Oppo
Member
So, I like Chris a lot as a writer and general game dude. I've seen him speak at PAX and otehr places and I think he's a good guy. I don't specifically mean to single out Kohler, I just think he's repeating a common console industry argument, and articulated it better than most, so I'm using it as a template.
That said man did he ever whiff this end-of-2012 article:
Consolation Prize: The Game Console Is Dead. What Will Replace It?
Please read my responses here in the tone that I intend, which is mostly playful ribbing... but I almost couldn't disagree more at the time I originally read the piece, and now, I think it's safe to say this was, and continues to be, way off the mark.
A few points:
There's our central thesis. Let's just make a note of that for now.
I believe this is the first error new paradigms and models have undeniably become more prominent, some spectacularly so, but this is not necessarily a full-market shift. Not either/or. In additon-to. We still have the old guard and the new guard (iOS and the like), apart from a couple of crazy shining stars financially, has not in fact made much of a dent in any market apart from what Nintendo is trying to court, arguably.
PS4 just crested 6 million sold. Xbox One is clobbering Xbox 360 in sales. Handhelds are struggling but that's not strictly the console market. The Wii U is practically stillborn, however, but that has as much to do with their own very specific shift towards the casual market (and rejection thereof). Nintendo tried to change the most, and they have had the least success. Quite the opposite, it's a disaster. They changed immediately and died.
This para... jeebus. I just couldn't disagree more. Consoles have never done anything best other than ease-of-use and immediacy, and even then not always. And I don't think anyone actually prefers Angry Birds to Mario who's over 6 years old. I think they prefer Minecraft to both, actually.
Sony has seemingly discovered exactly how to not min-max, and it's called courting indie developers aggressively. They now have a steady roll of low-priced, indie games, filling out the former "B tier" quite handily, and neatly sidestepping the pricing and uber-budget problem of the bigger companies (see AC3 vs AC4 below).
I'm gonna leave out the Peter Moore quotes.
The PC stuff:
It's early days for Big Picture and Steam Machines yet, but they are not really setting the world on fire, safe to say. The Machines initiative in particular seems confused and incoherent.
So Ubi continued going straight down the former road and AC4 just blew that game away with pretty much exactly the same dev process. Sales wise & quality wise.
I do agree that there may well be increasingly fewer "monster games" but compared to the past, there never were a huge number of those games to begin with, and they almost never sold what modern games sell. Absolutely there are budget problems at the AAA end, much like big feature movies, but I can't take that and project it everywhere. The documentary renaissance of the last few years reminds me of the Indie game renaissance very closely and I can't see how the budget of John Carter much affects the budget of Jiro Dreams of Sushi, at an industry level, or any level really.
The sales of GTA V, and now the PS4, have wiped this argument off the face of the earth. Sony is doing almost exactly what the article is warning about treading the same path, just more power and still high-priced relative to mobile and it's a huge success.
How do we account for this?
In my mind, and throughout all my 30+ years of playing video games, apart from the Atari "crash" I have never really seen the industry collapse. It just gets bigger and bigger. Sure there are up and down years but overlal the trend seems clear. And new methods and platforms spring up, and sure some of them make preposterous amounts of money (truly)... but I think we really need to rethink this idea that it means other models will be replaced. Games seem to be resembling book publishing more and more these days; high downward price pressure keeping things mostly in check; nascent digital models actually supplementing, rather than supplanting, the old brick-and-morter/physical copy ways... hell, even the #noDRM backlash that has kept discs working full time on the Xbox One... nothing got replaced. It just grows and grows and mutates and stumbles and keeps growing, in every direction. Mobile, VR, everywhere.
The home console is anything but obsolete. It has raged back harder than ever. It just has lots of company now.
This turned out much longer than I expected it to, sorry about that. Still love ya Chris.
That said man did he ever whiff this end-of-2012 article:
Consolation Prize: The Game Console Is Dead. What Will Replace It?
Please read my responses here in the tone that I intend, which is mostly playful ribbing... but I almost couldn't disagree more at the time I originally read the piece, and now, I think it's safe to say this was, and continues to be, way off the mark.
A few points:
In November, Nintendo will release Wii U, the first update to the groundbreaking motion-controlled gaming console that took the industry by storm in 2006. Pundits and developers presume Sony and Microsoft will quickly follow suit with their own updated game consoles also the first in years though neither have confirmed it.
