My new job

It's been a long time since I posted here. This is purely informational. I have a new job as a columnist for the San Jose Mercury News. I'm still blogging about video games at www.mercextra.com/gaming. I'm also writing columns for the Merc on Mondays and Thursdays. The Monday column is a tech product review column, and on Thursdays I write tech commentaries. It's a lot of fun, all opinion now. But hard work too.

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Bungie's New Game?
Category: Games

Whats next for Bungie?

Everybody knows that Halo 3 is well underway at Microsofts Bungie unit. But theres more going on inside the secretive game developer than just that one blockbuster project. Jason Jones, the project lead on the Halo games, and Chris Butcher, the top programmer, are both working on a different game. They are on a small project that is exploring something new beyond Halo. These folks are the cream of the crop in terms of the key talent at Bungie. Without them, neither Halo nor Halo 2 would have happened. Jones took about a year off after the launch of Halo 2, traveling around the world. Now he's back and is trying to come up with something new.

On top of that, Bungie apparently has another team working on yet another game. The whereabouts of Pete Parsons, general manager of Bungie, arent known. He is no longer the general manager and he has left Microsoft. We dont know which new Bungie game he is associated with, but it should be interesting. I asked Peter Moore about a second team at Bungie way back at E3 in May, and Moore said, I dont know that Bungie has a second team. Microsoft has declined comment.

Halo 3, meanwhile, is well underway and just went through a script rewrite. The game is slated for 2007 still. Spong.com recently went out on a limb and talked about how Halo 3 will be the last game in the Halo series and that Microsoft is likely to announce a new non-Halo Bungie game at the X06 event in late September in Barcelona, Spain. Various tidbits suggest that Halo 3 brings the story to its close. That makes sense since others have told me that Jason Jones is not a sequel kind of guy before. I wrote in my latest book that Jones toyed with other games such as a castle siege game and another game that involved Minotaurs, a subject of an early Bungie game, but both were canceled. Jones wound up returning to help finish Halo 2 while it was in midstream. Butcher, meanwhile, was one of the technical heavyweights who offered a lot of feedback to the engineers on how to design the Xbox 360. He was one of the folks, for instance, who argued to double the amount of memory in the system to 512 megabytes.

And lastly, a new Halo novel is slated to come out this year. (This got posted on Digg first). Amazon.com lists two new novels coming by Eric Nylund. One is Halo: the Ghosts of Onyx, slated for release on Oct. 31. Another is Halo: The Ghosts of Coral, slated for release on April 3, 2007.

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Sony Delays PS 3 in Europe, Lowers Shipment Numbers For Holidays
Category: Games

If you want a PlayStation 3 for Christmas, you chances just got a lot worse.

   Due to production problems, Sony said Wednesday that it will come up short with the supply of PlayStation 3 video game consoles for the critical holiday selling season and delay its launch in Europe until March.

   Sony's production problems with the PlayStation 3 could be a big boost for rivals Nintendo and Microsoft, but they could create big headaches for video game publishers such as Electronic Arts that have been counting on healthy sales of new software this holiday.

"Sony didn't have their ducks in a row this time,'' said Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan. ""It hurts their image with investors and consumers. I think Euorpean consumers will be rightfully angry.''

  Previously, Sony promised it would have 2 million consoles available in November to support simultaneous launches in North America, Japan, and Europe. Dave Karraker, a spokesman for
Sony's U.S. game division in Foster City, says it will now have only 400,000 consoles in North
America and 100,000 in Japan in November. Sony hopes to increase supplies in both Japan and
North America to a total of 1 million to 1.2 milion each by the end of the year.

   In May, Sony promised that it would ship in all three major regions in November and supply 2 million consoles in November, 2 million more units by December 31, and 2 million more by March 31. Sony still promises a total of 6 million units by March 31, but analysts found that hard to believe, given the production problems.

   Sony's game chief, Ken Kutaragi, announced the delay in Japan and apologized to consumers. He said that Sony was having trouble producing the Blu-ray high-definition storage components, which can store five to 10 times more than a typical DVD. The Blu-ray technology has now been the reason for two delays in the PlayStation 3 schedule, but Sony argues it will provide much more value to the consumer and give the PS 3 a technological edge over rival game systems.

   Asked why Sony's projections were too rosy and why Sony took a long time to revise them, Karraker said, "That is Ken Kutaragi's style. He pushes his internal teams to hit the numbers. When it became clear we couldn't hit the numbers, Ken revised it.''

   For the rivals, Sony's problems all but ensure that Microsoft will gain market share in the current generation, said David Cole, an analyst at DFC Intelligence. He also says Nintendo has an opportunity to gain market share with its Wii console. Nintendo hasn't set its launch date yet, but it says it expects to ship 6 million Wii consoles by March 31. Nintendo has scheduled an event in New York city on Sept. 14 where it is expected to provide launch details.

   "When Sony makes forecasts, I automatically downgrade them,'' Cole said. ""But I was expecting them to get out in Europe this year.''

   Sony has roughly 70 percent of the current-generation console market, with Microsoft at a distant No. 2 and Nintendo at No. 3. Part of the reason was that it had a head start of 20 months before Microsoft launched its Xbox console.

