Well, my dad works at Nintendo and~: Console Wars Horseshit Megathread

[Yegolev]

Flower is part of a set of three games that include Flow and Journey.

[Azazel]

Jesus, don't make me SirBruce this thing.

He's gone psychotic.

Here's an example. Sure, it's anecdotal, but I don't think it's by any means unique.
There are about 35-odd people in my workplace. I'm one of only 6 men working there presently. One other guy there has a Wii (unless he sold it?) and a PS3, which he enjoys sports games on. At least 4 of the (many) women own Wiis, none of which seem to use them any more from what I gather. Now you can argue gender bias or anything else, but they got their Wiis as Wii Sports machines, and one also got into Just Dance. Out of the 6 of us who owned Wiis, exactly two of us are interested even vaguely in "core" games, while none of the women I work with who bought their own Wiis would even be vaguely interested in Call of Duty 4 or GTA4.

The two of us who might be already owned a PS360.

[Jeff Kelly]

Maybe I have gone of the rails there, I don't know how to get my point across though except for being a rambling lunatic it seems.

What I see or at least what I feel is that the game industry has basically resigned itself to a certain business model that somewhat works, that is practical given the huge budgets necessary but that has no room to grow and is largely pandering to the same old audience. The lack of room for growth is offset by games and business models that are essentially cost cutting measures (more profit with the same sales numbers), free to play, online and social integration, DLC and season passes are just methods of extracting more cash out of the same user base.

To justify that it gets rationalized to an extend that people now often actually believe it. Maybe that impression is totally and utterly wrong and I should stop listening to the voices in my head (just joking on that part) but if we go with numbers of consoles sold then the 'dominant console of this generation' is actually third in a group of three and only because its two core markets, the US and UK, are exceptionally strong. The Wii would have 'won' (for certain definitions of winning) and the PS3 would be in second place. This is probably the only industry were the nominally third place system can set industry trends continually and consistently and the platform that sold the most units is completely forgotten and ignored.

Each console has sold about 100 million over its run with lots of overlap and multiple buys and consoles that just sit in a cupboard somewhere and collect dust so the individual user base is probably lower. That's what Apple or Samsung sell in a year or even a quarter. And even hit games only achieve a 1% conversion rate (more only if you are COD or GTA). The industry seems to have resigned itself too such an extent that nobody could even imagine that something like the Wii could happen or that it could become such a success and worse once it did happen nobody knew how to capitalize on it. I stand by it the Wii is the most successful failed product ever because nobody - not even the company that designed it - could handle its success. Also Nintendo doesn't even understand what went wrong or that the Wii - even though it sold inane amounts of units - is essentially the albatross around its neck.

The whole 'casual gamer' debate always felt like rationalizing that unlikely event away as being a fluke although no one could ever fully explain why people who had no interest in 'real' games and just liked things like Wii Sports chose to buy a $300 device that could do nothing else than run games even if it was just a Wii. It's the same hand-wavey thing for me as claiming that 'women don't play video games' and I always in my mind translate it as 'actually we don't really know how to make and market games to audiences we're not familiar with' instead.

Both new consoles are now essentially PCs. X86 CPUs, DirectX11 compatible graphics hardware, similar performance to an average consumer PC and industry standard APIs so even that process has been streamlined to an extent where porting and multiplatform releases becomes even more easy and what platform you play on is essentially just a matter of which industrial design you fancy the most. The manufacturers guarantee that the hardware won't change for the next five to six years at least to protect the investments into tools and assets those companies need to make and Nintendo is stuck in a loop of producing Zelda and Mario games over and over again because that's what they know how to do.

The customer base is stagnant because the industry is stuck in a feedback loop of only catering to the audience they know because that's 'easiest' and therefore only ever attracting the people who would have bought that stuff anyway. Most recent trends haven't been anticipated by the big publishers and once they acknowledged them they couldn't capitalize on them so they got rationalized away as being flukes or by describing the segment as not being worthy of attention or investment anyway. The whole indie-games sector, social gaming, the Wii phenomenon, iOS and Android gaming the recent board game boom - to name a trend from a different sector - all saw a huge influx of people and money. People the established companies didn't even know existed or were interested in gaming.

So they claim that those segments wouldn't buy 'real' games anyway or wouldn't even play games if they weren't free or easy to play. At the same time the meta-discussion about gaming is largely dominated by segments that feel discriminated against or are feeling disenfranchised by the current situation so there seems to be a disconnect between the assessment of the publishers that those people wouldn't be interested anyway and the claims by certain segments that they would be but that the current crop of games doesn't pique their interest or actively discourages them.

This leads to a situation where a platform can sell over 100 million units and everyone pretends it doesn't exist or it doesn't matter which seems even more insane to me than my own ramblings.

TL;DR: It seems to me that the gaming sector has resigned itself to extract more money out of the same customer base or to create more 'value' for their products by expand to other entertainment sectors because it doesn't know how to grow its audience anymore even though there seems to be a significant potential there.

[Miasma]

Most of the embargos are being lifted for the xbox one today.  Even taking into account (the well earned) Microsoft hate it is getting pounded fairly hard.  All their kinect, voice commands and TV TV TV stuff is the poorly implemented mess you would expect from Microsoft.  The cross title games run noticably worse on it.  Their exclusives are also rating poorly.  Dead rising isn't as good as the last ones and looks pretty bad due to texture pop in.  They aren't letting the embargo drop for Ryse which should tell you all you need to know.

If they wanted the xbox one to be a media hub and also play games (sometimes at the same time) then they really should have given it a lot more powerful hardware.

Edit: I guess the ars review is fairly good.

[Jeff Kelly]

Well rumour has it that MS is pretty far behind schedule on many of its SW features so I pretty much imagined some of the features to miss release or being half-baked. To be fair though all of the PS4 reviews mention that the PS4 has 'potential' which is also essentially saying that things are unfinished at release.

[HaemishM]

Why exactly? For me it sounds entirely like a self-fulfilling prophecy. '3rd party ports were obviously going to sell like shit because most people interested in any of those games already had a 360 or PS3 where they could play them in HD' seems to make this a foregone conclusion.

This was the main crux of the Wii's problem and why I think it's a failure despite all the money it made (for Nintendo - it didn't make dick for anyone else because 99% of the third party stuff sold like shit). Gaming companies didn't want to make a game for a single console, they wanted to port one game to three consoles. You couldn't do that with the Wii, the control scheme either required you to THINK when developing for it, or just half-ass it like most of the ports did. So you either end up with an expensive game that's not going to sell as well because it's market penetration is 1/3 what you'd see on a port or you end up with a shitty port on an inferior machine with a painfully obvious control port to waggle and nobody buys it because it's painfully obvious that it's a half-assed piece of shit.

It likely didn't help that Nintendo cares about 3rd party developers like a pimp cares about his ho's.

[Nonentity]

Most of the embargos are being lifted for the xbox one today.  Even taking into account (the well earned) Microsoft hate it is getting pounded fairly hard.  All their kinect, voice commands and TV TV TV stuff is the poorly implemented mess you would expect from Microsoft.  The cross title games run noticably worse on it.  Their exclusives are also rating poorly.  Dead rising isn't as good as the last ones and looks pretty bad due to texture pop in.  They aren't letting the embargo drop for Ryse which should tell you all you need to know.

If they wanted the xbox one to be a media hub and also play games (sometimes at the same time) then they really should have given it a lot more powerful hardware.

Edit: I guess the ars review is fairly good.

Really? From the places I read I am hearing the polar opposite reaction - the hardware isn't as good as PS4, but on the software front they are much further along. The voice commands work much better and are an actual good way to use the system, logins are good and fast with either face detection or voice, it can be a universal remote and use the Kinect to IR blast and turn all your shit on, and it appears that across the board most of the reviews on the launch games seem to be liked more.

I already have my PS4 and I enjoy it greatly, and my XONE is showing up later in December, so I'm interested in fiddling with it more.

[Paelos]

This thread went Wall of Text over the last few days.

The XBONE still sucks right? We're all agreed there?

[Miasma]

Really? From the places I read I am hearing the polar opposite reaction - the hardware isn't as good as PS4, but on the software front they are much further along. The voice commands work much better and are an actual good way to use the system, logins are good and fast with either face detection or voice, it can be a universal remote and use the Kinect to IR blast and turn all your shit on, and it appears that across the board most of the reviews on the launch games seem to be liked more.

I already have my PS4 and I enjoy it greatly, and my XONE is showing up later in December, so I'm interested in fiddling with it more.

I just keep seeing posts about glitches and problems.  Too many to remember but off the top of my head:

- There is no disk management system that tells you how much space you have.
- That snap skype while playing a game isn't currently possible.
- The ir blasting will shut off everything if it's already turned on, because xbox doesn't know.
- There is no way to tell what the battery level of the controller is at.
- It has problems understanding voice commands.
- Much fun is being made of the Redbox command, you can't simply say "xbox redbox" You have to say "xbox go to redbox instant by verizon", because "instant by verizon" is part of the name.
- Anything higher than stereo sound is being stripped out of sources fed through the xbox so no 5.1 surround from other inputs.
- Setting the language for the system and kinect seems painfully restricted.  For example you can't pick Spanish if you set your region to United States.
- There is no indication if a voice command is said wrong or does not exist.
- Patching some games seems to reset them.
- Cold boot takes over one minute.
- Lots of silly things like the command "xbox on" only works in five languages, there is no "xbox off" command.

Voice Commands: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caJpUpVKyzk

Face Recognition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5D0050sxio

An achievement for watching five Kevin James movies?

It's really the type of thing you won't know if you hate it or love it until you actually try to work with it.

[Margalis]

Yeah, it sounds like in a real-world scenario there are a ton of kinks. Also the hardware is worse than the PS4 AND reserves power for simultaneously running apps, which means it's even less powerful than it first appears.

[KallDrexx]

In non-xb1 haterade news, apparently some PS4s are getting bricked.

[Trippy]

- there is no "xbox off" command.

Too many griefers

[Paelos]

In non-xb1 haterade news, apparently some PS4s are getting bricked.

Honestly, why would I want to buy either or these machines over a PC?

[KallDrexx]

In non-xb1 haterade news, apparently some PS4s are getting bricked.

Honestly, why would I want to buy either or these machines over a PC?

Don't ask me, I have no intention of getting either

[Falconeer]

In non-xb1 haterade news, apparently some PS4s are getting bricked.

Honestly, why would I want to buy either or these machines over a PC?

Dark Souls 2.

And more seriously, you know, exclusives. The Gran Turismos, The Forzas, the Naughty Dogs and Quantic Dreams, edit: The Soul Caliburs! and all those supercool Japanese games. If that stuff doesn't really excite you, it's a very good move to pass.

Anyway, your answer is: games exclusive to consoles. And you know it.

EDIT: I guess some people get a console because they know they are gonna have a working, powerful gaming system for the next seven years. As opposed to a powerful gaming system (PC) that requires a 1000$ (or so) update every four year.

[Paelos]

Yeah they don't excite me. The fact they have to artificially create a market speaks volumes about the quality, and then the systems are either failing or trying to scan my retinas.

[jakonovski]

Honestly, why would I want to buy either or these machines over a PC?

The biggest reason is, most people lack the skills to build their own gaming PC and are unwilling to pay the inflated price of a pre-built one.

[Azazel]

Maybe I have gone of the rails there, I don't know how to get my point across though except for being a rambling lunatic it seems.

Haemish gave some more good reasons on the Why. And yes, people bought a $300 Wii Sports machine. A significant number of them were/are adult women. And no, they don't care about Call of Duty.

Also, you seem to care WAY too much about this, and I can't quite figure out why. From current information, it looks like I might be picking up my PS4 around this time next year, when the bugs are worked out and there are a bunch of games worth caring about. I was done with being an early console adaptor 3 generations ago.

[Father mike]

I've sort of surprised myself but doing so, but I'm still nursing a hate-on for Sony over the whole cd-rootkit thing.

