För många år sedan när Windows 95 släpptes så talades de om att det skulle gå att spela spel inne i Windows 95! Vilket slöseri med resurser tänkte jag då. Ska hela Windows 95 vara igång och ta resurser samtidigt som jag spelar spel? Det tog några år sedan var det gamla trimmade DOS-läget borta. Jag undrar om vi står vid ett liknande paradigmskifte där webbläsaren kommer att utgöra en naturlig del av nya datorspel. Jag förstår att Google pressar på… hur ska man annars kunna spela på deras Chromebook?

What Gamespot wrote…

First sign of trouble is the amount of money being invested in Xbox360 and Playstation 3 by Microsoft and Sony respectivly. The length of time these machines have to be on the market to become profitible are much longer than their predecessors.

The new trend of downloaded content will have an impact on local stores carrying games, why should they keep selling games when games are bought on-line and consoles often sold at a loss? Also games will be played “on-line” much like the MMO games of today, with the bulk of the processing being done on a central server.

Technology is making new games even more realistic and the need to keep up with technology will favour PCs over consoles. While we wait for the next leap in techonology the game developers must focus on other characteristics of the game in order to win an advantage.

And now for my take on it…

This is what they said… but let’s reflect a little. They seem to predict the future of the gaming market by pure extrapolation of our current situation. Did any of them glance at Nintendo? Did anyone notice that Nintendo acctually put up a much “lesser machine” but still beats the crap out of the two others (in units sold at least)?

I have no figures at all but my guess is Nintendo is winning this battle easily while Sony and Microsoft are pouring in money to get second place. Why? Because Nintendo did not just extrapolate, they innovated! One thing did the articles at Gamespot get right, advanced graphics technology makes developers have to look to other solutions to set them apart and that’s just what Nintendo did. Is that a bad thing? As I remember we had the same situation back in the 8-bit days, only then we only had crappy graphics and the price went to whoever could invent something cool to do with it.

As I’ve said before the game market probably needs to be re-evaluated because new techonology and better graphics isn’t the only thing we want… honestly for myself I’d much rather have a great game than great graphics.

The argument about downloaded content carries some weight, game retailers might fear this one… but why stop selling consoles? People would need them to download the content and the retailers make money on selling the consoles, it’s the manufacturer that often subsidies them.

Playing games on-line through a service is currently almost only being done on PCs (mostly MMOs). This is however an advantage that might become a turningpoint for consoles if used correctly. As I remember one of the great advantages of the old Nintendo cartridges was that the cartridges where upgraded as time went by but the console stayed the same, by allowing games to “upgrade” the console the Nintendo probably lasted much longer than it would have with a non-evolving media. Having the whole Internet as media must mean that, if used correctly, you only need to have a machine capable of displaying the graphics and handling input and leave the rest up to the “super computer” at the other end!

The days of consoles might still be numbered, maybe some hybrid “home entetrainment machine” of some sort will take it’s place. Call it a PC if you’d like (because it will much likely have better resemblance to a PC than a console), however I do not believe any of the given arguments are enough to pursuade me of this change in the future.

The battle of the gaming market is almost always fought in media by counting the number of units sold, here Wii (24,5 million sold units) just overtook Xbox360 (19 million sold units) and the Playstation 3 is far behind (14 million sold units). One seldom mentioned fact is that both  the Wii and Xbox360 are far surpased by both Playstation Portable (PSP, 37 million sold units) and most of all Nintendo DS (70 million sold units!). The major part of the gaming market is now in hand held devices.

What I’m getting at is despite the highly advanced PS3 and Xbox360 that can make incredibly advanced games it’s the hand held devices with far inferior technology that actually sells the most. The price of the units are surely also a large factor in this (the Wii and hand helds are much cheaper than PS3 and Xbox360). A game published on the PS3 or Xbox360 is expected to have superiour graphics and use the extreme hardware to the maximum, if not it’s a dissapointment. This creates a heavy presurre on developers to invest alot of time into making the game perfect (graphics wise) and only major developers can afford this.

On hand helds, or even better downloaded content, the technology is no longer a basis for judgement. While graphics do play a major role (and perhaps using the available pixels and colour depths as best as one can) it will no longer become a central role in the verdict on the playability of the game.

Games will invariably become better looking as the consoles keep getting better, I do however believe that there will always be a market for simple games like those on hand helds and downloaded content today. It’s simply to much fun in 8 bit!

Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_consoles

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