   Microsoft launched the Xbox 360 in three major markets last November, but its launch was plagued by a shortage of consoles. It sold only 1.5 million units in its first holiday season. By the time Sony launches in Europe with 1 million units in March, 2007, Microsoft will already have been selling the Xbox 360 in that market for 16 months. Cole said he expects Europe will be a critical battleground in determining the winner of the new console war. Microsoft will have 160 games in the market by the holidays, while Nintendo and Sony have yet to describe their launch titles.

   A spokeswoman for Microsoft said, "We know how challenging it is to pull off a global launch, particularly with unproven technology, so it's not surprising that Sony has backed away from their previously announced launch plans. Europe remains a priority for us.''

   Karraker at Sony said that the PlayStation 2 continues to outsell the Xbox 360 and that in the long run the initial shipment delays won't matter. Karraker said that production is scheduled to start at the end of September in factories in Japan and in Asia. He said that the lone component in short supply are the blue-diode lasers used in the Blu-ray storage media.

   For game publishers such as EA, Pachter said that the impact won't be severe because it may just mean that those publishers will sell more Nintendo and Microsoft console games. But the publishers missed earnings estimates and laid off employees last year after Micrsooft's shortages disrupted the entire video game market.

   In particular, Kutaragi said the crystallization process at the epitaxy reactor is behind schedule. While Sony could get back on schedule in the long run, the analysts said it's still going to hurt the company's image.

   "Those sales that they lose to Microsoft and Nintendo this season could be consumers that are lost forever,'' Pachter said.

   Most of the analysts said that the big battle will take place in 2007, when all three companies will likely have worked out any production problems.

    EA spokeswoman Tammy Schachter said in a statement: "

This is disappointing news for European consumers who were anticipating the arrival of the PS3 this year. Although delayed, Sony should still have opportunity for a strong launch next year in Europe. EA will have a great portfolio of games ready when the console arrives in Europe. EA has a strong line up for all next-gen consoles - the Xbox 360, the Wii and the PS3. There is room in the industry for a multi-console market and EA is well positioned with great games for all next-gen platforms."

Note: Let's all give a hand to Dave Karraker, Sony's new senior director of corporate communications for the U.S. division in Foster City. Dave is a veteran of video game PR, but he is jumping into the fire here. Maybe his job is not so different from the last one. He was mostly recently the top spokesman for Allied Domecq Spirits and Wine, the maker of liquor brands such as Stolichnaya. How about that leap?

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A Big Long Post About Graphics
Category: Games

Not everybody may care about how they get their eye-popping graphics. But how it gets delivered to you will be determined by the results of a multi-billion dollar chess game between the chip industry's giants. Can you imagine, for instance, a future where Nvidia doesn't exist? Where there's no Intel? The survivor in the PC chip business may be the company that combines a graphics chip and a
microprocessor on a single chip.

In the graphics chip industry, everyone remembers how Intel came into the market and landed with a thud. After acquiring Lockheeds Real3D division and building up its graphics engineering team, Intel launched the i740 graphics chip in 1998 and it crashed and burned. The company went on to use the i740 as the core of its integrated graphics chip sets, which combined the graphics chip with the chip set, which controls input-output functions in the PC. Intel took the dominant share of graphics as the industry moved to integrated, low-cost chip sets, according to Jon Peddie Associates. But the company never gave up on its ambition of breaking into graphics. Intel has a big team of graphics engineers in Folsom, Calif., to work on its integrated graphics chip sets. And it recently acquired graphics engineers from 3Dlabs. The Inquirer.net has been writing about rumors that Intel has a stand-alone graphics chip cooking. That may have been one of the factors that pushed Advanced Micro Devices into its $5.4 billion acquisition of graphics chip maker ATI Technologies. Because of that deal, the PC landscape has changed forever. Now there is an imbalance as Intel, Nvidia, and AMD-ATI try to find the center of the future of computing. (pictured: Intel's Jerry Bautista)

If AMD and ATI combine the central processing unit with the graphics processing unit, it could collapse the barrier between multibillion-dollar industries, leaving both Nvidia and Intel to scramble. What will happen? Will Nvidia stick a CPU on the corner of its graphics chip and take a lot of dollars away from Intel in the PC? Intel is betting that something else will happen. In interviews with its researchers, they are confident that graphics processing will naturally shift to the CPU from the GPU. Thats because they believe that the decades-old technique dubbed ray tracing will replace the technique of rasterization, or texture-mapping, that modern graphics chips have grown up with. Check out more about this in a paper by Intel researcher Jim Hurley at http://www.intel.com/technology/itj/2005/volume09issue02/art01_ray_tracing/p10_authors.htm. Ray tracing involves rendering an image by shooting a ray from a point of view and seeing what it hits.You can see what is in a picture and what is hidden from view. There is no need to render everything in the whole scene. Only what is visible. By contrast, rasterization is getting more and more complicated. Programmers have to make numerous passes, adding layer upon layer of shadows and lighting to a scene until it looks just right. Hurley says it is a more accurate depiction of reality, while rasterization can only approximate reality. Ray tracing has been expensive, but the animation houses such as Dreamworks and Pixar have used it in their latest movies. Perhaps the latest efforts in video games will not be far behind, says Hurley. If you look at the Cell chip for the PlayStation 3, it was clear that Sony thought about putting graphics and the CPU on one chip. But it changed its mind and brought Nvidia into the picture with the RSX graphics chip.

