Pay for platform development
Scott asks:
How much longer before Microsoft starts charging developers for the "privilege" of writing software for Windows? Pathetic.
It's not as outlandish as it sounds at all.. if you consider that game platform companies make up for their loses on hardware by selling software development kits for their consoles. Everyone's favorite, Micro$oft has sampled the 'charge for development' market with their xbox platform and I'm sure the accounting wheels are already turning calculating how they could capitalize on same with windows.
After all.. MS could claim losses on windows sales due to software piracy (that good-old equation when they think everyone who copied would actually pay for a copy otherwise).
Comments
I work with Visual Basic 6 and did not "move up" to the .NET platform because of the cost of the devlopment tools. I'm not paying over a $1,000 for a VB.Net IDE! Thats a big reason why I'm doing a lot more work with linux and learning linux programming.
Posted by: Blaine | March 24, 2003 11:04 PM
Hah, that's great.. I'll have to bookmark that one :)
Posted by: kasia | March 24, 2003 11:11 PM
It'll never happen. Platform vendors have a vested interest in *encouraging* people to develop for their platform. Microsoft knows this, Apple doesn't. The Xbox is an edge case; it's *because* MS is losing money on each unit that they don't want to open the dev market beyond the game-dev segment. They have no incentive to reduce the number of Windows developers, particularly when the large number of commercial developers is part of the ecosystem that they're touting in Linux-vs-Windows comparisons.
See Dave Winer's essay "Platform is Chinese Household" (http://davenet.userland.com/1994/10/29/platformischinesehousehold).
And to Blaine: skipping .NET because you don't want to use VB.NET is missing the point. Try C#. Heck, try Mono. Once you go .NET, I think you'll be reluctant to go back.
Posted by: paul | March 25, 2003 09:59 AM
There's a long history of selling developer kits. The Solaris and HP/UX compilers are separate, add-on components that cost money; ditto for the old Commodore Amiga. I don't remember if Apple ever sold their own compiler, or if it was a third-party product from the start...
The UNIX world is a special case, because RMS decided that before he could build an entire free operating system, he needed a compiler (GCC was the FSF's first major project, IIRC).
Posted by: Harald | March 25, 2003 11:28 AM
Aside from the profit reason, there are other motivations to charge developers for developing console titles. Because MS (or Sony, etc) controls the publishing of discs there's a quality control process that's independent of the developer and/or publisher. MS doesn't care if your title ships on time and is perfectly happy to bounce you from the approval process. This forces developers (or more importantly, middle managers) to have standards of stability and interface design.
Posted by: Matt | March 25, 2003 12:43 PM
It won't happen. The two models aren't comparable and valid comparisons are extremely difficult..
Posted by: Mike Short | March 25, 2003 03:38 PM