Rampant Games - Stumbling New Consoles?

Myrthos

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We've had plenty of articles already on the PC dying as a gaming platform before, but The Rampant Coyote addresses an article from Tech Crunch in which the sales figures of the new consoles are compared to sales figures when the previous consoles were launched. They show a decline and conclude that the console market might be in trouble.

By comparing the technical side of the PC vs consoles, Jay feels that the cost involved to develop for these new console and taking advantage of all its technical abilities doesn't improve the gaming experience much.

I think more than comparison to the PC, the big issue is the comparison to the last generation of hardware. Historically, each hardware generation offered immediate, striking improvements over its predecessor. But each massive leap in technology offered slightly less of an incremental improvement in the overall gameplay experience of the previous one. The jump to 3D helped maintain the progression a little longer, but the law of diminishing returns wasn’t repealed. With the last two generations (Xbox 360 / PS 3 / Wii, and Xbone / PS4 / Wii-U), there has been a greater emphasis on things like online connectivity (awesome, but again catching up to where the PC had been for years), and new control gimmicks. From a raw gaming perspective, the jump to more memory and more triangles per frame with even cooler shaders doesn’t really add that much more to the experience.
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My current nightmare: consoles lose, PCs lose, smartphones win
 
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I think the biggest problem is that hardware is no longer the chief bottleneck in developing games like it was through the 80s, 90s, and even the early 2000s. Now, it's the development cost itself. With modern games costing millions and million to produce, no one wants to take any risks, so game play is stagnating. Further, there is a real sense of diminishing returns in graphical fidelity. You need to spend millions to improve graphics by a relativity unnoticeable amount.

These new consoles demonstrate this by being what I think is the least impressive improvement over the previous generation we have ever seen. They even attempted to introduce steam like DRM (you don't own the software) but luckily it was shot down....for now.

I'm not buying in for a least a few years to see how everything plays out. My backlog is huge anyway.
 
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New consoles are not popular because they have almost no games released and most of those that are, can be bought for the older gen anyway.

Console players just do not have any reason to upgrade to play the games that they want.
 
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Good riddance. The games I like are making an extremely strong come-back so welcome to party I had to live in since around 95 to now, console players. I pray for the day when developers have to make civilized GUI's that do not factor in and favor uncouth console players. I can live with and prefer a GUI that is geared towards M+K and touchscreen over one that is geared towards a controller. When I have to scroll through a list of items to equip something in a PC game it infuriates me enough to want to shake babies. When I see "plays best with a controller" on Steam I almost want to fly planes into buildings. I don't understand why PC players don't demand a civilized interface before they fork out cash. But console players and pc gamers who pay money for console games on the pc have been screwing me for decades so reap what you sow, bitches.
 
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New consoles are not popular because they have almost no games released and most of those that are, can be bought for the older gen anyway.

Console players just do not have any reason to upgrade to play the games that they want.

Yup.

They keep making this mistake over and over. They release the systems before they have enough sufficiently interesting new games for people to have a reason to upgrade their console.

Beyond that, they keep messing up on backwards compatibility.

It's almost as if they've taken lessons in how to screw this up.

That said, the PS4 is selling surprisingly well - and I struggle to imagine why.
 
He's absolutely correct in this - previous generations of consoles have had huge, visible benefits (more colours, 3D graphics, HD etc), but basically there's nothing dramatic that the new consoles can do that the previous generation couldn't, except more triangles per second. Until some absoltuely outstanding games appear, it's a really tough sell outside the early adopters.

And of course, the PC towers above them all, even more obvious now that the consoles share the self-same technology. At least PS4 has GDDR5!
 
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I commented on Coyotes site already, but the gist of it was I am going to wait. I bought a PS2 at launch but it was a couple years before there were any games that I really wanted to play. With the PS3 I waited until it had been out over 2 years and had games I was interested in and the price had dropped.
 
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I bought a PS3 for Red Dead Redemption, and then bought 2 more games over the next year. After that, I bought no more, and it just became a dvd player. It does that quite well, I play games on my PC, and everyone is happy. I doubt I'll ever buy another console.
 
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Technology merges. Soon there will be no distinction; it'll just be your home supercomputer.
 
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Technology merges. Soon there will be no distinction; it'll just be your home supercomputer.

Yeah - that would be nice, middleware such as Unity is an enabling factor, but some way to go yet. Platform specific controls and screen size are still a drag on making universal gaming feasible.
 
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The analysis in the article leaves out some pretty big things in my opinion.

As already mentioned earlier in this thread, lack of games for both consoles is a problem. I guess if you're a FPS-fanatic there are enough titles at launch to keep you busy a while. But for everyone else, there really aren't enough titles, even today, to warrant plunking down $400 for a PS4 or $500 for an Xbox One. I'll pick up both consoles as soon as there are at least a few good titles I want to play but until then, I can keep busy with my current hardware.

The global economy is another aspect missing from the analysis and this is quite a big point. Household median incomes of 'western-world' countries are down and have been going down ever since 2008 with only small niche exceptions. Unemployment rates are virtually up everywhere. Uncertainty in the economy still rules the day. I would venture to guess that most purchasers of consoles are not the users, but the parents. And many parents out there are struggling to make ends meet. But even in the case of teens, 20-somethings and 30-something gamers who buy their own hardware - they aren't exactly rolling in discretionary income these days. Regardless of the many arguments I'm sure that could challenge my points here, the entire subject is definitely worth including in any analysis of so-called 'OH MY GOD CONSOLES ARE DYING' rhetoric.

Lastly, I am skeptical that any perceived incremental-only improvements between current-gen and last-gen consoles is a significant contributor to lower console sales relative to last gen, especially in contrast to my two points above. PC hardware improvements throughout the 80s, 90s, and even 2000s (even now arguably) were very incremental, yet people have still looked forward to buying these incremental improvements. It all comes back to point number 1 - it's about the games. My entire generation of 80s gamers bought new PCs just to play the latest and greatest new release of some series. For me it was Ultima and Wizardry.
 
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My entire generation of 80s gamers bought new PCs just to play the latest and greatest new release of some series. For me it was Ultima and Wizardry.

When I upgraded from a commodore 128 to a PC 386 I never had to by a new system for years. I bought a cd drive and installed it, and a sound card, etc., but all I needed to do was mess around and create a good enough boot disk and could play almost anything. It took me some days to get Ultima 7 to play but I did it. Granted, games like Doom and Myst held no appeal to me, and today, games that put the superficial over substance still do nothing for me, so experiences may vary. But like today, the best games tend to look like shit but play like gold.
 
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I couldn't care less about consoles. My kids like them, but that's because they're young and ignorant. :)
 
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