Ive interviewed a number of folks about what they think about the possibility of combining the graphics chip and the CPU, as well as the notion that ray tracing on the CPU might replace rasterization on graphics chips. Some of these interviews took place before the AMD-ATI merger, and some after. Here are some of the quotes.

Patrick Moorhead, vice president of advanced marketing at Advanced Micro Devices, said, The idea that the microprocessor and the graphics chip might combine was an element in our merger. We could have licensed that. We see that as a mid-term reality. We are announcing we will do a combined CPU and GPU development in 2007. Initially it is focused on emerging markets. Thats where the right solution is optimized for emerging solutions. The cost of emerging platform is governing a lot of things. The CPU controls the costs of peripherals in the system. If it is more integrated, the less power it requires. You can get by with a smaller power supply and have other benefits.

Pat Gelsinger, executive vice president Digital Enterprise Group at Intel, said: This idea is interesting for our tera-scale computing initiative. We have had a certain architectural model for graphics. ATI and Nvidia have evolved it very effectively. We do some a lot of business in integrated graphics. Now as people have moved to multipass, more sophisticated rendering, and we have introduced ray tracing and other models, the nature of the graphics pipelines is changing. You shove polygons through. That is not right for the work load. Small general-purpose algorithms look more like what we do on a CPU than a GPU. Ray tracing is being done today. People ship them today running a blade configuration, with two-unit rack-mounted servers. They use it for techniques for high-resolution rendering on things like Shrke 2. They produce superior graphics results with it. It will start to displace traditional rendering architectures. Were not there yet. We are still a few years away from that point of saying that.

What can the graphics chip do instead? Well, why can you tool the physics to run on the GPU or CPU? Look at Havok versus Ageia. The results of that is we see the next-generation visualization work loads. We are taking that into account in our planning. I wouldnt call it a collision of the graphics chip and the CPU. Its next-generation work loads. Im not expecting GPUs to go away, and Jen-Hsun and Dave Orton arent expect it to go away.

Dave Kirk, Nvidias chief scientist, said, If ray tracing was universally superior to rasterization, wouldnt digital film studios use ray tracing exclusively? They do not. In fact, the first film to extensively use ray tracing is Pixar/Disneys Cars, which has lots of shiny reflective objects and scenes rather than soft, flexible characters and natural environments. Most digital animated films use a combination of many techniques including both ray tracing and rasterization, to create the widest possible variety of effects as efficiently as possible. It is likely that games and interactive graphics applications will progress in the same way over time. It is naïve to think that CPUs with limited parallelism will be competitive with the massively parallel devices such as graphics chips.

On ray tracing versus rasterization, Greg Brandeau, the chief technology officer at Pixar Animation, said, This is a complicated question. My simple summary would be that more studios would use ray tracing if the computer power was cheap enough. There are work arounds to get nice images but ray tracing is computationally very expensive. Also, Cars was not the first movie to use ray tracing. Shrek 2 used ray tracing to approximate global illumination. As to which of these technologies will win out, only time will tell. These two technologies are so different that it is hard to predict which will ultimately win out. At Pixar, we dont know the answer but we are constantly evaluating the state of the latest hardware to figure out what is going to give us the most pretty pixels per dollar.

Dave Orton, CEO of ATI Technologies: I think it is extremely realistic that the CPU and the GPU will be combined on one chip. If you think about the market and how it has moved from the GPU to the integrated graphics chip sets, there are new opportunities. Like the ultramobile PC or MITs One Laptop Per Child project. Power continues to be an issue. There is a huge opportunity in the low end of the market to create a third platform stack to the overall PC platform. So you have integrated chip sets and GPUs. Its a question of when.

The question is if the CPU architecture can do graphics processing. I would agree there is a class of graphics processing that you would want a graphics processor to do. But the question is if there is a system-on-a-chip that could also do that. It will not happen in performance laptops. But think of how many chip sets still use Direct X 7 or Direct X 8 graphics. Those are still shipping. The One Laptop Per Child applications. I think there will be a class of problems you can solve with current technology. It might be one generation behind the state of the art graphics.

On ray tracing versus rasterization, Orton said: Ray tracing is just one form of how you render a pixel. Its not the only form. At a scientific level, you can say that it is growing to fit more problems. But the reality is there is a broad range of how you want to render a pixel. Ray tracing is one form of how you do it. Other applications will want to render it in different ways. I dont see the processor doing it as much as I see extensions of the processor doing it.

Henri Richard, chief sales and marketing officer, Advanced Micro Devices: Its more of a question of when than if. We will have a transistor budget at some point in time to combine the CPU and the GPU on one piece of silicon. In a multicore environment, one core will be the GPU.

