Slashdot Mirror
Is Console Gaming Dying?
mr_sifter writes "PC gamers love to obsess over whether PC gaming is dying, but bit-tech thinks it's time to look at the other side and examine if console gaming is really as secure as publishers would have us believe. All three console manufacturers suffered from the recession — this year, Sony announced its first net loss in 14 years; a stunning ¥989.9bn, which includes record losses of ¥58.5bn in its gaming sector. Microsoft also announced its first loss since it went public in 1986 in the second quarter of this financial year, with a $31 million US loss coming straight from the Entertainment and Devices division, which is responsible for the Xbox 360. Not even Nintendo has escaped the financial plague either, with sales of the Wii dropping by 67 percent in the US, 60 percent in Japan and 47 percent in the rest of the world. In addition to reduced profitability, casual games and the rise of the iPhone further suggest the current model is not invulnerable."
Next question.
<non smart ass answer>The console industry is hardly the only one that lost money this year. Hello, recession?</non smart ass answer>
<smart ass answer>Netcraft hasn't confirmed it yet, so it can't be dying.</smart ass answer>
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
But BSD is.
Perhaps if they charged less than $60 for a tier one new release, sales would go up.
After playing video games on my grandson's XBox 360 over Thanksgiving, I signed up with GameFly so I can try a lot of Wii games at home. It is so much better playing video games standing up :-)
During a recession, some people make cutbacks on non-essential needs [Game consoles for example], so why is this at all surprising?
When thousands of people lose their jobs, are they going to continue to spend money on expensive purchases like game consoles and the accessories and games that go with them?
Of course not.
The video game industry isn't the only one posting losses recently, so this doesn't seem like a big deal at all. That and these consoles are four years old, it's not surprising to see sales dip.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. -Aldous Huxley
Virtual marketplaces such as WiiWare and Xbox Arcade enable smaller developers to get a foot in the door
Smaller, yes, but not smallest. It appears that a small business still needs to do a first title on either the PC or the iPod Touch, and some genres aren't suited to those platforms.
What an ignorant story. We're in the middle of the worst recession/near depression that has ever occurred since videogames came to be, and it's somehow an ominous sign that the companies behind videogames experienced losses either during the whole year (Sony), a single quarter (MS), or simply had lower sales than the previous year PRIOR to the recession? How about looking at it from the perspective that it's amazing that the videogames sector has done as well as it has over the course of the past year, despite a tremendously inhospitable economic climate?
m@
Or it could be that we're in a global recession, it's been a rather lackluster year for gaming in general, and all of the consoles have reached the maturity/decline slope in their product life-cycle.
I doubt it. My 75-year old step mother recently bought a wii so she could play bowling. It seems she was quite active in a local bowling league till her health started to go.
C|N>K
This article is inaccurate. Microsoft didn't post a loss, it posted its first REVENUE DROP since it became public in 1986. They still made a pretty good profit in that quarter.
It's not dying.
Instead, with fattening broadband connections, mainstream gaming is probably going to go towards the way of OnLive, where one big bank of hardware can churn out the power needed for broadband-connected gaming machines, without needing to fill a loss-making box with proprietary hardware. In fact, limited bandwidth is the only obstacle to this technology taking off worldwide.
Bandwidth isn't the only problem; latency is another biggie. Players are used to being able to press a button and see something happen within 30 milliseconds. The latency for sending your keypresses to the game server, rendering and compressing a frame, and sending it back is likely to be much larger than that, even if only for speed-of-light reasons.
People have stopped enjoying video games, and they will never enjoy video games ever again unless they dumbass iPhone timewasters.
Great article! Really got your finger on the pulse of the worlds gamers, there.
I never got used to the stupid little joysticks and the A button, B button with no obvious functions. And back when i was trying them, there never seemed to be any rhyme or reason for which button did what.
Add to that the fact that I can play a perfectly good game on my PC using superior controls (F-16 Fighterstick, etc.) and the rich keyboard environment for additional settings, consoles just never seemed to be good gaming option in the first place.
I guess the only good reason for a console is that you can hook it up to a big screen TV and standing there, waving your arms around like a lunatic.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I'll consider this as seriously as when slashdot predicted that microsoft was dying, as well as the ipod and amazon.
The big lack of user maps and mods does not help also.
Xbox pay to pay on line is a joke when you look at that next to free pc and ps3 on line play.
Linkbait.
Let me see if I have this right... during a giant global recession during which people had trouble paying rent and were scared of losing their jobs, they weren't out buying $200 consoles? Egads!
Look at how gaming has done through all this. Yes, sales fell, but New Super Mario Brothers Wii has sold over 2 million units in a month in the US. Modern Warfare 2 sold tons and tons of units. Amazon is having tons of trouble keeping the Wii and Wii games in stock.
All things considered, gaming is doing amazingly well.
And why not? There is tons of trash out there, but some games are really REALLY good. GTA4 was the best yet (even if it still had flaws). NSMBW is classic gaming bliss. It's throw-your-controller-through-your-TV hard at times but still fun. It's a real challenge. Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks has been a blast so far (got my copy of the weekend).
Console gaming is doing very well.
BTW: Losses from MS/Sony? They sell at a loss, so that's a given. In fact, how many quarters has MS made a profit in the gaming division since '01? That's what I thought. If things were really bad, the losses would be much higher.
If New Super Mario Brothers Wii didn't sell, that would be a good indicator of gaming's downfall. But good games/stable franchises seem to be selling really well.
So why would consoles die? Only computers can compete with the graphics from a 360 or PS3, but computers haven't killed consoles in the last 15 years, so why now? My iPhone is great and has great games, but the games on the DS are better. The DS is targeted at games and it shows. Even with physical buttons (like most other phones) it wouldn't be as comfortable to play as a DS with it's buttons.
I'd say OnLive (or something similar) would be the most likely to kill gaming as we know it soon. Only problem: OnLive is basically a console, so that wouldn't kill "console gaming".
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Consoles aren't in any danger in my house, because I have ceased to maintain a gaming PC. I've switched to console gaming entirely- at the cost of the superior control scheme of Dragon Age, the third-party mods of Oblivion, and the keyboard-and-mouse input that I'm so familiar with. I gave that all up in order to get a game that I know will work when I get home, that won't disagree with my video card or run like a slideshow cause I don't have enough RAM.
Console gaming is, in my opinion, stronger than ever. It just happens to be a recession and people are spending less on luxuries... like video games.
I'd mod you up, but it's hilarious that you talk about something "waving ... fucking hand around" on their Wii.
Yes it is dying along with driving cars. GM lost a lot of money and so we know that people just aren't into driving cars anymore.
And I'm pretty sure that Sony and Microsoft both lost a lot of money in the format war that went on between Blueray and HD DVD. It seems to me that Sony won that war because of the PS3.
