[loup-vaillant]

Oh, I totally get that it's harder. At some point though, if you're serious about competition, you organise a LAN. (Too bad games gradually moved away from LAN altogether.)

More generally, locked down hardware means you have to trust a central third party. The cypherpunk in me doesn't like that. There has to be a better way (though I don't know what).

[dleslie]

LANs are just a way of locking down the hardware and software of the competitors; they also aren't a viable option if you're unable to be physically near to your opponents.

The better way is to buy a general computing device if that's what you prefer, and let others buy their locked down devices if that's what they prefer.

[loup-vaillant]

Here's the thing: I'm not sure we can, in the long run, have it both ways. Not naturally anyway. The current tendency seems to go towards generalised lock down. It started with game consoles. Then iOS. And now even on the desktop, we see scary warnings from Windows and bypassing signature verification in MacOS is actually difficult if you don't know the procedure already. And soon, maybe those warnings will turn into hard errors?

For me to chose an open device, that open device has to exist in the first place. Where is the open equivalent of the PS5? I don't see any. And even if it did: I bet many competitive game would exclusively found in the locked down version. Or, more insidiously, there would be two arena: the locked down one with fewer (or no?) cheaters, and the open one with (presumably) all the cheaters. There would be a strong incentive to get the locked down version for this reason alone, and one isn't going to waste money & resources on a redundant piece of electronics just so they can play without cheats and access the homebrew market.

Now that I think of it, there might be a way: how about optional signatures? You'd take the same hardware, and run it in two modes: the open mode, and the signed mode. The signed mode would be thoroughly locked down by the hardware vendor, and run only signed code. This could affect networking too: just sign the encryption keys with the secure chip, and pass that along with a certificate from Nintendo or whoever. That way one would know the communication was initiated in "signed mode", thus guaranteeing the integrity of the game's binary, just like we would in an actually locked down console.

Heck, we could go even a step further: have the hardware security module be swappable. That way we can separate the hardware vendor from the certificate authority. Of course, they'd be one and the same by default, but we could still switch for another if we need to. (You could have a tournament specific CA, or the hardware vendor could revoke it's own HSM and send a new one to people.)

DRM for the people. Never thought I'd say that.

[dleslie]

> Where is the open equivalent of the PS5?

Raspberry Pi w/ RetroPi or Batocera. Perhaps sometime in the future it'll be Batocera on a RISCV.

You won't get better because without huge corporate dollars, as is the case with the Linux kernel, Gnome and KDE, you won't be able to fund the QA and devs necessary to do the bullshit boring work that is essential to making certain that consoles are a polished experience; from the operating system through to every game you purchase.

TCRs and TRCs are a thing, after all. You cannot ship without meeting a certain level of minimal tolerable quality.

> And even if it did: I bet many competitive game would exclusively found in the locked down version.

Yes. Of course.

What's in it for the developers when consumers demand anti-cheat measures, which are hideously expensive to maintain, and active and pervasive moderation which is, likewise, hideously expensive to maintain? To say nothing of the _total absence_ of any strong example of a FOSS video game performing well enough to fund a AAA-quality title.

> You'd take the same hardware, and run it in two modes: the open mode, and the signed mode.

Sony has done this twice. There was the PSOne's Net Yaroze, and there was the PS3's ability to run Linux (only for the first few iterations). Consumers didn't care enough for Sony to bother with it again.

IIRC, Xbox One indie developer licenses are still basically almost free.

Your idea is still locked down, though; you cannot run arbitrary code because you cannot cross the signed/unsigned boundaries.

> DRM for the people.

Browsers have this in the form of media extensions.

[loup-vaillant]

> Raspberry Pi w/ RetroPi or Batocera.

The R-Pi is nowhere near the raw capabilities of the PS5. Can't do that amazing Unreal Engine demo, or VR. A difference in degree large enough to be considered a difference in kind in my opinion. (I do reckon the R-Pi is powerful enough to do serious stuff, up to and including being a blazing fast workstation if we wrote the software for it.)

