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Next Gen Console Commentary
Today has seen a bit of commentary on each of the three next-gen consoles, all relatively positive. The PlayStation 3 has seen users for the PSN community crack the 1.3 million mark, according to Next Generation. If you enjoy the Wii's Virtual Console feature, Chris Kohler has you set up today with a rundown on every VC title rumored or released to date. Nintendo's consoles are selling pretty well, too. Microsoft has had something of a mixed day. On the one hand gamers can look forward to Beautiful Katamri coming to XBLA in the states. On the other, an investment adviser has called Microsoft's entire gaming business a 'disastrous endeavor'.
On the other, an investment adviser has called Microsoft's entire gaming business a 'disastrous endeavor'.
Most investment advisors (the ones with an "o", not the ones with an "e") are mad at Microsoft because they have little to no debt, a ton of cash, and a healthy but not spectacular dividend. Yet they remain a viable company, making money and what-not. It kills me how little room for innovation is allowed in what most financial people use to define a "success." Whether the gaming division has made money to date or not, and I'm no Microsoft fan, you have to admit that branching out into something other than purely software and gaining a market-leading position is a Good Thing in the long-term for the shareholders (like myself).
Square-Enix will either port the main FF13 to the Wii or simply say that the PS3 FF13 has no greater significance than the others and cut some of its funding. Japanese PS3 sales are abysmal (although not quite as bad as the Xbox 360) and releasing something that costs that much to develop on just the PS3 would be suicide. We've already seen that Square-Enix is moving Dragon Quest to the DS since DS titles are dominating the Japanese charts and total DS hardware sales are expected to pass PS2 sales in Japan.
The people who think that Square-Enix can pick whatever console they want to release a game on are naive. Sure, some of the die hard fans will follow them wherever they go, but most die hard fans have a finite amount of money and can only follow Square-Enix to consoles they can afford.
Where in the article did it say anything about Katamari shipping on XBLA rather than as a retail game? Given the importance of the funky J-pop music to the Katamari titles, it would seem disastrous to me to ship it in a state where it can only be as large as 250MB.
The article did speculate that online multiplayer would be an additional future download, but that doesn't have anything to do with XBLA. The speculation is written in a confusing way as to imply that users would have to pay for that download, but they may have only meant that Xbox 360 users have to pay a monthly fee for a Gold subscription in order to play multiplayer online (and that the additional download would be free). Personally, I don't care either way. What I do care about is that I can get my Katamari fix without having to drop $600 on a PS3.
I could go on about how Microsoft isn't *really* making gaming hardware or how they've always made hardware (mice and keyboards), but that would miss the real point completely. The point is simply that:
XBox fits perfectly into Microsofts CORE business strategy: Everything should run Windows.
For consoles, this requires owning the ecosystem; having your own console. It's as simple as that.
Microsoft wants ATMs to run Windows (just as they want EVERYTHING to run Windows) and if that required actually making the ATMs, then I'm sure Microsoft would consider doing that. As it is, the volume probably isn't there and it doesn't matter, because it *doesn't* require owning the ecosystem. It just required waiting for IBM to stop supporting OS/2 ;-)
It's the same thing with PDAs, TVs and practically any other device (in wide-spread use) which requires an "interactive" OS. Microsoft's MO is pretty much the same every time. If there isn't a way to just stick Windows on it easily, they'll make the hardware themselves and show it off as prototypes. They've done this with complete computers, with servers, with PDAs, with TVs - and even with your Ford Refrigerators.
Anyone who seriously thinks that FF13 will be ported to the Wii is high. Since FF7, top-shelf graphical quality has been a hallmark of the series, and the Wii simply can't handle that. I'm pretty sure Square is releasing a spinoff on the Wii, but that's all that system's going to get.
As for the XBox 360, that's a bit more likely, but still doubtful because of that system's horrendous performance in Japan. Simply porting FF13 to the 360 would not be that beneficial to Square in the West either, since most FF fans have already resigned themselves to the idea of buying a PS3 when the game comes out. MS would benefit greatly from a 360 port, but Square has little incentive (especially against the massive amounts of money that Sony will surely be paying them for exclusivity), and would end up just cannibalizing its sales of the PS3 version.
Rob
I'll still stand by the fact that FF12 had pretty crappy graphics. I'd take Tales of Symphonia, a cellshaded, mid-gen GameCube title, over FF12 any day in terms of cleanliness and polish. There's a difference between "great graphics" and "polished graphics", and FF12s is less than polished. When objects suddenly pop into view at about 50ft, and textures suddenly shift resolution intermitantly, you know you've got an ugly game... FF12 may have been a great game, but it was ugly as sin. My problem with the PS2s graphics are not that they didn't allow for a lot of different effects (they did), but they took a "jack of all trades, master of none" approach, in which ALL the graphics looked very mediocre. This was mostly due to an outragious lack of smoothing.
I really could care less about fancy shader effects, high polygon count, or high resolutions, but as long as a platform doesn't allow a game to look clean and polished, that's going to get in the way. I don't feel that a single game on the PS2 looked completely polished. Even Shadow of the Collosus, which many go on and on about how pretty it was... yes, the design was great, but the system just didn't allow it to breathe fully, it still looked pixelated and had major slowdown problems. I'd rather take WarioWare style graphics, any day, if it can be made to feel more polished. And I really think few games on the GameCube didn't look polished.
I just played the PS3 version of Need For Speed Carbon the other day at Fred Meyers, and to my dismay, I got that very same unpolished feeling. I was seeing perpendicular line jaggies, uneven edges, and everything I remember hating about the PS2s graphics... it was just in HD with some prettier lighting effects. I looked over at a Wii playing the Twilight Princess open, and it looked cleaner.
I can't be sure that the TV wasn't malfunctioning, but currently, I'm really not convinced that the PS3s graphics are anywhere as capable as the 360s. And as long as Sony insists on not pushing developers into making polished looking games (one thing I've always appreciated about Nintendo), I dunno if I'm ever going to like them as much as 480p Wii graphics.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.