Younger Than The Xbox 360
marco.org
marco.org
Microsoft always intended to use games as a stepping stone to becoming a broader entertainment play. They were talking about this publicly as far back as the Xbox 1 (the former Xbox 1, now known as the Xbox 1 that isn't the Xbox One) in the 2001 time frame.
I'm fine with that strategy and even encourage it, but as a gamer I'm distraught with other decisions they seem to have made (it is impossible to tell what decisions they've actually made from rumors or misreporting because they are failing on the PR/messaging for specifics of the Xbox One on a spectacularly epic scale currently).
In the long run, the Xbox 360 is kind of the odd duck of the Xbox line in terms of hardware architecture considering the old Xbox 1 was x86 based and basically a closed PC, just like the new Xbox One. Of course, the 360 happened to occur over the time period that Live proved that a full online experience for a console should be considered an essential component. (I just wish they'd stop raising the cost of Live while also increasing the amounts of ads it throws at you (without raising the value to suit), and stop charging for things that are free elsewhere (eg. Netflix, etc), and start using some of the mountains of money they earn from Live to provide dedicated gaming servers, etc).
The Wii U is actually a pretty nice device. I have one. I'll buy pretty much any system Nintendo puts out just to play their first party games, at least until they're forced to go the route that Sega did. But anyway, the remote touchscreen gamepad "second screen" thing is pretty cool I love using it for Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Instant. Being able to redirect the video play to the gamepad device's screen when the TV is otherwise in use is really nice, and it really makes things like searching a breeze compared to using a more traditional remote. Yes, you can achieve the same basic sorts of things with other consoles plus an external device like a tablet via things like SmartGlass, but with the Wii U it Just Works without having to dick around with anything.
Microsoft went to IBM and shopped around for cores, and got a bastard chip spinoff of the Cell PPEs--one with six logical threads of execution and a fairly normal programming model. This gave good vector performance and had many threads--at launch, there weren't cheap x86 chips that could do that.
There was never a chance that the U would sell in the same numbers as the first Wii; the "non-gamer gamer" moment has come and gone. But if it had launched with a new Zelda, a new (real) Mario, Mario Party, Mario Kart, Smash Bros. (the list goes on), they'd be selling moderately well, with the game revenue as the cherry on top. Hopefully it won't be too late by the time those titles trickle onto the platform over the next year or two.
The non-gamer gamer market is bigger than ever before, and will continue to expand.
If it wasn't for pokemon and such titles, they would be long gone.
They tried the same model in the west trying to license every movie game, but it never caught on. You still can see them trying with a few disney titles.
anyway, i'd say the ONLY thing killing nintendo is their closed grasp of their developer program. If they were more open, they would have lots and lots of great innovative titles for the wiiU launch, and people would actually know the wiiU is a console, and not another weird controller such as the balance board thingy.
When the original xbox (no gamer call it xbox 1, at least before the current xbox one) was launching, microsoft released the development framework to everyone and their mother! heck i even was invited by a group that was going to show microsoft some game ideas and get $100k scot free! Think they ended up launching a minor puzzle game (their FPS idea was rejected, obviously)
Sony thinks it was robbed of victory (or at least it's usual dominance) by MS in the last round and is eager for a straight up rematch.
MS has all the momentum so at least they can pretend they won the last round and seem primarily worried about competition from other entrants (mainly Apple, Google and Samsung).
(If you don't personally like the Wii, hey, great. Neither did I, really. But it did win on most objective measures. Even the much-ballyhooed "attach rate" seems to be have been only slightly worse than the XBox360 & PS3, certainly not enough to make up for anything.)
Microsoft is currently a narrow 2nd out of 3, in imminent danger of becoming 3rd of 3 in a year or two (in a parallel world with no new consoles), but common wisdom would seem to have them outselling everybody by 4 to 1 or something, which isn't even close. At least when Sony acted like masters of the universe with the PS3, they actually were the masters of the universe. Microsoft's attitude has me very confused.
I think a case can be made for the 360 being more valuable than the PS3, though, just because of the online service offered by Microsoft. They had at least 20 million users paying for gold in January of 2012, which comes to around a billion dollars a year for Microsoft. Who knows what the operating costs are, but I'm sure they're doing well, especially considering that they show advertisements on top of the subscription revenue.
I can't find any numbers for PS+, but I'd be shocked if it's anything comparable to what Microsoft has going.
