Slashdot Mirror
The Battle Of The Consoles: From Atari To The Xbox
msolnik writes: "There's been a lot of talk about Xbox, and GameCube, and even more speculation about the technology inside the box. However, the console wars are not going to be won based purely on technology. There's a long history of cyclical win and lose peaks and troughs for companies that have tried to stay the course in this business. Nintendo stands alone in having survived a number of generations of innovation and still managed to remain a contender in the market. Tom's Hardware has delivered this unique assessment of The Console Wars." Update: 12/06 16:28 GMT by M : Note that Tom's has updated some of the charts in the article - they note that there was a misunderstanding between Tom's and the article's author as to which version of the charts to post.
The review seems a bit sketchy. How can we skip from 'Tennis for Two' (1958) to Doom (1993)?
Aside from a few sales numbers, I see no mention of Atari. This is more of a Console vs PC's article --- and new consoles at that.
Oh yeah, I don't think the PSX was 64 bits.
-B
-- he's not heavy, he's my sysadmin!
There may be a battle for the console market, but the question is why are they at war.
Microsoft is looking for control over the television. They think they've taken the first step, selling a box that people hook up to their TV. Too bad it's $300, but that's the microsoft way - you might as well charge the customer if they're willing to pay.
Nintendo is looking for control of the gaming market. Control of the television is not an aspiration - yet.
Of course, if people buy the hardware as a cheap PC console to hack on, and never buy games, Microsoft will also be able to take those numbers to the game writers and say "Look how large the installed base of the X-Box is. You should write your games for us, not the PS2 or GameCube."
In that case, taking the loss on the console won't hurt Microsoft in the long run, as it will increase their dominance in the gaming market.
That does sound to be true.
But it is not.
If everyone starts buying Xboxes, the cost will go down. The cost of something is made of fixed costs and variable costs (dunno the english naming scheme for them).
Microsoft will expect to lose money on a certain number of sold machines. Any machine morethen that will make profit.
It does make a difference if you make and sell 1 million machines or 2 million machines. The fixed costs only come once, only the variable costs count for each machine.
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
...Further proof that the world is in dire need of more (competent) editors.
... Relative successes are listed in bold." NEC's Turbografx 16 is listed in bold, as a "relative success." Sega's Genesis, on the other hand...? Apparently Genesis wasn't "relatively successful," according to Hodgson, etc. Oh, and FYI, while I'm sure Nintendo appreciates their listing N64 as a "relative success," they might have preferred that the authors at least INCLUDE the Super NES on the list.
The authors open their article with a neat little chart listing "the dates of the introductions of various consoles.
Their wonderfully-short second section, "Console History," spans in painstaking detail the gaming industry's progress during the crucial period between the heyday of MIT's Rail Road Club and the formation of software giant Infocomm in 1979. From there, they proceed directly to the next logical video gaming landmark -- with a third section, accurately titled, "Then Came Doom."
The article's most valuable offerings are a 21-item chart comparing a whopping three consoles (Xbox, PS2 and GCN), including such poignant criteria as "DVD Movie Playback" and "Broadband Enabled"; and a whole five sentences comparing these three systems, proving conclusively that somewhere during the authors' extensive research for this article, one of them did in fact quickly scan MSNBC's "Game Time" article -- which, it's worth adding, is a vastly more useful and intelligent article (with regard to the current "Top 3"), and can be found at the following URL:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/techgames_front.asp
crib
Please don't read my journal
It's obvious that technology doesn't really come into play when consoles are concerned. It's all about marketing and getting the buy-in of the game development companies. Just like the applications make the OS, the games make the console.
The Sega Dreamcast was WAY ahead of its time when it came to graphics. Soul Calibur is one example of a game with outstanding graphics that kick the crap out of anything on the PSone (which was the competition at the time). Personally, I think it competes more directly with the PS2, but that's another topic altogether. The point is that it didn't have the backing of the game developers like the PS did, so in the end, it lost out. Not because it was an inferior system (it wasn't), but because the marketing push and support wasn't there.