This is why online stores like Steam have taken off. "Plants vs Zombies" is a hell of a lot of fun and would have died at the fixed $60 price. A developer may notice their game sales are slowing down so they do a price cut weekend which is impossible to do with the classic distribution chain. Even in the citation, half of the cost instead of being consumed in the distribution chain just putting disks on shelves can be put elsewhere. I don't have much illusions the big boys with the big games will pass the savings on to us but having the flexibility is at least a start.
PC gamers love to obsess over whether PC gaming is dying? No, Console Players obsess over that. PC Gamers just keep playing :)
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
...I think Wii hardware sales declining have more to do with everyone who wants one freaking has one now. That's the problem with selling fast and hard, you drop off a cliff and lose all of your potential buyers because they already own it!
Living With a Nerd
there's two questions here:
1) is GAMING dying?
2) is CONSOLE GAMING dying?
1. no. people continue to want to play games. it will only grow as current gamers grow older and have kids who become new gamers.
2. no. while PC gaming will continue to have its niche market, especially in areas where keyboard and mouse have dynamic advantages (especially MMO and RTS games), console gaming makes modern games accessible to the masses who cannot (through lack of knowledge or lack of money) continually upgrade their PC's to keep up. Consoles give a consistent platform for several years where upgrading is not necessary, and games will "just work".
Sure during recession all forms of entertainment will suffer cuts, but gaming is far from being alone here.
frog blast the vent core
with sales of the Wii dropping by 67 percent in the US
Couldn't this be because enough households already have a Wii?! I mean, they make a good enough product that doesn't break every other year, and then they're surprised when sales slip... Maybe it's just that everyone already has one!
When thousands of people lose their jobs, are they going to continue to spend money on expensive purchases like game consoles and the accessories and games that go with them?
Of course not.
It is the government that provides the entertainment for the masses in such a case.
Worked for the Roman Empire... No, wait...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
For sure, I couldn't imagine paying for a xbox live, that would be like valve asking me to pay for steam. Seriously it should be an incentive to buy their freaking console not something they use to grab more money from my pocket. Oh and buying Microsoft money is the most retarded thing ever. There's a reason why people think gaming is for kids, and one of them is having to buy tokens like you're at chuckycheese.
The XBox is actually turning a profit; it's the Zune that caused a loss at the division. And the fact that the Wii printing press, years after release, is churning out slightly less hundred-dollar-bills per second hardly seems like a sign of Nintendo's imminent demise.
The argument may have some merit, but not the way they've argued it.
There is a lot to love by video game makers for consoles:
Piracy is not a significant issue (XBL bans, uncrackable platforms like the PS3 and Wii).
Game makers can release beta-level games, patch them via the Internet. This is unlike previous generations of consoles where the games had to be 100% perfect before they left the stamping (or cartridge making) place.
Big money stream after sale (charge for network access, new levels, etc.)
One standard, no worry about incompatible hardware.
And finally, every console gen generally tends not to run the previous generation of stuff, so game companies get their customers to re-buy everything every 3-5 years.
The reason why consoles are losing money is the same reason why everything else is losing money. Banks screwed up, took TARP money and now stopped lending. All this is now affecting people's disposable income.
The story's facts are twisted up and down to try and create a story.
For one, as stated Sony posted a huge loss OVERALL with it's gaming division being only a portion of that. Could it possibly be that with the PS3, as with every other product they try to hawk at us, Sony managed to create a product that does nothing their competitors don't yet costs much more?
Microsoft's entertainment division's loss was paltry. $31 million for a company that is swimming in money. Nothing was said about sales popularity though, which is what the article is talking about in general. It's no secret that Xbox 360's failure rate has been incredibly high. Microsoft, rightfully so, has been replacing and repairing these consoles pretty much no questions asked. This is needed to keep customer satisfaction high, but all that replacement work ain't free. How much of the losses were because of expenditures in the warranty/repair division?
Nintendo they even went worse on. They didn't report losses because Nintendo was profitable, but instead reported a drop in sales of the console itself. Wow. Hell of a shocker that that in it's third year of existence with only minor price drops sales of the console have declined. I'll give you a hint: at it's general price point most people who want a Wii ALREADY HAVE ONE. Until Nintendo's next console comes out most of it's sales will be after price drops to and to parents whose kids finally bugged them enough to buy one.
Not to mention the obvious reality that the entire country is in a friggen recession right now and sales of EVERY entertainment medium are down a bit. That's like saying "Is the world tired of being entertained?" Hell no, but food, shelter, electricity bill, etc are a little higher on the priority list.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Lets hope so, as PC games have been dumbed down to suit arcade button bash style for consoles, with a stream of terrible lazy titles over the last few years, & now you only purchase half a game & are sold the rest via micro payments.
Added to this, is that once FREE user created content, is in the process of being blocked & turned into a micro payment hell.
Also, you are now sold just a licence like the PSP Go titles & all downloaded content, so you can no longer sell, lend, take around to a friends house to play easily, give your software away for free or even sell the software when you sell your console as Sony's EULA for both the PS3 & PSP Go states you have to wipe your hard drive before you sell it or you could face criminal prosecution.
Game consoles & greedy corporations like sony, microsoft, EA, etc are destroying the gaming industry through greed.
The Truth Is Out There:
Xbox pay to pay on line is a joke
Sup dawg, I herd you like paying, so we put fees in your fees, so you can pay while you pay.
Moderation Guide:
+1 Funny if you like the misspelling in parent
+1 Insightful if you don't like microtransactions
No.
All car manufacturers suffered from the recession. Is driving dying?
The Wii has been out for quite awhile too. Wii games (and therefore licensing) can continue to be massively successful, even if sales of the console peter out. You left out the fact that despite falling sales of the Wii (which can actually be a good thing if it indicates market saturation), Nintendo is actually the only one of the three that posted an overall profit.
Are you an idiot? The iPhone is not going to replace anyone's XBox, PS3, or Wii. Mobile phones, PC games, and console games all serve entirely different markets. None of these are going to take over the other in the foreseeable future. Stop trolling the easily-trolled Slashdot editors.
with a $31 million US loss coming straight from the Entertainment and Devices division, which is responsible for the Xbox 360
Websense blocked the article but.... So, Microsoft lost money. One part of the company lost $31 million. That one part is responsible for the Xbox 360. Therefore the conclusion is that the Xbox 360 and it's ilk are doomed to failure? Sorry, but it seems to me that leap in logic could mean anything produced from Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices division was doomed to failure. Like games,... and keyboards...
What I think is far more likely was someone was thinking of how to drive traffic from /. and other geek sites to their site and said to themselves "Ooooo.... I bet an article about console gaming dying would do the trick!"
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
It's not dying. There's your answer. MS didn't post a loss either they posted a drop in total revenue. They still made a profit. I'd still rather play game on my 360 any day over my PC.
The Sony gaming loss of 58.5 billion sounds a lot less drastic when you actually measure it in US dollars, although $612 million is still nothing to sneeze at. It accounts for approximately 6% of Sony's losses, so I doubt it's the division bleeding the most at the moment.
