Anyway, this morning I listened to the interview with Eli Tomlinson from Gamix (I'm not gonna quote it all), he says that he intends to create a specification for creating gaming devices and environments running Linux (This is a relatively simple description, there's a little more to it than this).
At first thought this might sound cool, but personally I already think of it as a failure.
Why? First of all I should say, I'm not some weird guy who doesn't understand games, I've been playing games on computers since I was about 2½ years old, now given at this stage it was just hitting arrow keys on a keyboard for old DOS racing games, on PC, NES, SNES, N64, GameCube, PlayStation (I have one of those old gray clunkers somewhere, never use it anymore though), Sega MegaDrive and of course pretty much every darn GameBoy version produced.
Eli says that Gamix would allow for more flexibility compared to closed/fixed platforms from Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft. Personally I think openess is good, so that's one good point of Gamix, but the thing about fixed platforms being bad, I largely disagree. One of the things that drove me off of PC gaming and back to the consoles after I spent a few months only playing PC games, was the price!! Litterally, sure after you buy a PC it'll last you a little bit, but flexibility comes as a HUGE disadvantage for me, because for example to play the new game FEAR, if I ran Windows, I have to upgrade everything in my computer, litterally everything, motherboard, CPU, graphics card, memory etc. etc. and my computer is only three years old. OK, for a computer this may be a long time, but for a console, it's only about 60% of it's life span. So after I spent 3200 USD on a new PC, three years later I have to spend another 2500 to upgrade the thing! On the GameCube, PlayStation or Xbox, which came out 5 years ago, I can buy a game for it, and it will just play without me having to buy new hardware, sure being fixed is somewhat of a disadvantage for game publishers as they don't get new stuff to use in their games so often, but they do get the advantage of being able to know the platforms they support inside and out, and be able to really really optimize for that and tune the games to take advantage of every single bit of power in the hardware, with PC games, this is impossible, because you have all but an unlimited number of different hardware configurations out there. For me as the consumer, using a fixed platform allows for a cheaper and smoother gaming experience, sure I'd like a little more openess from the console makers, for example I'd like to see a homebrew SDK for the Wii so gamers could create their own stuff for non-commercial purposes, but it's not really that big a deal, as I don't store stuff like my credit card number or my social security number on my console, so I don't need security auditing or stuff for those. And I don't really think of consoles, such as a "gaming machine" like the GameCube, as PCs, the PS3 you "may" be able to somewhere along the lines, and I just have a different feel about consoles and openess than I do standard computers.
