You want fries with that?
October 29, 2007 by epoch
I’ve been watching the console wars with some interest. This go around has vastly more drama than previous ones and I’ve struggled to put it into words why. I got to thinking about it and realized that we may be watching the beginning of a paradigm shift in how game companies approach hardware, features, and extras.
Console subsidization has almost been a given since the 90’s. As initial hardware releases became more expensive, game companies cut back on amenities. No more pack-in games. Only one controller. It even got so bad, for a while there it looked like Nintendo was going to release the N64 without any video cables (their premise was that most N64 users would own an SNES, which used the same cable). Conventional wisdom holds that if you eat some loss on the console, you can make it up when royalties from the games come in. But the current generation is challenging that in some very interesting ways.
Let’s look at the three approaches to the current console costs and extras.