If everyone starts buying Xboxes, the cost will go down.
Now that's rich. I challenge you to name any Microsoft product where the price has dropped with mass production.
The cost of PC's has fallen to become an unbelievable value. The cost of the Microsoft software kindly preloaded on those PC's? Just the opposite.
Some "innovation," Bill. Sheesh...
Just my personal opinion....
Atari 2600 was the first game console I bought. Thoughout the game history I think it was the games themselves leading the trend, rather than the game consoles.
We choose a game console by the games which they could run, rather by the innovative technologies it had. I wouldn't buy PS if it couldn't run Final Fantasy, etc.(like I wouldn't consider switching from Apple II to IBM if IBM couldn't run Ultima. ^_^)
I wondered why so many good games would only run on one particular game console, until I got to meet a game developer who told me that gaming industry is in fact, in contrary to what I thought, running a very serious business out there.
Production of a game nowaday involved a lot of money. Unless a game developer signed a very restrictive license agreement with the game console vendor, you wouldn't be granted the right to develop game for their console, and VC wouldn't give you money for your development.
The gaming business in game console is very different from gaming business in PC. Everybody can write games for PC, but only under close-partnership would one be allowed to develop game in a particular game console.
That explain why one game would appear in one game console seldom(not never) appear in another.
This may sound like nitpicking...
"With this month's launch of the two most advanced domestic computing consoles ever witnessed - Nintendo's GameCube and Microsoft's Xbox"
Nintendo is a Japanese company, and the Gamecube is hardly a domestic console. In fact I believe the X-Box to be the first truely domestic console.
Note to self: No more arguing with the faithful.
Had some interesting little tidbits- but it was like he tried to rush that article in a day or something, the history of video games had huge holes in it.
And the hardware is somewhat irrelevant at this point I think- it's all about the games that are available! Playstation2 is the clear winner this year- though it did have a head start. X-Box though just has so much power and potential- it'll be interesting to see what comes out this time next year for it. Nintendo- well Nintendo is Nintendo and they just go and do their thing and sell millions of units almost apart from what everyone else is doing- as long as they keep their strong branding to kids they will happily suck up the cash.
Dreamcasts are cheap because they aren't making them anymore and they are trying to get rid of all the exess inventory. It has nothing to do with Sega's costs!
The total number of XBox's sold to people looking to modify them (and hence never buying games) will probably barely register a blip on the radar compared to total overall sales. Hacking the XBox is cool, but let's face it: 99% of the population will never do it.
Exactly!
This article has a huge black hole between the Atari 2600 in the early 80s and Doom on PC in 1993. To me, the first impressive PC game was Castle Wolfenstein. But before that, the entire second half of the 80s was dominated by Atari STs and Amigas as game machines. PCs and Macs during this period were "business" machines which didn't pander to the games market. For those of you not old enough to remember, the PC as dominant games platform is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
But as far as the Game Boy is concerned... Let's face it, Nintendo played its cards right. When the GB first came out it actually wasn't that expensive. It boasted the power of the NES (which was the only Nintendo console available) and a simple grayscale LCD screen. And it was cheap. When I got my GB, I bought it myself with money I had saved up (I was maybe 11 at the time), and it was maybe $150 CDN for me to buy. Plus I was able to afford a game or two.
Now, along comes Sega's Game Gear a few years later. Think Portable Genesis. That's all well and good, but the colour screen drove up the price enough to make it more inaccessible to some. And from what I understand from a couple of people who had them, they weren't that great for battery life.
Among the Nintendo users, people were always posing the question of when Nintendo would release a colour version of the GB, and the reply was when Nintendo could guarantee a similar price and similar battery life - two of the important factors for a good handheld console.
The Game Gear folded, maybe because it was too expensive. The TurboExpress was definitely a technical achievement for the time, but the price was definitely a little much, and out of the price range of its target audience.
