E3 is over! Yippee! We can all get back to our overworked and underpaid lives without the hassle of the marketing guys coming up to us and saying “We’ve got to have this demo released for E3!” Yay!
In case you’ve been buried under a rock, I’ll give you the highlights of this year’s E3!
SonyWhat the fuck are they thinking!? Seriously, they have the console market lead at this point and they are dropping the ball and placing all their bets right now on the blu-ray tech before they release the console. Blu-ray is a next gen DVD format that can potentially contain 5 times the content of a normal DVD giving it a whooping 50 GB of storage. That’s some pretty hefty tech, but the problem is, it’s not ready and it hasn’t been tested.
Imagine this scenario. You go out to buy your latest and greatest console, the PS3, and it comes with a whooping price tag of $600-$700 dollars or so. You unwrap it and get it all ready and setup to plug into your TV, then you realize that your TV is too old and you need to buy an HD TV, which by the way, Sony makes those. So now you go out and spend another $2,000 to $3,000 on a new TV to fully enjoy the glamour of the PS3, but then you realize you need surround sound. That’ll be another $2,000 for anything decent, and yes, Sony makes these too!
Initial investment for preferred setup: $6,000 bucks
Initial investment for Kick Ass PC: $3,000(and it comes with better resolution, more games, and is upgradeable.)
You get home and you plug it all in(or you have the service guys come over and install the flat screen TV mounted on the wall) and you put the disk in and then… nothing… A little red light blinks on and off signaling failure on the drive, or it actually displays an error saying it can’t read the disk. You just bought it! It was brand new directly from the manufacturer. Damn it!
Let’s say you don’t want the HD TV and the surround sound. Then you’re eliminating half the new features of the PS3, but let’s just say you want to run with your old TV and use the crappy sound; initial investment of $600-$700 bucks. Okay, I can live with that if some hefty titles are coming out that will redeem the purchase price with entertainment value.
So far, list of titles is not confirmed, but only two of the titles have even reached the %50 mark for completion and the console is months away from being released. You can forget about backward compatibility, since only a quarter of the PS2 games will run. That’s still a considerable amount of games, but nothing to contend to the Xbox 360.
And another thing that really pisses me off… They ripped off the Nintendo controller idea and are using it in a last minute effort to shove as much tech as they possibly can into a friggin game console.
You know, they had me when they wanted to put in their cell processor. Now that was a brilliant idea and from a tech point of view it made sense. You delegate out many different processors to do many different tasks and they all work synchronously. Brilliant!
They should have just left it at that and then built games on top of that instead of releasing this overly engineered, overly priced, piece of equipment that may or may not break down because over three quarters of the tech still hasn’t been fully tested.
Sony has placed its bets squarely on the Blu-Ray tech and is incorporating that into almost all of their future products. However, Sony is the only company so far to openly invite all other competing formats, such as the HD DVD, to meet together and discuss this format war before it spills into the publics lap. Brilliant move Sony! Absolutely fucking brilliant!!! Come across as the good guys and the public will love you, but at the same time, Sony stands to loose the most from any kind of format war since all their bets are on the table!
I guess we shall see where this goes.
MicrosoftNot much can be said about these guys. They released a statement saying they are going to up the production of the Xbox 360 and they plan on having over 10 million units sold by the time Sony has released their console. Now I don’t know if they’re going to be able to hit that mark, but this should get interesting considering only 3 million units have been sold.
The Xbox 360 is technically inferior to the PS3, but then again, please read above to hear the rant on that. However, the Xbox 360 leverages one of Microsoft’s greatest assets… a monopoly.
Oh crap, did I just say that? What I meant to say was their DirectX SDK. I can build the same app on a PC and then port it over to Xbox 360 since the dev kits are based off each other. Granted with the 360 there are other bells and whistles, but fundamentally they are the same which makes it a much easier console to develop for.
If there’s one thing Microsoft knows, it’s that if you get the geeks to support it and you get them to play around with it and become familiar then you’re sure to beat out the better tech the competition has. Just look at Apple, and there’s your perfect reference to this battle between Microsoft and Sony.
Speaking of the battle between Microsoft and Sony, I thought this section was hilarious. Microsoft Vice President, Peter Moore, went on Record to ask the question “Tell me why you would buy a $600 PS3?” and then continue to say “People are going to buy two (machines). They’re going to buy an Xbox and they’re going to buy a Wii.” After making that statement the press immediately put out headlines like “Microsoft Supports Wii!” This was later followed by a statement from Sony executive Phil Harrison saying “I think Peter Moore is exactly right, I think Nintendo will be the second system consumers purchase after PlayStation 3. I haven’t had a chance to check out Wii myself, but Nintendo has a great history of innovation and has always done great things for gaming and long may they do so.”
