The Changing Face of the Console Wars 223
An article at Gamasutra explores the decisions by Microsoft and Sony to launch significant hardware additions — their respective, upcoming motion-control schemes — in the middle of a console cycle, rather than waiting until the next generations of their systems are ready. It's indicative of a change to the established pattern of console wars; nowadays, it's more about adding features and gadgets to improve existing products than developing entirely new ones. Quoting:
"... for Sony and Microsoft, motion controllers are their next-gen consoles. And it's a damn sight easier than launching Xbox 720 or PS4. They can debut these peripherals without needing to engineer completely new boxes for consumers, potentially bundle them over time, and they have a much better chance at getting exclusive games, thanks to the specificity of the hardware (something that's happened a lot for the Wii). Thus, both hardware manufacturers and publishers like EA see these controllers sparking new interest in Xbox 360 and PS3, which will delay the next dreaded console transition for another few years."
How is this new? (Score:4, Interesting)
Naturally (Score:3, Interesting)
We are reaching an era in computing where devices can push audio and video beyond human perception levels. For example, if display resolution were increased, a person would not be able to tell the difference visually from typical viewing distance. Or if color depth were increased to 64 bit over 32 bit could that even be perceived? I'm not saying we're there yet, but we are quickly approaching that point.
Once that happens then what will be the next generation anything? It will be a matter of small refinements, novelties and exclusiveness of titles.
Long lived generation (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:New? (Score:5, Interesting)
All about the money... (Score:3, Interesting)
Could this be because of the losses that Sony and MS are making on each unit sold? I couldn't say whether past consoles always turned a profit, but I suspect that after investing so much money in their respective hardware, neither company wants to move on to the next gen before they can claw back as much cash as possible on games and add-ons...
What does this mean for game design? (Score:3, Interesting)
If Sony and MS start pushing for motion-driven controllers, instead of button-mashing, and they each design their own new controllers for that, what is the likelihood that the inputs will actually be similar? If a useful motion - say a forward stabbing motion - is interpreted dramatically different between the Sony and MS systems, this could potentially make cross-platform release more time and resource intensive for the game companies.
Which, one could conjecture, could potentially drive the game companies to release more games on just one platform, instead of both Sony and MS.
Re:You're geniouses among men Sony, MS (Score:5, Interesting)
It's certainly been done before.
Remember that after the '84 video game crash, Nintendo came along and pretty much defined modern video gaming as we know it with the NES. Controllers with D-pads, managed third party licensing, holiday timed releases, literature, and mascots: Nintendo pretty much just made it all up and the rest of the fledgling industry followed suit.
Here's some food for thought: It's becoming pretty clear that gaming as a whole is moving towards a bit of a different demographic. This is partly because those of us who were the kids buying the first Nintendos and Segas have grown up into (presumably) responsible adultlike beings who are now buying Wiis and Xboxes. Coupled with this is the move to 'casual gaming' led mostly by the Wii (and also the DS) which is bringing in people from older generations who up until now have been unfamiliar with video gaming entirely.
One caveat about this: The "bug your parents" business model doesn't apply as well anymore. Older and wiser people who are making frankly massive investments into consoles and games for them are expecting to get a decent run time out of their investments. The huge new market of first-time gamers, grandmothers, and all the other people we like to pick on (who are all buying the Wii) are a tenuous market at best, and it's likely that the console makers are concluding that forcing everyone to jump ship and move to a new platform will probably alienate this whole market. Lots of grandmothers will say, "screw you, I'm not buying a new games machine" and suddenly not only are they not making money on new console sales but they're not making money on their legacy machine anymore, either.
The cash cow then becomes not selling new machines, but selling new upgrades for the existing machines. Grandma (or whoever) will swallow "buy this thing that plugs into your Wii (or Xbox, or PS3)" easier than she'll swallow "spend $500 on this new console that's different from your old one."
The Wii already has this curious casual gamer market. Sony and Microsoft sure want to capitalize on that success, and it's clear that the best (read: cheapest) way to do this is by upgrading rather than replacing. And while all the rest of us are cracking wise about people ripping off Nintendo, at least this method of Nintendo-rippage will be cheaper (and hopefully better) than replacing existing consoles outright. Which will piss off a lot fewer people.
Re:New? (Score:2, Interesting)
An universally, every single one of these attempts failed; miserably.
If a console does not have functionality on day one, or by default, then you cannot tack on additional requirements, especially when it comes to games. Developers already worried about how small your console demographic really is cannot risk further decimating their audience by requiring people to buy some new fangled, overpriced gadget in order to play your game. People are not going to be willing to fork out double the cost on an accessory and a game, when they could just buy two regular game, usually of higher wuality, for the same price. Light gun game makers have known this for years, and often package the game with the accessory to try and make the package more digestable.
The Wii broke through the gadget impasse by making the gadget an integral part of the console from day one. Sony and Microsoft have done this to a lesser degree by making wireless controllers and in Sony's case "motion sensors" available from launch. But they cannot catch up to Nintendo on the gadget front until the next cycle. It's not possible to get all owners to upgrade their consoles at once so that developers aren't looking at a decimated pool of players. Baring an exceptional few, developers will make games for the console they know everyone definitely has, and they are right to do so.
We are not witnessing a change in the old regime of video games, at least, not from Sony and Microsoft. What we are seeing is envy from these two companies. They want the player numbers and console sales that Nintendo has. What they don't realise, or want to admit, is such numbers will neccessary mean a precipitous drop in the overall quality of game titles and consistent marketing of gadgets, widgets and dongles which may catch casual buyers but which will not attract and hold the longer term game players that the console needs to truly survive. The Wii has become a tired, cliched dead end, or real interest to no-one who actually choose video games over other pastimes. It can and will be replaced by an even blander and cheaper new console or console-like platform at the first opportunity. Nintendo has lost its loyal fan base and is now reliant on an extremely fickle and detached user base with no attachment to the brand.