Justin Rattner, chief technology officer, Intel, Intel builds raster-based graphics. We have for some time. Its mature as a technology and has reached its highest evolutionary form. What you see now is to achieve the desired look for a scene, you have to make many passes over the data per scene. Fifteen or twenty-five times on a GPU pipeline. Thats not raster versus ray trace Its about how GPUs have fixed pipelines, anything that is longitudinal, you render it, then take another pass. A more flexible architecture lets you render in one pass. Were interested in that from a pure architectural point of view. In the next five years, these two architectures will meet somewhere in the middle. GPUs will become more flexible and CPUs will do more things. Ray tracing has more to do with the fact that you get the desired result with very little effort. Right now its tedious to get the desired look. If you can do ray tracing in real time, its the obvious choice for the solution. Right now we get six or so frames per second. It can deliver an arbitrary degree of photorealism. The idea has generated a lot of discussion with the merger of ATI and AMD coming. We have been much more focused on working with the graphics and rendering software communities to create the architecture and software for a new generation of rendering. Its marked now by functions that dont have much to do with image quality. If you want to add physics and behavioral AI, you have to design the software in a different way. Not piecemeal. Thats where were we come in. You have to do this in a general-purpose environment. Our view is we have to beat them on performance. You have to do something they cant do today. Otherwise, you cant generate momentum.

Jim Hurley, researcher, Intel: We think that ray-tracing is going to take off. This is a technique where you render only what you see. Its different from rasterization, which is what graphics chips do. With rasterization, you feed triangles into a rasterizer and it processes them in order. But it doesnt take into account the relationship of the triangles. It can only do multiple passes and do things over and over again. Ray-tracing lets you shoot a ray into a model of a world and it will find the object it is aimed at. It is a simulation of the physics of light. Rasterized graphics is an approximation. It can achieve plausible images but it is using brute force. Ray tracing can run efficiently on a CPU because of the large caches. GPUs rely on brute-force bandwidth. Traditional raster graphics doesnt do that well with ray-tracing. You cant do ray-tracing on a GPU because there isnt that much memory. You get movie quality for games and can do it in real time. Rasterization is trying to mimic what ray tracing does in photorealism. Pixars rendering was based on raster graphics for a long time, but all the movies houses are moving to ray tracing. (CPU magazine).

Jerry Bautista, director of Intels Microcomputer Research Lab: Regarding the graphics chip companies, he said, If I were them, I would be nervous. We see a trend. We watch the FLOPS, or floating point operations, the watts, and dollars that go into the graphics cards and the computational physics on GPUs. They have been a growing part of the PC budget. We are aware of that. Some graphics computation is handled well on a graphics processor. We can pull the graphics back on the CPU. In the future, the load of rendering an image falls in favor of the computer side, the microprocessor, and the pixelization task becomes minor. Our horizon is three to five years.

He added, Instead of saying that we will win over the graphics chip makers, Id talk with them about the applications themselves. In todays systems, they are largely concerned with rendering. About 90 percent of resources are spend drawing pictures. There is not much left for physics and artificial intelligence. What happens if we are have real physics and real AI kicks in? In ray tracing, we see if we had 10 or 100 cores, we would see a 10X speed-up. With 1,000 cores, we would see 100X speed-up. It just keeps going. Ray-tracing can swallow up whatever compute we build. At what point do you get diminishing returns? (CPU magazine)

David Wu, game programmer and president of Pseudo Interactive in Toronto, Canada, said, Many concepts from ray tracing and rasterization are converging, eventually they will meet.  With current architectures (CPU or GPU) and memory bottlenecks, rasterization has an inherent advantage in performance.  That will be enough to keep it as the technique of choice for high performance applications for many years.  The main advantage of Ray tracing is the fact that you can create nice abstract images with little programming effort.  However when you get down to all that details that are required to render real scenes there is not much savings in programming complexity.  Ray Tracing might find its niche amongst hobbyists (who want to build there own renderers from scratch), dogmatic programmer evangelists who like the term "Ray Tracing", and existing, legacy systems.

Wu added, There is no question about the GPU/CPU separation.  They will both be on one chip using pretty much the same sort of hardware by the next console generation.  Something like CELL, but without all of the flaws and easier to program for. Physics will be done using the same hardware.  Relatively simple, massively parallel processors with a lot of hardware dedicated to the issue of memory latency and bandwidth.

Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games and graphics expert, said, I'm a very strong believer in the coming convergence of CPU and GPU hardware and programming models, enabling CPUs to once again implement great software rendering, or alternatively for GPUs to be applied naturally to general computing problem using mainstream programming languages. This is a separate topic from the question of whether ray tracing is the future of graphics. Many vast benefits would come from a CPU-GPU convergence that would benefit all means of generating scenes: rasterization, ray tracing, radiosity, voxels, volumetric rendering, and other paradigms.  Such a convergence means that real-time ray tracing will become possible, but by no means does it imply that ray tracing will become the de facto solution for 3D drawing. For example, ray tracing is poorer for rendering for anti-aliasing (looking towards multisampling and analytic anti-aliasing techniques), and typically imposes a 20-40X computational penalty compared to rendering.  Ray tracing is superior for handling bounced light, reflection, and refraction.  So, there are some places where you will definitely want to ray trace, and some cases where it would be a very inefficient choice. Certainly, future rendering algorithms will incorporate a mix of techniques from different areas to exploit their strengths in various cases without being universally penalized by one technique's weakness.

