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The Changing Face of the Console Wars

Posted by Soulskill on from the keeping-up-with-the-wiises dept.

An article at Gamasutra explores the decisions by Microsoft and Sony to launch significant hardware additions — their respective, upcoming motion-control schemes — in the middle of a console cycle, rather than waiting until the next generations of their systems are ready. It's indicative of a change to the established pattern of console wars; nowadays, it's more about adding features and gadgets to improve existing products than developing entirely new ones. Quoting: "... for Sony and Microsoft, motion controllers are their next-gen consoles. And it's a damn sight easier than launching Xbox 720 or PS4. They can debut these peripherals without needing to engineer completely new boxes for consumers, potentially bundle them over time, and they have a much better chance at getting exclusive games, thanks to the specificity of the hardware (something that's happened a lot for the Wii). Thus, both hardware manufacturers and publishers like EA see these controllers sparking new interest in Xbox 360 and PS3, which will delay the next dreaded console transition for another few years."

16 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. You're geniouses among men Sony, MS by binarylarry · · Score: 4, Funny

    I know the solution! We'll copy Nintendo!

    We'll be rich! Muahahaha

    - Sony and MS boardrooms

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    Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
    1. Re:You're geniouses among men Sony, MS by Zero_DgZ · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It's certainly been done before.

      Remember that after the '84 video game crash, Nintendo came along and pretty much defined modern video gaming as we know it with the NES. Controllers with D-pads, managed third party licensing, holiday timed releases, literature, and mascots: Nintendo pretty much just made it all up and the rest of the fledgling industry followed suit.

      Here's some food for thought: It's becoming pretty clear that gaming as a whole is moving towards a bit of a different demographic. This is partly because those of us who were the kids buying the first Nintendos and Segas have grown up into (presumably) responsible adultlike beings who are now buying Wiis and Xboxes. Coupled with this is the move to 'casual gaming' led mostly by the Wii (and also the DS) which is bringing in people from older generations who up until now have been unfamiliar with video gaming entirely.

      One caveat about this: The "bug your parents" business model doesn't apply as well anymore. Older and wiser people who are making frankly massive investments into consoles and games for them are expecting to get a decent run time out of their investments. The huge new market of first-time gamers, grandmothers, and all the other people we like to pick on (who are all buying the Wii) are a tenuous market at best, and it's likely that the console makers are concluding that forcing everyone to jump ship and move to a new platform will probably alienate this whole market. Lots of grandmothers will say, "screw you, I'm not buying a new games machine" and suddenly not only are they not making money on new console sales but they're not making money on their legacy machine anymore, either.

      The cash cow then becomes not selling new machines, but selling new upgrades for the existing machines. Grandma (or whoever) will swallow "buy this thing that plugs into your Wii (or Xbox, or PS3)" easier than she'll swallow "spend $500 on this new console that's different from your old one."

      The Wii already has this curious casual gamer market. Sony and Microsoft sure want to capitalize on that success, and it's clear that the best (read: cheapest) way to do this is by upgrading rather than replacing. And while all the rest of us are cracking wise about people ripping off Nintendo, at least this method of Nintendo-rippage will be cheaper (and hopefully better) than replacing existing consoles outright. Which will piss off a lot fewer people.

    2. Re:You're geniouses among men Sony, MS by __aaqvdr516 · · Score: 4, Funny

      If by fad you mean the Wii is a longstanding dominant force in the market then I agree. But that's pretty much the opposite of the standard use of the word fad.

  2. New? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Nonsense, consoles have been doing this for years.

    The various attempts of light guns such as the super scope, sega mega 32x cd add on, eyetoy for the ps2, added memory pack for the N64 etc.

    1. Re:New? by QuantumLeaper · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Very true, they always launch some sort of add-on, and no really buys them and very few games will use it. When they do use the new controller, they still support the old one because that where all the sales will be. I can't even think of one new controller/add-on in mid-cycle that even sold had more than 50% of the players adopting.

    2. Re:New? by Ceiynt · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The original PS1 controller didn't have analog control sticks. Sony copied it from the N64, and has used the DualShock controller since.

    3. Re:New? by A12m0v · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Gimicks are gimicks. They are not the future of video games. In modern games, I need to control movement of a character in 3D environment, while maintaining camera control and awareness, and while maintaining quick acess to broad array of functionality and abilities, all while making room for meta and system controls. How do I do this by waving my arms or shaking the controller? How would you perform all the functions needed in say, Super Mario World with a motion control system, while retaining the same level of responsiveness and control. You can't. The standard controller is a proven method of such control and this has not happened by accident but rather by design, and it would be the height of folly to disregard that

      I guess someone here didn't play Super Mario Galaxy

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      GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
  3. What? No. by stonecypher · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The extension of consoles is the defacto behavior for consoles, and always has been. In modern times it's been things like Wii Fit, the Eye Toy and so on, but nobody here has forgotten the Power Glove or the Power Mat, the Sega CD and the Sega 32x, and indeed that pattern goes back into the 70s, with the Intellivision overlay system and the Commodore 64 Extender.

    Indeed, it's only the last generation or two which have skipped it. Anyone who believes this is new has only been gaming through one generation of consoles, and that should be their first red flag that they're not ready to talk about the history of gaming.

    Could not be less correct.

