Let’s just come out and say it. The current generation is old.
Meanwhile sales of retail games are dropping, fast. Earlier this month, in his excellent regular column for Gamasutra, statistics-analyst Matt Matthews made this startling observation:
“In each of 2008, 2009, and 2010 the 50 million annual unit software point was crossed sometime in March. But in 2011, it fell back into early April, indicating a significant slowdown. This year, unit sales just crossed 51 million units at the very end of May.”
What’s happening is that the percentage of the installed base actually going into stores and buying games is declining. In other words, people are ceasing to use their consoles. This is what happened, catastrophically, to Wii and it’s now happening to Xbox 360 and PS3, albeit less drastically
Matthews and some third-party publishers are calling for hardware price cuts, and this will certainly help to sell more games. But if you haven’t gone out and bought a PS3 or Xbox 360 at any point in the last eight years, your likely dedication to spending lots of time and money on games has to be in question (assuming that youth isn’t the biggest factor.)
Game consoles do not exist in a competition-free zone. There are lots of products vying for your money. Gamers have other options, including PCs and fancy tablets, and while these two options have significant drawbacks, they are both clearly making their mark on gaming.
For gamers with money, PCs are looking like an extremely good way to embrace the future, while tablets, despite their current drawbacks as gaming machines, are so significant that they are becoming a core part of Microsoft’s console strategy, as illustrated with its SmartGlass initiative. They are becoming more powerful with every passing day, and do not require seven-year gaps between new iterations. Then there are unknowns, like TVs with built-in streaming games services, and whatever the hell Apple is planning.
The next generation consoles will offer significant graphical improvements, and this must be the single most exciting innovation. They will also offer cross-media adaptations that allow you to consume more non-games entertainment in more ways, which is less exciting. And they’ll probably offer new ways to interact with games, too, like the improved Kinect outlined in last weekend’s leaked documents, which for those of us who are pretty much okay with pressing buttons, is even less exciting.
So they are interesting, much-needed improvements, but unless there are secrets as-yet undreamed of, they are hardly revolutionary. In the days of tablet computers and Smart TVs, games consoles just aren’t as gosh-wow-amazing as they once were. There was a time when game consoles were the magic boxes of the living room. To you and me, they are essential and useful devices that do what they do better than anything else. But to Microsoft and Sony they are platforms for controlling entertainment in its entirety. There comes a point when the core consumer's interest and the manufacturer's interest diverge, and that's not good, especially if the issue is something as crucial as timing.
This week, Michael Pachter claimed that Xbox 360 probably wouldn’t make it to market until spring of 2014 in the U.S., almost two years from now. He told X360 Magazine, "If I were a betting man (and I am), I would say a spring 2014 launch makes more sense, since hardcore Xbots could get a console without having to compete with moms buying gifts at holiday, and it is likely that they won't manufacture more than a few million units for launch.”
The longer Sony and Microsoft wait before telling us what their console plans are and before actually launching these machines, the higher our expectations will be that they blow our socks off, and the bigger the disappointment if they fail.
Meanwhile sales of retail games are dropping, fast. Earlier this month, in his excellent regular column for Gamasutra, statistics-analyst Matt Matthews made this startling observation:
“In each of 2008, 2009, and 2010 the 50 million annual unit software point was crossed sometime in March. But in 2011, it fell back into early April, indicating a significant slowdown. This year, unit sales just crossed 51 million units at the very end of May.”
What’s happening is that the percentage of the installed base actually going into stores and buying games is declining. In other words, people are ceasing to use their consoles. This is what happened, catastrophically, to Wii and it’s now happening to Xbox 360 and PS3, albeit less drastically
Matthews and some third-party publishers are calling for hardware price cuts, and this will certainly help to sell more games. But if you haven’t gone out and bought a PS3 or Xbox 360 at any point in the last eight years, your likely dedication to spending lots of time and money on games has to be in question (assuming that youth isn’t the biggest factor.)
Game consoles do not exist in a competition-free zone. There are lots of products vying for your money. Gamers have other options, including PCs and fancy tablets, and while these two options have significant drawbacks, they are both clearly making their mark on gaming.
For gamers with money, PCs are looking like an extremely good way to embrace the future, while tablets, despite their current drawbacks as gaming machines, are so significant that they are becoming a core part of Microsoft’s console strategy, as illustrated with its SmartGlass initiative. They are becoming more powerful with every passing day, and do not require seven-year gaps between new iterations. Then there are unknowns, like TVs with built-in streaming games services, and whatever the hell Apple is planning.
The next generation consoles will offer significant graphical improvements, and this must be the single most exciting innovation. They will also offer cross-media adaptations that allow you to consume more non-games entertainment in more ways, which is less exciting. And they’ll probably offer new ways to interact with games, too, like the improved Kinect outlined in last weekend’s leaked documents, which for those of us who are pretty much okay with pressing buttons, is even less exciting.
So they are interesting, much-needed improvements, but unless there are secrets as-yet undreamed of, they are hardly revolutionary. In the days of tablet computers and Smart TVs, games consoles just aren’t as gosh-wow-amazing as they once were. There was a time when game consoles were the magic boxes of the living room. To you and me, they are essential and useful devices that do what they do better than anything else. But to Microsoft and Sony they are platforms for controlling entertainment in its entirety. There comes a point when the core consumer's interest and the manufacturer's interest diverge, and that's not good, especially if the issue is something as crucial as timing.
This week, Michael Pachter claimed that Xbox 360 probably wouldn’t make it to market until spring of 2014 in the U.S., almost two years from now. He told X360 Magazine, "If I were a betting man (and I am), I would say a spring 2014 launch makes more sense, since hardcore Xbots could get a console without having to compete with moms buying gifts at holiday, and it is likely that they won't manufacture more than a few million units for launch.”
The longer Sony and Microsoft wait before telling us what their console plans are and before actually launching these machines, the higher our expectations will be that they blow our socks off, and the bigger the disappointment if they fail.
