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.
Perhaps if they charged less than $60 for a tier one new release, sales would go up.
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 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.
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.
What, like gripe in a real-live conversation instead of posting some stupid shit on slashdot?
Pot meet kettle...
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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
I don't own a Wii, but I'm pretty sure there are several games available for it other than the "Wii Sports" to which you allude.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
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:
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.
Instead of writing that presumptuous post chastising some random guy you don't even know, you could've gone outside and we wouldn't have had to read your condescending bullshit.
In other words, under any of this situations you would come off as a jack-ass if you said just what you wrote. There is no holy grail way to play games.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
A video game isn't (normally) a replication of a real activity -- it's an activity in and of itself. Just because it is based on a sport doesn't mean it's a simulation intended to replace said sport. Using your logic, people who play ping pong ought to go play tennis since ping pong was inspired by tennis (IIRC).
I don't really like bowling, but I like Wii Bowling. It's more convenient, cheaper, and much faster. Not to mention that I suck at bowling, and would have to invest a significant chunk of time and money to become proficient enough to actually enjoy it.
I find it hilarious that people spend their valuable time on Slashdot arguing that others aren't wasting their time the correct way.
I think you hit it on the head. Hard core gaming is dying not console gaming.
I don't think that's true at all. "Hardcore" gaming (I hate that term) isn't declining, it's just being OVERSHADOWED by the massive growth in the entire gaming market. It's a smaller piece of a vastly larger pie. That may bother some egos, but isn't really a bad thing. Probably good for the industry.
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.
And you don't even have to leave your house to get the games.
And you'll never be able to resell them. And, if Steam decides to ban you, you lose access to your entire library. Even if you're banned because someone stole your credit card, you have no recourse.
No one I know resells their games anyway... PC or Console, if they didn't want to have it they would have rented it.
Since everybody has a computer anyway, a $100 graphics card will get you better graphics than a console at a lower price than a console.
On a much tinier screen, with a far less comfortable input device...and did I mention that your games will get progressively slower unless you plunk down $250 every year for a new video card? And if you have a laptop, you can't upgrade at all.
I have 46 inches of useable space on my desktop, its just a matter of what you plug your screen into...
And 250 a year? Not even close... try 250 everytime a console is release AND you get to play your existing games AND the new games. Too bad the console makes all your current games garbage....
smart ass answer = Unless you're playing a 2D scroller, joysticks are for losers.
Unless you're playing RTS or FPS, keyboards are for losers.
(which pretty much just leaves scrollers and sports)
And you'll never be able to resell them. And, if Steam decides to ban you, you lose access to your entire library. Even if you're banned because someone stole your credit card, you have no recourse.
So how does someone stealing my credit card get me banned exactly? Do I keep my steam password in my wallet? Or is because some cretinous thief tries every credit card they steal on steam in case they have an account? I know this would theoretically work but please, if you have my credit card you have a limited amount of time to extract as much cash as possible, if you then take it home and log in to my steam account by emailing Steam support then the Police now have a lovely electronic trail to follow. That is such a collossal risk I very much doubt anyone would bother unless they really wanted to see what bars look like on windows.
I know many people bitch about steam banning them, but I have a sneaky suspicion they do one of the following which I never do:
1) Download a game hack (Actually this only gets you banned from online gaming AFAIK)
2) Try and resell or buy a resold game on ebay (Not sure if this gets you a ban, might just mean you wasted the money if you bought it)
3) Lose their email address, username, password and previous bank account details all at the same time (not really a ban, you just lost the account).
You might argue that these things should not get you banned, but I don't really care. I do not plan on doing 1 or 2 (even for that Operation Flashpoint crap I recently purchased) and 3 is impossible. If I lost my email account, username and password I would still know my previous credit card number from a statement, or by asking my bank.
The people I do sometimes feel sorry for are people who use some wierd bit of PC optimisation software they do not understand or buy a game on ebay only to discover the reason it was so cheap was that it was previously used by a hacker. I know it is a bit harsh but as an honest net player who has never cheated I realise that if they bent the rules in any small way for niavity then the cheaters would just exploit this. Anyone who has read anything about trying to bypass should know that humans are often the weakest link and the social engineering can often net the best results.
I dont read
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.