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Console Price Cuts And The Holiday Season
Thanks to CNN Money for their article discussing the state of the console market heading into the Xmas season. The author discusses the lack of major price-cuts for the PS2 and Xbox, suggesting: "Sony feels it can make more money this holiday season from its existing customer base", and speculating: "It's more and more likely that the reason we haven't seen price cuts from Sony and Microsoft is their next generation machines won't hit stores until 2006." If this is the case, it's suggested that "...the life cycle of this [hardware] generation will be the longest of any in the industry's short history", perhaps surprising considering rapidly advancing technology.
1080i and/or 720p HDTV at 60Hz will be the standard for all games on the next generation of consoles. You can do HDTV on Xbox now but going beyond 480p mostly precludes anti-aliasing and limits scene complexity because you only have about 1.2GTexel/sec of raw fillrate. Right now this isn't too big a deal because HDTV has limited market penetration but HDTV is definitely the future.
Global illumination will be a big differentiator too - Doom 3 is the first glimpse of this, but with more powerful hardware lighting will get really compelling. Games like Resident Evil or Fatal Frame will be able to crank up the tension a few more notches.
Procedural geometry and animation through shaders will also add to gameplay. A lush, dense forest with waving branches that have collision with the player and can be broken off or set on fire could provide a bunch of interesting gameplay in a game like Counterstrike.
More memory and more horsepower will allow game worlds to be more interactive. Games like Red Faction and Otogi are a good start but there's a lot more that can be done especially when you add in a good physics engine. You could make a pretty cool demolition derby motocross game where bomb-cratering the track changes the racing line and sets you up to make jumps to new areas of the course, not to mention spattering nearby cars with mud to reduce their visibility.
Gamers want compelling and intensely involving experiences. Presentation is part of how you achieve that involvement. If you're willing to make your game world's representation more abstract you can cut back on the amount of computing power needed to express it, but that isn't what gamers pay for.
Graham
Atari 2600: 1977 to ~1984 (~7 yrs)
Nintendo Famicom: 1983 to 1990 (7 yrs)
Sega SG-x000 (later Sega Master System): 1983 to ~1988 (5 yrs)
Sega MegaDrive/Genesis: 1988 to 1994 (6 yrs)
Nintendo Super Famicom: 1990 to 1996 (6 yrs)
Sony Playstation: 1994 to (1999, but now rereleased as PSOne today)
Sega Saturn 1994 to 1998 (4 yrs)
Nintendo 64: 1996 to 2001 (5 yrs)
Sega Dreamcast 1998 to 2003 (5 yrs)
Sony Playstation 2: 1999 to ?
Nintendo GameCube: 2001 to ?
Microsoft Xbox: 2001 to ?
The video game industry is well over 30 years old, with the Magnavox Odyssey released in January 1972. It is just plain wrong to say the video game industry is young.
As for this being the longer generation, that's a hard claim to pin down. You can't really say "X generation lasted Y years" because consoles are not released all at once. The 8-bit generation either lasted until the introduction of the Sega Genesis in 1988, or it ended when Nintendo began selling the Super Famicom in 1990? (Or you could even say it never really ended, since Nintendo was still producing Famicoms long after 1990.)
I suppose you could say the Sega Dreamcast marks the start of this generation in 1998, and then if the first next-generation console comes out in 2006 it would make this the longest run without new blood. But wait, couldn't you say the Microsoft Xbox is "next-generation" along with the GameCube, having almost double the power of the Dreamcast and PS2?
Or you could ignore all of this, realize that we're all just waiting for "the next big thing" and start saving your pennies now. ; )
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