Yes, Nintendo's taken its sweet time to producing a 16-bit colour handheld, but one thing I respect them for is their methodology. With the GB line, they tend to wait until they can guarantee that any new products meet price and performance requirements set by their original device... And it's been worth the wait.
There is no escape from The Muffin.
Text adventures are still alive and well, and still to this day feature better graphics than any console. (Even if you have a 1600x1200 monitory, text adventures feature more detail, you can zoom in infinantly on any area if your imangination is good enough)
Text adventures have always been puzzles and NPC interactoin. Sure there is a strong movement away from pure puzzles in the text adventure world, but they are still there. Doom is about finding the blue key, while Zork is getting the theif to do what you can't do yourself.
However easy it is, it still sounds like a geek thing. Most people who would even consider doing a thing like that would already have a perfectly functional PC.
Saying that, using standard technology may get them into trouble in other ways. IANAEE (electronics engineer) but I bet that over millions of units, the custom hardware which most consoles use costs less. As the production ramps up, jamming loads onto a few custom made chips starts to pay.
If they think they can win the console wars the same way they one the browser wars (and let's face it, IE costs something to produce and distribute) then they would've had to come in a lot lower than $300. I'm assuming that their plan is to ultimately have the "all MS" household but they forget that:
browsers are cheap to make in bulk
people don't spend $100s on games for their browser
Unless they get the games that people want to play, they will come unstuck.
This insightful analysis has been brought to you by a Sega Saturn owner.
This sig made only from recycled ASCII
Take it from someone who has been programming consoles and home computers for 20 years. Even back in the day, you'd read that the Atari 2600 had only a couple of sprites, then you'd see games with a dozen or more moving objects. The problem is simple: specs are the raw capabilities of what the hardware can do. They're the *starting* point for the programmer. And of course they're meaningless by themselves. Let's use a guitar as an analogy. Imagine that console makers sold guitars:
1. In the spec lists comparing Nintendo's guitar to Sony's guitar, you'd see that one had 6 strings and the other 12. Does this mean you can play twice as many songs on the latter?
2. Sony claims that their guitar is capable of 1000 chords per second. Now what do they mean by that? Is that the limit to how much beating the strings can take? But what if you played 1000 chords per second? Would there be any time for subtleties or even *changing* chords? Of course not, so who cares about that number.
Hardware specs really are like this (for example, 3dfx loved to claim 3 million triangles per second on some of their cards; in reality, programmers only got about 150,000). Fanboys *love* to think that bigger is better and that console X really can have games with 50,000,000 triangles per second, but that's not how it works.
my first memories of game consoles in the 80's when nintendo and sega first broke out in the 80's the emphasis in advertising was on how much fun you could have using their consoles, the average person who buys game consoles is more into professional wresting and not kernel updates.
let's face it, there's a lot of really games out there that have amazing graphics, require state of the art technology to run, had used millions of man hours in their creation, etc... still are still not as adictive and fun as something as silly as a very low tech game you would use on your pda.
it just seems to me that it's getting harder and harder to find a game console that offers a countless number of games that are hard to put down.
My first console was an Atari VCS (the wooden version of the 2600) - My how things have changed.
Call me nostalgic, but I stil believe the 8-bit days were the best. Get your SEGA Master System or your NES (with funky robot if rich) and you were away!
I currently own a PS2, I use it sometimes, GT3 and GTA3 are pretty good games, lots of fun.. But having observed the progression of games over the last, say, 10 years, I believe they came to a bit of a halt when the Internet got popular.
Games houses all thought "Wow, the Internet, let's make our games support online play, let's build communities!".
Sure, that's a great idea. Brings in money. Uses the Internet. Builds huge user bases (look at Ultima Online, Everquest etc.)
