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Gaming Crash up Ahead
Milktoast writes "Joystick101.org has posted a story predicting an upcoming gaming crash. They claim that a crowded marketplace in conjunction with the large number of ports will lead today's consoles down the same road as the Atari 2600. Will gaming consoles go out the window like before, or will we pull out of this?"
Why not just get one of those 750 GHz CPUs and run PlayStation II, DreamCast, GameCube, and XBox emulators? :-)
Really, PCs are more versatile. Why bother with consoles?
If hardware in your hands == not vapor, I'd be playing games on a Pippin. X-Box is as real as Farenheit.
Games nowadays are so much more involved, with my schedule, I can get a full 3 months out of a really good game. Which means I only buy about 4 games a year. Think about it. This year, I bought two games, Quake 3 and Half-Life. The mods alone have kept me a happy gamer for three years straight. Can you say Counter-Strike and Rocket Arena? There are so many consoles and so many developers out there that only the best of the best will survive, right now I would say that is ID, EA, Square, Valve (RIP), and Namco (maybe). I'm sure there are others, but those are the ones who I see getting any of my money anytime soon. I used to buy 20+ games a year, because I would buy it without knowing much about it, and play it for a day, beat it and get sick of it. Games nowadays have a much longer shelf life.
How many parents will spend $450+ on a PS2 for their kids, when a decent PC with a good video card will display better graphics, surf the web, do word processing, and play DVD's?
Well, the PS2 lists for $300, and it does play DVDs. As far as better graphics, I don't know if they will be significantly better enough for the parents to tell the difference. You can't beat the simplicity of a console. And what makes you think a PS2 will never do work processing? It has a FireWire port and two USB ports. Surely those are in there for something...
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Then came the rise of the PC. A typical entry level PC has always been around 1000 UKP (that's $1500). Prices have stayed stable for a long time. But finally they are starting to creap down and with inflation over the intervening couple of decades, $1500 now is probably not worth much more than $600 was then. PCs have become cheap, real cheap and while the games cost more than the 8 bit ones did, the prices for those are coming down and budget games just put the icing on the cake.
I'm not saying consoles won't make it but they have a struggle ahead and the x-box (though I hate the idea) will probably just make things more complex.
Rich
But the parents have to buy a desktop PC (which continue to drop in price) anyways just so there kids can do their homework. The console then becomes redundant.
No, it does not.
How many times does this have to come up on slashdot? Console gaming and PC gaming are just different. They have different types of games and offer different experiences. The PC is better at more immersive, detailed games. The kind you sit up at your desk and play. The console is better (indeed, about 100x better) at games where you lay back on the couch and relax, maybe with a few friends.
Do not underestimate couch multiplay. I have much more FUN playing Mario Kart with 3 friends (who are right there with me, laughing and drinking) than I do playing online PC games with anonymous strangers, but I am still driven to play games online, improve my characters and my personal skills... Consoles offer a party atmosphere as opposed to the more solitary PC experience. It's nice to have something to do when you are actually physically hanging out with another person. For example, I can interest my girlfriend in a game of Worms Amageddon on my DC, or the aformentioned Mario Kart... But she would never agree to play Quake with me, even if we had two networked machines.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Console and PC games are different. Both will continue to exist, unless something comes along that combines the best aspects of both.
Josh Sisk
Calm down. I have nothing against consoles, per se. I meant the "should" part more from an economic POV. I'm not signing any petitions to have them outlawed and I'm totally opposed to age restrictions and the like.
I just think they're a waste. With the advances that are being made on the desktop, I can't see any value in throwing away buttloads of money on a console that can only play games.
I'm not much of an advocate of Network Computers either. I see how you *could* run all your apps over the net and rent your software and storage, but with the price of PCs dropping and speed increases, I just don't see any advantage there. I guess I feel the same about game consoles. Sure, they have better graphics right now, but the PCs will catch up in a short amount of time.
A few years back, consoles filled a pretty important role in that they were more affordable than a full-blown PC. But PCs get cheaper and consoles (+ games) get more and more expensive. I see less and less market for consoles, and *that* is why I think they should die. Their niche is shrinking. IMHO. sorry.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
"There are hundreds of PSX titles out there, but I only own 7 of them, because I have no reasonable way of finding out which ones I'd like"
This problem isn't nearly as bad as it used to be. Sony has a playstation underground magazine that comes on 2-4 CD's quarterly, and usually contains multiple demos. Subscribers also get numerous demo versions of assorted PSX games mailed to them.
You can also pick up demo versions of PSX and Dreamcast games in their official magazines.
Of course, these options pale in comparison to just downloading the demos, but then again, it can often be easier and faster to just go buy a magazine than to spend numerous hours pulling the demos down via a modem.
Not trying to start a flame war or anything, just wanted to let the AC know it wasn't a rumor...
Commodore had a CD "console" (ok, it was more akin to a set top box than anything) back when the NES was still an infant (around 1987?) - the CDTV. A full 16 bit game playing machine, it could be outfitted with a hard drive, a keyboard, and a monitor - if you wanted. Had a CD-ROM drive that allowed you to load a few games, and enjoy VCDs and such (waaaay ahead of its time!)...