Bob Drebin, chief technology officer of the PC business unit at ATI Technologies, said, They do pseudo ray tracking in the movies now. They rasterize. If there is a polygon that needs complex reflections, they start a ray trace for that. In both Shrek 2 and Cars, they use it depending on the effect. With our Toy Shop demo, we did limited ray tracing with cobblestones. Its limited. For the bricks. Its a tool that they use in a shader program for certain situations where you determine your color. What objects occlude you, what can you see. It is a technique. Notion of casting rays to determine visibility or color is something we use today. Its just one of the things. To me the more interesting thing is the dynamics of the scene. Top tier developers feel they are getting good. Now they want to make the scenes more compelling from an interactive view. Its more about how I make it more dynamic, more interactive, than to make the lighting more precise. The physics, the interaction of objects. Character animation getting muscle based. That is where the energy is going in game computing. In terms of realism, I see ray tracing as a technique that will be used selectively. Even if it goes that way, ray tracing is a highly parallel operation. I dont see a time when they are talking of a time with thousands of processors. I dont see advantage of a CPU doing it. If the question is who can do a single ray fastest, then the CPU will win. Then the goal is determine each reflection as soon as possible and move to next one. But if you complete a million of them, the question is how long it takes to do the first one. Youl can many of the rays in parallel together. The throughput would be much higher. Thousands or millions of ray intersections would collide. With thousands, then the GPU is the clear winner. I think that in a lot of ways with the new compute coming to the GPU, there are things that are not possible to do on a CPU. In the past, the only place you could express it was the CPU. The GPU is now becoming programmable. People arent saying give me a smaller CPU. They are saying now I can finally do more things. In a game like Half-Life 2, you would be able to throw around all the objects. Not just one or two. Multi-core is great for lots of sequential computation. It may become less clear. With a richer programming languages, the GPU needs less interaction with the CPU. I suspect CPUs will become more parallel. We arent running out of things we wish we could do.

Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia, before the ATI-AMD merger announcement, said, Programmability has different types. There are scalar programs. That uses a scalar microprocessor with a flow of instructions and it fetches instructions out of a cache. It processes data in a data-dependent way. That sort of programming is what microprocessors are really wonderful at. We are not very good at that kind of processing. Our processors are adept at processing large amounts of data that have less dependency. Our processor is more akin to a stream processor. The types of architectures are radically different. Just as the CPU can run DSP programs, a DSP is much better at running DSP programs. There are different types of programming models, whether it is signal processing for baseband, or voice. There are scalar processors. There are image processors for enormously large data sets which is what a GPU does.

There is integration at two levels. There is the unification of processing models. There is the CPU and the GPU, combined together in a unified processor model. I think the latter is very unlikely. Although on balance, transistors are free, we are challenged because most of the opportunities require low power. So you have to have efficient programming. It is far more efficient to run a program written for CPUs on a CPU, and it's far more efficient to run a program for GPUs on a GPU. There is the issue of power efficiency and cost efficiency. Brute force is not a very good option. There is the second approach of combining two processors onto one chip. In some markets, that would happen. For example, integrated graphics combines two chips into one where the technology is not very demanding. The market requirements are much slower in commercial, corporate desktops and others that require very little graphics. But if the graphics technology is a defining part of that system, whether it is a game console or high-end PC or workstations, the two devices innovate at different rhythms. There is no reason the two devices want to merge into one in that case. In fact, combining them into one makes it very difficult to combine two modern cores into the same substrate on the same schedule. There, what causes the two to move apart is not difference in programming models but differences in market requirements and rhythms. By putting it in one chip, you end up getting the worst of both worlds.

Nelson Gonzalez, CEO of Alienware, said about the merger of ATI and AMD, "It may be a good thing. The reason I say that is I see ray tracing is part of the way to go in the future. I dont think its going to be handled always at the CPU level. Maybe some FPGA chip. Thats the way to go. We are getting to the point where you have to run eight geometric processors to process all these polygons. At some point it doesnt make sense anymore. It makes sense to do ray tracing.

I would think at this point it makes sense to keep the graphics chip and the CPU separate. Unless you have many many cores, were still away from that. The writing is one the wall. Pixar rendered the Cars movie with ray tracing. Youre going to get a level of realism you cant get with what we have. The combo of ray tracing and rasterization makes sense at the beginning. Eventually, the future is really just pure ray tracing. Its easier to model than draw these things out.

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Interview About Why I wrote My Book
Category: Games

I did an interview recently with the folks at www.gamecritics.com. Here's a transcript of it.

Why did you write 360 Uncloaked?

I said that I would only do another book on this subject if I had a
good story. I asked myself if I had material that was worth another
book. And if I had the time and the access to write it. Everything
fell into place, so I wrote it. I just kept collecting more and more
material and at one point it just became clear that I had insider
material that no one had ever written about before.