Also, around the same time, more and more games started getting ported to new funky 3D versions - of course Wolfenstein/Doom/Quake were the daddy's - other platforms such as the Amiga failed miserably (With the likes of Alien Breed 3D - the apparent Doom competitor). I've not really seen any _really_ original games in the past 5 years, maybe it's not possible anymore? Maybe people are too narrowminded. I don't want any more 3D conversions of driving games, fighting games, or platform games. What does that leave? Is the games market so huge that we've expired originality and can now only focus on making our GPU's in consoles faster to support prettier textures on the same old 3D models. Who knows.
Why were 3D platform games soooo good? Why did everyone love a parallel scrolling Shoot'em UP? Sit a kid of today down infront of a 8/16-bit console with a 'decent' game from the past. Sure, they'll complain "the graphics are crappy!", but give it 5 minutes of gameplay and they probably wouldn't be able to get off it all day. I doubt they'd be the same with their new GameCube or PS2 or XBOX.
What changed? What happened?
Maybe I just got old and don't get the buzz from gaming I used to, I'm quite partial to a bit of GT3/GTA3 on the PS2 and FlightSim/Quake/UT on the PC - but you just don't get the same flashy lights around the 'gaming' thing anymore.
Be it the XBOX, PS2 or GameCube - they all basically do the same thing. Sure, some have slightly higher specs, some have Internet support, some have big this, big that. Whatever. The key to consoles being successful (as they once were) would be for the games designers. Back in the day, games designers/dev guys would make the most out of the limitations of the machine - look at platforms like the C-64/ZX Sinclair. People used to get excited about the demo's cracking groups etc. used to release basically because it was so unreal of the technology at the time. You don't see that anymore. I'm not actually aware of any 'demo scene' on the PC. Did the PC get too good? Is there nothing worth making a demo about these days?
The flair has gone. Modern games are just conversions of old games, made into pretty 3D and added Internet play.
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story..."
And why did the writer skip from Infocomm straight to Doom. There were a lot of genres that grew up between text adventures and FPSes. What happened to the side-scrolling platform jumpers like Sonic and Super Mario Brothers? What about all of the RPGs published by Square? Sports games grew by leaps and bounds during that time.
I generally like the articles on Tom's Hardware, but this one seemed like it was thrown together by a team of rabid monkeys (or some other randomly-generated /. page creator) in a matter of minutes. I know that failure to check your sources is nothing new to most slashdotters, but I hope it doesn't become the norm for other sites like Tom's.
</RANT>
not to mention their total disregard of the NES. it's not on their little table and i think most people would agree that it had alot to do with the reviving of the gaming industry in america after the crash of the atari systems.
another thing that bugged me, was in the text of the article the jump from 1979's zork to 1993's Doom. i seem to remember being alive in the 80's and i think that i played some video games, pretty sure at least.
i guess the author's intention was to race quickly through the history of consoles (which he harldly talks about, save for one incomplete chart) to get to the hardware of the new stuff, since it is tom's hardware. but whatever, very incomplete...blarg.
Master Using It, and You can have THIS!!
He left out Commodore - who released two consoles. Both of which were somewhat groundbreaking - the CDTV being the first system to have a CD-Rom drive (released in 1989 - designed by former Atari guy who invented pong) and the CD-32 the first 32 bit dedicated console - which actually has a lot in common with the Xbox - being that they were both came from former PC's. At the time I thought they both played great games.
Really, this person doesn't seem to complain about the X-Box's Halo, which could be said to be just a revamp of Quake, which was a revamp of Doom, which was a revamp of Wolfenstein. Or DOA3, which is yet another copy of every other fighting game out there. Naturally these statements aren't entirely true, but it is the same type of argument.
Yes, Nintendo recylces the same video game characters and general themes, but they do a great job of putting them into new gaming experiences that show vast improvements over other games.
NES: Super Mario Brothers was one of the first side scrolling action games ever. Clearly a big step up from the one screen games like Donkey Kong.