I don't have the Microsoft numbers off hand, but a $31 million dollar loss is infinitesimal compared to the sheer size of that company. They probably spend more money on paper and staples. Ballmer could probably support the Xbox division out of pocket just to give his kids something cool to play with.
Nintendo still made a profit. Just less of a profit.
Let's just ignore the fact that Modern Warfare 2 was the biggest media launch of all time and write a doom and gloom piece stretched to 5 pages with 7 obnoxious ads on each.
Name...That...Autocomplete!
so then the current model *is* vulnerable. Double negatives might not be unclear, but it's difficult.
Yeah, console gaming is dying. Especially since Modern Warfare 2 only sold 7 Million Copies on XBOX and PS3.
I guess not.
I doubt console gaming is going anywhere.
What may be going away is the practice of selling consoles at a large loss and then trying to make up for it in software sales, which may cause the next generation of consoles to only be slightly more powerful than this one.
"with a $31 million US loss coming straight from the Entertainment and Devices division"
I am pretty sure the Entertainment and Devices division is responsible for more than just the Xbox, so equating the $31 million loss to the console is kind of a stretch. Seems to me like the Zune would fall under that category, and I'd bet they lose plenty of money on that thing as well.
Name...That...Autocomplete!
No, console gaming is not dying, yet.
Fine, they suffered a bit... So did pretty much everyone else - especially anyone in the entertainment industry. Money is tight, folks aren't spending as much on games. The fact that there are different consoles that don't run each-other's games just spread the money even thinner. Deal with it.
However, I do think gaming in general is going to have to make some adjustments.
$60 for a game that barely offers 10 hours of gameplay just isn't going to cut it. I think the gaming industry is going to have to either start delivering smaller, cheaper games on an accelerated timetable - episodic stuff. Or they're going to have to start delivering much more substantial gameplay for that $60 price point.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
It just happens to be a recession and people are spending less on luxuries... like video games.
Dude, not cool! First you you couldn't be bothered maintaining a l33t gam31ng r1g because of petty things like compatibility and cost. Then you said video games are a luxury! Every gamer knows they're not a luxury, they're a human right. So that's it! Hand in your l33t gam1ng card, grandad! And get out of my treehouse! (If I can't be on your lawn, you can't be in my treehouse!)
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
It's the truth. Consoles died after the Dreamcast. Since then its been imitation and not innovation.
Visit my Forums?
Does Netcraft confirm it?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
What's that you say? Hook up a gamepad? Well how is that any different than a console?
For one thing, once you've plugged a gamepad into the PC, you can use it for minor mods, total conversions, and even original games by microstudios. Those tend to be underrepresented on consoles, apart from 1. token efforts like basic level editors and a few editor-oriented games like RPG Maker and LittleBigPlanet, and 2. cracks.
Look at the parallels to 1983.
Too many consoles? Check. We have the Wii, Xbox360, PS2, and PS3 all jockeying. Back in 1984 it was Coleco, Vectrex, Atari and Mattel (plus a bunch of people making Atari/Mattel clones) battling it out.
Loss of control of licensing? Well, sort of. It's not that there are nonlicensed titles, but the licensing is so wide open that the shovelware problem is just as bad. There are maybe (if you're optimistic) 20 good titles for the Wii, out of a selection of well over 300. Similar ratios exist for the other consoles (hell, there are maybe 5 good games for the PS3 at best).
Overhyping and epidemic of crappy movie/TV license titles? Oh, you'd better fucking believe it. Activision are at the forefront of "crappy movie games", but there are plenty from other sources. Between those and overhyped "blockbuster" titles that can only get a high reviewer score if it's bought and paid for (one of the reasons Gamerankings now only aggregates from the few big Gamespot/IGN-level sites, rather than including honest sites that actually played the real game instead of partial publisher-provided demos with a promise of "everything you don't like will be fixed so review as if it was"), what do you expect?
We had a minicrash a while back when Sega almost folded and turned themselves into a "software developer"; it's quite ironic that they're now primarily publishing on their former biggest rival's (Nintendo) console. Then again, no Sega game has been worthwhile in years; they even managed to crap up a few good Nintendo franchises (see F-Zero GX, a pale imitation of its predecessor).
The only reason that yet another console manufacturer hasn't fallen out has been that they're all bankrolled. Nintendo is the "too big to fail" of Japan and are very canny about making sure none of their manufacturing is at a loss, even though their hardware is far inferior (gimmicky controller that rarely sees its features truly used notwithstanding) to the other two. Microsoft and Sony have deep, deep pockets. Sony isn't about to let the PS3 go when they're counting on it to push Blu-Ray (their proprietary format), just like they counted on the handheld camera market (Betacam) to push Beta and the PS2 to push DVD back when Sony was one of the 6 companies that held licensing interest in the DVD format.
Outside answer? Yeah, we're looking at a crash. It may not be as total as the 1983 crash, but the market can't exist at the level of shovelware being pushed. Something has to give, a number of developers need to die, and certain overly abused lines need to get radically scaled back (Activision's yearly Tony Hawk crappings, for instance: after seeing Tony Hawk: Ride we might as well rename the series Tony Hawk: Bird Poo and get it over with).
It also seems like there are more games released for console that do not make it to PC than the other way around. I may be wrong on that due to not following PC only games
You're right that you're wrong. Pretty much every shareware, freeware, or free software game for PC is a PC exclusive. If you thought Apple's App Store model wasn't friendly to small studios and individual developers, the model used by Sony and Nintendo (and for Xbox 360 games that use the console's advanced features) is far more of a hassle.
Have you ever thought maybe he's no longer married because he got tired of dealing with her whinny-ass nagging? Or maybe he was never married and his grandchildren are the result of a one night stand. Or maybe he does f*** the wife, but isn't 18 anymore, so needs something else to do for the other 23 hours of the day.
Going out side and walking around are nice, when the winds are less than gale force and the temperatures are above freezing. Same with golf & soccer, it's damned hard to perform those when there's a foot or more of snow on the ground.
So how about this, since I've already invested the money into the machine, I spend the $60 to buy a copy of Tiger Woods Golf and enjoy waving my hand around when it's too cold to go outside and I've finished f***ing the wife. Now take your condescending, smug-ass, 12 year old self and get off my lawn.
Here in Australia we get charged 110 Oz for a tier one game, which works out to be 100 US with current exchange rates.
Relative CD, DVD and game prices were set when the Oz dollar was worth about 60 US cents which was a decade ago and margins haven't been adjusted since.
It's turtles all the way down.
In a recession people start saving money instead of spending it. Also in some countries (like the US) many people used credit buying to get the items they wanted. They also bought houses the same way. Now many people have lost their jobs and other people are encouraged by their banks to pay back the credits. So people stop buying unimportant luxury stuff, like games or game consoles. When they bau they try to spend less money. That's why they buy netbooks rather than full fledged notebooks.