2. What was the overall reception for Opening the Xbox? Did it impact
your decision to choose an ebook publisher this time around?..

It was a good seller for a game industry book. But it was published
through a traditional hardcover publisher. This book moved in real
time. It happened so fast that the only way to do it was to write an
ebook. I started much of my writing and interviewing in December, and
I finished it in April. By early May, the ebook and the
print-on-demand paperback were ready to begin selling. (The book is
available in either form at www.spiderworks.com). We hope to get it
into stores as well. If that happens, then the ebook serves its
purpose well. It seeds the market, then enables the paper book to get
into the stores.

3. What different challenges did you face when writing the second book
compared to the first?

This book happened much faster than the last one. It was good that I
saved material for four years, but it was harder getting access to the
team on a timely basis that could meet my deadline. We just barely did
it. There were also so many more people to talk to this time because
the Xbox 360 was a much larger effort than the original Xbox.

There were some people who I wanted to interview but couldn't reach.
Some didn't want to talk. Some required that I go through some hoops
with PR. I didn't have time to wait for them. When I was writing the
book, I would write as much as I could until I found a gap in my
knowledge. Then I would have to find some people to answer the
questions I had. Then I would resume the writing.

What made it easier and harder was that I needed to construct a
chronology this time around to keep track of everything and to see
what was the context for certain events. But the chronology was also
hard to construct from people who didn't remember everything or
remembered incorrectly. So I had to double back with sources and check
with them.

Another challenge was that much of the story happened elsewhere, in
Europe and Japan, where I didn't have the luxury of being able to
travel. I relied on phone calls and other journalistic sources for
that information.

4. The original team behind the Xbox or at least the idea of the Xbox
have moved on. How are the new caretakers of the Xbox different from
that original group.

I think we saw the transition become complete as the team became a
real team, not a diverse collection of different types of people. In
short, the gamers left. The corporate folks took over.  But those
corporate folks now have a lot of gamer blood in their veins.

This is very generalized and oversimplified. But I'll give just two
examples of what i mean.

Ed Fries was one of those who crossed the divide between game-focused
executive and Microsoft corporate lifer. He liked to run his game
division as he saw fit. He didn't coordinate his efforts as tightly
with the hardware and system software design teams as the other
executives wanted. This relates mainly to his refusal to cut short the
development of Halo 2 so that a Halo 3 game could be ready for the the
Xbox 360 launch. Ed defended his game developers against time
pressures, but he often put the interests of the game before the
interests of the corporation. After he left, there was less division
among the executive team. This is not to say that the remaining
executives don't care about games. Peter Moore has a good reputation
in the games industry. He has gone along with what the executives
above him want, but he is also in touch with what gamers want.


5. Microsoft made mistakes with the original Xbox. What corrections did
it make with the 360? What mistakes has Microsoft repeated?

It launched early, not too late, with the 360. That gave it time to
fix errors such as the manufacturing glitch. It designed a more
balanced box that was both powerful and not incredibly expensive. It
created a better-looking fit that was thankfully smaller than the
other one. It lined up more support from game developers and
publishers than it did the first time around. It eliminated the GTA
exclusive. It financed new game franchises such as Gears of War.
Microsoft clearly repeated a mistake in Japan: launching without the
right games for the Japanese market. Some of the games being released
don't look like nex-gen games. It was slow to replace many faulty
units, earning it a bad reputation for customer service. And there
have been some dry spells in the release schedule.

6. With all of the problems Microsoft was having gearing up for launch,
did Microsoft really believe it would be ready in time?

I think that many people underneath Robbie Bach thought that he would
allow them to delay the launch for various reasons. He should have
delayed the launch in Japan. But Bach was the one who was determined
to stay on schedule because he believed it was critical to the overall
strategy. So certainly he believed it would be on time because he
wouldn't allow small delays to add up to big delays. Others thought
that he really didn't mean it when he said there would be no delays.
Toward the end, as problems popped up, the Microsoft team had no
choice. They were going to launch.


7. What is your take on Xbox Live and Live Arcade?

I think they are both Microsoft's key advantages. But I don't know if
they are such big advantages that the other guys can't and won't copy
them. Live Arcade helps them make more money than they planned on, but
right now it's a small business. If it grows, the importance could
make a big difference in profits.

8. Why do you think Microsoft hasn't gotten a foothold in Japan? Does it
still perceive Japan as significant?

They should have launched with more and better games. When it was
clearly many of the big games were being delayed, Microsoft should
have delayed the launch. Now it has a lousy brand image in Japan.
Microsoft invested more money in Japan this time, so yes, Microsoft
sees it as important. But if they execute well in the other regions,
they could still grow their overall market penetration in this
generation. So it's important, but not critical.

9. You dropped a bomb revealing that Microsoft would be releasing a
handheld of sorts. Since then Microsoft has announced that it will be a
media device more likely to challenge the iPod than PSP. How serious is
Microsoft about the handheld videogame market?

This first device is likely to target only the iPod. I wonder,
however, if they're going to go after the gamers with a second device
in the Zune family. That would be a good way to attack the profit
centers of Nintendo and Sony.