Batocera is not a piece of hardware? Could act as a platform for sure, but an ISA (fully specified, which means CPU + GPU + most peripherals) would in my opinion be better than an API. Closer to reality. Of course, we'd need APIs on top.

Two interesting aspects of consoles are the fixed ISA, and the fixed performance characteristics. We could possibly lift the latter without much consequences, as long as the hardware provides a well defined set of performance floors, that would determine what can run at which speed.

> you won't be able to fund the QA and devs necessary to do the bullshit boring work that is essential to making certain that consoles are a polished experience; from the operating system through to every game you purchase.

I certainly wouln't. The best I can boast about is having raised $7000 from the OTF for a 7-day security audit.

That said, it seems to me the "polished experience" is composed of fairly separate, or at least separable, problems. At the bottom is the hardware. Or even ISA. We need a hardware company to make that stuff. Not just the CPU, but all the rest. (Repeating what Casey said, stuff like GPU are becoming stable and general enough that fixing an ISA wouldn't have a significant negative impact on their evolution.) To do that, we need a big player like Intel or Nvidia on board — good fucking luck with that, unfortunately.

The second problem is provide high-level services that run on the hardware. OS, middleware… A huge undertaking if we're to have any backwards compatibility (we'd at least have to port Linux, and recompile everything). Perhaps not so bad if we flip the table and go in a direction closer in spirit to the Oberon project (Niklaus Wirth), or STEPS (Alan Kay's Viewpoint Research Institute).

The third problem is writing one or several store fronts like Steam.

The fourth problem is writing the actual games (and other applications). In some ways the easiest problem to solve, and in other ways the hardest. Easiest because game devs will go wherever they could sell their games, providing the ISA/API isn't too horrible (sometimes even when it is). The hardest because (i) that's where most of the effort will go, and (ii) the incentives of making the platform easy to work with may not be commensurate with that effort.

The zeroth problem is separating the above. The current world is set up for vertical integration. Apple and console vendors are the most extreme examples, but even Windows tends to be sold with the PC, in such a way that removing it is often not even cheaper. I have the feeling that we should think about a legal structure that would make it happen. This would include thinking about what corporations are supposed to enable. (This is where I start to question the entire economic system, so let's just note that pushed far enough, pretty much any subject has political implications.)

> Sony has done this twice. [PS3]. Consumers didn't care enough for Sony to bother with it again.

Wait a minute, if the first iterations of the PS3 could run Linux, how hard could have it been to port that ability to the new versions? I suspect they ended it for other reasons. If for instance the console did not by itself generated enough profit, and they compensated with online services, they'd have an incentive to limit sales to actual gamers, and run from the compute-cluster market.

> IIRC, Xbox One indie developer licenses are still basically almost free.

It's not just a matter of price. Can we make and sell porn games on the XBox One? I've heard that platforms like iOS disallow porn. And I don't see console vendors taking the heat for being "that platform with porn on it".

If regulation forced hardware vendors to open up their platforms, you could access questionable content on them, and nobody would take the flak. You'd still have "safe for work" store fronts, and porn hubs, and whatever controversial stuff huge corporation wouldn't feel like supporting.

> Your idea is still locked down, though; you cannot run arbitrary code because you cannot cross the signed/unsigned boundaries.

Locked down, yes, but the idea was to not lock people out of the system entirely. The main idea is that signed mode would give one additional ability: to prove that a given program, and the data it produces, traces back to a certificate chain that goes up to a given trusted certificate authority. (Sony gives Blizzard a certificate, Blizzard uses it to sign Starcraft 3, which then produces Blizzard authenticated network packets to stop cheats).

Unsigned programs should not be locked out of the platform at all. They'd just not be explicitly approved of, and maybe we'd display some warning before installation that this program is not endorsed, and may contain or do stuff that is "Not Good For You".

We probably won't see a competitive erotic wrestling game any time soon (no signatures to help cheat prevention), but at least we don't sacrifice some capabilities just so we can have other capabilities.