Why hasn't a common, open standard, game/app platform been created?

[Craig234]

It's always been a concern how proprietary/monopolistic issues with one OS being dominant have broken the competition between different platforms.

Want to use something other than Windows? Then you'll pay a big price in how many applications you can run - though emulation partially improves that.

But to this day - minutes ago I just saw a post from a gamer thanking the company for porting to mac - I see games with posts asking for Mac Ports or Linux ports or whatever.

What to do about the problem? I'd think it'd be possible to create a standard where a game (or other app) is ported to that, and then it works on any OS that implements that standard.

It could be tricky in some areas - using things that are OS specific - but it could be a big improvement.

I wonder why this hasn't happened.

The way I think of the issue is, the market leader opposes such open platforms and tries to keep a proprietary advantage, but their competitors push the open standard and sometimes it wins.

So, sure, Microsoft for selfish reasons is unlikely to push the idea, but if others did it - competitors or just users - it could see widespread use and Microsoft wouldn't have much say.

I wonder why it hasn't happened and every app and game has these same 'will they port to this or that' issues.

Is it because there is just too much OS specific in the design now, and so labor-intensive porting to each OS is justified?

 

[whm1974]

Well for starters there are open APIs games developers can uses such as SDL and Vulkan That can make porting easier to do.

 

[Newbian]

Technical issues would be a huge issue not to mention it would be a financial problem for those that don't want this to happen.

 

[DigDog]

Well Direct X being windows-proprietary meant that macOS could not longer run games, this happened long ago. And when the time came to write their own set of libraries Apple wasnt in a rush "because macs are for sirius ppls".

I did the same BS unfortunately.

I could have gotten in IT in the 90s when the requirements were 1. Buy a book 2. Be not-an-idiot, but by the time i got my head out of my ass there was already too much work to be done to get started.

How do you imagine a new OS would go about catching up to 20 years of development in game support? Were would the money come from? How much investing would it take to get a market share off of a company that dominates the market?

This discussion has already been had years ago, but the people involved were too blind to make the right choice, and now it's too late.

 

[paperfist]

Unity?

https://unity3d.com/

 

[TheELF]

Java runs on pretty much anything and a lot of games are made for it.
Downside is always performance hit because you have to go through an additional layer.

 

[Anteaus]

Companies tend to make the most money when they control the method of delivery, and that includes codec standards such as DirectX and OpenGL/OpenAL. To me, the biggest irony of capitalism is that it feeds off monopoly. We won't allow companies to get so large that they can defacto control markets, but we will issue them certificates of monopoly in the form of patents and copyrights.

This is why Linux is not expected to ever overtake Windows in the PC OS consumer space. As bad as Windows can be sometimes, developers like consistancy of platform and control over their code. While there is nothing wrong with selling close-sourced software on Linux, the large variety of distributions fracture the user base and make developing software for retail a challenge. Operation systems are now being viewed as marketing and distribution platforms, and as such encourage further restriction.

 

[Midwayman]

Lots of middleware packages can compile to various targets. You're really talking about an intermediate layer though. It'd be fine for low performance stuff, but games would probably suck.

 

[Craig234]

Companies tend to make the most money when they control the method of delivery, and that includes codec standards such as DirectX and OpenGL/OpenAL. To me, the biggest irony of capitalism is that it feeds off monopoly. We won't allow companies to get so large that they can defacto control markets, but we will issue them certificates of monopoly in the form of patents and copyrights.

This is why Linux is not expected to ever overtake Windows in the PC OS consumer space. As bad as Windows can be sometimes, developers like consistancy of platform and control over their code. While there is nothing wrong with selling close-sourced software on Linux, the large variety of distributions fracture the user base and make developing software for retail a challenge. Operation systems are now being viewed as marketing and distribution platforms, and as such encourage further restriction.

On Windows versus Linux, isn't the issue that it's not really a competition for 'best', but rather one that has large amounts paid for it to fund development, while the other is a mostly free 'it works' alternative, that can't compete on features without the money to pay for development? Even most 'open standards' are for-profit products.

 

[Stuka87]

It comes down to costs. Developing for linux is not nearly as cheap as developing for windows, and windows has significantly more users so there is more money to be made. The number of people that want linux games is most likely in the 10's of thousands. The number of windows users that want games is in the hundreds of millions (worldwide).

The technologies that are cross platform (such as Unity) do so at a performance hit. Its not well optimized for any singular device or OS.

 

[Craig234]

It comes down to costs. Developing for linux is not nearly as cheap as developing for windows, and windows has significantly more users so there is more money to be made. The number of people that want linux games is most likely in the 10's of thousands. The number of windows users that want games is in the hundreds of millions (worldwide).

The technologies that are cross platform (such as Unity) do so at a performance hit. Its not well optimized for any singular device or OS.

This suggests that it might just not be technically feasible to have that middle universal layer, other than for a small amount of products.

It's an issue when the desirability of having one platform creates an artificial monopoly, but maybe that's what happened.

 

[Craig234]

I also wonder my more games that use characters you play as don't offer different 'races' as options. RPG's as a genre do, of course, with character creators, but games like, say, JRPG's and adventures offer fixed characters in the game. They could simply design half a dozen character appearances to pick from. Being able to choose gender has gotten more common.