    --
    StoneCypher is Full of BS
  4. How is this new? by Darkness404 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    How is this a new tactic? Nintendo released a successful Famicom Disk System for the Famicom (NES in Japan) that expanded the Famicom by using cheaper media and cheaper games that could easily save without extra expense of a battery backup. Sega released like a million things to expand the Genesis (Mega Drive) including a CD add on, and the 32x. Nintendo used games with new CPUs and other chips to extend the life of the SNES beyond the 16 bit generation.

    --
    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
  5. Long lived generation by spire3661 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    THe reason the last generation of consoles went by so quickly is because the level of online interactivity on the previous consoles left alot to be desired and were jsut out of reach. Now that all the consoles have successful online digital money presses, the motivation for new hardware is less and less. I figure we wont see next gen prototypes for at LEAST 2 more years, maybe more.

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    Good-bye
  6. Re:Could it be a sign of delay in the "next gen?" by TheKidWho · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The current generation of consoles are TERRIBLE compared to PCs. A new PC with a Radeon 5870 has nearly 6-8 times the graphical processing power.

    Most consoles games run at sup 720P resolutions and are upscaled to fit a 1080p screen, view distance in console games is terrible, textures are blurry messes, and frame rates suck.

    The fact that you can't see a difference between the xbox to xbox360 is laughable.

    Just because you have low standards doesn't mean the tech can not advance much further than it already is.

    Either way, eventually the hardware will get powerful enough to run real time ray tracing in HD, or at least a mix or real time ray tracing and rasterization, this is when consoles will most likely achieve very long life cycles.

  7. Re:What? No. by Jerf · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The Intellivoice sounds like a closer fit to what we're talking about, as it enabled a new form of game, rather than functioning as backwards compatibility.

    No idea if that's what the original poster meant. But it definitely does show that augmenting consoles is a very old idea... older than many people reading about it. :)

    Somewhere around here I still have an Intellivoice, and all four released games for it (I don't count the baseball one). You have not lived until you've heard a little 4KB cartridge (not a typo! in fact, 4KB was twice the usual size; and yes, I'm using bytes because I think measuring games in kilobits is a crock) babbling away at you. An amazing amount of voice was shoehorned into those things. Online MP3s that have samples of even a single thing it could say are themselves larger than all released games combined.

  8. $2 billion says you're very wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar_Hero has proved, to the tune of $2 billion in sales, that you *CAN* "requir[e] people to buy some new fangled, overpriced gadget in order to play your game".

    Clearly people *ARE* willing to fork out double the cost on an accessory and a game, instead of just buying two regular games, for the same price *IF* you create a game that makes it sufficiently more enjoyable to play with the accessory. The announcement of Guitar Hero for the PSP demonstrates that the game does not require the accessory controller, but who honestly believes it would have been as successful on the major consoles if it had used just the standard controllers?

  9. Re:Sucks for PC users by Quiet_Desperation · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Game graphics advances will be stunted

    And some of us gamers cry "Thank effing baby Jebus" for that. Have you missed all the complaints about how gaming is too dominated by graphic card wank fests over who has the best lighting effects or water reflections? Or how the hardware has advanced too much along the polygon count side, actually making it difficult to do anything else other than service shiny graphics, enemy AI or any other intellectual concerns be damned?

    I guess the bright side is I won't be blowing $300 every 2 years on graphics cards.

    Yeah, bingo. People are getting tired of that. A friend showed me a newer PC FPS a couple weeks ago. Pretty as all hell, but just another goddamned shooter with dumbass enemies and puzzles for the short bus crowd. Whee!

  10. Re:Could it be a sign of delay in the "next gen?" by PostPhil · · Score: 3, Interesting

    No, it's the other way around. PC's are currently TERRIBLE compared to consoles. How can I say that? It's easy. There is no objective meaning of "terrible": it depends on what your goals are. Apparently you're one of the gamers who prioritizes eye-candy and/or processing power. I don't, and many others don't either.

    Here's what I think is important:

    1. I can actually play the f***ing game at all. The PC market has intentionally alienated used-games with copy-protection and "activation". If you already activated your old game and try to resell it, good luck if you're the new owner who can't install it on their computer. But let's say this is *my* old game, not a used one. Five years down the road, if I want to use it on my new PC with my new version of Windows (because it's going to *have* to be Windows), can I activate it to play? Is the company's servers even around? How do we deal with all the breakage due to OS updates, malware, driver bugs, etc...

    2. I can actually play the f***ing game at all, without having to take out a bank loan. For under $300, I can buy a console off the shelf, pop in the disk for any game I own, and I can play it immediately. As long as I have this hardware, I can continue to have the *freedom* to play these games 10 years from now if I wish to. Let me see you play Crysis with a computer off the shelf for under $300. "Technically feasible" doesn't count. I'm referring to the ability to have a genuinely enjoyable gaming experience.

    3. Consoles are dedicated to their jobs, with standardized hardware and software. PC's are for general purposes, but do not excel for special purposes like gaming (or high-end audio or video) unless you spend a lot of money to get *non-standardized* hardware and software. As a result of the predictability of the console platform, quality control is easier when you only have to worry about one hardware platform coupled with one software platform. (Note that I wouldn't condone this for PC's. They really are for general purposes and not specifically just gaming.)

  11. Graphics no longer; gameplay it is. by beatsme · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Thank the heavens. The gimmick will no longer be about graphics, but gameplay. Now, how long before the emphasis is on storytelling?