I think the point Hideo was trying to make was a good one, theoretically there is no physical reasons for platform specific content, the only reason for it is to allow companies to profit from content sales on each individual platform. Why sell one unit when you can sell 3.
Imagine a world where any game would play on any platform.
If you owned a PC, PSP and an Iphone then you could play the same game on each device, with the PC giving the best experience as it's got the best hardware, the iPhone would give a reasonable but limited experience for travelling to and from work and while out and about while the PSP would be great for going on longer journeys and holidays.
As a consumer you would only need to buy the game once online. then simply activate it on the device you needed to run it on and you'd just download and play. When you wanted to switch platforms you'd simply activate it on the new platform and it'd be deactivated on the other platforms and be available to play.
The above exapmle would work if the comanies responsible for producing platforms (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Apple, Nokia, Motorola, etc, etc) didn't introduce proprietry formats into their systems. The reason they do is to stop the above happening and to increase their control of the content on thier respective platforms thereby increasing the profits gained from their platforms.
A couple strong examples are:
Microsoft with Direct X. This was created to make sure that no other PC operating system would be compatable with PC Games, if developers used OpenGL, OpenAL, OpenCL then games could be much more easily ported to Unix or Mac OS.
Apple with no Adobe Flash support, this is to allow them to control the content and profit from each app created for their platform, if they supported Flash then they would very quickly lose control of content on the i series of devices and the apple app store would be all but useless to them, as it stands it's their killer app for all i platforms.
The fact is that for Hideo Kojima's prediction to become true it wouldn't need cloud based anything, simply for proprietry code to be dropped in favour of Open standards. He wasn't quoted as saying Cloud anything, it was latched onto the end of the paragraph as 'by others in the gaming industry'
Cloud has a long and rocky road ahead of it, chicken and egg to the nth degree, I won't switch until bandwidth and lag issues are sorted but ISP's don't feel demand for Low latency high bandwidth connections are strong enough. Add to that the enourmous costs involved in rolling out such a network, unless you're willing to sell your dignity to Google and convince your Mayor to change your town's name to Google's Town for a Decade or two for a free Google Fiber rollout/trial.
I would love to see Hideo Kojima's dream a reality but there are too many industry hard hitters against it right now as the bulk of their profits depend on cross platform incompatability that they will fight hard to resist change to their business models.
Just look at how badly Bluetooth was implemented due to fear of copyright infringment. Bluetooth is a great personal network standard that has been hacked up by so many different platform providers that it's hard to find two devices that can connect to each other in any meaningfull way.
I have the following bluetooth compatible devices: two mobile phones, a wireless Keyboard, a camera, a bluetooth headset, three bluetooth usb dongles.
It's near impossible to get any use from them as the camera can't talk to my phone. my keyboard can only talk to it's specific dongle, if the other dongle's plugged in it interferes, the Keyboard's dongle won't talk to anything except the Keyboard. My phone's can talk to each other but one can't send files to the other but the other one can and even then only certain files and only to certain places on the phone's directory structure. the headset will work on the phone's and the PC but can't be connected to more than one at a time.
The above is deliberately confusing because that sums up bluetooth to me, a confused bastardised standard that should have worked well but currently has little or no value other than specific tasks. This is what happens when companies release products for multiple platforms. There is no hardware specific reason why the Keyboard shouldn't connect to the Phones or the PC, there is no hardware specific reason the Phones can't communicate equally with each other and transfer all user files between them, there is no hardware specific reason that all these devices couldn't connect to each other, the reason is that the manufacturers limit what bluetooth standards they implement to limit cross platform compatibility.
Well that's the end of my little rant, my 2 cent's if you please ;-) lol
JKay6969
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