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Comments: 223 +- Games: The Changing Face of the Console Wars on Saturday October 17, @11:25AM
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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."
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You're geniouses among men Sony, MS (Score:5, Funny)
I know the solution! We'll copy Nintendo!
We'll be rich! Muahahaha
- Sony and MS boardrooms
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
What do you mean? An african or european grandma?
Re:You're geniouses among men Sony, MS (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's also completely fucking pwned the PS3 and the Xbox 360 for the entirety of those ~3 years.
And the Xbox 360 had like a full year head start.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
A fad is something that becomes highly popular and is quickly replaced or suffers a loss of use.
I think it is pretty clear, given how little people actually play their Wii's (and how few games are actually even likeable), that it IS a current fad.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As someone who lusted after the elusive Wii for months before finding one, I can tell you first-hand it is a fad product. It was fun, we bring it to boring family parties and everyone tries the bowling, but it is dead to me.
It's fun to play, once in a while, but having every single goddamned game require you to either point at the screen or flail your arms, means I will never play it when I just want to "veg". There is no way to play Wii in a relaxed position, you can't just lay back in the sofa (or stret
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"Nintendo has completely dominated a market we didn't even no existed by adding basically nothing more than instructions telling people to move while playing video-games. If we make something which not only does that, but which also actually captures motion, perhaps we can claim the market they found for ourselves!"
Haven't tried WiiMotion+ because, for fuck's sake, should I need to spend £80 to try out something which the system claimed to already come with? I've got no evidence that it's actually any
New? (Score:5, Informative)
Nonsense, consoles have been doing this for years.
The various attempts of light guns such as the super scope, sega mega 32x cd add on, eyetoy for the ps2, added memory pack for the N64 etc.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:New? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
$2 billion says you're very wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar_Hero [wikipedia.org] has proved, to the tune of $2 billion in sales, that you *CAN* "requir[e] people to buy some new fangled, overpriced gadget in order to play your game".
Clearly people *ARE* willing to fork out double the cost on an accessory and a game, instead of just buying two regular games, for the same price *IF* you create a game that makes it sufficiently more enjoyable to play with the accessory. The announcement of Guitar Hero for the PSP demonstrates that the game does not require the accessory controller, but who honestly believes it would have been as successful on the major consoles if it had used just the standard controllers?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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
I guess someone here didn't play Super Mario Galaxy
What? No. (Score:5, Insightful)
The extension of consoles is the defacto behavior for consoles, and always has been. In modern times it's been things like Wii Fit, the Eye Toy and so on, but nobody here has forgotten the Power Glove or the Power Mat, the Sega CD and the Sega 32x, and indeed that pattern goes back into the 70s, with the Intellivision overlay system and the Commodore 64 Extender.
Indeed, it's only the last generation or two which have skipped it. Anyone who believes this is new has only been gaming through one generation of consoles, and that should be their first red flag that they're not ready to talk about the history of gaming.
Could not be less correct.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Parent
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Once that happens then what will be the next generation anything? It will be a matter of small refinements, novelties and exclusiveness of titles.
Nope, interactive pr0n. Get super high resolution, let people scan/upload face pictures for the head and choose from a menu for the body, and you wouldn't build enough of them at $2000 each. Obviously, you would need some kinda of wireless control system that doesn't require two hands.
Re: (Score:2)
Long lived generation (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (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.
Could it be a sign of delay in the "next gen?" (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps it's merely my own lack of vision and creativity, but I can't imagine much further growth in the capabilities of consoles. Display technologies have been maxed out. Memory and processing systems are well balanced between power and cost even if the consoles are still a bit too costly in my opinion. Until the next great other technology comes out, I can't imagine getting much better than it already is... a little better perhaps, as the costs of more impressive technologies decrease, but nothing significant. In fact, I would go so far as to say the advancement between XBox and XBox360 is barely noticeable. PS2 and PS3 is largely the same thing.
What they will do, in the next gen, however, is figure out new ways to kill the second hand and other post-first-sale business activities. If the PSP Go is any indication of what is to come, we are going to see a decrease in the popularity of new consoles.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The current generation of consoles are TERRIBLE compared to PCs. A new PC with a Radeon 5870 has nearly 6-8 times the graphical processing power.
Most consoles games run at sup 720P resolutions and are upscaled to fit a 1080p screen, view distance in console games is terrible, textures are blurry messes, and frame rates suck.
The fact that you can't see a difference between the xbox to xbox360 is laughable.
Just because you have low standards doesn't mean the tech can not advance much further than it already
Multiplayer drawback (Score:2)
The current generation of consoles are TERRIBLE compared to PCs. A new PC with a Radeon 5870 has nearly 6-8 times the graphical processing power.
Even if one PC in your network has a powerful GPU, you usually need four PCs for four players, and you need to buy powerful GPUs for all of them. Even if you did buy extra PCs to run things like OpenOffice, Firefox, and Boxee, the Intel GMA that probably came in them won't cut it. Consoles, on the other hand, have a wide selection of major label titles that can use one console, one monitor, and four gamepads. Some of these games are in genres that don't even need to split the screen, like fighting games.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You now, he was responding to the GGP post, who said
And clearly they haven't. That doesn't mean the PC is a better gaming machine, it's just technologically more advanced. The reason for the lack of single-system multiplayer games is not technical, it has to do with different target markets.
Re: (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 activat
Yawn, you suck at answering questions (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Big deal, crack the games
You ignored the whole breakage due to OS updates.
