Jason Chen on the Christmas console wars
Ξ November 16th, 2008 | → | ∇ Gadgets |
With all the talk of the gaming landscape being more and more dictated by the casual gamer, you’d think that this Christmas season would be littered with games that target mums, dads, grandpas and anti-gamers; not so much. Sony’s making a big, big push with LittleBigPlanet, and Microsoft has its Lips singing platform but what else is there? What game is being released this holiday which you’d take to your parents’ house and set up for them to play? Right, Wii Sports, Wii Fit and Rock Band.
Why, if Nintendo has proven that the casual gamer can put low-to-mid-budget titles like Wii Fit and Wii Sports at the top of the sales charts, is Microsoft and Sony still putting out so many titles for the core gamer? Because they’re the people who pay the bills. One look at the calendar for Christmas ‘08 and you can see why game studios and game publishers decide to release what they release.
For both platforms, you have Shaun White Snowboarding, Need For Speed Undercover, Rock Band 2, Tomb Raider Underworld, Fallout 3, EndWar, Prince of Persia, Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe and various other tier 2 games too numerous to list here. In exclusives, you have titles like The Last Remnant, Lips, Left 4 Dead, Resistance 2, Gears of War 2, Mirror’s Edge, and Fable 2. Does anyone, even a core gamer, seriously think they could get through a quarter, let alone half of the games on the release list this Christmas? And there’s the problem. Follow along with me.
The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 departments of Sony and Microsoft make most of their money from software sales - especially Sony, who is even now either still selling the PS3 at a loss or barely breaking even. That means they’re counting on software sales to bring in the money this Christnas, and this actual Christmas to make sure their fiscal year doesn’t end up in the toilet. But let’s rewind six months to summer. Do you remember summer? Do you remember ANY games this summer that were on the level of a Fallout, a Rock Band, a Resistance or a Gears of War? Neither do I. The most you got was a Command and Conquer, or a Soul Calibur, or a Civilization series that wore out their welcome years ago. And because of the lopsided release calendar, gamers everywhere had to suffer through three/four months of mediocre gaming.
What’s even worse this year is the current global economic dunghole we’ve buried ourselves in. Sure, people will have plenty of time to five-star songs in Rock Band when they’re unemployed, but they also have no money to actually BUY Rock Band in the first place. There was no way the gaming industry could have seen this mess coming, but that’s exactly why they shouldn’t put all their eggs into one basket; especially a basket that’s so reliant on Santa and the current consumerist mood.
Here’s my message to the publishers and developers in charge of producing the content we devour greedily: diversify, diversify, diversify. Just like you wouldn’t load up your entire portfolio with shooters, or sports games, or racers, or RPGs, you shouldn’t unload all your hot releases at the end of the year to compete with everyone ELSE’s hot releases. It’s like the Japanese puppy cam. Super cute when it’s just six of them, but load twenty puppies in that same space and you’re going to get the type of violence that’s rated M for Mature. Is this a message that’s been delivered before? Of course it is, but it’s also a message that hasn’t managed to sink in…ever. See you all same time next year, I suppose.
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