As far as the 90s are concerned - in 1992 (or was it 1993? Can't remember...), the CD32 came out - a full fledged 32 bit CD-ROM drive based gaming console (and this one looked like a game console), joypads, etc - had either a 2x or 4x drive, and the ability to play back MPEG-2 streams from CDs (no DVD then). Shared a lot of hardware with the Amiga 1200 (AGA Graphics, etc), as well as had a bit of custom hardware not on the Amiga AGA computer line (vector chip? Can't remember). The blitter was faster, too. A full CD based 32 bit gaming platform - long before all the others...
Nice to see everyone play catchup...
I remember being in a shop here in Phoenix, and seeing a CD-based game on the thing, and was very impressed. I asked the salesman what CD32 title it was - he told me "It isn't a CD32 game - it is a CDTV game we had lying around, we just wanted to see if it would work!" - amazing...
Memories...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
There will almost certainly be some sort of convergence for gaming playing in the future, but I don't think we should assume that the desktop computer is the source of the gravity. The PlayStation 2 is essentially a computer. Not only does it have decent CPU power and a DVD drive, but it has a FireWire port and two USB ports. That stuff is there for something.
Now, consider the marketing component. With the exception of Apple and Gateway, TV ads for computer hardware are pretty rare. And I never see ads for computer software. By contrast, Sony has blanketed the earth with PlayStation ads. They could easily make the PS2 the most advertised computer system ever -- essentially buying its way into the space. I know it has been said a thousand times, but you cannot beat the simplicity of a console. This is very attractive to a lot of people. I'm sure Microsoft figured this all out around the time the PS2 specs were announced, which is probably why the XBox will be coming out a year after the PS2.
As far as an actual crash, I think that's fairly unlikely. There's going to have to be some shakeout over the next two years: PS2, Dreamcast, Nintendo's GameCube and XBox can't all be significant. But at the same time, it's fairly obvious that the demographics for video games have expanded dramatically in the last five years or so. There's nothing abnormal about a 35-year-old man with a PlayStation. It's totally acceptable. I'm not sure the same could have been said about the NES in the 80s. And girls are progressively getting more interested in games as well. There are more people playing video games than there have ever been.
Yes, desktop computer graphics will significantly surpass PS2 in time, but apparently most people don't really care. Sony is selling oodles and oodles of PS1s this Christimas, even though it has the most fugly graphics of any platform in circulation right now.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Imagine if the gaming industry could pin all their hopes and dreams on this one title... and it would be sure to be a success because its based a Steven Spielberg film that everyone loved!!!
Yeh yeh ... the licensing is insanely expensive, but trust us, it'll make one hell of a game... It'll change our company forever!
now go out and write the worst game that you can create, make sure the graphics are horrendous, the storyline is stupid and incomprehensible, and there is not point to it.
Great... now lets see how our company cashes in on this!
tagline
... hi bingo
Gaming won't die, but consoles will (and should).
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Also, you can get demos for many consoles with the purchase of a gaming magazine (not Nintendo for obvious reasons). Sure it requires a $7 purchase, but that's a small price to pay if it saves you a couple of bad $50 purchases
The sole purpose of the Internet is to get porn and bomb making plans into the hands of children.
If you're old enough to remember 1984, you may remember that demand for the Colecovision (like PS2 today) was VERY strong in 1983/early 1984 and we were all sitting on our hands waiting for the supersystem from Atari, the 7800 (like Xbox today). A huge older system, the Atari 2600 was still selling well (like PS1 today). The market quite suddenly crashed under its own weight and the 7800 was scrapped, only to re-emerge in 1986 as a half-assed American answer to NES. I remember bargin bins of Atari 2600 games for like $9.99 when they were selling for more like $40 and everything was rosey a couple of months before.
1984 is much more similar to today than you think. The big players were raking in mad cash and awesome systems loomed on the horizon, just like today. Your likely scenario may come to pass, but I think a crash may be equally likely.
I have a feeling that with consoles now supporting online play, developers would want to develop games where console gamers and PC gamers can play across the same network. If games such as Diablo were ported over to the Playstation, then I feel that developers can take the next step and implement network gaming between the console and PC. The game itself won't have to cost that much, as the profit for the company developing the game can come from the monthly access fees to the network.
The playstation2 will get it's killer app and dominate the market.
The dreamcast, with its internet features and some really innovative games (Jet Set Radio fits IMHO) will have a diehard following. I don't think Sega will make much more money from it though.
The gamecube will once again please Mario/Zelda/Metroid fans. I doubt it'll unseat Sony though -- we'll see.
XBox and Indrema are up in the air. Either one could succeed with a killer app or by moving more towards an appliance.
That's my take on the current situation. Take it for what it's worth, nothing. I highly doubt there will be a crash though. Atari was being stubborn (so stubborn that they still tried to compete with Nintendo years later -- under 50 bucks!) and everyone seemed to think that Atari WAS videogames. It would be as if Sony just kept on kicking out Playstation1 games, and nobody paid attention to anyone else. Videogames are big business now, there won't be anymore crashes.
I used to be a straight gamer, with all the latest high tech games (now PoS software titles going for $5 in EB). Now im just a simple coder and net user, but i still play the occational game. There will always be a demand for gaming, basically because mankind demands stuff thats fun, and people like to just be lazy and sit in a chair and blow stuff up in Doom. Even at work i occationally have a Quake deathmatch or a descent anarchy game. Life without games is boring, and boring sucks. Gamers may become less of a rampant buyer, but they will always be there.
I am !amused.
Disclaimer: I have been big into both PC and console gaming at various times in the past.
