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Motion Control To Lengthen Console Hardware Cycles
With the recent E3 demonstrations of new motion-based control for consoles — Microsoft's Natal, Sony's Motion Controller, and Ubisoft's camera-based system for the Wii — analysts now expect the current console generation to last longer than normal. Microsoft exec Shane Kim said he expects the Xbox 360 to last until around 2015, in part due to Natal and new services available through Xbox Live. Signal Hill's Todd Greenwald thinks this cycle may not need to end at all:
"Microsoft and Sony have invested so much in their current hardware line, as have third party publishers, that we don't think any party is seriously interested in throwing away these investments and starting over from scratch. For all of these reasons, we think this cycle will last longer than those in the past, and don't see new hardware coming until 2011 at the earliest, and 2012 to 2013 more likely (if at all — if new services like OnLive take off, or if Xbox Live and PlayStation Network become more and more robust, there may not be a need for another console cycle).'"
An xbox wouldn't even last until 2015...
Have we really reached the point where "Good enough is"
Is the XBox 360/PS3 really the pinnacle of console gaming for the next 5 years?
With the Wii selling bucketloads more initially than anything else, despite having inferior graphics hardware, have the other two finally realised that Faster chips, bigger numbers and impressive specs are really just nothing more than macho posturing?
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
I'm still waiting for the price of a PS3 to come down to a ridiculous price, right now they have a ludicrous price.
If you consider the fact that most games are constantly looking for the latest and greatest, whether it be hardware or software or (god help us) controllers, there will be only negative results from the lengthening of the console lifecycle. By extending the life of these boxes, console manufacturers are going to face the waning interest of consumers.
In some respects, the decision to keep current consoles longer makes some sense. There has not been any serious change in gameplay since the earliest consoles from Nintendo came out (this is not perfectly true, but I'll come back to that later). In order to keep interest alive, more powerful consoles were needed to bring the graphics capabilities into sync with the gameplay. Now, with the latest batch of consoles, we have seen that level reached. There will still be a few more tweaks that could be applied: anti-aliasing is one technological hurdle that hasn't been tackled satisfactorily.
In effect, the development of consoles has been dictated by the needs of the games. Unfortunately, these games have needed better graphics more than anything else. So what we have now is the situation where graphics are really good, but gameplay has not improved.
Now to come back to the issue of gameplay. There have been only a few true quantum leaps in gameplay. 3D, independent cooperative gaming (as opposed to simple team-play which has been around since R-type), and the latest is motion control as introduced in the Wii. Motion control has been around a long time, but until Wii no one has been able to make it a success. Nintendo used to have a motion activated controller, but it never took off. Para Para Paradise was interesting, but very limited in scope and popularity. And though there were fighting games which attempted to use motion sensors for input, these were also widely criticized. It was the Wii which was able to break through the closed-mindedness and create games that were fun and realistic to the gaming world.
But what is next? What is the next quantum leap in gaming? Without it, there can't be any new consoles that do anything more than make graphics better. But if console manufacturers think that gamers are going to sit idly by twiddling their thumbs on old consoles, they are going to be in deep trouble. They are damned if they do and damned if they don't. It's better for them to release new consoles, even if it means nothing more than better graphics. The alternative is to simply lose the interest of the gaming public.
And in The Future...
#1 "You mean you have to use your hands?"
#2 "That's like a baby's toy!"
The major failing of current motion control systems (wiimote, Natal, whatever the PS3 system is called) is that there's no feedback. You're waving about, and simply hope that the game gets it right. By removing the layer of abstraction the controller provides, you're making things LESS immersive by starkly revealing that the game cannot respond to you in ways other than the visual or the audio.
Until cheap, reliable haptic control systems emerge (not a for about half a decade if things like the Falcon, and the cost of more flexiable systems, is anything to go by), motion control will be limited in usefulness to a few casual games that don't require fast and accurate responses.
Both Microsoft and Sony can create faster variants of their existing hardware, but mandate that new games are backward compatible.
As can Nintendo. Most Game Boy Color games early in the GBC's lifetime could display in grayscale on a Game Boy Pocket, and Nintendo has stated that some new DS games will have extra capabilities when inserted into a Nintendo DSi system of the correct region.
That claim comes up every now and then, but at this point in time its really kind of baseless. The major failure of the Wiimote is simply that it just doesn't work the people expected it. It doesn't give you 1:1 mapping and thus your movement on the screen ends up having little or even nothing to do with your actual motion. Its not even a matter of precision, its simply not enough sensory data to do any kind of real 3d tracking. That's the sole reason why the experience ends up a little flat, as you end up performing the same game moves as always in games, just triggered by a different mechanism.
The PS3 and Xbox360 solutions are very different in that they give you real 1:1 mapping. There is no longer a need for waggle-replacing-a-button style gameplay. Those things can give you completly new gameplay possibilities, as they allow you to directly manipulate the gaming world and get rid of a lot of limitions current games have. Weird example: Try to shoot yourself in the head in any shooter, doesn't work, because you can't target that spot with current day game controllers. Its one of the many blind spots todays games have where you simply can't do things that your character should be able to do with ease. With 1:1 on the other side those things become trivial.