Assuming all of these new machines arrive as predicted, theyll hit store shelves at nearly the exact moment when the venerable game console, and the business model that sustained it, became obsolete.
There's our central thesis. Let's just make a note of that for now.
The last generation of devices has been bigger than any previous one. Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo combined have moved over 225 million home game consoles since their launches in 2005 and 2006. Thats a stunning success, especially when you consider the consoles were just a Trojan horse for the real business of selling billions of game titles at a wallet-thinning $40 to $60 a pop.
...
Nearly seven years have elapsed since Xbox got an update an eternity in hardware manufacturing. In that time, the $67 billion worldwide game business has shifted radically, forcing far-reaching changes in everything from pricing, game design, distribution, audience expectations and devices.
I believe this is the first error new paradigms and models have undeniably become more prominent, some spectacularly so, but this is not necessarily a full-market shift. Not either/or. In additon-to. We still have the old guard and the new guard (iOS and the like), apart from a couple of crazy shining stars financially, has not in fact made much of a dent in any market apart from what Nintendo is trying to court, arguably.
Anticipating the shifting sands for consoles, Microsoft this week unveiled a slate of new features for Xbox that aim to turn it into a new type of entertainment platform with hooks to mobile devices, cheap gaming apps, video streaming and music a move that comes even as it is poised to release the latest sequel in its blockbuster Halo franchise. The dual message couldnt more clear: Consoles are bigger than ever, and they need to change immediately, or die.
PS4 just crested 6 million sold. Xbox One is clobbering Xbox 360 in sales. Handhelds are struggling but that's not strictly the console market. The Wii U is practically stillborn, however, but that has as much to do with their own very specific shift towards the casual market (and rejection thereof). Nintendo tried to change the most, and they have had the least success. Quite the opposite, it's a disaster. They changed immediately and died.
Actually, Netflix and Halo. The rest of the "smart apps" have barely made a scratch. You could make a case for HBO GO. The rest is just bonus. No one cares as long as they can play and chat online. Modern TVs come with smart apps built in and even then when we say "smart apps" we're mostly talking about Netflix and services like it, which tend to skew geographically (LOVEFiLM in UK, Amazon/Hulu in USA etc).The videogame console as weve always known it actually died a few years ago. It keeled over somewhere around the time that Microsoft redesigned the Xbox 360s user interface so you had to tab through Bing, Home, Social and Video before you got to the tab marked Games. Ever since, the big three makers have been bending over backward to show that their boxes arent just dumb game players but connected everything-machines that play more Hulu than Halo.
Well even CCP paid lip service to this, but again I believe the problem is not one of erosion, but simply a new entrant, a new model, that was disruptive but not any more so than, say, World of Warcraft, which did not annihilate the PC game market.Everybody who is paying attention is seeing the tectonic plates under the game industry shifting pretty dramatically, says David Reid of CCP Games, which is bringing a free-to-play shooter called Dust 514 to Sonys PlayStation 3. The core model is eroding.
Consoles used to do everything best, but those strengths are now being wiped away. Unlike PC games, which may require finicky custom settings, consoles just work, fans have long pointed out. Well, so does the iPad. Consoles are cheaper than PCs? Not when you factor in the growing disparity in game prices. Consoles have all the good content? Well, if you want Nintendo- or Sony-exclusive games, youll need to buy their hardware. But for many gamers, Angry Birds is becoming more attractive than Mario.
This para... jeebus. I just couldn't disagree more. Consoles have never done anything best other than ease-of-use and immediacy, and even then not always. And I don't think anyone actually prefers Angry Birds to Mario who's over 6 years old. I think they prefer Minecraft to both, actually.
These days, makers of high-end console games need to sell more and more copies, at higher and higher prices, because triple-A game development is getting exponentially more expensive. Thats creating sticker shock for fans, who are increasingly being asked to pay far more than the standard $60 to absorb crippling development costs. Game publishing giant Ubisofts plan to squeeze $150 out of its most diehard Assassins Creed III players on day one is typical: $120 for a limited edition game package and $30 for a season pass of downloadable extra game content, to be drip-fed over the next year.
...
In game design, says Red 5s Kern, the optimal strategy for any game tends to fall to the player known as the min-maxer. A min-maxer quickly finds the advantageous parts of the game and optimizes by dumping all of their gold, all of their skill points into the things that allow them to win the game. And they put nothing into the other stuff.