10. What do you think of the Nintendo Wii? Where does it stand compared
to the 360 and the PlayStation 3?

I think it is the wild card of this generation. It may capture the top
market share, or perhaps No. 2. It depends on how much mileage
Nintendo can get out of leveraging creativity and the new controller.

11. After a tepidly received E3 press conference and months of public
relations gaffes, many journalists and industry analysts have been
critical of the PlayStation 3. Can Sony recover in time for launch?

Sony has a tough uphill battle to regain the undecided folks. Clearly,
they have a lot of fans who love everything that Sony does. For the
rest of us, charging a high price for the console is a slap in the
face. I think Sony will lose some share in this generation, but how
much is the question.

12. Of the three next-generation consoles, the Xbox 360 is the only one
without a motion-sensing technology in the controller. Do you think
Microsoft sees such technology as relevant?

I know that Microsoft claims to have tried it years ago. But perhaps
they were just caught by surprise. It may be relevant and important to
gamers, but it clearly didn't occur to Microsoft to innovate in this
area. Perhaps that is a side effect of being in a rush to go first.

13. Why is Microsoft releasing an HD-DVD add-on? It won't benefit Xbox
360 games and isn't likely to be profitable.

I don't know where you can get the assumption about the latter part.
Toshiba has argued the costs of HD-DVD drives are lower than Bluray's.
I think Microsoft wants to cover the bases. If they offer this option,
they won't necessarily lose the people who really care about this
particular feature. This is about matching Sony.

14. The industry has grown much in the years since the Xbox launched.
But the industry still shows great immaturity and videogame journalism
in particular. Do you see an improvement or shift with excellent
podcasts like GamaSutra Podcast (formerly Tom Kim's FatPixelsRadio), 1UP
Yours Podcast and (the slightly okay) Dean & Nooch on Gaming growing in
popularity?

You mention only podcasts in terms of the immaturity of the video game
journalism. For sure, podcasts are even farther behind. But I believe
there are a lot of institutions that are covering games closely now,
whether it's academic observers such as Henry Jenkins, big media
outlets such as CNN.com, or newsletters such as Next Generation. It's
getting better and it has some way to go before it catches up with
other big entertainment media such as sports or Hollywood-related
journalism. Our roots are with the geeks, and we're growing as they
do. Game journalism has to be about having fun and being serious.

15. Public Relations companies and representatives have a lot of power
in this industry--largely because it is dominated by the so-called
enthusiast press. Has this impeded your duties when covering the industry?

Sometimes PR folks make it easier for you. Sometimes they block your
path. When they block it, you have to try to go around them to get to
the information you need.

16. You've covered Microsoft and its Xbox. This makes you almost the
default Microsoft guy. Ever wanted to do something similar with the
PlayStation 3 or Nintendo? Did you ever try to but found harder to get
into the secretive Japanese companies compared to a secretive American
company like Microsoft?

I've tried to work more closely with Sony and Nintendo. But it's
harder, given my base of operations in Silicon Valley and because I
can't speak Japanese.

17. What do you plan on writing about next? What would be your dream
project?

I hope to take a break. I'll write an essay on the making of Halo and
Halo 2 for a Halo Anthology from Ben Balla books. But beyond that, I
have no books planned right now. There usually isn't a plan. It
depends on whether I can keep finding good stories to tell that are
best told in a book.

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Critics Talking About The Book
Category: Games

If you like my book, please go to amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com and post your own review on it. I need the help, and thanks for your consideration.

 

 

"...The games business's most controversial book ever."

-- Game News

"'Uncloaked' provides a surprisingly engaging story about a little-seen side of a business obsessed with journalism about the products rather than the process. Digging deep into his ample array of sources, Takahashi has crafted a business book enjoyable by the average gamer and a grand narrative interesting to anyone in the industry."

-- King Features, DenverPost.com

"It's an absorbing read... What makes 'The Xbox 360 Uncloaked' required reading for video game fans is the incredible amount of inside information it contains... The author deserves high praise for providing us with a comprehensive record of what goes into the development of a video game system. The behind-the-scenes drama makes for a juicy, entertaining read regardless of one's console allegiance."

-- Matt Paprocki, BlogCritics.org

"Dean's book really needs to be seen by the [video game] community. It's that good... I'm reminded of Bill Carter's book 'The Late Shift'... Both books have a great way of not only telling a story, but cutting down to the interesting facts. Video gaming really needs more books of this manner."

-- Matt Green, PressTheButtons.com

"'The Xbox 360 Uncloaked' is a gripping look inside the competitive, high-stakes world of the game industry and required reading for self-professed gamers and industry watchers."

-- Bobby Stein, Gameworld Network

"This is an entertaining and in-depth book... If you want to know the background on the console, and many interesting and entertaining anecdotes about the different players in the industry, this one's worth a read."

-- The Inquirer

"Probably the best book on the topic of the video game industry in a while."

-- Chris Espiritu, uberfunction

"You could argue that no one outside of Microsoft knows more about its Xbox game business than Dean Takahashi."

