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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.
<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.
Perhaps if they charged less than $60 for a tier one new release, sales would go up.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
you must be a blast at parties...
I think you hit it on the head. Hard core gaming is dying not console gaming.
I have been playing video games since I got a new 2600 way back when. Just like war games and flight sims you have reached the level of just to hard to be fun. When I pick up a game for the XBox I can not just start to play it and be any good at all.
There will always be hardcore users that want hard core games. But the number of casual users will always be many times greater.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
I like consoles because I know that even in 5 years, if a game is released for my xbox 360 (or wii, or whatever), then it'll work on that console. I can build a PC this year and I've still got to check every game to be sure it'll work. For the next 1-2 years, it'll probably work, after that, all bets are off. Maybe it'll work as long as I turn down some of the graphical options or maybe it'll be completely unplayable. This is especially true if I'm building a PC that has a cost in the same range as a game console.
Then you've got various hardware and software compatibility issues to worry about. I have to assume that stuff isn't as big of a deal as back when I did play a lot of PC games in the DOS/Win 3.2/early win95 days, but judging by posts on forums the problem still exists.
Some people are ok with that to have the "better" (which is really opinion anyway and varies between games) controls, the usually better graphics on the PC version of a game if a console is more than a year or so old, the mods from the game community, etc. I can certainly understand that and there are times where I think about getting back into PC gaming because of those reasons, particularly the community mods. In the end, though, for me and for most console gamers I personally know, the known ability to just buy the game, stick it in the console, and get playing wins out.
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, though.
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.
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.
...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.
Sony isn't about to let the PS3 go when they're counting on it to push Blu-Ray (their proprietary format)
I don't know how the rest of your post got +5 insightful, but this comment especially should've gotten you a couple of troll mods. Blu-ray is design by committee. It's not Sony's proprietary format even though they started the project to work on it and were most aggressive in pushing it (through the PS3). Sony doesn't own the format and if Sony died tomorrow, you would still have Blu-ray on the market.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
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
the Wii is awesome because the games are *fun*.
The Wii had the lowest rated games of all platforms in 2009.
Wii: 362 games... 1 considered great.
Xbox 360/PC: 7 considered great. PS3: 10 considered great.