Dear Game (and nearly every other) Industry,

With very, very few exceptions, good will is not a free resource. It’s precious and valuable, but ever so fragile, and seemingly small decisions can set it ablaze like so much kindle.

Even after a over a decade of ubiquity, digital goods are still in a rather nebulous proposition. A gamer’s decision to spend cash on a non-tangible product lives and dies on a) whether it’s worth it, and b) whether they want to walk into the digital storefront in the first place.

And here’s a textbook example of how not to do it: Nintendo’s Virtual Console

When Nintendo announced the virtual console and 3DS, and far more importantly, when they announced the transition from Wii to Wii U on the matter, they dumped kerosene onto the service and kicked it into an open bonfire.

It was a perfect storm about how to do things wrong:

• The existing Wii library, a year in, had not made the transition, and games would be released anew, with no guarantees about the rate of release
• For the games that did make it into the Wii U’s separate library, owners of the Wii release would need to spend $1.50 to unlock the Wii U version.
• Purchases of classic games made on Wii U will not show up on the 3DS, and vice versa, and there is no way to transfer save data between the two.

I’m not about to make any arguments as to what anyone, as a gamer, is owed by a publisher for a previous purchase. However, what I will say is that, for many people, and whatmore, the very people who were most likely to want to spend money on this content, Nintendo essentially made two statements with this:

1. We have zero investment in the Virtual Console as a platform.
2. None of these “classic” games will have any longevity.

People are just beginning to understand how creator-centric digital services can be. Even the least technologically-capable luddite you know probably has some understanding that PS One classics aren’t arriving on the 3DS anytime soon, and that their iOS games won’t arrive on their new Android phone.

But we do see those PS One classics going from PSP to PS3, and now to PS Vita. We do see our old iPhone and Android apps arriving on their respective successors, and their larger tablet cousins. And regardless of how sloppy the handling of the transition from PS3 to PS4 and Xbox 360 to Xbox One was, we still see a lot of  carry-over, with Xbox 360 games keeping DLC when purchased on Xbox One, and PS3 games magically unlocking when ported to the PS4.

So when people see the Virtual Console storefront selection whither away with the launch of a new console, and the few remaining scraps slapped with an upgrade fee, with no interoperability between Nintendo’s only two platforms, not only is there little incentive to spend the buck-fifty, there’s monumentally less incentive to ever spend a dime there again.

Quick aside: I have zero financial entry into the Virtual Console on Wii. But I have spent, at this point, nearly a couple hundred dollars on iOS, about as much if not more on PSN, and more than I care to admit on Steam.

Editor’s Note: “Dear Game Industry” is a cynical and angry column, and will often feature language not suited for readers under 27 years of age.

Dear Game Industry,

I would appreciate it if you didn’t assume that the gaming populace was fucking 80 years old and senile. I say this because it’s about the only fucking conclusion I can draw every time I see a framerate/resolution headline:

• http://blog.ubi.com/assassins-creed-iv-black-flag-in-native-1080p-on-playstation-4/
• http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-02-18-thief-1080p-on-ps4-900p-on-xbox-one
• http://www.computerandvideogames.com/436075/confirmed-cod-ghosts-is-720p-on-xbox-one-1080p-on-ps4/

It really bugs me that the discussion that comes about whenever we see these articles is how the Playstation 4 compares to the Xbox One, and not the bigger, more egregious problem: How in the flying fuck is a game built for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 not running at 1080p/60fps on both of these systems?

It’s not 1998. We don’t have one set of graphical assets for a given title that have to somehow be shoehorned onto all platforms. We don’t have a situation where the faster, stronger, more graphically powerful platform needs a silly workaround like individually rendering blades of grass that were once a texture to showcase its capabilities. Chances are that your modern game is built for the PC, where graphical scalability is not a negotiable requirement. Games are regularly built nowadays to run on a PC with a graphics card that’s 8 years old but take full advantage of one that came out last week. And that’s what lets your 360 game not look out of place on its successor.

Therein lies the rub, however. These games run just fine on systems that are over half a decade old. They play without a problem on graphics hardware that was released before the advent and proliferation of *unified shaders, inexpensive anti-aliasing, and viable realistic lighting. The age-old exclude of taking a performance hit to get higher detail levels isn’t going to cut it because even at twice the framerate and pixel count, the Xbox One and Playstation 4 should still have leagues higher levels of detail present, what with 16 times the memory and +5 times the shader capacity of their predecessors.

I’ll end this with some simple math:

The Xbox 360 has a 10MB chunk of embedded memory on its graphics chip package. For the sake of discussion, this is enough memory for a 720p framebuffer (1280x720x32-bit color = 3.5MB) and a single G buffer of equal precision and resolution (another 3.5MB), with a smidgen extra for, say, very light anti-aliasing. 1080p uses nearly twice the pixel count, taking us to 7.9MB for each. So we’re at 16MB to go 1080p… out of the 32MB embedded onto the Xbox One’s graphics package… and the anti-aliasing options available on that chip use way less memory than the MSAA the 360’s chip was saddled with.

* The Xbox 360 had unified shaders, but the developments that have gone into optimizing this processing type make that version look frighteningly primitive compared to what’s possible on XB1/PS4.