In addition to the recession. The consoles are now on the market for quite some time. And the number of people who really want such device already bought it. So fewer people want new units. In some cases people buy replacement units for their old machines. But honestly, the market is satisfied and new devices are not needed. The next thing would be to create new consoles which can do things the old one cannot, but what shall that be? As graphics is not the primary sales argument, it is story line. That's why Nintendo was so successful lately. They invented interactive games which can be used in groups. A little like Activity or Cranium (board games where you have to perform).
...are recent games! Mario Kart for Wii and New Super Mario for DS has sold very well.
Top 20 console games of all time
1. Wii Play (Wii – 24.43 million)[68]
2. Wii Fit (Wii – 22.5 million)[68]
3. Nintendogs (DS – 22.27 million, all five versions combined)[69]
4. Pokémon Red, Blue, and Green (Game Boy – 20.08 million approximately: 10.23 million in Japan,[45] 9.85 million in US)[19]
5. New Super Mario Bros. (DS – 19.94 million)[68]
6. Mario Kart Wii (Wii – 18.36 million)[68]
7. Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES – 18 million)[108]
8. Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day! (DS – 17.41 million)[69]
9. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PS2 - 17.33 million)[114]
10. Pokémon Diamond and Pearl (DS – 16.81 million)[70]
Except for the single PS2 game and Super Mario Brothers 3, DS and Wii games seem to be selling very well. It will be very interesting to see how well New Super Mario Wii sells. It has been out for three weeks and is currently clocking in near 2 million units.
From the article:
It's with this in mind that I've been watching the current console generation with great interest, and even I'm starting to think that this may be the last generation of consoles as we know them.
Okay, that I'll buy. This generation of consoles is changing the console world in two important ways: input mechanisms (Wii, Guitar Hero, Project Natal, et cetera) and network connectivity (and all of its implications).
Yeah, look at the Nintendo DSi, and look at XBox Live's "games on demand"... the console as a standalone box that exists to play software off of media that you buy at a retailer, using a standard gamepad... yes, this might be the last generation with that as its focus. But I don't give a rat's ass. I'm content to download code to internal storage, and I've got nothing against more diversity in control schemes.
And note that the article doesn't even pretend to claim that Nintendo has lost any money doing what they're doing. Yeah, profits are down, but the numbers are still in the black. Sony and Microsoft are still being silly, sure. Next generation may see them approach it more like Nintendo, which is certainly fine with me.
Console gaming is dying... arcades will come back!
I don't generally trust analysts who have problems with decimal points.
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20091119-702857.html says that Sony "reported a net loss of ¥98.9 billion for the fiscal year ended last March." Which is a little different than the ¥989.9 billion reporting in this article. Especially when you consider that Sony's revenue is listed as ¥7.730 trillion on Wikipedia.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/14/sony-japan-sales-financial-loss seems to be the actual source of the numbers, as that lists the ¥58.8 billion number as well. So I think this article was a copy/paste that went a bit wrong.
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
Now w/ the recent price cut on the ps3 slim Sony is knowingly losing money on the ps3. The ps3 is selling better, and will probably continue to sell well assuming it makes another price cut, and the ps3 continues to release great software.
The Wii however is seeing a decline in sales, and it's not surprising. It's pretty much hit full saturation, and w/out re-releasing a new variation of the console Wii sales will continue to drop.
What I like about the Wii, for example, is the ability to play games with three of my friends and feel like I'm playing with real people.
<devilsadvocate>
Of course you can frag your friends in person on a PC. You just have to unplug your friends' PCs, carry them to your house, put in the WEP or WPA key, and play with your friends over the LAN. It's no different from multiplayer gaming on DS or PSP.
<devilsadvocate>
But seriously, I agree with you. I just want some solid arguments as to why a LAN party is not enough.
As long as consoles don't have
Open development and development that does not force you to pay fees to just to make a game.
console manufacturers have censorship control
user mods and maps
user upgradeable HDD's nice job sony! M$ real bad move to ban people for useing 3rd party memory cards and HDD's
pay to play on line
game size limits
needing to pay $60 for a game and then $10+ more to get the full game.
on line game store lock in. The pc has few differnt ones.
be able to do other stuff like office, the web, non game apps.
2 more screens yes some games are better with more screens.
The pc will be better.
And AFAIK, you do not NEED to use the XNA system to develop for the 360.
My sources indicate that unless you have a big-company devkit, you need to use XNA in order to run your games in the Creators Club environment on an Xbox 360.
You can produce something in C++ using Visual Studio
That's true technically, but only because Visual Studio can compile C++ to .NET bytecode since VS 2005. The developer is still subject to XNA limitations, such as no audio synthesis and no foreign languages.
The big lack of user maps and mods does not help also.
<devilsadvocate>Super Smash Bros. Brawl has a stage editor, and the player can decorate the town in Animal Crossing: City Folk. Sony consoles have RPG Maker 2 and LittleBigPlanet, which are designed from the ground up to be modded.</devilsadvocate> According to fanboys that I've met on Slashdot, these should be enough to count for "user maps and mods". I'd like some ammo to use against them.
[The latest Mario platformer is] throw-your-controller-through-your-TV hard at times
Is it Kaizo Mario World hard? Or Super Mario Forever hard? Or is it only Super Mario Bros. 2 (Japanese edition aka The Lost Levels) hard?
Sony's even close to breaking even on the PS3...
http://m.news.com/2166-12_3-10414022-52.html
A new iSuppli report issued Friday suggests that Sony may finally be nearing the break-even point with the PS3. It said that its teardown analysis service estimated that the design cost of the new 120-gigabyte PS3 Slim comes in around $336, while it sells for $299 in the U.S.
That means that while Sony is still losing about $37 per unit--plus somewhat more for marketing, royalties, box contents, and other expenses--it is for the first time closing in on breaking even with the console itself.
It is the weakest link
if you've ever touched or seen an iPhone game, you'll know that it in no way competes with Ps3 or Xbox360...get a clue. Mobile gaming is a novelty
I never understand when somebody buys a console. You can get TONS of great games to play on a computer, including many older console titles in emulation. You can play all those games with better controllers, better graphics, without shuffling for DVDs, etc...
I mean, Wii has a few fun games, and it's cheap enough to at least consider, but then again the Wii emulator runs most of the games nearly perfect if you have a decent machine.
Buying a console is just throwing your money away so you can play the latest games, most of which are inferior to their earlier incarnations.
I'm still playing Civ 2 and Mario Kart 64. Not because I don't have the newer titles, but because the games are more fun!
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
There's a reason why people think gaming is for kids, and one of them is having to buy tokens like you're at chuckycheese.
LOL. How apt. Atari shares its founder with Chuck E. Cheese. Nolan Bushnell.
If it runs like a slideshow, try turning down the freaking settings. You know, so it matches the Xbox graphics.
The problem is that a lot of games' settings don't even go all the way down to Xbox graphics, which are more like a GeForce 3, let alone the Voodoo3-class graphics that an Intel GMA offers.