Gimicks are gimicks. They are not the future of video games. In modern games, I need to control movement of a character in 3D environment, while maintaining camera control and awareness, and while maintaining quick acess to broad array of functionality and abilities, all while making room for meta and system controls. How do I do this by waving my arms or shaking the controller? How would you perform all the functions needed in say, Super Mario World with a motion control system, while retaining the same level of responsiveness and control. You can't. The standard controller is a proven method of such control and this has not happened by accident but rather by design, and it would be the height of folly to disregard that.
Sony and Microsoft complain that modern games are "too hard" for potential new players to understand or control, so we need new control methods. This is like arguments that maths is too difficult, so we shouldn't bother having people learn it. Yes, it's hard to learn how to control video games. But for decades now people have done just that, despite the difficulty. Why? Because they truly love to play video games and have put in the effort to become good at doing so. Just like people who actually like so called "difficult" things like maths will put in the effort to become better. People who cannot control video games are people who were never interested enough to bother learning how, yet now you want to disregard the former group for this latter, albeit larger one?
For the long term sake of your business, which of these groups should you be trying to hold onto? By focusing on these peripherals instead of on core games, what kind of foundation are building for your business over the next ten years?
Re:What? No. (Score:4, Interesting)
The Intellivoice [wikipedia.org] sounds like a closer fit to what we're talking about, as it enabled a new form of game, rather than functioning as backwards compatibility.
No idea if that's what the original poster meant. But it definitely does show that augmenting consoles is a very old idea... older than many people reading about it. :)
Somewhere around here I still have an Intellivoice, and all four released games for it (I don't count the baseball one). You have not lived until you've heard a little 4KB cartridge (not a typo! in fact, 4KB was twice the usual size; and yes, I'm using bytes because I think measuring games in kilobits is a crock) babbling away at you. An amazing amount of voice was shoehorned into those things. Online MP3s that have samples of even a single thing it could say are themselves larger than all released games combined.
Re:Could it be a sign of delay in the "next gen?" (Score:3, Interesting)
No, it's the other way around. PC's are currently TERRIBLE compared to consoles. How can I say that? It's easy. There is no objective meaning of "terrible": it depends on what your goals are. Apparently you're one of the gamers who prioritizes eye-candy and/or processing power. I don't, and many others don't either.
Here's what I think is important:
1. I can actually play the f***ing game at all. The PC market has intentionally alienated used-games with copy-protection and "activation". If you already activated your old game and try to resell it, good luck if you're the new owner who can't install it on their computer. But let's say this is *my* old game, not a used one. Five years down the road, if I want to use it on my new PC with my new version of Windows (because it's going to *have* to be Windows), can I activate it to play? Is the company's servers even around? How do we deal with all the breakage due to OS updates, malware, driver bugs, etc...
2. I can actually play the f***ing game at all, without having to take out a bank loan. For under $300, I can buy a console off the shelf, pop in the disk for any game I own, and I can play it immediately. As long as I have this hardware, I can continue to have the *freedom* to play these games 10 years from now if I wish to. Let me see you play Crysis with a computer off the shelf for under $300. "Technically feasible" doesn't count. I'm referring to the ability to have a genuinely enjoyable gaming experience.
3. Consoles are dedicated to their jobs, with standardized hardware and software. PC's are for general purposes, but do not excel for special purposes like gaming (or high-end audio or video) unless you spend a lot of money to get *non-standardized* hardware and software. As a result of the predictability of the console platform, quality control is easier when you only have to worry about one hardware platform coupled with one software platform. (Note that I wouldn't condone this for PC's. They really are for general purposes and not specifically just gaming.)
Graphics no longer; gameplay it is. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What does this mean for game design? (Score:3, Interesting)
For this generation the most likely thing is that most games will completely ignore the motion sensing stuff, as it doesn't make much sense to invest large amount of money into an add-on that only a fraction of people will own.
On top of that its questionable if motion sensing would even work for regular hardcore games. Especially Microsofts Natal just seems unfit, with no buttons at all you are extremely limited in how you could use the controller in a game (how do you fire a gun?).
Sonys solution looks more promising as it actually has buttons, so it might be useful as a lightgun like tool that could enhance aiming in some games. But how to apply it to gaming in general is still pretty much an unsolved problem and it remains to be seen how many buttons it really has (Is it a full PS3 controller replacement?).
Even on the Wii after all those years people are still struggling to do anything useful with the motion controller in regular games. And more often then not the results are rather uneven.
I think in the end we will end up with a bunch of party & mini-games, some experimental use in regular games and then only see actual real use of motion sensing in the next generation after all that experimentation is over and some new gameplay mechanics have been established.
Re:Graphics no longer; gameplay it is. (Score:3, Interesting)
mod this up
last 20 or so years the only thing that improved in consoles was graphics. the controllers have stayed the same and a few gimmicks like the power glove never caught on. now the graphics are good enough even if they get better that people want a different game play experience and not just better graphics
Re:Long lived generation (Score:3, Interesting)
No that's a biased way of looking at it because the Dreamcast didn't have any successor (and it came out in 1999, not 1998). Look at it this way, PS2 (2000) to PS3 (2006), 6 years, GameCube (2001) to Wii (2006), 5 years, Xbox (2001) to Xbox 360 (2005), 4 years. So the average periodicity for this previous generation was 5 years. It's not THAT short but on the other hand I don't think it's ever been shorter.
Re:You're geniouses among men Sony, MS (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Could it be a sign of delay in the "next gen?" (Score:3, Interesting)
That's a good point. I never thought of it because I don't have any friends :D.