2. You already have a PC, so that's a dishonest point to make. Everybody has a PC, no matter whether or not they want to play video games.
Almost 10% of new computers buyers have macs actually.
Of the ones that have PC's, large numbers of them today just have laptops. Just how are they going to put in that new video card? What about netbook buyers? Are they going to have a fantastic gaming experience too even though they technica
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's a good point. I never thought of it because I don't have any friends :D.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Wow Reading comprehension, get some you retard.
Re: (Score:2)
P.S. If you want to see where the next generation of consoles are headed, simply look at Crysis on a maxed out Rig.
Current Generation PCs can still barely run the game at 1600p with 30fps, personally I predict the next generation consoles to have equivalent power to this.
Here is a screenshot.
http://img185.imageshack.us/img185/4228/crysis64200806291401238to6.jpg [imageshack.us]
http://media.photobucket.com/image/Crysis%20max/LiquidReactor/Crysis/Crysis2009-05-2608-40-24-45.jpg [photobucket.com]
Re: (Score:2)
I play games at 2560x1600, you insensitive clod!
Re: (Score:2)
Modern graphics cards such as the Nvidia GTX series or Radeon 4xxx to 5xxx series can easily play games at 2560x1600 with 30-60fps, especially games that are console ports.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree though, I think they are not going to be upgrading the hardware significantly. They are going to play this like the PS1 did with the introduction of the duel shock controller. Even then, there was a clear need for an anal
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: (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
Accessories and gimmicks (Score:3, Informative)
You can sell more $99 gizmos and gimmick games than you can new consoles, pure and simple.
What? Game consoles? (Score:2, Insightful)
OMG I'm a computer nerd. I thought this article was about terminal emulators!
I'd rather just have next gen (Score:3, Insightful)
For me the way to ease the purchase of a new gen console is with strong backward compatibility. When I bought an XBox 360, it was partially because I never had the original XBox, and the XBox games (Halo 1/2, Fable 1, Jade Empire, etc.) I wanted to play were on the compatibility list. I really feel Sony dropped the ball when they dropped PS2 compatibility.
I've gone back and rented a number of Gamecube games (Tales Of Symphonia, Eternal Darkness, etc.) for my Wii. If Nintendo wanted to have achieved true awesomeness in my eyes, they would have put a slot for Gameboy Advance games in the thing. I played some GBA games on the attachment for the Gamecube, and playing them on a big TV is great. Advance Wars with big, glorious maps made the game much more epic.
I also recall the Sega 32X and the CD for the N64. both of which I have. Nifty idea, but the developers just don't develop in droves for something not in the core system specs.
Graphics no longer; gameplay it is. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (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
The sooner the better (Score:3, Insightful)
The sooner that everyone has implemented and is using motion controls, the better. We need developers to get shitty, gimmicky uses of it out of their systems, and we need better hardware and software for reduced lag and more precise control.
Am I really personally that interested in games that are 100% built around motion control? As the Wii taught me, no, I'm not. I think a lot of game enthusiasts feel the same way. What I *am* excited about, and what I think game enthusiasts should be excited about, is when developers come up with more subtle uses that really add control and flexibility. One thing I really want is the ability to change the direction of the first-person camera in racing games by tilting my head, so I don't need to take my hands off of the controls (note - I'm not talking about "head tracking" where position data is used to provide a realistic viewport, I'm just talking about mapping head tilt to an analog camera control). My understanding is that GT5 + PS Eye will provide this feature. Leaning in first person shooters is another good example. Is it a "realistic" 1 to 1 mapping of a real world motion to a game action? No, but it adds to a player's ability to control the game seamlessly. It only adds to the experience - it doesn't take anything away and you don't have to use it, and the game is still perfectly playable even if you don't have the right hardware.
We need to get to the point where developers are no longer asking "how can we establish a good player experience by using motion control" and instead focus on gameplay and implementation with standard controllers, later asking "where could motion control help this experience we've established?"
I'd be interested in their 360 addons... (Score:3, Informative)
... but my FOURTH xbox is starting to flake out, and will probably be dead soon.
I appreciate that they sent me 3 new ones under warranty, but god DAMMIT, a console should last more than a year. I would have thought that by the 3rd one they would have figured out how to manufacture them correctly.
Re: (Score:2)
You actually think Nvidia and ATI (and Intel..hahaha) aren't going to compete anymore because some morons in tangentially related industries got into the game business?
Re:Sucks for PC users (Score:5, Insightful)
Game graphics advances will be stunted
And some of us gamers cry "Thank effing baby Jebus" for that. Have you missed all the complaints about how gaming is too dominated by graphic card wank fests over who has the best lighting effects or water reflections? Or how the hardware has advanced too much along the polygon count side, actually making it difficult to do anything else other than service shiny graphics, enemy AI or any other intellectual concerns be damned?
I guess the bright side is I won't be blowing $300 every 2 years on graphics cards.
Yeah, bingo. People are getting tired of that. A friend showed me a newer PC FPS a couple weeks ago. Pretty as all hell, but just another goddamned shooter with dumbass enemies and puzzles for the short bus crowd. Whee!
Parent
Re:Thank You Nintendo (Score:2, Insightful)
There, fixed that for ya.
Patents (Score:2)
I don't think there is anything earth shattering about the input tech that others can't copy.
It depends on which patents Nintendo owns or exclusively licenses from another party vs. which patents Nintendo non-exclusively licenses from another party.