Not even Nintendo has escaped the financial plague either, with sales of the Wii dropping by 67 percent in the US, 60 percent in Japan and 47 percent in the rest of the world. In addition to reduced profitability, casual games and the rise of the iPhone further suggest the current model is not invulnerable."
The Wii drop is due mainly to demand finally being supplied. For all of 2008 it was still hard to get. This year marked the first year that the Wii was able to fulfill it's backlog of demand since the thing was launched.
And here comes the iPhone mention, right on queue.
The iPhone is a drop in the bucket compared to the DS.
Nintendo is still massively profitable.
They make TONS of money on hardware alone, AND they make buttloads on software. MS and Sony LOSE money on hardware, and don't develop, let alone publish, nearly as many successful games themselves as Nintendo does.
Nintendo's missed earnings projections have far more to do with the falling dollar (as much of their holdings are in US currency) than they have to do with falling sales.
Articles like this are usually filled to the brim with ignorance, so it shouldn't surprise me that they got it wrong yet again, but I still feel the need to point out the obvious. Nintendo OWNS the "casual" market, Nintendo OWNS the portable market, and Nintendo fucking won this round BECAUSE they realized that the current model was broken before anyone else did.
I simply don't see how it can take people more than three fucking years to see it.
"Console gaming dying"? That's fucking absurd. It's PC gaming that's on its death knoll (unfortunately), and the only ones complaining about console gaming sales are hardware loss-eaters and mega publishers like EA who haven't been able to transition away from the "uber development cost, hope to break even model".
This console generation is a fucking travesty.
MS launched a defective product at a loss, had such a shitty supply situation that they had a SECOND launch a couple months later, and STILL can't produce a 360 that won't fry itself to death.
Sony launched the PS3 at a mind-numbing $599, with a shitty controller and an extreme lack of games.
Nintendo launched the Wii at an affordable price, but took 2 fucking years to meet demand because they underestimated themselves and refused to up capacity, fearing demand would drop off quickly.
MS and Sony have a shitton of different SKUs out there. Nintendo has people with motion + and without motion +, people with the balance board and people without it. With the microphone and without it.
MS charges you to play online. Every console whores out paid downloadable content.
I could go on, but it doesn't matter. Despite all the shit we've seen in the past 4 years, people keep paying for it. I fear hardware manufacturers will be much more service-oriented next generation in an attempt to recoup money lost on hardware sales. I fear games, and my overall experience as a gamer, will suffer greatly as a result.
Console gaming isn't going anywhere, and all players involved are fully capable of ponying up the dough to play in the next round. If Sony or MS fuck up as badly as they did this go around, THEN they may be out of the running.
But as of now, it's full steam ahead - the question is who's going to jump the gun and talk about new hardware first? Sony and MS seem to want this year to be about their motion controllers. Nintendo has a few key titles this year and is typically the last one to the party in terms of hardware.
Double-smartass answer: only a typical doesn't-get-out-much geek, who thinks that he and his friends are the whole marketplace, would even ask whether console gaming is in trouble. When the care and feeding of a PC is as simple and pain-free as a console (which is to say, never) then we can talk. The DGOM geek doesn't see this, because dealing with his PCs weirdnesses is something he takes for granted, and even enjoys. He simply doesn't relate to non-geeks who have no interest in hacking their toys, and may even suffer from anxiety attacks when they have to solve technical problems.
Retail game prices might be fairly uniform, but Xbox Live Arcade and WiiWare prices are significantly lower.
Agreed, but the method of input is the same for consoles when you use a gamepad :-)
Living With a Nerd
I worked as a videogame writer/reviewer for over 10 years... covering the PS1 and PS2. When the "next generation" was just beginning to take form the Revolution/Wii was the only one I had any interest in and even then I saw massive issues/shortcomings. This industry has been massively declining for some time. The thing is, it's all media/marketing driven based on essentially lies. The concept of the "Hardcore" gamer has always been far less in number than marketing would like you to believe. It seems like a lot when you only travel in certain circles or sites (gaming sites, mags) but that is because they are essentially funneling everyone into a few small channels so the numbers seems very high. They are not. This charade was kept going for a number of years and only fairly recently have the cracks begun to show through. The E3 shrinking. The cost of game production began to rise meteorically and companies had to basically admit that the "hardcore" market is small and couldn't support the costs of such games. Franchises, sequels, and their ilk are all that can be made right now and it's not getting better.
The emperor has no clothes.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
Asking this question is like claiming the automobile is dying because Toyota and the rest of the industry had a bad year.
Also, you are now sold just a licence like the PSP Go titles & all downloaded content, so you can no longer sell, lend, take around to a friends house to play easily
Is it any harder to take a console to a friend's house to play downloaded content than to take a PC to a friend's house for a LAN party? At least console games are more likely to have single-screen multiplayer, and Xbox Live is like Steam that you can log in to Live and play your DLC while online.
the method of input is the same for consoles when you use a gamepad :-)
Which is hardly a bad thing. The consoles' typical method of input is superior when you have friends over and don't feel like setting up a LAN party: you can all look at one TV-sized monitor.
Gaming suffers from too many analysts talking shit to justify their job.
HAHAHAH!!! This is a joke right?
As mentioned previously, that summary puts an odd spin on data in an attempt to make it look like everyone is suffering equally:
Sony... net loss [of]... ¥58.5bn [~650 million USD]
Microsoft... first loss [of] $31 million US
Nintendo... sales of the Wii dropping by 67 percent in the US, 60 percent in Japan and 47 percent in the rest of the world.
The summary (excluding the first sentence) seems to essentially be a direct quote from page 2 of the article. Clicking through on the Nintendo link, there's a mention of Nintendo net profit for a 3 month period of ¥42 billion (US$443 million).
The first sentence of the article mentions that
the title of this feature alone has “troll” written all over it
I think if this guy wants to look less like a troll, he should at least try to choose more comparable statistics.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Perhaps if they charged less than $60 for a tier one new release, sales would go up.
I think they realize there is a place for all tiers, which is why you have $60 games, but also PSN original games that go from $5 to $15.
Yes, I too think $60 is too expensive. But Sony still made money, probably even better margins, on the many things i've bought cheaper.
The variability of offering is why I really doubt we'll see any of the consoles suffer like we in the last videogame crash.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Try playing soccer in the middle of winter. Also, do you know enough people with free time all at the same time to play? Also, can you instantly play in a leagure tournament with refs and scores? So you buy clubs...spend 80-100 bucks per 18 holes round...if you can find some people to play. You can't do these things in real life. With the Wii, you can.
Of the people I know who started out on consoles, when the got a Gaming PC they never went back.
While I don't think it's ever going to disappear, I do think that the gaming aspect of consoles is slowly becoming less important than its media functions. I'm a tech geek and I only recently bought a PS3, but not for its games. I bought it because: #1 it became slimmer, #2 it became cheaper, #3 it plays DVD's and Blu-Ray movies, #4 it can stream my photos, music, and videos wirelessly from my MacBook.