-- Rob Wright, TwitchGuru

"...The Xbox Uncloaked steeps readers in the darkest machinations of the video game industry, providing a level of insight into the console wars hardly ever seen. And it does it in a way that is approachable even for video game novices."

-- Brian D. Crecente, Rocky Mountain News

"This is riveting journalism from an unbiased source. Takahashi provides a rare peek behind the scenes of the rollercoaster video games business."

-- CliffyB, Epic Games

"A page-turning revelation about the big decisions and bigger dollars it takes to get a new console off the ground and into the hands of consumers."

-- Greg Wilcox, BonusStage.com

"An engaging and revealing tale."

-- Christian Svensson, Next Generation

11:45 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Description of The Xbox 360 Uncloaked
Category: Games

"The Xbox 360 Uncloaked" is the result of more than a hundred interviews, many at the highest levels of Microsoft, as well as countless months of independent investigative reporting. This highly anticipated book goes beyond the official story to deliver a true insider's look at the creation of the XBox 360 and Microsoft's multi-billion dollar gamble to become a leading force in the global video game industry.

With unprecedented access, San Jose Mercury News Technology and Gaming Writer Dean Takahashi takes you behind the scenes as he reveals:

• The birth of the machine as seen through the eyes of the Xbox 360 engineers who designed it.
   
• Blow-by-blow coverage of the heated internal debates as senior Microsoft executives battle to define the future of the Xbox brand.
   
• The strategic chess moves as Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and company take risk after risk, trying to outmaneuver their archrivals for the brass ring: dominance of the incredibly lucrative video game market and control of the digital entertainment gateway in the living room.
   
• Includes more than 50 photos!

Sony, Nintendo, Electronic Arts, the entire Microsoft Xbox 360 team, and the industry's most celebrated game developers -- all of the major players are included in this captivating story.

This book will not only appeal to gamers, but also to anyone who's fascinated with high-stakes business strategies and the hard-boiled politics involved in technology, product development, and global marketing on a grand scale.

Buy the eBook --OR-- Buy the Printed Book

Download the FREE eBook Preview
or view the online Printed Edition Preview

11:42 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Book Reading Info Right Here
Category: Games

I'm doing a book signing/reading at the Barnes and Noble store at the Pruneyard in Campbell on Aug. 29 at 7 pm. Anyone is welcome to attend. I hope to have some fun. The address is at 1875 South Bascom avenue, and the store is in the Pruneyard shopping center, not far from Hamilton/Bascom in the city of Campbell.

2:27 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Creativity: Milking A Franchise Or Managing It?
Category: Games

Electronic Arts has focused on creativity. We've been there, done that on that story. But Nintendo has always focused on it. But I find that one of the most interesting business questions is this: once you have been creative, how much do you milk it?

With The Sims, EA was creative. But then they milked it with umpteen million expansion packs and The Sims 2, which prompted even more expansion packs. EA has sold more than 70 million copies of Sims games. I'd guess that generated $2.1 billion in retail sales.

With Nintendo, it's different...

With Nintendogs, the company scored a hit for non-gamers that has generated 6.65 million unit sales worldwide on the DS. That's incredible. But think of what they would do if they were EA. By now, they'd be working on Nintendo Cats. Nintendo Birds. Nintendo Snakes. NintenFrogs. (I want to copyright that name before Nintendo uses it).

Similarly, they sold more than 5.1 million units of the Brain Age and Big Brain Academy games in Japan alone for the DS. But how many sequels will Nintendo do to cash in on these games for non-gamers? I'm waiting for Big Brain Academy Preschool edition. Then first grade, second grade, third grade ... all the way up to college. I mean, really, you should throw a question about Marcel Proust at a graduate student, but don't ask a preschooler to add 5 + 5.

What do you think? Every big game company has a portfolio of franchises that it has to manage. It should exploit those brands, but not exhaust them. Whose the marketing student here? What should these companies do to milk all the necessary profits without spoiling the properties?

10:56 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Making Your Own Xbox 360 Game?
Category: Games

I'm imported from my regular blog at Dean & Nooch on Gaming (http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/gaming)  to see if people would rather read it here.

I have always fantasized about making my own game. I've never taken the trouble to actually do it. But it's looking like it isn't so hard to do, given Microsoft's announcement here.

Here's a version of our story that ran in the paper.

Microsoft hopes to recruit future game developers by making it possible for just about anybody to make games for the Xbox 360 video game console.

   The company is announcing today that it will make available a stripped-down version of its game development tools for $99. The XNA Game Studio Express software will have everything someone needs to make a working video game.

   Peter Moore, head of the games business at Microsoft, said the company wants to encourage high school students and others to make their own games the way that YouTube encourages consumers to create their own videos.

   "We need to develop the YouTube of games,'' he said. "With YouTube, the tool is a video camera. In this case, it is tools for making games.''

(For gamers, here's some extra info:  the beta will be available August 30th, and the final product which will also allow for gameplay on Xbox 360 will be available this holiday.  Both beta and final version will be available for download at the following:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/xna/
and the Xbox 360 segment will be available for purchase via Xbox Live Marketplace.

10:25 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment