You're right that there's a trade-off in resrouces that's involved with high quality graphics, but you're operating under a false premise when you think that an emphasis on graphics is in any way new.
Graphical output trumped text. VGA trumped CGA. Etc. Etc. The advance in graphical capabilites and the emphasis on graphics has always been with us. Why was Dragon Slayer wildly successful in 1984? Because it was the most extreme gameplay for graphics tradeoff ever.
What is new is that the vast majority of big publisher, popular games share root similarities (we're moving through a virtual world and . ..) and that those root similarities require a large expenditure to establish.
So the question is, why don't they build 'em like they used to? The answer is that they do - but most old style games are either small press, Internet published, or novel one offs, like New Super Mario Bros.
Could Nintendo sell a new version of Mario Bros every year if they wanted to? I bet they could get away with it. Could other developers start pushing out old school 2D games like it was 1989? If they want to sell them in stores to the home market, probably not. If they want to publish them on the Internet, yes.
Things change and we keep getting more power to play with, but there have always been trade-offs made in design and development. I don't think 3D or shaders or mocap or any particular technology is a tipping point that has ruined games forever.:)
I'll just reply to myself since a number of people seem confused by my calling Prince of Persia new IP. I was indeed talking about Sands of Time.
Yes, there were quite a number of Prince of Persia games that came before, and Jordan Mechner was involved with Sands of Time. However, from the point of view of the publisher it was treated as new IP for a few reasons, the main one being the spotty release history of the series and the low brand awareness in the target market. The previous version, Prince of Persia 3D, came out for Windows and Dreamcast in 1999 and didn't get a very wide release for a number of reasons not directly related to the game itself. Before that the last game was in 1994.
Even though Sands of Time didn't do the business it deserved, Ubi tried to treat it like a franchise after that title and you can see the difference in the release schedule. Previously to Sands of Time a game came out every 5 years, 1989, 1994, 1999. Then here's the release schedule including and following Sands of Time: 2003, 2004, 2005 x 3.
I'm sorry I didn't use a better example of good "new" IP that failed to become a franchise late in a console lifecycle, but Prince of Persia is what everyone was talking about when I heard that theory.
A counter example to the trend is is Katamari Damacy, but you'll note that it wasn't launched as a AAA title - it was an experiment that did better than anyone expected.
I should note that the theory of a new IP launch window has been playing out on the handhelds. Look at the numbers, the launch dates for new vs old IP and draw your own conclusions if you're really interested. Some games were definitly scheduled with these thoughts in mind, but in my opinion the awareness didn't have a real impact on the success of the games - being a fun game is still the most important consideration.
EA and others have said that they feel they made a huge mistake by abandoning new game development for the PS1 as early as they did. Their current plans seem to indicate that they will keep putting out new games for the PS2 for at least 10 years after the system's launch date.
However, new games don't imply new IP! The floundering of Prince of Persia in the marketplace, in spite of what many industry insiders considered a very well executed game, convinced many in the industry that there's only a small window at the beginning of a system's life to launch new IP in. After a certain point it's just not worth it because people don't buy AAA games that aren't sequels in sufficent quantities to recoup development costs. Sad, but apparently true.
Strangly enough, a theory has also developed that says that while you need to rush out new IP at the beginning of the life of a new system, if you're doing a sequel to existing IP on a new system it's not worth it to push it out in that early window. It's better to take your time and "get things right"/wait for the install base to develop before you push out things like GTA 4 or Halo 3.
Honestly, no one except insiders know the true intent.
However, while it's easy to give them the benefit of the doubt that they left in executable code that wasn't intended to be accessed, doesn't it seem strange that they left in the animation data for the Hot Coffee sequence?
If they hadn't included those files on the disc, the game would probably have just crashed when it was hacked.
From TFA: It's as if consumers woke up and decided to start gaming again
Anecdotes aren't always meaningful, but my personal experience concurs with the reported conclusion and what you're saying. The DS Lite is making all the difference here.
My game purchasing had never really recovered from the WoW induced slump, and when the DS Lite came out I bought it and... I think I'm up to 11 games now.
My brother did the same and also has 11 games, as did a good number of my friends - though they're mostly in the 3-4 games range at this point. The games that we all want the most are games with multiplayer and WiFi.
Mobile gaming has become social gaming... if people remember to carry their DSes!
A little off topic here (hi Mom!), but the Sony/Sega/Nintendo Playstation story is similar to 2 other stories I've heard lately.
