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Slashdot Asks: Is the Golden Era of Video-Game Console Sales Over?
Microsoft announced on Wednesday that it has stopped producing Xbox 360, a gaming console it launched in 2005. According to estimations, the company sold more than 85 million Xbox 360 units worldwide. Quartz has an insightful story today, in which it compares the shipment numbers of Xbox One and the PlayStation 4, the current generation consoles, to conclude that the "golden era" of video-game console sales is over. According to estimations, citing data provided by Nintendo, CNET, GameSpot, and Giant Bomb, the crown for the most popular gaming console goes to the Sony PlayStation 2 (2000) with 155.1 million inventories shipped. Sony PlayStation (1994) saw the movement of 102.49 million units, whereas 101.63 million Nintendo Wii inventories were dispatched. In comparison, Sony has sold 35.9 million units of PlayStation 4 so far, and Microsoft has sold roughly 10 million Xbox One units. From Quartz's report: It does seem, to some degree, that the golden age of home video-game consoles may be over. The previous generation of consoles was the last generation that didn't have to contend for users' time with mobile games. And you could make a strong case that a large portion of the casual gaming audience that Nintendo attracted for the Wii was almost entirely wiped out by mobile gaming. After all, the Wii was released in 2006 -- a year before the iPhone launched. Nintendo's next console, the Wii U, has been the company's worst-selling of all time. The average consumer may now feel more inclined to just pick up their phone and play Candy Crush or Temple Run than to get up and swing a controller around. The home console's saving grace could well be virtual reality. Just about every major tech and video-games company is working on a VR headset -- apart from Nintendo, it seems -- and early reviews of Facebook's Oculus Rift and HTC's Vive headsets have reduced non-gamers to tears. None of the top 10 most popular games consoles of all time have been released in the last 10 years, and VR may well be what turns the slowing console market back around.What's your take on this?
Does noone remember the Virtual Boy console from Nintendo? I don't think more than 30,000 or so were manufactured, probably less.
moox. for a new generation.
The original article has a small blurb that compares sales over the first three years:
Microsoft’s follow-up console, the Xbox One, has not sold nearly as well as the 360. In 2008, less than three years after it was launched, the company said the 360 had sold over 19 million units worldwide. The Xbox One was released in 2013, and has sold about 10 million units in roughly the same amount of time as its predecessor.
Sales for the first 3 years are bad for Xbox One. Sales of PS4 compared to PS3 for the first 3 years are very promising.
They are implying that everyone is having a bad time because Microsoft is having a bad time.
So, your #1 draw for console gaming is real-time multiplayer, and you're not willing to pay for it. I'm not going to argue about whether MS or Sony are making a huge profit off their subscription prices, but I'm sure that the infrastructure that they've put in place did not come free and the cost has to be covered somehow.
Yes, it does. It's called your Internet connection, and you pay your ISP for it.
You can have high-end online games with 10-20 simultaneous players working just fine with a regular Internet connection. No phoning home. No subscription. No lock-in. No expiry date. I know, because I was there when we started writing them. That was around the 1990s, back when broadband was still a dream for most of us and people on the academic networks were called LPBs.
Given the advances in technology of the past 20 years, I don't for a moment believe that it's actually necessary to have a centralised server as a core dependency just for most multiplayer online gaming today. In fact, I can see only two reasons to write your game that way.
One reason is because you really are co-ordinating massive numbers of players in a shared world or otherwise dealing with huge amounts of content that changes over time. If that really is the nature of your game, that's fair enough, but in most cases it is not.
The other reason is just about keeping control, so you can do things like limiting second-hand markets and making it harder to pirate. That's an entirely understandable goal from a commercial point of view, but there is no advantage for legitimate users who just want to enjoy a game with their friends and there are a lot of potential problems or disadvantages.
I didn't like paying for it as well at first, but I don't really see it as that big of a burden anymore.
And that's exactly what a lot of these services are banking on, but apparently quite a lot of customers are getting bored of being exploited in that way now. I can't say I'm overflowing with sympathy for the services in question, because I remember the days when games were about having fun and not just about squeezing as much profit out of the customer base as possible. Ironically, I bought a lot more games in those days.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.