Are you serious? Do you mean a 2D Mario with actual effort put into it? Because that's Nintendo's biggest series in the ones you listed. Also, all of those games were available on the Gamecube (excepting 2D Mario), and Wii U is basically selling at Gamecube levels. I think it's important to note that the philosophy Nintendo has with the Wii U is more their Gamecube philosophy than Wii philosophy. Look at what Iwata had to say during the respective console cycles. I agree that it's the games, but more specifically it's their lack of interest in focusing on the games that sell systems (hence their horrible treatment of 2D Mario).
I'm inclined to believe that after three years of the Wii being sold out in stores, Nintendo went straight back to the strategies that led to the abysmal sales of the Gamecube. This led to significantly lower sales for the rest of the Wii's life and led to Gamecube-level sales for its successor, the Wii U.
Can you imagine what pundits would say if Apple released a new product that didn’t immediately make money hand over fist, let alone pissed away this much money over more than a decade? Sales are emphatically not what matters here.
I have no idea what you’re talking about when you say Nintendo’s returning to the “Gamecube philosophy” with the Wii U. The GameCube was a relatively powerful (more powerful than the wildly successful PS2, and pretty close to the Xbox) system that had a pretty standard controller, used (mini) optical discs, which was a first for Nintendo. It didn’t fail miserably like the Xbox and Xbox 360 have (the Xbox 360 hardware having had a special problem with failure), unless we’re still smoking crack, but it also didn’t sell 100 million units like the Wii or PlayStation 2. The Wii was not very powerful for the time, but had a unique controller and otherwise appealed to casual gaming, and has now sold about 100 million units. Nintendo has undeniably won this generation in the marketplace, even if the Wii doesn’t appeal to hardcore gamers with inflated perceptions of self-importance. There’s actually kind of a pattern: the most powerful system never sells the most units (e.g., Wii vs PS3/Xbox 360, PS2 vs. GameCube/Xbox, PlayStation vs. N64, SNES vs. Genesis I think), so while this seems like a risky strategy, it probably isn’t really.
I think the Wii U exactly continues the “Wii philosophy”. The problems Nintendo is having so far with Wii U sales probably stem from a combination of poor marketing, to the point where people don’t even realize it’s a new system because Nintendo has gone too far trying to tie it to the Wii brand, and a lack of titles for their loyal audience who buys Nintendo’s systems to play Nintendo’s games. I own a Wii U and not a 3DS, but it seems like the 3DS is getting a lot more first-party titles than the Wii U has so far. Once Nintendo starts getting out stuff like Pikmin 3, a new Super Smash Bros. game, a new Mario Kart game, an HD Zelda game, a hardcore 3D Pokémon adventure, game or whatever, I think the system will start looking a lot more attractive. It’s kind of too bad they just released a Luigi’s Mansion sequel, a Paper Mario title, and an Ocarina of Time remake for the 3DS because they probably could’ve used some of that for the Wii U.
Huh?
Ok, I know I'm out of touch with console gaming ... but ... Huh?
I'd say Xbox, as no other console is named the Xbox except for the one that came out in 2001.
But to clarify:
In 2001, Microsoft released a game console known as the "Xbox".
In 2005, Microsoft released a follow-up game console known as the "Xbox 360". To differentiate the original "Xbox" from the "Xbox 360", it was common for console gamers to call the first "Xbox" the "Xbox 1". As in, "Remember playing Halo LAN on the Xbox 1? Good times!". "Xbox" alone generally meant you were talking about the current "Xbox", the "Xbox 360". Adding the "1" made things clear that you were talking about the original.
In 2013, Microsoft revealed (but hasn't yet released) another follow-up game console known as the "Xbox One".
[1] This shows the PSone and the screen http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/PSone.jpg
It seems like an oddly -aughties convention for something coming out in 2013. Even Apple just stuck with numbers and a simple designation for the iPhone line, though they did something similar to MS with "The New iPad" groan
Today's 7 year olds grew up in a world where Xbox, Playstation, Wii, Facebook, Android and iPad are a normal part of their universe. There's nothing novel or special about them. If this generation of consoles finds its audience with this age group like the Super NES did for me when I was growing up, the Xbox One, PS4 and Wii U will be much-loved despite their strategies, flaws, cloud computing, DRM or achievements. They will just be loved if they have good games.
We're all cynics who can look back and compare now to then, exclaiming how Facebook and Apple have stolen the market. But for 7 year olds, the world is the world, and they're only getting started. I envy them for the ability to be naive about this stuff. :-)
They sure don't make games and systems like they used to.