After I got it, I discovered that I could also rent a substantial selection of videos (though not as much as iTunes yet and the prices are still $1-2 too high), and buy very cheap ($5-15) downloadable games that are often much more fun than the games on a disk b/c they were simpler to play, took much less time to play, and I didn't have to pop in a new disc everytime I wanted to play a different game. Furthermore, I really enjoyed the news by location feature in Life with Playstation (the World Heritage Channel is very cool too if you like National Geographic quality photos).
After I showed all these "features" to my non-techie friends, 3 of them went out and bought a PS3, and 2 more are about to. If Sony manages to either finally bring PlayTV and/or Hulu to the PS3 in the US, they have essentially managed the very nifty trick of turning their "gaming console" into a Home Theater system. It would essentially negate the necessity of owning a HTPC.
I don't own a Xbox 360, but it seems that Microsoft is essentially going for the same thing. Nintendo looked like they were going to head down this path at the beginning with their "channels" menu system, but they haven't done as much as Sony or Microsoft. I'm guessing the next Wii will have HD hardware and push harder towards this goal. So, while I don't think console gaming is dying, what we think of traditionally as a gaming console is being transformed. "Convergence" would be term I suppose?
"The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well."
The box office is up for the year. If sports are up too, this is all bad news for nerds!
what a lame attempt at creating news.
No PS2/3 emulator.
That means you can't play some of the greatest titles in the universe, like the Metal Gear saga, Okami, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Final Fantasy, Ace Combat, Virtua Fighter, Katamari Damacy or God of War.
In other words, you are not a gamer.
4 - A robot may not masturbate, except where such action would conflict with the Second Law.
I have an acquaintance who works in the console gaming industry, and based on his look at his market data, he has mentioned these points:
- Microsoft laid off huge swaths of internal game studios/developers, so they're limiting their output to only surefire titles for the Xbox 360
- Many major publishers prefer to sell games on consoles, pirating on the PC and the difficulty and expense of supporting PC users makes it less desirable
- The Wii is not a good console to publish for due to low sales. The only games that sell well are made by Nintendo, and Nintendo offers little help to third parties; and they have unusual rules as well. Most third party games tend to be shovelware.
- Major publishers have announced many exclusive games to come out for console only. PCs are considered too expensive to support.
- Though nvidia and AMD make their video cards faster and better, only a few independent development houses are interested in taking advantage of faster cards, like Crytek. He feels Valve software still uses old technology for a lot of its games, so faster video cards are not worth the money. Developers hate Unreal Engine 3.0 so Epic games won't get too far trying to get new licenses with major publishers.
- There will probably be many exclusive games for the PS3 since there are no pirated games for it (yet) and support from Sony is a little better than Microsoft. Though Microsoft has better development tools.
~~~~
I don't agree with this guy on points but when I think about my own habits, I have bought more games for my console than my PC. The games I have bought for my PC have been mostly small games from indie publishers, the only excpetion being Fallout 3.
On the Wii and PS3 I have bought some of the downloadble games.
When I look at potential games for the PC to get, I look for RPGs or something unique that can't be done on console. But I don't see too many compelling games. And those that do look good often come to console first. PC games that are based on console games tend to be poorly programmed so I avoid those.
game on PC. Console is for Tetris and Super Mario.
I wish it would, but that isn't going to happen any time soon...
PC gaming is dying because no one has made a game better than ut2k4.
I mostly agree with what you said. I see Farmville on Facebook more of a threat than iPhone and iPod games -- Farmville for iPhone anyone? It seems like everyone I know on Facebook is playing that game. The question is how much does Farmville make? I know Apple says they have tens of thousands of apps, but we don't know how much people are making off those apps and how well games are actually selling.
You mentioned solid production values. That is key. A game company is not selling technology, they are selling content. As long as Nintendo can make good content then they will be able to compete. Is Super Mario Brothers Wii fun? Can you play it over and over? What about Wii Sports? Mario Kart Wii?
I think a lot of game companies are having problems because they are making very expensive games that lack content. How do I know that? Just look at what these $60 games sell for after three months on the market. Instead of the game companies ramping up content, they spend more money on making an "interactive movie" or putting in steamy sex scenes and complain about used game sales. Game over.
There is no holy grail way to play games.
How can you SAY that?
eg: http://megatokyo.com/strip/17
Oh L337 M4573R...
(captcha: dodged)
hey, it's the Great Recession...just about everything is losing money
Yes, indeed. Which is why it's so annoying that there are hardly any PC games that support multiplayer on one system any more. Especially considering how many games on the PC are console ports that *do* support single-system multiplayer on their home systems!
Supremacy of computer graphics over console graphics isn't to be taken for granted in the future.
GFX cards have recently hit a point that you have to get more than one card to satisfy your top performance, and last ATI card has almost broken the ATX standard to power the card.
GFX cards haven't been enhancing as good as other computer HW, maybe they are reaching a point where no better thing is required, just better coding for games. If that point exist and GFX cards reach that, then consoles will catch up soon and the whole point of PC being better in graphics than consoles will fall.
I'm not saying that GFX cards won't develop and get better, I'm just saying there is a possible scenario that maybe considered.
Funny, I went the other way - I used to get everything on a PC if possible, but now I am starting to find myself choosing the console when a game is available on both. I just don't have time these days to deal with "maintaining" a decent PC for games.
Case in point - I just bought Dragon Age for the PC since I heard the gameplay was better - and in about 5 hours of playing on Saturday, it crashed a half dozen times and BSOD'ed twice. After manually downloading and applying the latest patch (why couldn't they have added an auto update system?) and *downgrading* my Nvidia graphics drivers, I got that down to 2 crashes in 3 hours on Sunday. If I had picked the XBox version, it would have autoupdated, and probably not crashed at all - but at the cost of a simplified/clunky RPG interface. Sigh.
Console games sales are down. Mainly I think that is because they are priced FAR too high, and far too many games are just remakes of the same old thing. In addition, all games released for consoles should be released for PC as well. The PC is MUCH superior for gaming, both graphics wise, and control wise.
e? nobody. it is annoying an makes no real sense anymore since games are published on the console 6months prior the pc release. some even never see a PC port.... having a high performance gaming rig will result in a high performance electricity bill too. why bother paying for high performance parts (electricity) when your pc is idling like 95% of the time, especially the vga card...?
The article ends with mentioning that cutting edges graphics don't matter apparently because of the success of iPhone games.
This is both WRONG and RIGHT at the same time.
It don't matter in a "cheap" and cheerful game you play on the move to amuse yourself for a bit. It don't matter in a game that is window dressing for excersise. It DOES matter in the latest EPIC major story thrill ride game. I am currently both playing Dragon Age Origins and Ghost Master. Not heard of the last one? Not suprised, small game from years ago. Bit of an oddity in which you have to haunt a house. The graphics are "okay" but horribly out of date. I am not going to say that graphics don't matter in the game, but they are good enough and the subject matter is such that it don't matter that all the characters look really badly drawn (women have chests that would make Dolly Parton complain of backache).