The console market seems to be slowly coming around to demos, demo discs often come with videogame magazines just like they do for PC gaming. That said, scrounging up a PSX demo disc is not nearly as convenient as clicking on a web site to download a PC demo, then playing it without ever getting out of your chair.
I think you're wrong about console game reviewers not being objective, at least on the Internet. I'm a big fan of VideoGamespot, I think they give consistent reviews and they aren't afraid to tell you an overhyped game is a piece of crap (or more likely, just average). There are certainly other sites on the net with similar ethics, you just have to find them.
Over the years I've come to trust videogamespot's ratings overall. If a game gets a 9+ from them I can buy it feeling confident it will be a good game and I've never been disappointed (maybe I'm just not critical enough).
> Consoles may be competitive against $1500+ PCs...
Yeah, but it's getting harder to live w/out a $1500 computer at home anyways.
But who am I to say. I play 2600 games with Stella and that's good enough for me.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Because the consoles are getting more expensive
I beg to differ. Most consoles have traditionally retailed, at launch, at $300 or more. The current consoles continue this trend and the Dreamcast was much lower, at $199, I believe. The PS2 is more expensive, since it comes loaded with a DVD player, but I believe it is no more expensive than the PSX or SNES were at launch.
A cheap PC becomes the hot new console. And that, my friends, is the end of the console era.
Then why, even though entry level pcs have been getting cheaper and cheaper, has the console market, at the same time, grown so fast? And why is the PC market disappearing? Console games are different from PC games. People need to figure this out... The best PC games are the ones that would be no fun on a console (who wants to play a RTS or FPS on a gamepad). The opposite is true, too. Who wants to play Tekken or Madden sitting at your desk? Console games are easy and appeal to the masses where computer games don't. I personally prefer PC gaming, but would never get rid of my consoles.
Josh Sisk
People have been predicting a game crash for years. Won't happen. Trust me. There is excellent content in the pipe. There are excellent platforms in the pipe. Sales are brisk, even if they aren't uniform.
Even if sales disappeared, you would still find people working on the next epic title. It goes beyond profits. Game developers write games because they're passionate about it and addicted to it. Just as film-making is a dumb idea for turning a buck, so is game-making. It's not a sensible business to be in, but people get hooked even though it is extremely risky.
VC's generally avoid game investments because it falls in the class of "hit-driven" industries. I had a friend who wrote what I consider to be one of the finest business plans I've ever read, but it was for a game company. He shopped it to over 200 VC's. No one bit. He eventually got backed by one of the few game publishers that has managed to stay afloat (surprise, surprise).
This is the way the game industry tends to work. Whoever is winning often ends up being the next big publisher.
So in a sense, you could say the game industry has always been in a slump because no one wants to invest directly in start-ups, but in a way, its own incestuous investments are more stable because the winning game developers end up investing in the other game developers.
Amateur game developers are the angel investors that infuse new money into the industry. They work for months - sometimes even years - without pay, draining their savings because they believe in the title.
It may be the case that many developers continue to suffer the marketing politics, the retailer shelf-space bribes, project cancellations, poor back-end compensation, artificial milestones, moving target libraries, and turnover. However, the consumers will not.
Ask yourself if the film industry or music industry or book industry has ever really "crashed". There are lots of starving, passionate actors, musicians, and writers, but consumers continue to see great selection year after year.
It would take something really major, like the repeal of copyright law or a way for pirates to have access to considerably higher bandwidth media and connections than the developers have access to in order to cause serious damage to the game, movie, music, or book industries.
I'd love to see Pinball make a comeback!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Again, ever since I discovered programming, which I consider to be a game in itself, I've loathed consoles: where's the keyboard and disk?!?
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
I'm a fan of Joystick101. I go there every day to check for any valid news links to my site. The writers opinions are always insightful. However, I think the author is off base on this one.
It's funny that John Carmack called these the halcyon days of polygon based gaming, and yet two years down the road, some flawed marketing is going to drop that down the tubes. Consoles are just not that essential.
I think we're finally arriving at at age where we can honestly say that games look exciting to people who don't play games. The same people who stop to watch movies playing at Future(Torture) Shop would now stop to watch some kid playing a game at some display stand.
Games truly look good for the first time, and there are enough excess polygons to throw around to express artistic ideas. I don't buy it.
It's the death of the console system as we know it (and I feel fine, yeah, insert REM song here).
The point is, every console out today has some sort of "extra ports" on them to be able to connect to other people--something PCs have had for ages, and the console makers are finally waking up to the fact that "Hey, them gamers like to play with each other! Hu-yuk" I guess it goes without saying that the fact that the PS2 has two USB ports and a modem jack (I'm assuming it's a modem jack, I'm probably wrong), and the Dreamcast has a modem that finally made its debut with NFL2K, that the consoles are trying harder and harder to actually become little PCs.
I mean, hell, look at the X-Box. It is a little PC. It has RAM. It has a name brand video card. It has a hard drive. It has an OS. It has upgradability.
I think the thing that seperates consoles from PCs is the fact that there are no drivers. There are no bug patches, or updates. There are no mods. There is the CD (or cartridge, for you poor N64 users), and that's all you get. With NFL2K, you can use laggy-ass servers to play a half-ass game of football that you'd be better off playing on a PC anyway.
I think it would be nice to believe that consoles serve a purpose, and they should only do that purpose--to have fun. You plug it in, turn it on, and it works. But when you utter the absolute tightening-tech-support-asshole words of upgradability and Operating Systems in the same sentence as consoles, your only going to have problems. Those wonderful seven year olds out there are going to want a new hard drive for their X-Box so they can play Pokemon 2200: It's Not Over Yet, and more ram or a new video card so they can watch Tony Hawk do another sweet move off the half pipe.