No doubt this is driven by publishers, who'd rather focus on big topline profits on new releases than double-dip (or triple-dip) old titles. There's less and less ROI in investing the time, resources, and manpower to build emulation for old console hardware, or to get developers to do the same for their old games.
That being said, I predict we'll see a golden age of backwards compatibility and cross-platform titling within a few console generations. Not for folks like you and me, whose old (by now, ancient!) games are evolutionary dead-ends. But for the 7-year-olds of today, whose consoles are basically just fancy PCs in shiny shells -- and whose games are going to be built very similarly, regardless of platform, and distributed digitally.
Way back even before the 8-bit NES, the Atari 7800 was backwards compatible with Atari 2600 games. So was the ColecoVision, although through a hardware adapter that basically was an entire 2600 on a chip outputting raw video to the ColecoVision.
And the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive had an adapter to play 8-bit Sega Master System games, running the SMS code on an auxiliary sound Z80 in the Genesis, so slightly hardware assisted but mostly built into the console.
This was a supplementary point to the parent post about how old hardware can still be played today, while today's hardware won't be playable in 10 years.
I can see how my comment, as phrased, led to a lot of misinterpretation. My apologies on that.
In all honesty, the digital era could well be a boon for backwards compatibility if anyone tried enough. Nintendo are a great example, packaging up old games to be sold on the Wii Store.
PS2 had it for free from the design that used the PSX-on-chip as I/O processor. Later consoles had been more integrated and the BC hardware had been additional cost. This is why BC has been removed from PS3 and Wii during cost reducing revisions.
Thank goodness for emulators.
This overlooks a use-case that is common in my home: browsing the web with others in the room. It happens all the time in my living room that there are multiple people present and we want to look up something online, or share something with the group. Yes, we could pass around or huddle in front of a tablet or phone, but using the HTPC is the best shared-experience solution.
It's for reasons like this that I'm (so far) heavily leaning towards the Xbox One as my preferred choice as my nextgen console. If it's as fluid of an experience as they led us to believe during the unveiling (which is a big if), the Xbox One will become the #1 used device in my home. It will be the best way to view content in my living room, without having to hunt for remotes or wireless keyboards or switching inputs. And yes, it will also play triple-a video games. Sign me up.
Brad Pitt and Catherine Zeta-Jones are notable to a certain set of people. However, they are probably not notable to a large swath of South American tribespeople or even the 7+ billion people on Earth at large. This doesn't mean they aren't notable people in certain contexts.
Now, once again, Marco is writing an article to his audience, and his audience is aware of Tumblr and Instapaper and they find those products notable.
It's notable to his audience. Is this really that hard for you to figure out? Or do you have some personal anger/beef with Marco?
This really jumped out at me as a silly statement to make.
Isn't the general idea of innovation that you imagine what people might want or need and then you build it? Why is it misguided for Microsoft to be trying something new that they think people will like?
My experience with browsing the web on a Smart TV is that opening the browser was a hassle, the interface was awkward to use (buggy on-screen keyboard), it was extremely slow, seemed to give me mobile versions of sites and - for some reason - was unable to stream content smoothly. If I had to guess as to why people don't browse the web on their TVs, it would be because the technology sucks. Mobile phones had browsers for years before the mobile web really took off. TVs could be the same. A few use cases that I can think of from my immediate family:
* Streaming web content while doing something else. Watching online guitar lessons while playing along, for instance.
* Watching TV while using another application. Tweeting while you watch chat shows, Skyping with friends while you watch a movie, creating animated .gifs on the fly and posting them to Tumblr.
* Browsing in a group. Huddling around a screen and/or passing a device from person to person is sub-optimal.
* Quick, voice-initiated browsing or searching. Currently performed using phones/tablets, this could easily spread to televisions if the technology existed. Pause your movie, open a browser, find a restaurant that delivers and order food without going hunting for your phone.
Never underestimate the power of Pokemon though. That alone can potentially change the tides.
The Wii U may make a comeback when an original Mario or Zelda game comes out for it.
The mistake Nintendo continues to make (which it made previously with the Game Cube) is releasing a new console without a "Oh my god I have to play this!" game.
So far Sony and Microsoft have not announced "Oh my god I have to play this!" games, either. At least, IMHO.
When everyone you know, including your 85 year-old grandfather, is getting in on the bowling/tennis action you know Nintendo did something right.
The N64, SNES and NES all released with "Oh my god.. " games as well.
Wii Sports is probably one of the most important bundled games in console history. It was a killer app with system-selling universal appeal reaching well beyond just gamers.