Now of course having haptic in addition would be great, but it really isn't needed for a lot of things. You don't need haptic to aim a gun or shoot a crossbow. You don't need it to throw a grenade either. And even for things like sword fighting being able to precisely decide how a sword stab would work would be big.
I think the hardest part of motion sensing is really the game design at this point. Games will need to change a lot if motion sensing gets a central part of gaming and a lot of todays mechanics will need to be replaced with other different ones. Gaming pretty much needs to be reinvented the way it did from 2D to 3D.
An as a side note: Microsofts solution, as cool as it looks, seems a little useless without an addition controller, you can do casual stuff with it, but pulling a trigger on a gun kind of needs a button and I don't think it can track hand movement either, so being limited to your arms and legs is kind of a big issue. Sonys solution on the other side looks spot on, it looks basically like a Wiimote done right and I can see huge potential for that in normal non-casual games.
Yes they did.
However, was there not research showing that the attach rate (i.e. frequency of game buying) was very much lower for casual/Wii gamers? Making the Wii continue to pay might be difficult.
That's a myth.
From Wikipedia:
Best selling PS3 games:
Xbox 360 games selling more than 3.31 million:
Wii games selling more than 3.31 million:
So the Wii has 5 games that have sold more than any game on either the PS3 or the Xbox 360.
Looking at it another way, the top 10 PS3 games have sold a total of 21.4 million copies, the top 10 Xbox 360 games have sold a total of 29 million copies and the 10 Wii games have sold a total of 133 million copies. The consoles themselves have sold 21.3, 28, and 50 million copies each respectively. So for the Wii, excluding Wii Sports, that's 87 million top 10 games for 50 million consoles: 1.7 games per console. The other two consoles manage only 1 top 10 game per console.
In terms of total games, PS3 has sold 94 million and the Wii has sold 353 million. Not sure about the Xbox 360. So that's 4.4 games per PS3 and 7 games per Wii (6 excluding Wii Sports).
Clearly, the idea that the Wii has a lower "attach" rate is pure BS. It might have been true initially but now the attach rate is significantly higher for the Wii.
>... we don't think any party is seriously interested in throwing away these investments and starting over from scratch.
Man, wouldn't it be funny if Nintendo did a hardware refresh in a year or so and called it a next generation machine? They could make it backwards compatible to the Wii, have simultaneous releases for both systems, but distract Sony and MS to no end. But would it be the Wii2, or the WiiII (or Wiii)?
One Red Ring to rule them all,
One Red Ring to find them,
One E74 to bring them all,
And in the Blue Screen bind them.
I have not played a single DS game where the touch screen is a gimmick, it is almost always unused (e.g. Mario Cart DS), and alternate control method that may or may not be better (e.g. advanced wars), or a fantastic edition (e.g. tap for backup item in NSMB). The Wiimote is a different story though often it is used as a very fun gimmick.
As for attach rates:
http://vgchartz.com/aweekly.php
This is the American charts, it has the attach-rate at about the same as the PS3 and lower than the 360, of course arguments can be made to drop the Nintendo one by 1 or 2, it is still pretty fricken high in raw numbers of sales. If you subtract out 1 from the attach-rate (for Wii Sports) you end up with 150 million to XBOX 360's 170 Million, and PS3s 70 million. This is in the most 360 heavy region (North America).
Where Nintendo really makes their money though is software. Taking out Wii-play and Wii-sports they still sell more than EA on many weeks, and without licensing fees. Nintendo dominates in total money in the industry by such a huge amount that it isn't even funny. As far as the games industry goes Nintendo is a shrewd company, that is miles ahead of the rest.
Even with the Came Cube they were a major publisher by raw numbers, this is competing against companies selling for XBOX, PS2, and Computers.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
maybe you missed some key words in the analysis like
So for the Wii, excluding Wii Sports, that's 87 million top 10 games for 50 million consoles: 1.7 games per console
or
So that's 4.4 games per PS3 and 7 games per Wii (6 excluding Wii Sports).
It pays to read the whole comment, its not like we're asking you to read TFA or TFS.
Fixed that for you.
MotionPlus doesn't give you 1:1 mapping. The controller has still no idea where it is in 3D space. The controller now has sensors to measure rotation independent from acceleration, which will allow to make the mapping of action a good bit better then before, as it will get much harder to cheat the thing, but it will still be a lot of guessing of what the player did, instead of just taking the coordinates and bringing them into them game. So MotionPlus is more an intermediate step, then the solution to the 1:1 problem.
MotionPlus however has the advantage of actually being a mostly finished product, while all the other stuff is just techdemo stage and it could easily take a year or two till some actual games surface.
I absolutely agree with the article. If they decide to go motion control, then my current console will last me as long as they continue manufacturing it because I have no interest in upgrading to motion control.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Because Wii games are more fun. I don't like FPSes, I find them the most boring genre ever invented. And even the non-FPS games- it's the same damn thing I've been playing for the past 20 years. I'm tired of that. Wii games tend to have more new material. Even the games that are old genres have motion controls which give it a nice change. And of course the Nintendo first party games are polished to hell and back.
As a gamer of over 20 years, someone who uses to spend 8 hours a day gaming- I can't think of a single 360 or PS3 game I'd even want to buy. I can think of a dozen Wii games I would if I had time. I'm not interested in the MS/Sony more of the same with prettier graphics.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?