When you get into upgradability, it gets dangerous. When you get into connectability, it gets dangerous. When you try to be something your not, normally you're just going to fuck it right up.
Now we'll just watch and see it happen.
It's an interesting article, but I think it's incorrect in a couple of ways.
1. The main reason for the crash wasn't because of all the competing systems. It was because there was a huge amount of crapware released for the Atari (like the infamous ET game). This turned off gamers more than having to choose between competing systems. Indeed, one could argue that with Atari being in such a dominant position over the other guys, there really was no real competition, hence the downward spiral in quality.
2. Just because a console is made by Microsoft doesn't mean it's going to contain a bunch of mediocre PC ports or patches. There's no reason why Microsoft can't enter the business like any other console developer. Remember, the real reason console games don't need patches is because a) There's one and only one hardware configuration you have to deal with (and without any other concurrently-running programs to worry about), and b) Console companies run very thorough quality checks of prospective games before releasing them. All Microsoft joking aside, I see no reason why Microsoft can't equal other publishers in this area.
I think what you will discover is that the market can't support all 6 developers at once. One or two of them won't gain enough critical mass to sustain the whole "enough people playing it = publishers develop games for it = more people buy the console" cycle. It will mean failure for one or two developers. But an entire market crash? I'm skeptical.
"Do you expect me to talk?" "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!"
In 1984 my brother and I were both turned off by the crap being sold for consoles and turned to the commodore 64, which had a very healthy gaming market, and never skipped a beat (plus, you could actually PROGRAM it. What a beautiful assembly language it had!). People shouldn't talk about the video game crash of 1984 but rather about the console crash of 1984, because all my friends at the time were playing tons of games on their commodores and apple IIs and we were all lusting after the AMIGA!
Video games didn't crash in 1984; consoles did. I think the same statement may be applicable in 2002, as the author of the article indicates.
Keep in mind the current state of society. We have those stereotypical fat teenagers that sit on the couch all day and play video games. There is the demand... Also, people are making more money and so it is not uncommon to own multiple systems. Here on campus finals started today and there are people playing DreamCast as I type this. Keep in mind the PlayStation and N64 in the same room are sitting idle...
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It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
It seems to me that the games you see today are all rehashes of older games. Hence the categories of games (RPG,RTS,FPS,etc). They're all modeled of the same successor or successors. I've pretty much given up on finding a game that can hold my interest. RTS games were great when they came out but the last few years everyone I've played is the same old concept with a new spin. My starcraft addiction took all the fun out of RTS. The same could be said for all the other categories. The gaming industry needs to come up with some new types of games or stop releasing 12 games that only have relatively minor differences every year. How many first person shooters can you play before you're burnt out on the entire category of games?
Folks,
One problem with the PlayStation 2, Dreamcast and Gamecube is the fact you often need very specialized programming tools just to write the games for these systems--this costs major amounts of money to pull off.
I know I'll be flamed for htis, but this is why Microsoft's Xbox could be a very formidable competitor when it is released in September 2001. Think about it: Xbox is essentially a PC running a highly-optimized version of the Windows 2000 operating system code base. Given that there is a huge amount of Windows-based games out there, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that all the experience writing games for Windows 95/98/ME/2000 machines can be very easily applied to writing games for Xbox.
For example, a game like Diablo II or The Sims could in theory be a very fast and straightforward code conversion to run on Xbox.
This is why Electronic Arts has signed up to write games for Xbox. EA sells a lot of games to PC owners, and since the source code for the PC games can be easily ported to run on Xbox....
Also, don't forget that almost every Japanese game publisher (Namco, Koei, Hudsonsoft, Game Arts, and many others) are already writing games for Xbox. The only notable absentee is Square--and they may come onboard given their working relationship with Electronic Arts.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
I have never had a console and have always considered keyboard based computers far superior (for my purposes)
Rich
I read a lot of comments saying "Consoles are dead (and good riddance!)", but I have a different take.
The thing people like about a console is that you plug it in, and it works. It's simple to operate (though, the games may not be), it's non-threatening (one or two controllers, with a few buttons and a joystick).
The downside is that it's limiting (no keyboard, no high-rez screens, no connectivity) -- dowsides that are being alleviated with the Indrema or (maybe) the PS2.
But look at your modern computer -- no longer a box of bits you put together yourself from bought and found parts (/.ers excepted). It's a nice, friendly box you buy from a nice, friendly guy at CompUSA that you take home, plug up and (most of the time) works. Computers are becoming more consolish every day, while consoles are becoming more computerish every day.
The juxtaposition of these two axis will create some bastard box with the computer's "eyes and nose" and the console's "hair and bone structure" -- and it may not do all that well. (Vis a vis, the 3DO or Apple's Pippen, the first generation of bastard boxes) For example, the Pippen was a great idea -- a computer or game platform, reasonably priced. Computer labs should have been filling up with those things, since they were so easy to set up, nearly impossible to infect with a virus, and w-a-y cheaper than a full computer (at the time). I think Apple sold ten of them. It was a so-so computer, a so-so game platform (and marketed like a leper whore).
Will gaming die out? Not likely -- people by nature loved to be entertained, and as long as games provide entertainment, they'll sell. Where will these games play? It's too early to tell -- I think consoles will move to the top of your TV and will be TiVO/PS2/WebTV bastardizations, until the tech improves to where it will be included in every TV. But that's nothing more than a guess.
One more item -- the great console crash of the early 80's was partially due to market saturation (everybody who wanted one already had a 2600), paritally due to home-computing's rise (C64, Apple ][ ), and partially due to cable TVs rise ("you wanna play Pitfall?" "Nah, let's see if we can find some boobies on Cinemax").
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Hardcore gamers and hardcore games are no longer the juggernaut they used to be. Sure, your Quake XVII and Diablo 29 get a ton of sales, but that's slowly being eclipsed by the Joe Average gamer who plays things like Deer Hunter. Check the gaming sales charts back for the last year, and you'll notice hunting and fishing simulations all over the boards.
Whether or not there's a hardcore game market crash is almost irrelevant. Maybe it'll happen. Maybe the old "Golden Convergence" scenario that Robert Morgan was trumpetting two years ago will happen. In the end, it will have limited effect on the Wal-Mart gaming market, which is where the money is really being made these days. We can scoff at Barbie Detective, but it's making more money than the vast majority of other games out there.
Recently all this talk has been made about the PC dying as a games platform - well nearly all the companies I've seen abandon the PC for pastures X Box were not the game makers I look out for or expect great things from. So a badly licensed substandard kid's product won't ship on PC, but Deus Ex 2 will. Boo fucking hoo. The PC will also continue to innovate in the online realm before the consoles do for several more years.
As far as a gaming crash is concerned, ask EA or Square or Sony how much they think they're going to lose in the next few years. Very, very little.
This is no reason for hope, however. Massmarket acceptance and the pure visual quality of titles released today will insure gaming continues - albeit in a sea of licensed, substandard, boring hogwash. More WWF games, more bad movie ports, another EA Fifa 2001 September edition. The gaming business is no longer what it once was, a playground of innovation and boundary pushing and an attempt to create a genuine new art form. Now it is all about the money, bottom line. That's what's depressing. True, there will be the odd rose buried in the mountain of shit - but unfortunately this article has it all wrong. That mountain of shit is worth a lot of money, and people are going to fork over cash for a piece of that shit, and keep doing it. What the article should've said is that we need a gaming crash to rejuvanate it creatively.
** http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/ ** Human rights in North Korea. 1 million estimated dead from starvation.
This article ignores one of the factors of the 1983 crash. Cheap home computers. Parents could buy a system that would let kids do their homework (that old salesman's story) and at the time had much better capabilities than the braindead 2600 (which was an ancient system by that time, true, but it was the king). Consoles have always face irrelevancy in terms of price vs. capabilities of computers. The NES came out and for its price it couldn't be beat by computers for years to come (especially since the PC was taking over the market where more game-capable systems were losing relevance). The gap between when a console comes out and it is matched in price vs. capabilities is shrinking rapidly. Because the consoles are getting more expensive, and their capabilities are only slightly better than a PC in the same order of price magnitude. Meanwhile, satisfactory gamers' PCs are getting cheaper by the minute. The X-box and Indrema only make it official. For the same price and capabilities, plus the ability to "do homework on it" makes it the preferred choice. A cheap PC becomes the hot new console. And that, my friends, is the end of the console era.
Well, let's see.
I just bought Mindrover. Haven't seen a game like it since Robowar on the Mac or Robot Odyssey on the AppleII
Number 1 and 2 sellers on PC right now- The Sims and Roller Coaster Tycoon. The Sims is certainly original, and RRT may be a clone of Theme Park but it's got its own unique flavor.
Yeah, there are a dozen RT strategy and first person shooters for every innovative thing out there, but they certainly exist.
Eric
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
The analysis is complicated somewhat by the fact that the systems aren't coming out all within a year like they used to. Who knows if people will to buy a new system in another year? My guess is no, I think that by being first Sega and Sony will have too big of a market share to be displaced by the time Nintendo and Microsoft finally get their products launched. But I'm not an industry expert, obviously. I guess I'll stop speculating and just wait and see what happens.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Soul Caliber
and
Tony Hawks Pro Skater (1 & 2)
2 of the best Dreamcast games, bar none.
When we start getting 3d video cards in those cheap PCs it will be very hard to justify buying a limited machine only for games when one can get a general purpose computer capable of playing the same games.
If you take a cheap, buggy PC game and port it to X-Box (assuming X-Box even ships, which is not proven), you have a cheap, buggy PC game on a midlevel modern gaming PC, on which MS is dumping money instead of earning it. My suspicion is that the whole thing isn't to produce X-Box, but to kill the console market so people give up and go back to Windows games.
One of the great hidden secrets of the video game industry is that 50% of all products lose money, 40% break even, and 10% make a profit. Of those 10%, only a handful make what could be considered a spectacular profit.
I think the author is off base about what would cause another video game crash (something that comes up every couple of years, going back to at least 1990). This time around the issue that development is hugely expensive, takes two to three years, and games have to do exceptionally well just to make up development costs. The next time you read a poor or mediocre review of a game, consider that a team of 20 was slaving away on that game, day in and day out, since 1998. This is in a different class than a band spending two months to write and record a weak album. Daikatana is a high profile example of a failed game, but the sad truth is that most games follow the same path; it's just that they don't have a well-known figure managing the team.
