The New Mobile Console War
The current situation makes me reminisce about the long lost console trilogy that battled for my adolescent attention: Sega, Nintendo and Sony. We old people have tendencies to cling to relics of the past, that made us happy in our youth, and as a consequence never fully embrace new developments. There was simply something cool about the open competition those three consoles were facing. There were excellent games being produced for each console as a result. Each console excelled at a particular area and / or type of game, but none really differentiated itself too much from another.
The current generation of consoles is a bit different. Nintendo made an abrupt 90 degree turn at the beginning of it’s current campaign. Microsoft and Sony still haven’t figured out how to catch up to it, for if / how they want to. As for the Microsoft / Sony battle, you could say they are in direct competition, yet there are many differences to their consoles and their respective strategies that it makes it much easier to segment the gaming population, and therefore reduces REAL competition.
The new developments in the mobile consoles, however, may lead us to the times of old again. I couldn’t be more excited.
- PSP-3000: The best mobile console that never materialized. I don’t subscribe to any particular console or publisher. If I were to pick one console to be left on a dessert island with, it would probably be one of Sony’s inventions. Perhaps a Playstation 2. So it breaks my heart to see how they have squandered the opportunity to take the crown away from Nintendo and make the best mobile console ever.
The potential behind this thing was amazing. All you would need to carry around was this and your cell phone, and you were set. It would play your music and movies, it would carry your pictures, it would connect you to your buddies, and it would have the best games available. The implementation, execution and policies however simply broke what could have been ground braking.
Sony has a stupid fetish to always try to establish their own proprietary physical format. History is littered with their failed attempts: Betamax, mini cd, mini disk, UMD and blu-ray. Yes blu-ray failed. While they were busy fighting with Samsung, the competition had all the time in the world to develop excellent download services as well as cheap upscaling DVD players. The only thing they managed to do was create confusion for consumers, and give their real competitors a head start that they would never catch up to, but I digress. So they included UMD. Why not just use SD cards (maybe a slightly modified form factor) for the games? In one swoop they would have simplified distribution and management of games, saved their customers tons of battery life, significantly reduce load times, and could have even given their publishers / customers cheaper games! The hardware on that device is really good, the screen real estate is excellent. Why not let me extend the functionality of the device by letting me put third party applications on it? That would solve two problems in one: Give the users what they really want, and make sure the device is capable of doing all the things that they didn’t take the time to enable themselves. Whatever the case may be the PSP had the right vision, just the wrong execution. Whenever I talk negatively about the PSP one of the first counter arguments I hear is “but you can jail break it”. That is certainly true. You can jail break it, and the device then gains some of the abilities it should have had from the get go. Still, if this is the FIRST consistent argument, then you know that the company behind it has failed. - iPod Touch / iPhone: This is a very interesting little device. A lot has been said about how disruptive it has been to the cellphone market. It’s very hard to dispute that at this point. Evidence can be seen anywhere from it’s competitors making devices like it, to the overwhelming commercial success the device has had. The focus of this device is an interesting one, that probably has only been observed from PC gaming. It is a general purpose (mainly focused on communication and multimedia) device that has trying to make inroads into gaming. More on that later. The complete focus on digital distribution for not only it’s games, but all applications is also an interesting novelty in the industry. Gamers no longer have to suffer outages for the games they want to play. Developers / Publishers can get more bang for the buck, since the distribution channel only has one distributor. That is both a good and a bad thing, but I could make several other blog posts only on this subject.
- Nintendo DSi: Ah Nintendo… the undefeated king of mobile gaming. Has always held the title up to date. Arguable has always offered the best mobile gaming experience, and most of the time has had the best games.
A recent announcement revealed the new revision of crazy successful console: The Nintendo DSi (Little side note: Don’t the ‘i’ seem a little unoriginal?). In summary they are making additions to it to give it the ability to take pictures, play music, use portable media (SD Cards) and download games directly to the device. Interestingly they are on the opposite side of the spectrum. This is a console that has focused all of it’s life on being just that: a console. Now it is making inroads into multimedia. Once again, allow me to tease: more on that later.
The only explanation as to why they would release this revision of the console now is that they are viewing Apple as a possible strong competitor in the future. Otherwise, the console is still selling very strongly. It would make no sense to release a revision at the moment.
Yet they still have a couple of points to prove:
- Will they be able to pump out the games we want to play? Getting the third parties to line up for thier device might not be as easy as people think. Yes it’s an exciting device to publish for, but sadly thing aren’t that simple.
- Will all games fit into the accelerometer and touch controls? Simple games will fit into this model fine, but more complex games still require complex controls to play appropriately. How far can game design ingenuity take this control scheme?
- Despite their current marketing efforts, will people really think about an iPod Touch when considering which console to buy this Christmas? It definitely is not there yet. Will it get there in the future?
- The application store is an excellent place to buy games. It beats me having to walk down to my local video game store. But like also suffers from the long tail problem. Most of the games at my local game stop are games backed by a big publisher. Most of them also suck, but a certain level of production quality is inherently guaranteed. The application store however is full of crappy, single function applications. Will the best rise to the top?
- The specs on the cameras that will be included on the DS are pretty weak, even for today’s cell phone standards. Will people really use those for their day to day pictures?
- What kind of formats will the DS support for pictures and music? That could be a big limiting factor. Of course, if you support MP3 you are practically set. But what about future ambitions to support video playback.
- What will the user interface be like? Apple has shown everyone that a good user interface can dramatically change the market’s perception of a certain product. If you don’t believe me, put Windows Mobile side by side with an iPhone.
- Will I be able to easily move and organize my media on the DS? People like applications like iTunes and Windows Media Player, that automatically organize and sync thier collections for them. One less chore they need to attend to.
- Will I be able to acquire new media using the DS itself? If the DS partnered with the Amazon MP3 store, thought would bolster it’s media ambitions greatly. The users would have a place to get their media, and more competition would be created in this market. Sadly I don’t see it happening.