Microsoft, who had more Mac programmers than Apple, only created Windows when Jobs refused to license their OS more broadly. (Gates was a big booster of what Apple had done and so literally Windows was intended to be a copy of the Mac OS with different licensing.)
Apple approached Creative about co-branded MP3 players and a joint venture and only created the iPod when they were rebuffed.
I know it's fashionable to predict the demise of Sony, but comments like yours (which I've heard others echo) make me wonder if Sony didn't lose a lot of their credibility with the PSP, and if that isn't now coming around to bite them.
In many ways the PSP is the model for the PS3, high end specs and design sacrifices made to accomodate a new form of video playback. Would Sony have been better off if they never launched the PSP? If they hadn't, we wouldn't all have a mental model of exactly how they're going to fail with the PS3.
Oblivion isn't a good example of a game that moved to consoles and sucked, it's a counter-example. It has a Gameranking score of 93% on the PC while Morrowind has a score of 88% on the PC.
To speak to your questions though, when games released on Console & PCs games have problems, the usualy suspects are designing for different control schemes and different audiences.
Oblivion and GTA are strong examples of games that have defied those problems, so it's not inherient in targeting consoles and PCs at the same time - it probably comes down to limited resources and the talent and focus of the individual teams.
It seems to be a common misconception that superheroes are science fiction. Like Star Wars, they're Science Fiction Flavored, but they aren't really stories about science.
It can be a fun framework for discusion, but (stating the obvious here) realism is no more important to these stories than it is to Harry Potter or King Arthur.
Talking about realism is more relevant when the story is science fiction instead of fantasy dressed up like science fiction.
While I enjoy fantasy stories, it seems unfortunate they have eclipsed science fiction by appropriating the settings and conventions.
It's always so sad to see these articles about Google's OS coming in the future. Doesn't anyone realize it's already here?
It's what Google's services use to interface with their giant computing and storage cluster, and the thin client is the web browser.
That's their whole business strategy, selling computing services as a commodity that people pay for indirectly with ad-views. Search is just their most successful application because most people use computers primarily to read documents.
The fact that they treat their cluster as a platform is why they have a competitive advantage over many (all?) of their rivals, who just compete one service at a time.
I feel like this post should get modded -1 Obvious, but the fact that these articles keep coming around again and again makes me wonder...
Google isn't a search engine company, it's a commodity computing company that sells processes indirectly.
I mean games like Halo could easilly get enough pre-orders to meet the ransom posted by the developer.
So all we get is Halo sequels then? Remember, people have tried to raise funds for additional episodes of shows like Star Trek and Firefly, and failed.
If we can't use the street performer method to raise money to pay for popular TV shows how do you expect to fund projects by unknowns?
More to the point, why are these new business models the only business models that are allowed? Because people will just take what they want if you don't follow these new ways? It's good to try new ways to fund the arts, but why pull the rug out from under everyone while you do so?
Tim Wu just had an article on Slate last week about how China is trying to grow their own film industry.
One of the interesting points: China has to orient (no pun intended) their films to an American audience because rampant piracy in China means that there isn't enough of a local market to support Chinese films.
I've heard the same thing from Chinese video game makers, they have to make games that will sell in places where copyright is to some degree respected because they would starve trying to live off the money they can make in their home market.
If everyone pirated everything we would have no Lord of the Rings movies, no video games like Halo or Grand Theft Auto -- we'd still have small indy films and subscription games like WoW, but piracy only works now because it's a group of parasites feeding off media that the rest of us pay for.
Just because something is often repeated doesn't make it false, and I didn't imply that PS3 and XBox 360 are crap - they were designed with a differentset of goals than the Wii.
I was in the audience when Sony promised that the PS3 would offer 1,000x the processing power of the PS2 and that it would automatically hook up with other Cell chip enabled systems beowulf-cluster style to create the worlds most powerful system for the home. Don't say they didn't bring this ridicule on themselves.
So you see then that Nintendo is creating demand where there was none. Right? They're selling ice to eskimos, as it were. It's amazing work they've done before the system has even launched.
The answer is in this question: what is E3, and how did the consoles do at E3?
E3 is an expo for the people who make buying decisions for the retailers. That's why it requires an industry connection (though they aren't vetted well) to get in. Retailers have to plan Christmas in the spring, which why we have E3 in May.
So, as a buyer for the big retailers you make your plans based on what you saw at E3. How do you think Nintendo did?
