistics thread. However it was with a Binomial distribution and didn't make sense relating to predicting the month it could occur compared to using exponential distributions for waiting times.)

Edit: Edited the post a few times to fix up spelling errors and grammar.

[Alc]

Interesting analysis - concur with most of it.

My main concern is the X1. It's not unusual for devkits to have different hardware to the final product, but it's usually in the form of more RAM (for debugging, like the Gamecube NPDP-GBOX or TDEV) or a PC-like machine, with the game hardware as a sister board (like the PS2 Tool or the Dreamcast Katana HKT machines). The X1 is a couple of years old (a lifetime in mobile hardware design) and didn't make a huge splash when it was released. Comparisons to mobile and console performance are always apples-to-oranges as their core design philosophies are so different (consoles focus on extracting as much power as they can and pump it into a beefy CPU/GPU, mobile tries to do clever rendering tricks to reduce power consumption as much as possible whilst still having modern graphical presentation - they are "powerful" in different ways). The early 360 devkits were famously, and embarrassingly for Microsoft, just regular Apple G5 machines, with PPC CPUs - purely so that developers could get used to coding on multiple PPC cores; it's possible this X1 dev unit could just be a "dip your toe in the water" and the real device will be custom, possibly based around the new X2, which would be much more competitive. My worry is that Nintendo will do what they usually do and go with the cheaper option, which will result in a machine that is graphically on par with the Wii U/legacy consoles - possibly worse. That does not seem like a good idea to me, but they've made truckloads of money doing things that didn't seem like a good idea to me, so hey.

Given the success of Pokemon Go, if the device didn't have GPS in it before, you can bet they're scrambling like mad to get that in.

Most of the internet seems to think that the dock will have a GPU (or similar) in it. I doubt this - cost and engineering complexity make it a dubious proposition. Roll on September.

[sol-alpha]

Remember that battery power was a main concern for the 3DS and that the Tegra 2 failed in that regard. I don't know if Nvidia had anything soon in the pipeline back then to fix that  problem. So Nintendo switched GPU providers back then.

Fast forward to now, we have the X1 but Nvidia have a new generation of Tegra at a 16nm node being revealed next month. It being smaller and more efficient means better performance with regards to battery power and heat produced. So I'd imagine it's a better proposition for Nintendo even if it's more costly. I'm basing this off their slow RAM experiences with the N64 that they spent a pretty penny for 1T-SRAM with the GameCube and Wii and eDRAM for the CPU and GPU for the Wii U.

So it's still a 50/50 chance X2 could happen rather than no chance at all. I almost forgot how we found out earlier this year that NX is releasing in March 2017 at the end of Nintendo's financial year. This made it sound very likely that something delayed the launch from releasing during the holidays because everyone was expecting insider accounts that NX would release this year. Nintendo reps stated that the delay was to make sure that software would be ready for launch and I believe the launch period to avoid droughts.

That sorta irks me since it sounds like they had all these years with lack of Wii U games to release to develop games on NX and that they said they got over their HD development troubles. So either that is true, the delay is due to software. Or the speculation is that the delay is due to hardware.

Even with a customised X1, they could have released the system this year since X1 has been around for a year or so, so if we find out that the NX isn't using anything Pascal-based which will be revealed in August. Then it will be true that they delayed the launch for software reasons.

Regardless of Pokemon Go's success. I question that they would put GPS and wireless internet for that alone. They may do that because of Pokémon Go's success however, I'm certain they would want to look at how they could use GPS and wireless internet in their own games. The only similar technology they've used relating to travel is a pedometer on the Wii fit U accessory and the 3DS (Assuming the 3DS uses that and not motion sensors.)

Unless Nintendo have a feasible way to implement GPS without using wireless internet and sim cards. Then Nintendo would have to put a sim card slot along with gps and wireless 4G internet into the NX because celluar data, wireless internet along with GPS is how most of our phones work to get accurate positional data. (From what I've read)

The other thing similar to this was putting NFC into the Wii U gamepad. Skylanders was already around and ubisoft had ideas before Wii U was re-revealed on how to use NFC. It took a couple years after for the amiibo platform to appear with the only experiment before that was the figures for Pokémon rumble. Then, when amiibo was successful and made people salty, Nintendo added NFC readers into the New 3DS and a peripheral device for old 3DS users.