I agree with you though I might be more inclined to pick up the first Playstation, and see if I can cheaply find certain games that were among the best that console had to offer. The last thing I'll want is expansion. I'd rather wait a couple years and get that PS2 at under a hundred bucks- assuming it's even still possible to get a console that was as direct and unfussy as the Atari 2600 I grew up on, or a Playstation. I wonder if that is becoming a thing of the past, and people will end up grovelling through errata and knowledge bases just to play various simple games on their consoles. "Well, this original X-Box game gets broken by this update that enables this other game, and these two games also get broken, but the latest game won't run without the update though you can run one of the two new games on an older update that I saw on an FTP site somewhere..."
It's not too easy to see what the shake down of these four consoles is going to be in two or three years, but here is a take on the strength and weakness of the four players, and what we can expect them to do.
Dreamcast: The first one out of the gate.
Their strengths are their strong first-party support, a cheap system, and the first ones to establish an Internet presence. Their first-party is second only to Shigeru Miyamoto. Their system will be the cheapest of all systems, cheaper than the GameCube, and may be as cheap as the GameBoy advance. Everything they shipped shipped Internet-ready, and even though it took a year, the software now uses it.
Their weaknesses will prove overwhelming, however. Their hardware, to put it bluntly, is maxed out. This means that there will only be less, not more, support to this system in the years to come. It's Internet support is crippled by the lack of a hard-drive. This is not a big deal this year, but the next machines will have this support, and it will be very very important. And the final nail is that the system has already lost in Japan, to the PS2, which doesn't even have a fistful of good games yet. Let's get to that now, shall we...
Playstation 2:Let's start with the weaknesses. It is almost impossible to program for right now, requiring a massive development team and gifted coders. This is resulting in a stunning mediocrity of released games. This will NOT change in the near future. Sony is losing money because Japan is more interested in it's DVD capabilities which is crippling its DVD player sales. Sony loses money on the hardware, and is not making it back in software. It has no harddrive or internet connection. Oops. Noone buys peripherals that are over $50. It's been proven in the marketplace. If they want to establish an Internet presence, these devices will have to be sold at a loss (do the losses ever stop for Sony?). Moving on to the strengths, they have what noone else has, and may never have this generation: the most consoles sold. They win if they continue to throw money at their problem. Accept the losses for another whole year, give away harddrives and ethernet connections, and finally people will have the software developed to make great games, and everyone will own a PS2 and will buy said games. This is their only way to win.
X-box:This is getting entirely too long, so I will shorten my entries on these last two consoles. The weaknesses of the X-Box is that they have horrible 1st party support, and no presence in a saturated market. Their strengths are great, however. They have EA, and may have Square, they have a box that is easier to code for, and they have internet and a hard-drive. The ball is in Sony's court, but if Sony doesn't continue to spend money enhancing the PS2, then Microsoft wins. The X-Box is better, but no normal consumer will buy both a PS2 AND an X-Box.
Gamecube:Finally, Nintendo. This company will win and lose at the same time. They lose because their console will arrive too late. They have the best first-party team in the world, but it makes no difference in this upcoming saturated market. But they win because it doesn't matter. They can sit this whole generation out and still amass profits because of Gameboy and Son. They have a monopoly on hand-held software, period, and they can reap as much profit as they want from that. It simply does not matter that they are missing out on the next-generation console war.
Well, if you've read all the way through this, thank you for listening to my diatribe. I don't pretend to know the real answers, but this is the only result I can see. PS2 will win by losing the most money. Will that result in a console crash? Well, I guess you should flip a coin. -------------------
It is easy to control all that you see,
Gaming will never die.
Consoles, may.... kinda
Consoles are getting better and better. Faster, better graphics. But it will hit a point where the Console becomes the computer. They will both have the same features, and basically be the same machine as your desktop. Once this happens, consoles and computers will merge into one.
Its bound to happen.
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Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Does anyone remember the great comics crash in the early 90s? Marvel was putting out two books a month for every character because people would buy them, the market was saturated with speculators, and it all came tumbling down, driving many, many indies out of business...
Okay, no one speculates on video games. But a hyper-saturated market where you can sell anything you can put in a box can't be a good thing; and we've seen it more recently than 1982...
grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Personally I am a little tired of what's out there. Let's face it, there has been little to no innovation in Game markets, they have been pushing out crappy FPS after crappy FPS. And don't get me started on bad Sims. I think the gaming industry needs to wake up and put some of these suckers out of business. Start supporting free games instead of these money-whoring, anything to make a buck companies.
Looks like someone got spanked on the Gamespy servers last night...;)
The games are different, but that doesn't mean they're worse. I would suggest to you that it takes as much skill to become a Q3 rail-god as it takes intelligence and memorization to clear Zork, or tactical thinking to beat Civ on Emporer mode.
I really can't agree with you on this one. At least for me, the biggest appeal of video games is that it's not something I have to watch it's something I can do. There is certianly something to be said about the wonder of watching a master go about his work be it athletics, music, metal working, coding or gaming. The difference is that video games are so accessable to the average guy and therein lies their appeal. When games are unwinnable on their own people develop cheats or lose interest quickly. Therefore, most good video games aren't really all that difficult to play well, they may be difficult to really master but I usually lose interest after I've learned a game well enough to be successful most of the time.
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I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
I'm going to elucidate here what I think is the fundamental advantage of PC gaming over console gaming as they each stand today.
;)
;) But other than that, I don't expect to end up with many games unless I find some reliable journalists or a friend who rents the things like crazy.
The list of console games I've bought since I started seriously gaming on my PC (circa Quake) is very short.