SNES: Super Mario World was a huge improvement over the original SMB concept. Larger (sorta non-linear) world, multiple exits in one level, more power ups and abilities for Mario, Mario can ride on "Yoshi."
N64: Super Mario 64 was a much different game than
the side scrollers, being 3D.
With totally different objectives, power ups, level ideas, and abilities.
Game Cube: Luigi's Castle isn't a Mario game. It is a totally different type of game in which Luigi captures ghosts with a vacuum cleaner. It is a bit strange, but it isn't the same thing we've seen before at all.
And of course, by mentioning Mario and other kiddie games, we are of course forgetting Nintendo's other titles. Most of them might be family friendly in that both the small kids and adults can enjoy them, but that doesn't make them kiddie. Zelda and Metroid come to mind, as well as the fact that Miyamoto doesn't produce crappy games in the opinion of most gamers, even those that don't own Nintendo consoles. His worst game was probably Zelda 2, which is a lot better than the average PS2 title by far.
Playing as the same plumber over and over has never ceased to be fun, really.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
I seem to have noticed that they didn't include the Nintendo 8-bit console on the list, the Nintendo Entertainment System. You know, the one that had The Legend of Zelda, Bionic Commando, Final Fantasy, Contra, Super Mario Bros I, II and III? Ya, it was missing on the list when I looked at it, 1:36pm EST. One would kinda think they would at least mention the console that for so long was the thing to buy to play games. There had to have been at least 500 titles released for it. Feh to them I say!
"It's here, but no one wants it." - The Sugar Speaker
I can't understand how this horrible mess even gets posted.
:)
First, look at the history. One page attempting to cover console history from its infancy to present?? Oh but wait let's throw in some crap about PC games as well, and mash everything all together! Idiots.
Second, their concept of the various generations is way wrong. You want a brief overview, here you go:
Prehistoric Age
(Atari 2600, Coleco, Intellivision, etc) Mostly dominated by Atari but definite niches for the other systems. Good debate to be had as to respective merits.
Age of Revolution
Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Master System
This is what really brought consoles into homes. Almost everybody had one or the other of these. Yeah, it depended on your region or local distribution, but both systems had excellent and addictive titles. Again, you can have great debates over which one was more dominant.
Round of 16 (bits)
The logical extension of the previous age. SNES & Genesis. One more time, great games and great fun. Sure that TurboGrafx and some other crap was in here mixing things up a bit.
Pre-Modern
PSX, N64, and Dreamcast
These span a pretty wide time period. But you look at what people were actually playing, and it's clear that recent competition was between these 3, until we reach the present.
Now - "Next-generation" consoles are here today!
PS2, GameCube, and X-Box
Well, there's been enough talk debating the respective merits of these suckers. Time will tell the winner.
Final rant
PC games started up for real around the time of NES. By for real I mean getting serious about graphics and starting to drive the hardware revolution (which I think was possibly one point of this misguided article). Once that first VGA monitor hit, that really kicked things off. (Does anyone remember MCGA?
Since then, PC games have continued merrily along in their SEPARATE MARKET from consoles. Let's all say that slowly. SEPARATE MARKET. There NEVER will be an integration between the two, the differences in the platforms are far too great. People need to stop with the arguments of which one is better since they're just different.
Look at it: Screen resolution, user interface (10-12 key controller vs. 101-key + mouse), storage capacity, delivery mediums, the list goes on and on.
If Microsoft's business plan is to merge the two together and dominate all gaming worldwide, well they're screwed. They'll get beat by people writing games just for PC's that do a better job, and they'll get beat by people writing console-specific games that do a better job.
Terrible article, but at least it can kick off the discussion...
-a rogue Nugget
Yes, developers do look at the installed base but they also look at sales figures for the top titles and especially sales figures of titles in the same genre as their own product. Your assertion that this "will increase their dominance in the gaming market" is a supposition that looks at the issue from only one angle. There's much more to it than that.