I don't like to think of myself as being that petty, but the evidence suggests otherwise ...

[Quinton]

From the places I read I am hearing the polar opposite reaction - the hardware isn't as good as PS4, but on the software front they are much further along.

That wouldn't surprise me given that Sony basically started over on PS4 with a new freebsd-based platform.  The menu system, etc, on PS4 is nice and snappy, but there are definitely little features missing here or there and annoying sony-ui-isms like "you can delete videos/screenshots from the *list view* but not from the *item view*".

[Miasma]

I'm a smug PC player who looks down on those poor people who don't get to use keyboard+mouse and have to deal with those subpar graphics but even I have to admit some games are just better suited to the console, unless you are willing to both configure a controller to work with each game and stream your PC output to your nice, big TV.

Anything with melee controls like Arkham Batman, Assassin's creed etc is better on a console.

Anything using analog controls like driving and most sports games are better on a console.

Ironically, many multi player games have a wider pool of people to play with on consoles.

Plus yeah, exclusives and not having to wait a year to play the latest GTA.

[KallDrexx]

I'm a smug PC player who looks down on those poor people who don't get to use keyboard+mouse and have to deal with those subpar graphics but even I have to admit some games are just better suited to the console, unless you are willing to both configure a controller to work with each game and stream your PC output to your nice, big TV.

Anything with melee controls like Arkham Batman, Assassin's creed etc is better on a console.

Anything using analog controls like driving and most sports games are better on a console.

Ironically, many multi player games have a wider pool of people to play with on consoles.

Plus yeah, exclusives and not having to wait a year to play the latest GTA.

You do realize most games you can hook a 360 controller up and bam, no setup.  Also most laptops and desktop video cards have hdmi out.

[Soln]

959 Words

68 Lines

Dude.

[Jeff Kelly]

I know 

But seriously 8 paragraphs is considered a wall of text now? It's not '25 pages of John Syracusa reviewing the latest MacOS at ArsTechnica' levels of text.

[Falconeer]

I would say it begins to feel "intense" when it is the fourth 8-paragraphs post in about 24 hours on a topic no one seems to care that much anyway.

[luckton]

And the cover of Edge magazine's PS4/Xbone launch month is...


 

[Jeff Kelly]

Also, you seem to care WAY too much about this, and I can't quite figure out why.

GTA 5 was really the straw that broke the camel's back because while everyone kept fawning over that game and how it was 'the best game of this generation' all I saw was lots of wasted potential. If you look closely most of the gaming mainstream today is just lots and lots of that. Big Budget productions by big publishers are becoming more and more of a serious constraint that strangles the business and the creative side. The Wii had potential, Kinect was basically a direct reaction to the success of its motion controls but it was also too different in both performance and approach for the big studios to make sense of it. It didn't fit into their business model.

The next gen consoles are basically designed to maximize reuse and profit options for the publishers. Microsoft has gone all out by integrating probably everything the companies wanted and they got a lot of backlash but even the PS4 pretty much fits the template of what they think developers and publishers want from a console, down to using standard X86-based CPUs and DirectX compatible hardware. The next gen PCs and consoles have essentially become Call of Duty machines because that type of game seems to be the only one publishers still know how to make and sell and they have been fine tuned to extract more money out of a customer base that hasn't grown.

I fear that the time of experiments - outside of the indie fringe or steam greenlight - is over. You can be the most successful thing yet, if you do not fit the mold and are incompatible with the standard business model you are pretty much out. Games like X-Com or Rayman have become so rare that it is pretty much a sensation when they come out and a miracle if they sell well and games like the Stanley Parable or Legend of Grimrock are indie games made by a bunch of enthusiasts in their spare time, self published and self-marketed and if they sell a few hundred thousand units it's sensational in a way as if Big Foot gave an interview on national TV.

I've probably had the most fun this year with Hotline: Miami, which makes me extremely sad because that game could have been made on a Commodore Amiga. Maybe I'm just a bit burned out on gaming though but gaming has become less diverse than probably any other type of media even movies and also the only business that essentially failed to grow its audience in the last ten years.