I played Einhander (PSX) at a friend's (who rented it) house, loved it, and bought it.
I borrowed Final Fantasy Tactics (PSX) from that same friend, loved it, and bought it.
I bought Viewpoint (PSX) cuz it was $8 and I remembered playing it on a NeoGeo arcade machine. It sucks
I've also bought a number of NES and SNES games, like Super Metroid, Star Fox, Wizards & Warriors, and Power Blade, that I had played before and picked up because they were relatively cheap.
What do all these have in common? I'd played them before. I'm most likely to buy a console game if I have the opportunity to play it for a significant amount of time before purchase time. And while it's true that many used game stores like our local BuyBack Games chain will let you play used games for a minute on their in-store systems, that's not the same thing. I'm talking about the kind of sample experience you get from - here it comes - a PC game demo.
I haven't bought a single PC game in recent memory that I didn't download a demo or or borrow from a friend first (well there was Half-Life, but that was a gift. And come on, it's Half-Life!) There are hundreds of PSX titles out there, but I only own 7 of them, because I have no reasonable way of finding out which ones I'd like. Gaming journalism is largely a joke, the writers tend to have $5000 PC's and every console in history, have played more games than I've ever even seen or heard of, and have editors that won't let them come out and say a game sucks balls. And renting games based solely on the box-back propaganda (and maybe some of the aforementioned BS journalism) for $5 doesn't float my boat.
So I think that once broadband internet becomes really pervasive, the best thing the console industry could do for itself would be to create a system for downloadable game demos. Gamers could log on to a central repository of demos, and browse them by (BS journalistic) rating, genre, number of downloads, or whatever. This would give us a reasonable way to thresh the wheat from the chaff.
I plan to buy a Playstation2 (eventually) mainly because it plays DVD's, and because it's Squaresoft's main platform. If there ends up being a Final Fantasy Tactics 2, that'll be worth the whole $300+$50 right there
MoNsTeR
Molog
So Linus, what are we doing tonight?
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
There will always be some degree of conflict between pricing of game units and PCs; consider:
- PCs that provide PCI bus should cost a bit more because they offer the option of upgrading video hardware, RAM, and possibly even CPU. (Plus other options not so directly relevant to gaming.
- PCs are built in smaller lot sizes with less uniform hardware, so you'd expect them to be a bit more expensive.
- PCs as "general purpose" hardware can run any software (within some limits); as a result, the hardware vendors cannot afford to assume they can subsidize low-priced hardware by virtue of people having to come to their software arm to buy from their 'video game monopoly.'
Put that together and the present pricing of PCs being a fair bit more expensive is quite rational.Those factors seem to me to be more crucial than that of "cutting-edgeness."
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
What happened in 1985 was because Atari was the 600-pound gorilla in the industry, and they completely mismanaged their product line -- also because it was too easy to write a crappy 4K ROM and put it in a cartridge. One year later, video games bounced back, but it wasn't a U.S. company leading the way.
Also, it's easier than ever to port software to a new platform. In ye olde days, you had to completely rewrite Z80 assembler code in 6502, for example -- now you just write a new wrapper for your video/sound/control routines and recompile (I'm simplifying a great deal of course). And XBox will make that process even easier.
I doubt it. The industry seems stronger than it has been in quite a while, with more serious competition than ever before. Backwards compatability, ports (older games seem to be converted to newer platforms more now than ever before), and the Xbox's similarity to MS Windows should fuel the industry, not destroy it. With all this competition, there shouldn't be any lack of new material either.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
If you talk to a lot of the developers out there you will find a strong aversion to developing PC games. The market is just too hard to make money in, and there are all those compatability issues. Many PC game developers decided a year or so ago to start creating console games seeing this market as having greener pastures. So in the next few years I think we will see less and less good PC games, and more focus on the next gen consoles. But will those games sell well and be any good? Time will tell, but I bet we see a backlash in 2-3 years as more developers realize that the grass wasn't really greener, and they go back to writing PC games.
My money is on the X-Box because of all the $$$ they are pumping into developers. On the other hand look at how hard it is for a developer to get in with Sony to make a game for the PS2. Even if the X-Box sucks as a platform if enough good games are funded I think it will become the defacto standard.
A gaming crash like that of the Atari 2000 doesn't seem likely. Gaming and gaming culture is a much more accepted and much more prevelant than the Atari days. In addition, gaming companies are in much better shape (with the possible exception of Sega) than Atari was. Nintendo and Sony (and of course, MS) have war chests just in case. The game companies are more powerful than they have ever been. The markets for gaming machines are also very different. A lot of young adults, in addition to teenagers and children buy games now. The PC is not a threat to standard consoles. PC gaming and console gaming are two different beasts. Final Fantasy VII and VIII were great console games, but horrible PC games, because of the Save game system. The PC is better for sims, FPS, and the ilk, while consoles have the platformers, RPGs, etc. Notable exceptions good probably be given, but it's a pretty good general rule. Also, consoles are truly plug and play, while some level of technical know-how is needed to run PC games.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
The only new system I plan on purchasing is the Gamecube, for Metroid, Zelda, and Mario. I will not buy a PS2 at any time in the near future. Why? Games. There are no decent games at the moment and none that I am looking forward too on the Release List. Sony is starting to become the new Atari, quantity over quality. Sure, they have Final Fantasy, but I haven't liked any since VII, and Gran Turismo. I can't stand that stupid Crash Bandicoot, and many of the games in the last year have been of low quality and no fun to play. Check out the reviews here at IGN. Backwards compatibility? Already have a Playstation. DVD? Already have a real DVD player.