I forgot to add with talking about NX speculation, how are you suppose to use touch screen controls when the NX is docked? I thought of either using hand gestures which are recognised by the camera but, that needs good positioning to work properly. Then I thought maybe the Wii Remote would be a substitute however, if the touch screen is multi touch capacitive, then it won't work well replicating the controls. So I'd have to think of any ideas other than it won't use it at all.

[sol-alpha]

So new rumours are appearing that NX will be using a Pascal-based Tegra SoC. That sounds great because it's more efficient and powerful for a portable than using a Maxwell  Tegra. However, something isn't adding up with regards to it being a hybrid.

Eurogamer claimed the docking station would allow the NX to play games on the TV. Let's imagine the NX is slightly less powerful than the Xbox One, such that Xbox One plays games at 900p resolution and NX can play equivalent games at 540p as a portable.

We assume the screen in the portable is 540p so QHD due to past rumours and it being a waste of power to render higher resolutions on a small screen.

Some people are assuming that the NX is underclocked when it is portable and reaches the regular clock rate when it is docked. They are using examples that it goes from 540p to 1080p, now, that is possible. It's just not going to happen with AAA games.

What I'm getting at is similar to the PS4K, in that it's not powerful enough to render current AAA games at 4K resolution so all Sony wants is to have the games upscale from 1080p to 4K resolution.

So unless we know more about the console unit of the NX since everyone is calling it a hybrid. I am thinking of a couple of scenarios:

1) portable is underclocked, when docked it increases clock speeds and can render games at higher resolutions for HDTV but is limited to games that aren't graphically intensive such as indie and mobile games.

2) portable is not underclocked, hence it is more powerful than 1) as a portable. When it is docked, it will only upscale the image to HD on the TV. (High res textures and AA would help a lot)

Any components in the dock to help boost processing will make NX expensive.  There's the SCD from the patent but, we don't know if that will be used for NX or how it will be used.

I'm only erring on the side of caution because I am excited by how powerful it is as a portable but, I really need to see this thing revealed to find out if it can even render AAA xbox1/ps4 games in 720p or 1080p to the TV. (Since developers can't just brute force things to work.)

Edit:
There's a post from someone in the link below that describes how capable Pascal-based Architecture is for the Nvidia Tegra line. However, it is just theoretical numbers and not real world performance. It would be preferable to see what the NX would be capable of in real world performance.

In the link, he makes an example that it could be as capable as a PS4. That sounds possible on paper but, how would the real world performance be when it is underclocked and when it's at its regular clock rate for the "docked mode".

http://m.neogaf.com/showpost.php?p=211846308

Edit 2: I think this is a better post to read off because this person has better knowledge of SoC used for mobile phones seeing as FP16 (16-bit floating point precision) is more efficient in phones and can help with pixel shading as stated in the post below about how capable the NX could be but it's still only speculation.

http://m.neogaf.com/showpost.php?p=212056509&postcount=10494

[sol-alpha]

I just had this video grab my attention.

It's the first step I mentioned with regards to improving AR, especially where I said that AR has to be able to interact with the environment.

https://youtu.be/4f09VdXex3A

Here's the article where I found it: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/08/02/mit-just-changed-the-vr-game-with-interactive-dynamic-video/#gref

As said, it's only a first step though. You'll see that objects vibrate but, that's about it. I'm guessing it would take a lot of RAM and CPU processing to knock the object over or cut it in half or smash it. These would be computer generated things anyway.

Anyway, it's pretty good to see this because again I keep thinking that things will take longer than expected.

Think again what I said before that you could play an AR MMORPG outside and just grab random people on the street to join your party. Oh and I still want a Shin Megami Tensei AR game, it makes so much sense with the themes of the game.