[Jeff Kelly]

Hotline: Miami or Guacamelee!. Games that could have been released on an Amiga or Sega Genesis vs. GTA 5, the probably biggest technical achivement I've ever seen and that has been completely wasted on a mediocre story and half-baked mechanics and that never even comes close to the industry standards on even the core mechanics like shooting, cover and driving. 250 million dollars wasted on the most pretty but also most empty and superficial sandbox ever.

[jakonovski]

And the cover of Edge magazine's PS4/Xbone launch month is...


 

No, it's 

Time to buy that WIIU!

[Velorath]

I'm not sure why you're upset over big budget gaming when you acknowledge that there's really good indie stuff being made. I don't know, it just seems like you're trying to be really angsty over the state of the games industry when the fact is there seems to be a bigger variety in the games being made right now than at any other time in the history of video games.

[jakonovski]

I think the state of the video games industry can be summarized as, "some great games despite themselves".

[Jeff Kelly]

Because the initial Xbox One as it was presented at E3 was pretty much designed for the needs of the big publishers, game developers and media companies. Always connected, online only, no physical media, social and multiplayer features integrated into everything, media center extensions that tie you into their cross media campaigns and ads, no indie developer support, features and APIs that have built-in support for nickel-and-dime-ing your customers etc.

That's the direction EA, Activision and the other big media companies want consoles to go in. Design us a platform where we can monetize everything more easily and with less effort on our part and where consumers have a lot less rights that would prevent us from maximizing profits. I don't really believe that MS was disconnected from the needs of the gamers when they designed the One they just really didn't consider those needs because in reality their stakeholders were the publishers and the gamers were seen as the product. It's a concept that tried to secure and stabilize as many of the traditional business models as possible.

MS really didn't consider that it could get that much backlash, for them it was clear cut. We are the dominant platform,we have publisher support, everyone will buy the next Xbox anyway and we need the business support and so will prioritize the needs of the publishers over the experience of the users. The only reason this has failed was because everybody already considered Sony to be on its way out and that it would fade into obscurity eventually and so they didn't really lean on Sony as much as they did lean on MS - dominant platform you know.

Yes Indie gaming is offsetting some of that but the Xbone tried to explicitely raise the barrier of entry for indie developers on the XBox Live marketplace with requireing a publisher to even get listed and the way they select the number of games they actually let into the store each week.

If it weren't for Sony getting its shit together which left gamers an option and an 'out' because they had a platform to go to, all of the consumer backlash would have probably not mattered in the slightest and we would have gotten the Xbox One in exactly the way that it was presented at E3.

Just because we won this round doesn't mean that publsiher will simply stop pushing for those things.

[Falconeer]

I am gonna admit that I read the first three chapters of your saga Jeff Kelly but I can't bring myself to read the most recent ones in full, so I might be missing some important passages in the context. But springing from the last line of the post right above this one, I will say that in a time when pretty much everyone can make a great game and find a way to distribute it globally, I am not worried one bit about what will big publishers do anymore.

Also, what Velorath said. And PS4 paying so much attention to indie games, something that would have been unthinkable five years ago, makes your argument pretty invalid in my opinion.

[Yegolev]

I'll read Jeff's posts in full once the paperback comes out.

Today I mostly learned that I need to wait for the PS4 Slim.

[Pennilenko]

I will get a new console the same way I have always gotten consoles. A few years late and substantially discounted with some sort of huge practically free bundle of games.  You know what I am talking about, that huge price reduction because the manufacturers have sucked every last dime out of the early adopters, and they know that the only way they can increase sales is to make it attractive to the people like me who will not spend 500 hundred bucks on a console.  I am old enough that I really don't need to play it now and sometimes not even later.

The real problem that these companies are going to face is that my current mind set about spending money with them will carry over into my purchasing decisions for my son, and I will work hard to make him skeptical of spending money with the big companies as well.  Daddy is going to show him that if he saves his summer money then he can buy a bucket load of games on steam during a super sale and really get some value for his money.