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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.
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.
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.
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.
I didn't know F-Zero GX was so badly received - it appears to be fairly WELL received in fact. Are you talking about direct comparisons to the fun factor compared to the other versions, as if so, do you have any claims to back that up?
I find Sega's situation completely disheartening however. They used to be all about really cool, slightly off-beat games, or REALLY well done "more normal" type games. It's really sad to see them in their current state where maybe a handful of interesting games per year comes from them anymore (MadWorld, HotD: Overkill, Valkyria) when they used to pump out game after game of awesomeness and originality.
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
You seem to be a little scattered with what you're saying, but the gist seems to be "of course there will be a crash, look at all the crappy games that are coming out."
What you're failing to notice is that those "Crappy games" are selling... What we're seeing now are Once great publishing houses (Midway, etc) that have too much overhead and outstanding debt to function in the low effort - high reward shovelware market.
That's not a sign that the market is failing, it's a sign that Some publishers aren't lean enough to hack it and they're going to falter as a result.
You can crap on Activision all you want because Tony Hawk: Ride was bad. But they made $550,000,000, in FIVE DAYS by releasing Modern Warfare 2. And don't think they aren't constantly raking in the World of Warcraft dollars... Most of what Activision puts out is garbage, but as long as projects mostly cover their costs, and the company as a whole doesn't put too much money on one horse, they'll be fine.
The bottom line is, it's a recession. Every industry is seeing large declines, (the average is something like 18%) and will this kill off some poorly structured developers/ absolutely, Is it a "Crash" or does it spell the doom of console gaming? Absolutely not.
Even if developers die, the Platforms will go on.
Did you not note that I pointed out DVD was in the PS2 for the same reason?
Sony has a hand in the design of Blu-Ray. They, along with a set of other companies who also "contribute", gain a certain amount from the royalties on discs/players adhering to the blu-ray format, the same way they were connected to DVD.
Sony's setup has always been this way. They never implement an open, universal standard unless they absolutely, positively have to. Look at the amazing number of "standards" they've tried to develop themselves (Beta vs VHS, Compact Disc they had a hand in, DAT, Video8/Hi8, Minidisc vs Philips Digital Compact Cassette, Sony ATRAC vs MP3, Sony SACD vs DVD-Audio, MMCD vs SuperDensity till they gave in and "contributed" their patents to merge EFMPlus into the DVD standard with Toshiba, Memory Stick Duo vs SD, SDDS "Sony Digital Dynamic Sound" versus DTS and Dolby Digital, and of course the craptacular UMD format). Their goal is to make their proprietary "standard" the industry standard, and rake in the royalties, not unlike Microsoft's "embrace, extend, destroy" philosophy concerning open standards.
The 3 1/2 floppy disagrees with you. Not to mention, like you say, a lot of companies are part of the Blu-ray association and as such, if every maker of Blu-ray devices is part of it, no one charges royalties. Like DVD, Blu-ray is very much design by committee with no one company controlling it. This is the exact opposite of proprietary.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
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.
A lot of the stuff they put out is partnerships and they participate in many of the industry standard committees.
Yes, so that they can get their patents included in the "standard." It's part of the ongoing barrier-to-entry collusion on the part of the "standards committees"; if you're part of the committee, you generally have some form of patent-access trade so that you can produce the "standard-based" equipment with no patent cost. If a new guy wants to come along and enter the market, the "standards committee" members (of which $ony is one) all agree to hike their access costs to an exorbitant amount to keep real competition out of the marketplace.
They've sectioned up the market quite nicely to themselves, really. Note how LG is given de facto control of the entry-level segment, as long as they agree to not compete higher up.