Silent-Q.com

Something has struck me here in the midst of E3.  Most of the games I’m looking forward to are 3rd party games that will be available on both of the major consoles.  I currently have 3 games pre-ordered, SoulCalibur IV, Fallout 3 and Resistance 2.  Of those, only Resistance is a PS3 exclusive.  Final Fantasy XIII has just been announced to be going multi-platform as well.  And the one game so far to really catch my eye at the show that I didn’t know much about before is Mirror’s Edge, an EA game that is releasing this fall for….you guessed it….both the PS3 & 360.

So you have to wonder, does it really matter which console you get anymore?  Granted, there are still a few system exclusives.  These are mainly first-party offerings, and they can definitely be an influence.  Maybe you’re a Halo / Fable type of guy.  Or maybe you prefer some Ratchet & Clank / God of War.  So I’m not denying that there are some exclusives still there.

What I am saying is that the big impact games are more & more multi-platform.  Grand Theft Auto IV, Devil May Cry 3, Fallout 3, Burnout: Paradise, Soul Calibur IV, Rock Band 2 / Guitar Hero IV - these are all titles that either have released or will release for both systems this year.  And pretty much all of them will almost undoubtedly have more of an inpact than the exclusvies for the two systems.  They pull bigger sales, and they usually end up claiming more of gamers’ time.  Personally, I’ve probably put more time into Burnout: Paradise and Rock Band this year than I have any other games.  And I doubt I’m alone.

So is this a good thing or a bad thing?  For years, I’ve heard people say that consoles should be generic, like DVD players, where no matter what company makes the player it will play the same games.  And I’ve always wondered how I felt about that - is it a good model for the game industry or a bad one?  Now that it seems to be becoming more & more of a reality, I’m still not sure how I feel.  Would a generic player lead to the death of quality, system-pushing first-party titles?  Or would they florish even more, with the big companies having more money to put into software developement instead of system wars?

I don’t know.  What I do know is that I don’t want to have to re-buy a 360 to play Fable 2, Viva Pinata 2 and Gears of War 2 this year.  But that just might happen…

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.

Read the rest of this entry »