Graphics MATTER for certain genre's same as input and for that matter storage. Would you want to play Dragon Age or the latest FF without speech? But speech soaks up space, space that has to be somewhere. Que the Wii not being able to handle nearly as much and meeting serious trouble with "random" speech. Streaming from CD was the reason the early Tombraider games used regular music CD track for complex sound moments, a horror to PC gamers who were used to sounds being mixed on the spot from sample randomly read from a HD. Non-developers or people without technical knowledge often over-estimate the Wii's capabilities, they see it as a non-HD version of the current console generation, a scaled down PS3/360. It is not. It is a totally different machine aimed at a different genre.
The new mario isn't a throwback to decades old gaming for nothing, that is what the Wii does. For people who like that, it is perfect but for people waiting for the next Triple A title, look somewhere else. You wouldn't expect them on the DS or on the iPhone would you?
On a dutch news site someone commented that Dante's Inferno wasn't coming for the PC and how that meant the end of PC gaming. Eh... when has a slash-em-up EVER come to the PC? Those type of games are the domain of the controller, not the keyboard. From the same company (EA) Dragon Age not only launced on the PC but is now also coming to the Mac and Saboteur (a FPS) is coming for PC as well. These Genre's started on the PC (console RPG's were a very different beast to what Bioware makes) and are remaining there more or less. Where is the DAO modding community for the PS3/360?
Different hardware for different genre's. You can't make WoW for the console, the way that game works is to have a ton of buttons and the challenge is to pick the right one. Bayonetta on the other hand has the challenge of hitting 1-2 buttons over and over. Different market.
I don't think that console gaming is dying, but the current console companies MIGHT have to rethink their strategies. Maybe... the sales figures in the article are horrible. MS posted a loss... eh no? Their REVENUE dropped. By a tiny amount. They STILL make a profit and a very nice one at that. Talk about mis-reporting, it is "correct" but also a complete and utter lie. Sony does seem to be in trouble but then again, Sony has been bleeding for a long time and it can't all be blamed on the PS3. They lost their position as "slightly overprice but reliable decent to good quality". This was a good position to have, it meant that the fast majority of the market, the "we got money but are not swimming in it" bought Sony if they could because it was better then the cheapo stuff and not as expensive as the high-end stuff.
What I think is hurting gaming is the move away from the nerdy gamer into the general "cool" kids market, but the companies forgot that this market is far more fickle. It is in a way easier to make game for the OLD hardcore market (think Deus EX/Mario) then it is for the MTV crowd. Modern Warfare 2 is a game for that crowd, lots of flash and bangs but very little substance once you dig down. The pro
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
After the thick end of a decade and a half of pretty much constant upgrades combined with 100+MB drivers and patches being up to 2.5GB (Battlefield 2 1.50) and still getting loads of problems just trying to run some games, I gave up on PC gaming. And thats even before you get to the hackers, aimbotters, those using modified drivers so they can "see" through walls and those who think its fun to exploit bugs that kick everyone on a server or punt them to desktop.
All in all, PC gaming is becoming one epic fail and will degenerate into nothing more than a raft of MMORPGs.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
"Is Console Gaming Dying?"
As the entire thread seems to be people desperately defending the cost of PC gaming it would seem not.
Let me think what I've done on my PC the past week or so:
1. Done a mail merge and printed address labels for my Christmas cards.
2. Ripped a load of DVD movies to put on my PC media server in the lounge.
3. Checked email, ordered presents on line, browsed Slashdot.
4. Ripped a couple of new CDs to FLAC and MP3, and played them.
5. Booted up in Linux, wrote a few shell scripts to do some automated tasks.
6. Had a Spanish/English exchange session with a Spanish colleague using Skype.
7. Edited some photos that were taken at a Christmas party last weekend.
8. Sync'ed my mobile phone to it.
9. Remotely accessed my sister's PC using Hamachi & VNC to fix a problem she had.
10.Burnt a Linux distro onto CD for a friend of mine who was asking for one.
Oh, and found time to play a couple of quick games of Azgard Defence as well.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
That's the path that I and most of my peer group at work (for major IT name) have followed, and I'd give 50:50 odds you're in the middle segment at the moment. When you realise that you just cannot be bothered fighting whatever copy protection is stopping you playing that legally purchased disc in your hand, and you've got too much to lose to torrent the new release of Windows, maybe things will look different.
Maybe I'm wrong, and the upgrade cycle is really your hobby, with gaming an occasional bonus - that's the other way to go.
Which is why it's so annoying that there are hardly any PC games that support multiplayer on one system any more.
I think the lack of major-label single-screen multiplayer games for PCs has something to do with a perception 1. on the part of publishers that people don't have their PCs connected to a TV, and 2. on the part of gamers that PCs aren't designed to be connected to a TV. The rise of HDTV starts to solve #2, but the rest is a catch-22. If I were to develop such a game, what would be the best way to get it to sell?
Whoa.
Some modfag decided to go for broke. Way to go diggfags, you're all the same. This is why Slashshit is going down the toilet, insightful comments modded down by the diggfag crowd.
I have to agree, for awhile back when PC games were the craze, (Halo, Unreal, Age of Empire)...there was many games out for the playstation, however I felt the lines were getting thinner and thinner. Before that we had nintendo 64, which was already on its way, way out! Tehy came out with a console that could also play dvds and mp3, and hook up to your pc to see image files on your network, this saved or extended console's lives longer, and now the wii, with its fitness games will be the next life extender in a dying breed.
The console is just another computer, right, the games are too limiting when they are made for a console, where as when you have a pc, you could have it anyway you want, and then you can install your game....so if you can afford to have a octocore computer, more power to you...you don't need to get stuck with jimmy's p3 which still plays unreal tournament perfectly, but would never be able to handle the needs of a game like call of duty 5.
So yes, you need a console for most cool games as many do not want to try and pc their games, but think about this, when you put it on the shelf, and dust it off in about 10years for your kid, most everyday computers will be able to still run those games, where as most people will not still have an ol xbox sitting around, as the next craze of consoles kicks in.
the latency would be similar to the latency we have now with for example FPS games were the latency seems to be acceptable and feels responsive enough.
FPS games also have client-side prediction to make at least the player's own actions happen instantaneously. GoLive can't offer that, except by a lot of faking (e.g. drawing the HUD and playing weapon sounds locally and everything else remotely). As far as I can tell, they won't be able to get the latency down below that of, say, Kaillera. I've tried playing a Tetris clone for NES over Kaillera, and the sideways motion of the pieces was so slippery that it got hard to place pieces accurately.
Besides, I still dispute your premises of zero compression delay and zero transmission delay apart from speed-of-light latency. Zero compression delay would require transmitting uncompressed frames over the wire, and uncompressed HDTV at 720p and 4:2:0 chroma takes 1280*720*60*12 = 663 Mbps. I'll grant you 8:1 compression using motion JPEG, which theoretically would need only 16 scanlines worth of delay. But even then, I don't see 83 Mbps coming to homes in the United States any time soon.