Game companies cant have it both ways. Theyve got to min-max.
Sony has seemingly discovered exactly how to not min-max, and it's called courting indie developers aggressively. They now have a steady roll of low-priced, indie games, filling out the former "B tier" quite handily, and neatly sidestepping the pricing and uber-budget problem of the bigger companies (see AC3 vs AC4 below).
I'm gonna leave out the Peter Moore quotes.
The PC stuff:
Oh, I dunno, maybe it's because that Linux catalog ain't so hot, you know?Now, PCs are eyeing the living room. Valve recently introduced Big Picture mode to Steam, an interface designed for big screens 10 feet away from the couch. Plug your PC into your television its easier than ever because they both use HDMI cables now and you might start asking yourself: Why do I need an Xbox?
It's early days for Big Picture and Steam Machines yet, but they are not really setting the world on fire, safe to say. The Machines initiative in particular seems confused and incoherent.
Assassins Creed III, says its creative director Alex Hutchinson, is not just the biggest game Ive ever worked on, but probably the biggest that Ubisofts ever worked on. Hell, maybe its the biggest game ever. Hutchinson says development was spread out across five studios flung across every corner of the globe: Montreal, Annecy, Singapore, Bucharest and Shanghai.
Three years, hundreds of people, far too much money, he says of the games development.
Speaking to Edge magazine earlier this year, Hutchinson called his game the last of the dinosaurs. In a follow-up interview with Wired, he said that he didnt mean to imply they were about to die out just that hes noticed there are increasingly fewer of them.
So Ubi continued going straight down the former road and AC4 just blew that game away with pretty much exactly the same dev process. Sales wise & quality wise.
I do agree that there may well be increasingly fewer "monster games" but compared to the past, there never were a huge number of those games to begin with, and they almost never sold what modern games sell. Absolutely there are budget problems at the AAA end, much like big feature movies, but I can't take that and project it everywhere. The documentary renaissance of the last few years reminds me of the Indie game renaissance very closely and I can't see how the budget of John Carter much affects the budget of Jiro Dreams of Sushi, at an industry level, or any level really.
Shoulda picked League of LegendsMark Kern, who led the development of the massively multiplayer game World of Warcraft, now leads Red 5 Studios and is hard at work on its first game FireFall, a PC first-person shooter aimed at getting hardcore gamers to embrace free.
At some level, every hobby has its aficionados, says CCPs Reid. You could play golf with ratty clubs and walk around the field yourself, or you could get the best clubs and plate your golf cart with platinum. Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins echoed this sentiment in a recent interview, saying consoles would become a hobby market.
But in saying that game consoles will become the domain of a selective group of enthusiasts, Reid and Hawkins might be writing consoles obituary. Call of Duty cant put up the massive numbers it needs to with a small base of hobbyists. Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft need to continue to produce game hardware that is desired by a mass market and they wont be able to do that by digging in their heels on old models.
If Kern were to design a game console, he says hed forget about adding fancy new hardware and concentrate on embracing a radical new business model.
Id figure out, how do we get gamers playing any games they would like to play, at free or close to free, he says. When I can try someone elses games for a buck, why should I pay 60 bucks to try your game especially if I hear that its more of the same?
The sales of GTA V, and now the PS4, have wiped this argument off the face of the earth. Sony is doing almost exactly what the article is warning about treading the same path, just more power and still high-priced relative to mobile and it's a huge success.
How do we account for this?
In my mind, and throughout all my 30+ years of playing video games, apart from the Atari "crash" I have never really seen the industry collapse. It just gets bigger and bigger. Sure there are up and down years but overlal the trend seems clear. And new methods and platforms spring up, and sure some of them make preposterous amounts of money (truly)... but I think we really need to rethink this idea that it means other models will be replaced. Games seem to be resembling book publishing more and more these days; high downward price pressure keeping things mostly in check; nascent digital models actually supplementing, rather than supplanting, the old brick-and-morter/physical copy ways... hell, even the #noDRM backlash that has kept discs working full time on the Xbox One... nothing got replaced. It just grows and grows and mutates and stumbles and keeps growing, in every direction. Mobile, VR, everywhere.
The home console is anything but obsolete. It has raged back harder than ever. It just has lots of company now.
This turned out much longer than I expected it to, sorry about that. Still love ya Chris.