In essence, these guys are playing tug of war with Nintendo stuck in the middle. Screw you both! I’m just going to pick up a Wii!
One of the most shocking, yet completely hushed secrets released at E3 was the fact that Grand Theft Auto IV will be released on the Xbox 360. Who would have ever thought!?
Also on their press release site is more info about the upgraded Xbox Live due to be released that would allow for mobile games, PC games and Xbox games to all coexist? What the hell are you talking about Microsoft? You can’t even get Outlook to work with Exchange Server. Both of those are products you built! You expect all devices to work together harmoniously yet you can’t get any of your existing product lines to work together.
I also believe Microsoft’s battle against Google is a day late and a dollar short. With Google stashing away their hefty 18 billion in profit and Microsoft dipping into their reserves to pay for the upcoming Microsoft Live service, it makes me wonder how all of this will play out for the giant Microsoft Corporation! Not to mention the delay of the Vista OS and other bad press Microsoft has been receiving, the stock prices have shown that the industry giant is loosing its foothold.
We are looking at a very interesting time in the market. With Microsoft fielding battles on all fronts. Their OS is being jeopardized by Apples stronghold and Linux popularity. Perhaps we are looking at the beginning of the end for MS? Not likely, but the thought brings a smile to my face!
And last, but not least
NintendoSit back and enjoy the fireworks! While the two titans go head to head, Nintendo is taking a back seat. The previous remarks from Microsoft and Sony gave them the perfect opportunity to repay the favor. When Sony imitated their controller, all Nintendo said was “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”
If I was Nintendo, I would have ripped Sony’s balls off through countless lawsuits, but instead they are doing the smart thing. They are keeping their cool.
By releasing a technically inferior, yet less expensive machine, Nintendo is doing something smart by staying out of the way of the two staggering giants! They aren’t even competing within the same audience. It’s brilliant!
With their newest handheld, the DS, outselling ALL other previous handheld game consoles they are hedging their bets with the family market. Something I think they are being very smart about!
Doom and Gloom or Fame and Fortune?For some reason, I am reminded of the 1981 crash in the video game market where too many things were going on in the industry and overnight the whole industry shut down losing millions of dollars. Large companies toppled and the loss was felt throughout the industry for the next ten years. The theory as to why this happened is because of the good old “bargain bin” games that were outselling major titles. The major titles would have to decrease their price to undercut the competition, and then all of a sudden all the major players in the industry started loosing money with no end in sight.
Fast forward to today where at E3 there were over 300 titles on display and over 60 publishers trying to get a foothold in the industry and secure a long term IP contract where they would be fortunate enough to gain public appeal. The fact remains that of those 300 titles; only 30 of them will make money. Of those 60 publishers, only about 8 or 9 of them will pull in any significant profit. This is an 18 billion dollar industry and yet the future for the industry is completely uncertain with legislation against sex and violence and the uncertainty of digital distribution bring to light the fragile nature of the games market. Whatever happened to the PC? What about Indies? What’s this about all these new consoles requiring so much investment in a quality entertainment that it is merely out of reach for the average customer?
There are too many questions and too many theoretical answers that it is astounding. Every financial firm that has overviewed the industry projects great prosperity. Perhaps that is because the financial firms that don’t see eye to eye don’t make it in the news and I can only find *good* reports in the industry, but there is some doubt as to what the future holds for this industry.
In the sister industry to the games industry, yes, I am talking about Hollywood, they upgrade the format every 25 to 30 years. Going from the original 8mm film to video cassettes, and finally to DVD. In the last 30 years there have been 6, count them, 6 new generations of video game consoles therefore upgrading the content and the medium once every 5 years with no standard and no means of reaching a standard anytime soon with major players like Microsoft vs. Sony with Nintendo stuck squarely in the middle.
Perhaps I am naive and cautious in nature. Perhaps it is because I am much more adept at finding problems instead of building solutions. Perhaps it is my point of view that is skewed in this matter, but I believe we are headed to a point where the market won’t support us anymore and that they will get sick of constantly being bombarded with the next generation every 5 years when the previous generation has barely put out a handful of hit series.
Previously I took a swing at Sony and asked them what they were thinking by over-engineering the PS3, but perhaps by over-engineering it they are opening up the market for years to come and creating a solid platform that we, as developers, can finally work with. Then again, perhaps their only thought is to make a bigger better mouse trap in the form of fancy graphics, impressive computational abilities, and a large storage medium and in five more years they will do the same.
I’ll tell you what I want! I want to go to the store, pick up a game for $30-$60 bucks and put it in the drive and play it. I don’t want to care what platform it is made for. I don’t care what medium it is stored on. Hell, I don’t really care that it can hold gigs of MP3’s(a feature that is rarely going to be used). I just want to play games.
Strap yourselves in because these next few years are going to get very interesting!
-Ken Noland