Sony's losses have a lot more to do with blu-ray, sluggish music sales, psp FAIL, and it's utter failure to penetrate the digital player market than it's console, Microsoft just released a new OS and people aren't buying it. Nothing to see here, move along...
It's called a "recession". _everything_ is depressed, not just console gaming. Recession + new products = losses.
I wish this were the case, but it seems that what we actually end up with is a lot of :
NFL/NHL/etc 2006
NFL/NHL/etc 2009
NFL/NHL/etc 2156 (TBA)
We also end up with games shipping too early, way too late, and generally full of bugs or other bullsh*t. Why? Because people will buy them. Yes, they will bitch and whine, but they will still buy them.
Now maybe I have rose-coloured-glasses, but it seems to me that when gamers were fairly "hardcore" or at least a smaller group, releasing stinkers such as these would get you blacklisted. When your market is fairly select, this can be fairly profit-destructive as those that actually give a damn would a pretty big chunk of your target-market.
A good thing is that the advent of internet gaming seems to offer a fair bit more in the way of players etc, so *finding* competition isn't so bad, and you don't have to wait until you actually have 3-4 friends to play with. On the other hand, finding decent competition and a not a bunch of 12-year-old aimbotting I've-got-a-map-hack your-mama-is-fat lamers is not so easy.
Maybe it's rose-colored glasses on my part, but while it might be good for the *industry* in terms of sales, it's not necessarily good for the people.
I've got an NES, SNES, an old gameboy in a drawer somewhere that still works (though nobody wants it), old PC's, a gamecube, a PS2, etc etc. The first ever truely dead console I've had was the 360 (I don't count the NES where the power brick got pulled on too much, besides that was easy to fix with solder and heat-shrink). With a failure rate of over 50%, I'd say it's not just a matter of taking care of the consoles. Other than needing a little bit of "blow-on-the-pins" magic, the old game carts tended to weather better than current-gen discs as well.
Similarly, I've heard of elevated failure rates behind various models of PS3, though not nearly that of the 360. An honorable mention goes to older DS's with scratched screens, but nowadays screen-protectors are easily available and I believe the screens are a bit more resilient.
[...] console games can be purchased secondhand, whereas it's all but impossible to buy used PC games.
Dude, where'd you get that? Go to your next GameStop, heck, search eBay - there's tons of used PC games to be found.
Non-supporter of Online Activation and any other draconian DRM
Hey .... heres one RIAA went into cahoots with the bankers to create the current recession ... people stopped spending money on PC games and fell back on "cheap" entertainment, movies!
I can't believe this is a legitimate post. Console gaming will never die. The direct association with console gaming to sales of consoles is ridiculous. At his point in time there are close to hundreds (only a handful of mainstream) of consoles to choose from. I myself had a great blast from the past playing some Tiger Heli and Jackal on an old Nintendo over the weekend. I think the concept of needing the latest and greatest console is wearing off. Nostalgia wins out sometimes, my PS2 still runs like a champ. Of course I've also logged a few hours in the past few days with MW2 on the Xbox 360. The Wii has done wonders for introducing console gaming to a new market. Of course at the same time, I used to complain that PC gamers had a natural bias based on the machines of the gamers they were playing against. I still see connection speed as the biggest factor hurting multiplayer gaming, that is, the one with the fastest connection, always seems to win.
Really? Again? 'Seems this topic comes up about once every 3-4 years, until the next new fangled console is released. This ranks up there with other fear mongering I ignore like... an email tax.
I think it has less to do with what phase you are in in life than what types of games you play.
While I do play both console games and PC games, the choice is usually dictated by what type of game I am buying. If I am looking for a Prince of Persia or God of War type game, I buy it on the console. Since I won't really need fine control with lots of buttons, the console works out great and the ability to just drop in the disc and play is nice. For FPS or other games where I want a fine level of control and a good array of buttons, give me a PC. For example, look at the progression of the Rainbow Six games. By the second game of the series, I had an amazing amount of control over my character. The third game simply added to that. When the fourth game was announced as a console only game, I and many other fans started whining. Unfortunately, UbiSoft decided to give us what we asked for and ported Rainbow Six: Lockdown over to the PC. The controls felt like a dumbed down version Doom. And the actual game play wasn't much better. The series went from a tactical shooter to a yet another run and gun fest.
As for the hassle of keeping a gaming PC running, it's really not that hard. Yes, I have seen my fair share of games which lock up or refuse to run, but they aren't that common. And the trade off is usually a community around a good game making maps and mods. Yes, paid for downloadable content can be nice, but the stuff some of the modders do can be as good as, and sometimes even better than, the original game which gives me a lot more bang for the buck.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
I've been playing PC and console games since I was like 6 years old, (I'm 25 now). I pretty much consider myself an hardcore gamer. Well first thing, it's been 3 years since I bought my last PC (~800€ - g80 year) and I can still play every game that gets released with good graphics, the reason? Maybe we are stuck with the consoles? Games still on DX9? console ports? Many reasons. The era of exclusives on the consoles is pretty much over and I look at the games that are released today for the consoles and think "wow nice selection of casual games" many of them available on the PC , and I still think playing FPS with gamepads is a step back. In my opinion console gaming died, where are the J-RPGs? the beat'em up on the streets? I could go on... Most of the games you can play them on the PC, and the ones you can't I guess it doesnt matter because they are not that exclusive. As for the PC gaming it has been dying for some time now, few good games come out each year, I miss my dungeon keepers and fallout spirit of inovation
Just got a new system and started buying PC games... then I remembered why I had switched to consoles in the first place. The second game I bought - bam - Sony secuRom. Console games usually don't have poorly written software protection schemes that degrade the performance. Sure, I'm playing on hardware that's a couple generations old, but I'm actually playing the games and not wondering if my $1200 PC now has a security hole.
Your problem was actually buying an Electronic Arts Game. They are crap on consoles too.
Nope, I am middle aged. And all the people I know have stayed on Gaming PC's once they got them. It is funny that you say they don't want the hassle, but things like the red ring of death, vendor lock-in problems are more hassle than PC Gaming.
Electronic Arts is just publishing it. Bioware developed it, just like they developed Baldur's Gate, KOTOR, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, and Mass Effect, all of which are up there in my list of favorite games. That's enough credibility for me. You might as well blame Best Buy for selling the game.
At some point there will be a convergence and all you will have is one host machine somewhere in the house and you access the content from different portals around your house. Just sit on the couch, pick up the controller (or not depending on what control method you prefer), turn on the tele and pick a game. Want to use a keyboard and mouse? Go over to your desk, turn on the monitor and pick a game.
No sig for you!!
So true. I really do not want to fight with updates, hardware problems, building or buying a PC for gaming. A console was the logical choice.
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919