How do I put it... the XBox 360 and PS3 were designed around the industry's conventional wisdom that hardcore gamers drive the market. The analysts created and boosted this idea with their reports about how a small minority made the majority of game purchases. (For example most games have the majority of their sales in their first month of release, which has exacerbated the importance of hype.)
The Wii flies in the face of the industry's conventional wisdom, and if the current buzz translates to sales (not a given, of course) it will be the winner of the next gen console war. If IDG went along with the idea of the Wii being #1 they would be telling people to ignore the guidance they've been giving for years because following it doesn't translate to winning in the marketplace.
If the Wii is the next-gen winner there are going to be a lot of upturned apple carts in the industry.
The RIAA is working great. It's a great big magnet for all the ill-will generated as the labels fight to control how music is distributed. Everyone hates them, but no one hates the member labels - the abstract acronym organization that sells nothing takes all the blame. Perfect.
Why would the RIAA care what their public image is? They want you to like Shakira (her hips don't lie, you know) - they don't give a flip what you think about the organization.
If you read the article Buffet has never used the funds that he's now donating.
Buffet and his wife Susan shared the same perspective on wealth and charity. As she was a few years younger the plan (which has been the plan for 20-30 years) was that when Warren died his wife would oversee the philanthropic dispersal of the fortune. It sounds like Warren trusted his wife deeply and in a way this would be a final gift to her, something to give her a reason to keep on living after he was gone. Philanthropy seems to be something that always was more of her interest than his - the lunch meeting that Buffet has auctioned off for charity for years (this year I think it brought in $400,000) was her idea.
Sadly, she died in 2004.
If Buffet were legacy chasing, we would expect him to start a foundation in his own name. But he doesn't care about that, he wants his money to make the world a better place. So he's giving it to an already existing foundation.
From my perspective Buffet has been and is doing everything for all the right reasons. Why invent reasons to knock that down?
There's a point, I want to say it was identified to me as the 1890's or so, where so many people started writing and keeping their writings that making sense of history became more difficult instead of easier. There's so much modern historical data that it's difficult to pick out signal from noise.
So, I think you're right that people in the future will like reading old blogs, but it won't be the masses per se. For the great majority of blogs the only people who will find our blogs interesting will literally be our children. "Grandpa used to play some game called World of Warcraft and opposed the Great Middle Eastern War before it even had a name, huh."
I think it's very cool, but we should keep things in perspective. Just because something is historically meaningful doesn't imply that it's important to the culture at large.
As the mods say it's an Interesting thought, but according to this BBC article there were 575 million PCs in use as of 2004, and trends indicated that there would be 1.3 billion PCs in use as of 2010. There may be a good number of XBox 360 owners that don't own PCs (actually I'm skeptical about that since HDTV and early rev console ownership would seem to indicate someone who could afford a computer...), but any way you cut it, it's not going to be the route to market dominance.
My understanding is that if Adobe is talking about taking Anti-Trust action against Microsoft it isn't Adobe acting as "the inventors of PDF" it's Adobe acting as "the leading seller of PDF solutions". The fact that they have a special relationship to the PDF format is incidental to the proposed action.
They're complaining that Microsoft is destroying a market by bundingly software functionality with their system. Is this in any way different than when Microsoft bundled IE to hurt Netscape? If so, can someone explain it to me?
You're right, "crash" is overstating it. I was under 10 in 1984, and I don't even remember the interruption between playing Atari games and getting a NES. I guess I vaguly remember that games got really cheap at some point and we picked up a bunch of cartridges we wouldn't have gotten otherwise, but heck - I actually liked the ET game.:)
Anyway, the XBox 360 has already sold more than 3 million consoles, so it's not like the market will completly go away, though it might not be able to sustain today's production budgets.
I read this article earlier today, and the author just writes off the Wii completly. What he's not grokking, is that the Japanese game market already crashed a few years back. Microsoft and Sony were able to use the ever growing US market to write that off as an anomoly, but Nintendo took it to heart and came out with the DS and now the Wii in response.
So, yes, it's reasonable to say that Sony and Microsoft (and all their 3rd party developers) are in for a harsh awakening, but Nintendo is already on the other side of the crash and things are looking better than ever.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right that there's a trade-off in resrouces that's involved with high quality graphics, but you're operating under a false premise when you think that an emphasis on graphics is in any way new.
.) and that those root similarities require a large expenditure to establish.
