LogFAQs > #980106201

azuarc posted...

Effectively it is. He implied that developers don't have an impact on the industry. Or at least that they cannot have a noticeable enough impact to compare to hardware companies.

I didn't say this lol.

Games created by developers obviously have huge impacts on the industry.

But Microsoft created infrastructure and libraries that influenced EVERYTHING in the industry, not just game design, but everything around it.

I think foolmo would be the best person to explain this, but as far as I know it used to just be OpenGL, then DirectX came out and almost all games used it. Then you have things like friends lists integrated into games and invites, achievements, voice chat. These things existed before Xbox, but the Xbox and Xbox 360 made the impact that caused them to become widespread. That's not even discussing things like the MSN Gaming Zone, which was a website where you could host and join multiplayer PC games super easy, as opposed to the old days where everything was server browsers and direct connections over IP.