The North American Game Industry - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 85

on lease necessary to create the game (O'Donnell 2011b). Put another way,
game console manufacturers control access to those who can produce
games for their platforms. At fi rst glance this seems like simply a small
barrier to entry; however, the costs associated with leased “DevKits” can
be quite high, and the particular idiosyncrasies of a given game console can
make development time consuming and expensive.
Microsoft, with the release of “XNA Express,” which was later renamed
“XNA Game Studio Express,” removed some of these barriers to entry.
Whereas the game development tools included with the Express line of
development tools prevent developers from using more platform agnostic
programming languages like C/C++, they enabled a new community of
independent game developers. For no cost, games could be developed for
Microsoft Windows-based computers and for $99.00 a year those games
could then be tested on the Xbox 360 and deployed on Microsoft's “Indie
Game Community.”
This more open approach to development tools for a given game console
has proven an important shift for the game industry. Devices like Apple's
iOS based devices (the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch) and Android OS-based
tablets and smart phones have emerged as a new kind of game console with
a much more open mentality to access to development tools. iOS develop-
ment can be started for free, and testing and deploying a game require the
maintenance of a $99.00 per year license. Android OS development tools
are free and games can be tested and deployed in the virtual “app stores”
for free as well.
These new devices pose a particular threat to the once highly lucrative
“handheld” market in North America. In this segment, Nintendo reigned
supreme, with its Game Boy line of products dominating. From the origi-
nal Game Boy to Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS (“Dual Screen”) and
the recently released Nintendo 3DS (3-D Dual Screen) Nintendo depended
heavily upon parents purchasing portable devices for younger players. The
emergence of iOS and Android devices has had a particularly telling ef ect
on this market.
Digital distribution has proven an important development for the North
American market. The Valve Corporation developed one of the fi rst suc-
cessful digital distribution platforms, initially developed to aid in the
distribution of game software patches to users. The initial infrastructure
formed the foundation of the Steam platform. It is estimated that Steam
accounts for nearly 70 per cent of all digitally distributed game revenues
(Graft 2009). All three major console platforms as well as iOS and Android
OS-based platforms support some mechanism for digital distribution. This
removes the overhead associated with the physical distribution of disks, as
well as the profi ts that retailers take from the sale of games.
The game console, is the “platform,” or “whatever the programmer takes
for granted when developing, and whatever, from another side, the user is
required to have working in order to use particular software” (Montfort