:)
Graphical output trumped text. VGA trumped CGA. Etc. Etc. The advance in graphical capabilites and the emphasis on graphics has always been with us. Why was Dragon Slayer wildly successful in 1984? Because it was the most extreme gameplay for graphics tradeoff ever.
What is new is that the vast majority of big publisher, popular games share root similarities (we're moving through a virtual world and . .
So the question is, why don't they build 'em like they used to? The answer is that they do - but most old style games are either small press, Internet published, or novel one offs, like New Super Mario Bros.
Could Nintendo sell a new version of Mario Bros every year if they wanted to? I bet they could get away with it. Could other developers start pushing out old school 2D games like it was 1989? If they want to sell them in stores to the home market, probably not. If they want to publish them on the Internet, yes.
Things change and we keep getting more power to play with, but there have always been trade-offs made in design and development. I don't think 3D or shaders or mocap or any particular technology is a tipping point that has ruined games forever.
I'll just reply to myself since a number of people seem confused by my calling Prince of Persia new IP. I was indeed talking about Sands of Time.
Yes, there were quite a number of Prince of Persia games that came before, and Jordan Mechner was involved with Sands of Time. However, from the point of view of the publisher it was treated as new IP for a few reasons, the main one being the spotty release history of the series and the low brand awareness in the target market. The previous version, Prince of Persia 3D, came out for Windows and Dreamcast in 1999 and didn't get a very wide release for a number of reasons not directly related to the game itself. Before that the last game was in 1994.
Even though Sands of Time didn't do the business it deserved, Ubi tried to treat it like a franchise after that title and you can see the difference in the release schedule. Previously to Sands of Time a game came out every 5 years, 1989, 1994, 1999. Then here's the release schedule including and following Sands of Time: 2003, 2004, 2005 x 3.
I'm sorry I didn't use a better example of good "new" IP that failed to become a franchise late in a console lifecycle, but Prince of Persia is what everyone was talking about when I heard that theory.
A counter example to the trend is is Katamari Damacy, but you'll note that it wasn't launched as a AAA title - it was an experiment that did better than anyone expected.
I should note that the theory of a new IP launch window has been playing out on the handhelds. Look at the numbers, the launch dates for new vs old IP and draw your own conclusions if you're really interested. Some games were definitly scheduled with these thoughts in mind, but in my opinion the awareness didn't have a real impact on the success of the games - being a fun game is still the most important consideration.
EA and others have said that they feel they made a huge mistake by abandoning new game development for the PS1 as early as they did. Their current plans seem to indicate that they will keep putting out new games for the PS2 for at least 10 years after the system's launch date.
However, new games don't imply new IP! The floundering of Prince of Persia in the marketplace, in spite of what many industry insiders considered a very well executed game, convinced many in the industry that there's only a small window at the beginning of a system's life to launch new IP in. After a certain point it's just not worth it because people don't buy AAA games that aren't sequels in sufficent quantities to recoup development costs. Sad, but apparently true.
Strangly enough, a theory has also developed that says that while you need to rush out new IP at the beginning of the life of a new system, if you're doing a sequel to existing IP on a new system it's not worth it to push it out in that early window. It's better to take your time and "get things right"/wait for the install base to develop before you push out things like GTA 4 or Halo 3.
Honestly, no one except insiders know the true intent.
However, while it's easy to give them the benefit of the doubt that they left in executable code that wasn't intended to be accessed, doesn't it seem strange that they left in the animation data for the Hot Coffee sequence?
If they hadn't included those files on the disc, the game would probably have just crashed when it was hacked.
Hey, I didn't write that! I've been framed!
Oh yeah, I'm buying a Wii instead of a PlayStation 3 as well...
From TFA: It's as if consumers woke up and decided to start gaming again
Anecdotes aren't always meaningful, but my personal experience concurs with the reported conclusion and what you're saying. The DS Lite is making all the difference here.
My game purchasing had never really recovered from the WoW induced slump, and when the DS Lite came out I bought it and... I think I'm up to 11 games now.
My brother did the same and also has 11 games, as did a good number of my friends - though they're mostly in the 3-4 games range at this point. The games that we all want the most are games with multiplayer and WiFi.
Mobile gaming has become social gaming... if people remember to carry their DSes!
A little off topic here (hi Mom!), but the Sony/Sega/Nintendo Playstation story is similar to 2 other stories I've heard lately.
Microsoft, who had more Mac programmers than Apple, only created Windows when Jobs refused to license their OS more broadly. (Gates was a big booster of what Apple had done and so literally Windows was intended to be a copy of the Mac OS with different licensing.)