Screw Mario; what about Sonic? Sonic: Lost World looks like the coolest and most innovative thing they've done with that long-beleaguered franchise in well over a decade, and harks back to the radical experimentation they were trying with Sonic X-Treme in the mid-90s. It's my "oh my God, I have to play that" game, anyway.
Honestly, I think part of the problem with the Sonic franchise since it went 3D is that there's been too much innovation. Every game has to have some "revolutionary" new feature without the basic gameplay being polished - three characters at once in Heroes, cars and guns in Shadow the Hedgehog, the mach speed zones, vehicles, and telekinesis in Sonic 2006, the swordplay in Black Knight, the list goes on. I've always thought they would've been much better off going back to the style of the Sonic levels from the Adventure series, perfecting that, and then building on it with new features.
That's more the approach Nintendo took. Super Mario 64 laid the solid groundwork for all the 3D Mario games since and Sunshine and the Galaxy games were able to play with the formula a bit.
Anyway, Sega have hired a couple of writers (the writers of Happy Tree Friends as it turns out) to take Sonic in a completely different, more cartoony direction.
You are so right. It's annoying that the standard for "gamer" has become FPS players.
In my day, hardcore gamer meant you could have been into any genre, whether it be Japanese style RPGs, Japanese style shooters (I'm talking Raiden or Gunstar Heroes, not FPS), or fighting games.
The only reason why I keep a PS3 around is for stuff like Street Fighter and King of Fighters -- stuff that a "modern gamer" (i.e., gamers from the 360 era and forward) would probably call niche.
With very few exceptions, most of the heaviest gamers I know play games from almost every genre, and the more genres they play, the less likelier it is that they call themselves "hardcore".
Consider for example how the Monster Hunter series became a cultural phenomenon in Japan and made the Playstation Portable incredibly successful. In contrast Sony's Monster Hunterless followup system, the Playstation Vita, has been a failure.
Of course it's impossible to predict which games will become phenomenons (though Nintendo seems to strike gold more often than others) and so when predicting game industry fortunes you have to make a prediction ignoring the possibility of a random breakout title, but then footnote that "of course anything could happen."
I don't think I've read a more accurate summery of the Xbox One than the above quote.
I'm not saying that many people do this, but I'm saying many would.
Back in the days when we had to use WAP to get web access on phones, I'm sure nobody imagined that we'd be doing desktop style browsing on the small screens of our phones.
Even having PDAs/phones with great screens sucked. I had a Toshiba e800 PocketPC with a VGA screen, but browsing on that thing sucked. And then in 2007, along comes Apple with phone having a less dense screen than my e800 but a vastly better browsing experience. And now, with awesome browsing experiences available on all smartphones, people have trouble remembering how the Internet on a phone used to suck horribly.
Obviously browsing the web on a TV is not a good experience. But using apps could be great. They demo'd skype and a fantasy sports app, and both look like great use cases. As we all know, the Netflix app is one of the best reasons to own a console. TV apps will happen when someone comes along with a good development environment, reasonable distribution terms, and a large volume of users.
The Wii was truly innovative. Everyone want it and to play it. Adults enjoyed it, they played with their kids. I remember my co-workers raving about them playing bowling with the family every night.
I see that not in the WiiU.
Basically, a return to the hardcore world they'd abandoned with the Wii, taking what they'd learned from the DS and bringing it over.
The device seems to be a half-hearted move back towards core gamers, but they kind of got lost in the middle and got interest from nobody. Perhaps it's doing better in Japan where there's more room for that middle content - for complicated, elaborate overwrought single-player experiences without screaming about hardware power.
That said, I don't agree with his take on consoles. Though I'm a little unimpressed with the Wii U, "almost changed nothing" is an exaggeration. HD Video, tablet controller, improved online functionality, etc. are all big to most gamers.
Also "the best casual gaming device for most people is the iPad Mini" may be true, but that's not in my mind what the Wii was good at. Wii was one of the best party-game consoles ever made (IMO only beat by the N64, however PS1/2 and XBox were great as well). Online gaming is more convenient for hardcore gamers, but if you just wanna have a few drinks and some pizza in a buddy's basement, nothing rivals Mario Kart or Smash Bros.
I'm a die hard PC gamer, but as soon as Smash Bros. drops for Wii U I'll be buying one. Halo is the only other exclusive title I can think of that has this kind of notoriety.
But my reasoning against PS4/Xbox One is that gaming PCs are not selling well; phones/tablets are. The latter will be sudden death to consoles.
PS2 is the best-selling video game console to date http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_conso...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/28/business/global/sonys-brea...