This is the promise of things like the Oouya console but they have yet to be proven commercially viable in the market.

There are some interesting forces at work here. The amount of time and effort needed to build a truly cutting edge game console has historically been high, further tools to get the most performance out of the hardware have required similar investments in expensive engineering time. This combined with selling the consoles into a very price sensitive market.

In order to recoup those costs, given the market realities, the console makers have traditionally resorted to extracting a 'tax' out of the game developers. On the theory that charging a few extra $ for your game to cover the cost of the tools / access is possible, whereas trying to fund the tool development on the back of base console sales is not possible.

Historically this has been the PC's "secret" weapon against game consoles for a long time. The cost of building tools was offset by developer fees across a much wider base of developers. "Free" tools were good enough if the hardware was sufficiently over powered, and gamers would spend $3500 on a machine that "normal" people would budget < $1000 for. That makes things flexible.

Then there are the phone games, which like PC games, have the advantage that the phone is useful for other stuff and there are more developers trying to write apps for it.

Ooya's promise is that the existing Android infrastructure / developers will support tool development, and the wide variety of handsets will constrain there efforts to work on systems that are similar to the modest abilities (relative to all android platforms) of the Ooya console.

So to respond to the articles point, the reason you cannot write a game for Xbox using $100 worth of tools is because if Microsoft only got $100 from everyone writing a game for the Xbox you would not have enough money to actually create the tools, much less support them decently. Their best effort at this was XNA but they have since killed that due to lack of adoption, if you are EA you can pay big bills, if you aren't, there are not enough of you to pay any bills.

MS could make development cheaper but still charge a 30% tax on game sales (which would actually be double what they take on a disc game).

what you describe ("if you aren't big and selling enough games, there aren't enough of you to pay the bills") is exactly the thinking I used to see inside Microsoft, not just around xBox, but around various development tools. it is a really really weird mindset today, though I think for xBox in the early days, when you really needed some low-level hardware tools to get the best juice out of the GPU, it still held a bit of whater. but that was then, and now game engines and GPU programming are much much easier. both Apple's XCode and Android development tools are basically free and there is a vast quantity of good quality graphics and physics and GLSL open source to draw on. they need to change their thinking about tools and access. they have to believe that developers will come and make great games and will be willing to give you a cut if you give them distribution, promotion, and access to your huge installed base of consoles.

I just bought a fairly capable gaming PC for around $1,000. It's not the absolute fastest thing but it certainly performs more than well enough for all the indie games I've bought.

" for all the indie games I've bought."

Those are typically not the graphics-intensive ones. I'm not sure what specs your machine make it into a 'gaming' PC, but I have yet to see anyone in the industry call a machine with the specs that 1000$ gets you today a 'gaming machine'.

What's more, this point applies to ANY consumer device today:

"Why can’t I write a game for <device with a CPU> tomorrow using $100 worth of tools and my existing Windows laptop and test it on my home <device with a CPU> or at my friends’ houses"

If as a company you're going to push for any device (game console, tablet, TV-box, phone, etc.), that seems like a number one pre-requisite to significant market share.

Really? The number one pre-requisite? I think you're greatly overestimating how much the general population shares your particular hobbies.

I think you are underestimating how much the general population wants apps

Normally, I very much try to temper my thoughts on what the "general population" wants. I realize that I'm probably an outlier (as is nearly any person considered in isolation).

However, I just do not see the never ending thirst for apps that people act like exists. What I do see is people enjoying well produced, well adapted, easily distributed pieces of software that do what they need, whether that's in the form of a web application, a mobile app, or a desktop program.

I don't see people just flat-out demanding apps. No one says "I'd prefer to type all my documents on my 9 inch touch screen device" when there's a nice, light, ultrabook with a keyboard right next to it (and the same office suite on both devices).

HOWEVER: of course people want their devices to be able to do lots of cool things. However, that's only if you can do LOTS of really cool things and do them well.

Everybody, even your grandmother, snickers at the shoes equipped with a Twitter reader. There are limits, and developers would do well to take a good hard look at those limits.

People would be much more apt to become hobbyist developers if they even knew where to start; we're all curious beings with problems we want to solve. My interest in web came only after I realized how easy it was to look at the innards of a site and go from there. It's not that simple for most software and games at the moment.

Steam boxes should also be pretty open like that. Obviously you can already make a "PC game" that can run on a Steam box but, Newell promised the approval process of Steam will almost completely disappear in the future, so it should be even easier for game developers to put their games on Steam, and then having them distributed to any device that runs Steam.

I'm sorry I didn't mention Valve's steam as a competitor in the post, I am very very excited to see what they come up with. I <3 Valve. I do think Apple and Android have a little more indie developer momentum right now, but not sure how that will play out long-term.

The OUYA is going to fail spectacularly. It won't even dent the market.

Why? Because it's going to be an inferior product with an inferior ecosystem that no average gamer is going to trust to stick around. People stick with what they know and have liked in the past, unless you give them a very substantial reason to change direction (positive or negative).

Some people want OUYA to succeed, but that's not reason enough for it to.

Why do the tools need to cost anything at all?

you're spot on, they shouldn't really cost anything. XCode for iOS development, for example, doesn't cost anything (once you've bought a mac). similarly Android development tools don't cost a thing. charging a small fee like $99/year for the apple developer program or the Amazon store, or $25/year (i think it is) for Google Play is something they say simply helps defray the costs of hosting your apps and icons and in-app-purchase stuff, etc, reviewing apps, supporting you as a developer, and they all say it "helps improve the quality of apps in the store." To be fair, Windows development tools and access to the Windows Marketplace and the XBLGI are similarly free and/or priced (although honestly the tools are pretty stunted in free form). I was really trying to make the point that the cost on xBox for developing games that get real promotion or are easily visible to users are very high and Microsoft gets overwhelmingly strong veto power over your apps/games.

I asked about this specifically because, when I got the book that really started me deep into programming [1], I was hampered by my lack of a C compiler and assembler, and the ~$200 cost thereof ($400 total, in mid-1990's dollars, for the two tools -- kids these days have it easy with binary downloads of Windows ports of gcc and NASM available free on the web). If I'd had that kind of money in middle school, I would have blown it on video games. (I didn't know about GNU, I don't think the DOS port of gcc, the Allegro system, was yet born, and I didn't have any mentors.)

The source is messy and compiler-specific, and many implementations are irrelevant to modern systems. For example, I recall Chapter 14 is about implementing multiplayer over serial cable by directly writing to I/O ports in assembly language to drive the UART. I never did get that to work, but trying to translate the book from the Watcom C + MASM toolchain to the QBASIC + DEBUG toolchain -- without access to a working copy of the former and zero prior C experience! -- actually taught me a lot.

So maybe there is a reason toolchains should be expensive -- to encourage starving students with lots of time but little money to expand their minds by jury-rigging alternatives :)

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Tricks-Game-Programming-Gurus-Andre-La...

>I don't think the DOS port of gcc, the Allegro system, was yet born

It might interest you to know that according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJGPP, there's been a DOS port of gcc since 1989.

This is veering a bit off topic, but Apple do a fair bit for their $100/year. Especially in regards to handling overseas tax withholding to ensure that you don't need to keep up with every country's local tax laws. They also stand between you and the customer with regards to processing refunds, volume and educational licensing.

Google Play, as far as I'm aware, don't do this for every country you sell in. Leading to situations where you may be liable for tax payments but won't know it unless you do the research yourself. This is discussed in more detail here: http://retrodreamer.com/blog/2012/03/why-dont-we-have-paid-v...

> or $25/year (i think it is) for Google Play

Actually it is 25$ once and for all.