Apple approached Creative about co-branded MP3 players and a joint venture and only created the iPod when they were rebuffed.
I know it's fashionable to predict the demise of Sony, but comments like yours (which I've heard others echo) make me wonder if Sony didn't lose a lot of their credibility with the PSP, and if that isn't now coming around to bite them.
In many ways the PSP is the model for the PS3, high end specs and design sacrifices made to accomodate a new form of video playback. Would Sony have been better off if they never launched the PSP? If they hadn't, we wouldn't all have a mental model of exactly how they're going to fail with the PS3.
Oblivion isn't a good example of a game that moved to consoles and sucked, it's a counter-example. It has a Gameranking score of 93% on the PC while Morrowind has a score of 88% on the PC.
To speak to your questions though, when games released on Console & PCs games have problems, the usualy suspects are designing for different control schemes and different audiences.
Oblivion and GTA are strong examples of games that have defied those problems, so it's not inherient in targeting consoles and PCs at the same time - it probably comes down to limited resources and the talent and focus of the individual teams.
It seems to be a common misconception that superheroes are science fiction. Like Star Wars, they're Science Fiction Flavored, but they aren't really stories about science.
It can be a fun framework for discusion, but (stating the obvious here) realism is no more important to these stories than it is to Harry Potter or King Arthur.
Talking about realism is more relevant when the story is science fiction instead of fantasy dressed up like science fiction.
While I enjoy fantasy stories, it seems unfortunate they have eclipsed science fiction by appropriating the settings and conventions.
It's always so sad to see these articles about Google's OS coming in the future. Doesn't anyone realize it's already here?
It's what Google's services use to interface with their giant computing and storage cluster, and the thin client is the web browser.
That's their whole business strategy, selling computing services as a commodity that people pay for indirectly with ad-views. Search is just their most successful application because most people use computers primarily to read documents.
The fact that they treat their cluster as a platform is why they have a competitive advantage over many (all?) of their rivals, who just compete one service at a time.
I feel like this post should get modded -1 Obvious, but the fact that these articles keep coming around again and again makes me wonder...
Google isn't a search engine company, it's a commodity computing company that sells processes indirectly.
I mean games like Halo could easilly get enough pre-orders to meet the ransom posted by the developer.
So all we get is Halo sequels then? Remember, people have tried to raise funds for additional episodes of shows like Star Trek and Firefly, and failed.
If we can't use the street performer method to raise money to pay for popular TV shows how do you expect to fund projects by unknowns?
More to the point, why are these new business models the only business models that are allowed? Because people will just take what they want if you don't follow these new ways? It's good to try new ways to fund the arts, but why pull the rug out from under everyone while you do so?
Tim Wu just had an article on Slate last week about how China is trying to grow their own film industry.
One of the interesting points: China has to orient (no pun intended) their films to an American audience because rampant piracy in China means that there isn't enough of a local market to support Chinese films.
I've heard the same thing from Chinese video game makers, they have to make games that will sell in places where copyright is to some degree respected because they would starve trying to live off the money they can make in their home market.
If everyone pirated everything we would have no Lord of the Rings movies, no video games like Halo or Grand Theft Auto -- we'd still have small indy films and subscription games like WoW, but piracy only works now because it's a group of parasites feeding off media that the rest of us pay for.
Just because something is often repeated doesn't make it false, and I didn't imply that PS3 and XBox 360 are crap - they were designed with a differentset of goals than the Wii.
I was in the audience when Sony promised that the PS3 would offer 1,000x the processing power of the PS2 and that it would automatically hook up with other Cell chip enabled systems beowulf-cluster style to create the worlds most powerful system for the home. Don't say they didn't bring this ridicule on themselves.
I'm not sure if we agree or not. :)
So you see then that Nintendo is creating demand where there was none. Right? They're selling ice to eskimos, as it were. It's amazing work they've done before the system has even launched.
You ask how much retail space the Wii will get.
The answer is in this question: what is E3, and how did the consoles do at E3?
E3 is an expo for the people who make buying decisions for the retailers. That's why it requires an industry connection (though they aren't vetted well) to get in. Retailers have to plan Christmas in the spring, which why we have E3 in May.
So, as a buyer for the big retailers you make your plans based on what you saw at E3. How do you think Nintendo did?
You are not, by any stretch of the inagination, the intended audience of next gen. consoles.