Sega, on the other hand, has some incredible, original games. Not just the lastest version of some worn out game. Check out IGN's Dreamcast reviews. Yes, there may be a few worn out games and some low rated ones, but if you look at the overall ratings, quality, and originality of the games over the last year, you will find many great games. Plus they have SegaNet and a broadband adapter coming out soon. Enough about Sega...
Too many game systems will spread the developers too thin. Personally, I'd like to see the X-box and PS2 fail. One more thing Microsoft doesn't need to do. And PS2 has yet to impress me, except for their resale value on eBay and that will soon fall below retail prices. I don't think Indrema will be popular enough to even take off, except in the Slashdot and geek communities. And like the article stated about Nintendo, "Nintendo generally plays by their own rules." Plus they have the Game Boy Advance to and a whole slew of killer franchises to fall back on.
Ok, enough from me...
Amigori
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I have no sig...
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
A crash would be welcome in my opinion because game developers could get back to realistic goals for their games. Rather than have everyone try to create from scratch a winning game design and cutting edge graphics, why not give gamers who like a game more chances to enjoy it? The good games would stick around longer, the bad ones would go away quicker. I look back fondly on the days of the endless Ultima sequels--a good game, same basic winning concept, with tweaks and updates coming at a just the right pace. Even the best franchises today like Resident Evil are under pressure to create huge games. Code Veronica is something like 4 CDs that'll likely never make it into my Dreamcast's drive.
How about a game that takes 40 hours to finish, and is followed up shortly by several installments? Why not use the same game engine for more than one release? Rather than one huge 200+ hour Baldur's Gate release of which I'll never even reach the climax of the story, I want several seperate campaigns of reasonable size. It sucks paying $59.95 for a game that you don't even know you'll finish, much less like. Reasonable goals in game development would lead to games built on reasonable budgets, within reasonable time limits (not 18+ months), and which cost less per installment when released. I'd rather pay $20 a pop for several installments of something good than $50 up front for crap.
Looking Glass Studios is a prime example of the kinds of casualties that occur when the gaming industry moves at breakneck speed. They developed a hugely innovative game (Thief: The Dark Project), but 18 months later are belly up. The good guys can't keep up because the idiots making crap games out there suck up all the money, resources, and mindshare with their promises of the latest and greatest. 9 times out of 10 though, they release some crappy Quake derivative. In the meantime, the guys trying to make good games can't because they're under constant pressure to keep up.
Let 'em all crash and burn. Then only better games will get made, and publishers will have less incentive to push for the unrealistic goals games today try to reach.
The only certainty is entropy.
...when it is saturated with total crap at unfairly high prices long enough for customers to realize it and for the companies to stop making profits.
Look at the gaming fall-out of the 2600 era. Why did it happen? Because tons of crappy 2600 games at $30 a piece (or more) were flooding the market for so long that people eventually saw through the crap and found a complete lack of non-crap. Result: customers stopped purchasing, companies stopped making profits, companies fell out.
But hey, guess what happened? Nintendo released the NES and enough non-crappy games for it at reasonable prices that customers got interested again, and Nintendo rose above all others (until Sega finally started making non-crap at reasonable prices as well, i.e. Genesis).
Look at the recent dot-coms fall-out. Guess why it happened? Because the companies weren't producing any tangible products or services that people actually wanted for the prices being asked. After about 2 years of flooding the marketplace with crap, customers finally caught on and stopped buying, and venture capitalists finally ran out of patience and said "No profits, no funding". Result: all these companies stopped having a source of money for doing business, and went bankrupt. Quite simple.
I think that the gaming industry has grown large and diverse enough that it isn't likely there will be another big fall-out like the 2600 era. It's not like we have 5-10 big companies making all the games in the world--there are TONS of different little companies making all kinds of games for all kinds of platforms, so if Nintendo or Sony or Microsoft or SEGA screw it all up, there will still be innovative smaller companies trying new and different things, so there will always be a starting point of non-crap alive somewhere in the industry.
- "It's just a matter of opinion!" - PRIMUS
He knows a winner when he see's one ... Xbox is going to tranform the console market.
John Carmack is the deity of high-end PC geek gaming. He doesn't know anything about the mass market.
Consoles have had 20 years to turn into computers. They haven't, and likely won't. Ever. Computers are nonspecialized devices that play a few games, do your taxes, browse the web and so forth. Consoles are specialized for gaming, and every attempt to make them nonspecialized (3D0 springs to mind) has failed utterly. I can't see how that'll change now.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
With PC gaming down the toilet, I don't think you can count PCs as serious competition to consoles. What will definitely keep consoles alive for the next decade will be DVD. Everyone will eventually ditch their VHS, and as long as they're doing so, might as well get a DVD player that runs games, or can even record TV shows in mpeg. People would be buying the total entertainment unit, with games as an afterthought.
Oh, and the author is a loon if he thinks ports of PC games to consoles are a bad thing. He seems to believe that only games that are exclusive to your system will sell. Far from true. Very little people have a machine powerful enough to play Quake3 or UT at a reasonable speed, but on their shiny inexpensive console it runs like a dream. Plus unless said game is so good it actually makes people buy your console, then exclusivity is a lie.
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"After Careful Consideration, Bush Recommends Oil Drilling" - The Onion