Except for the Wii, which he says he's planning on buying, and that's exactly the reason that Nintendo looks like the next-gen winner.
When you said that you were engaging in the same type of thinking that made Sony decide that a $600 price point wasn't a bad idea.
How do I put it... the XBox 360 and PS3 were designed around the industry's conventional wisdom that hardcore gamers drive the market. The analysts created and boosted this idea with their reports about how a small minority made the majority of game purchases. (For example most games have the majority of their sales in their first month of release, which has exacerbated the importance of hype.)
The Wii flies in the face of the industry's conventional wisdom, and if the current buzz translates to sales (not a given, of course) it will be the winner of the next gen console war. If IDG went along with the idea of the Wii being #1 they would be telling people to ignore the guidance they've been giving for years because following it doesn't translate to winning in the marketplace.
If the Wii is the next-gen winner there are going to be a lot of upturned apple carts in the industry.
The dumbest people alive? Hardly.
The RIAA is working great. It's a great big magnet for all the ill-will generated as the labels fight to control how music is distributed. Everyone hates them, but no one hates the member labels - the abstract acronym organization that sells nothing takes all the blame. Perfect.
Why would the RIAA care what their public image is? They want you to like Shakira (her hips don't lie, you know) - they don't give a flip what you think about the organization.
If you read the article Buffet has never used the funds that he's now donating.
Buffet and his wife Susan shared the same perspective on wealth and charity. As she was a few years younger the plan (which has been the plan for 20-30 years) was that when Warren died his wife would oversee the philanthropic dispersal of the fortune. It sounds like Warren trusted his wife deeply and in a way this would be a final gift to her, something to give her a reason to keep on living after he was gone. Philanthropy seems to be something that always was more of her interest than his - the lunch meeting that Buffet has auctioned off for charity for years (this year I think it brought in $400,000) was her idea.
Sadly, she died in 2004.
If Buffet were legacy chasing, we would expect him to start a foundation in his own name. But he doesn't care about that, he wants his money to make the world a better place. So he's giving it to an already existing foundation.
From my perspective Buffet has been and is doing everything for all the right reasons. Why invent reasons to knock that down?
There's a point, I want to say it was identified to me as the 1890's or so, where so many people started writing and keeping their writings that making sense of history became more difficult instead of easier. There's so much modern historical data that it's difficult to pick out signal from noise.
So, I think you're right that people in the future will like reading old blogs, but it won't be the masses per se. For the great majority of blogs the only people who will find our blogs interesting will literally be our children. "Grandpa used to play some game called World of Warcraft and opposed the Great Middle Eastern War before it even had a name, huh."
I think it's very cool, but we should keep things in perspective. Just because something is historically meaningful doesn't imply that it's important to the culture at large.
As the mods say it's an Interesting thought, but according to this BBC article there were 575 million PCs in use as of 2004, and trends indicated that there would be 1.3 billion PCs in use as of 2010. There may be a good number of XBox 360 owners that don't own PCs (actually I'm skeptical about that since HDTV and early rev console ownership would seem to indicate someone who could afford a computer...), but any way you cut it, it's not going to be the route to market dominance.
My understanding is that if Adobe is talking about taking Anti-Trust action against Microsoft it isn't Adobe acting as "the inventors of PDF" it's Adobe acting as "the leading seller of PDF solutions". The fact that they have a special relationship to the PDF format is incidental to the proposed action.
They're complaining that Microsoft is destroying a market by bundingly software functionality with their system. Is this in any way different than when Microsoft bundled IE to hurt Netscape? If so, can someone explain it to me?
You're right, "crash" is overstating it. I was under 10 in 1984, and I don't even remember the interruption between playing Atari games and getting a NES. I guess I vaguly remember that games got really cheap at some point and we picked up a bunch of cartridges we wouldn't have gotten otherwise, but heck - I actually liked the ET game. :)
Anyway, the XBox 360 has already sold more than 3 million consoles, so it's not like the market will completly go away, though it might not be able to sustain today's production budgets.
I read this article earlier today, and the author just writes off the Wii completly. What he's not grokking, is that the Japanese game market already crashed a few years back. Microsoft and Sony were able to use the ever growing US market to write that off as an anomoly, but Nintendo took it to heart and came out with the DS and now the Wii in response.
So, yes, it's reasonable to say that Sony and Microsoft (and all their 3rd party developers) are in for a harsh awakening, but Nintendo is already on the other side of the crash and things are looking better than ever.