Next-gen consoles predictions?

The Game Room
21

This. I think Nintendo has proven that the days of gamers jabbering about how Console X supports a higher frame rate or resolution than Console Y are over.

The Next Big Things in gaming are in the control methods.

What’s interesting is how everyone else should have predicted it. Looking back, video game controls went:

  1. Atari 7800 and its contemporaries: stick, 1 button
  2. NES/Master System: pad, 2 buttons (plus Select on the NES)
  3. Genesis: 3 buttons, and later 6
  4. SNES: 4 buttons plus two shoulder buttons, which were a real breakthrough.
  5. PlayStation: 4/2
  6. N64: 6/2 (well, three, but you could only use L or Z, not both)
  7. PS2: 4/4, plus two sticks
  8. PS3/XBox 360: 4/4, plus two sticks.

See what happened at the end there? Once Sony and Microsoft decided they couldn’t add any more buttons, they just sort of decided that controller development had gone as far as it could. Instead, they seemingly abandoned controller development and focused on bigger and better processors.

Only Nintendo thought outside the box, and the result was a resounding victory in the eight generation console market.

ETA: Looking back at the U-Force and PowerGlove, perhaps it’s not that surprising that Sony and Microsoft didn’t put too much thought into motion control.

22

How much has the price of game consoles increased in the last 2 decades? In the first half of the 90s, they were at about 200-300$ at launch. The xbox 360 and the PS3 were 400-600$. Building hardware that will play games decently 5 years from now costs a lot.

How much has the price of a gaming computer decreased in the same time period? I remember a gaming computer was about 3000$ a decade ago, about 2000$ 5 years ago and now it’s around 1000-1200$.
Will the price points meet? If they get in the same neighborhood, what advantage could the console offer over the PC?

There’s never having to worry about the game being playable over your system. There’s renting/trading in which can keep costs down for some players.
DRM systems are likely to be a pain on the PC (how do you like playing Starcraft II offline? Oh, that’s right…).

23

There’s a big difference between PC gaming and console gaming, and the two are not going to meet up.

PC’s are a ‘sit forward’ experience, in which you are sitting in a chair, with your face very close to the monitor. This puts a premium on resolution and detail. PC gamers tend to be hardcore, so the games can be more complex, require more setup, and can accommodate a large number of alternate peripherals and displays. PC gaming is also a solitary activity, other than online.

Console gaming is a ‘sit back’ environment, where you are sitting a long distance from the display. Resolution is not as important, but standardization is - because console gaming is aimed at a much wider audience and uses simpler control input, the emphasis is on ease of access and gameplay. Console gaming is more social, with multiple people in the room playing the game at the same time.

The standardization in game consoles brings a number of large benefits - standardization of controllers means that multi-player gaming is played on an even playing field - you don’t have to worry about the guy who’s got the whiz-bang programmable keyboard and ultra joystick with programmable attack buttons. Likewise, the game developers don’t have to develop for millions of pertuberations of audio card, video card, CPU architecture and input device. This helps keep development costs down, and helps to keep the games from being buggy.

From the developer’s standpoint, a big advantage of console gaming is that piracy is a fraction of what it is on the PC. Some of the new games cost more to make than Hollywood movies, and developers aren’t going to expend that amount of money just to see their profits vanish from piracy. Pirates on the PC have seriously damaged that game market, and I’m not sure it will recover.

For these reasons, I see more and more gaming activity moving to the consoles and handheld devices. That’s also why new PC sales have slowed down so much - once you stop gaming on your PC, you find that you really don’t need that much horsepower to do everything else. I used to upgrade my PC or at least my graphics card just about every year. But my current PC is a dual-core Athlon machine that I upgraded three years ago, and the video card is a Radeon 5770, one of the low-end ATI cards - and I feel no need to upgrade it any time soon.

24

**Yeah, I guess the Playstation Move is pretty forgettable. **

25

This sounds much more like the Wii than the Xbox or PS. The Xbox and PS are trying to appeal to hardcore gamers. Will they look at the revenu of the Wii and decide there’s only enough room for one hardcore console while the casual market can support two?

26

I hold mild umbrage with Sam Stone’s point. With regards to hardcore gaming, we’re the vocal minority. The game designers are the ones that push us away.

The ultimate point being that I don’t think any of the platforms are geared towards the hardcore gamers. They’re always going to go for the mainstream audience, but make things customizable enough so hardcore gamers can have a nook of their own, and then bitch about how the franchise slowly moves away from them.

27

This is nonsense. It hasn’t been true for a very long time.

Do you really think the myriad of indie devs and big publishers would bother bringing games to the PC if they had to “develop for millions of perturbations”?

Say hello to the standard Audio/Video API’s.

28

[ignorance hat on]
What is stopping a manufacturer (one that owns or secures the proper rights) from developing a PC add-in card or drive/card combination to allow XBox/PS/Whatever games to run on a PC’s hardware?

Software compatibility? Can’t a PC run most other OSs as a virtual machine? Can’t that be done via hardware-dependent drivers on the card, so the manufacturer retains control of the language?

Are the optical drives different? If so, including the drive as part of the card/kit raises the price, but if their still relying on the major components of the PC to run its system (from PSU to graphics and audio cards, and even cooling) it would still be less than the cost of a whole new Xbox system.

So, if MS starts putting out an Xbox card for PCs, it can tell its developers to save tons of money porting a game to the PC because they’ll be able to reach that market as well. From what I understand (obviously very little), many of the edges that PC gaming has over consoles (e.g., more advanced hardware) scale up within a game without the need to program for each incremental step. That is, the same code that runs on a minimum requirements-meeting graphics card that looks good will look great on a high-end gaming machine.

How absurd is this post?

29

My prediction: I will not buy one. Sick and tired of paying $59.99 for a game, then either having to subscribe to Live or buy Microsoft points to even use half the game’s features.

30

I predict a big expansion on the idea of “rumble.”

Maybe something you wear, so for example if you were playing a boxing game you would really feel the hits you took.

31

Nah. All the consoles appeal to pretty much the same gamer sensibilities. The only difference in this generation is that the players have seemingly separated along favorite genre lines: FPS on Xbox 360, racing games on PS3, platformers on the Wii… that sort of thing.

32

There’s a lot more to multiple hardware support than just standard APIs. Gameplay can be affected by multiple controller types, wide varieties of resolutions and aspect ratios require more graphic design, multiple processor speeds means making sure the timing is the same for all aspects of gameplay (including stuff that’s not necessarily on a game clock, like rendering performance). And so it goes. I will grant that it’s not as big a deal today as it was a decade ago, but it’s still there.

33

All things that are taken into account in modern API’s.

I’ll give you that PC games do have to be scalable. They need to cater to not just the high end but the mid range hardware also (at least when it comes to graphic intense games).

So it’s not as straight forward as on the consoles, but the effort required to do this, while not insignificant, is not herculean either. Plenty of devs, small and large manage it.

34

Here we go again. Sorry to say, standardized APIs haven’t fixed it. The world is still full of threads like THIS ONE HERE wherein the OP has several games he’d like to play but can’t due to hardware issues.

Clearly, all things are not taken into account, no matter how much it seems like they should be.

35

PC Gamers will tolerate a lot of stuff that console gamers won’t. Like troubleshooting a bad driver, or fixing stuttering problems introduced by some poorly behaved software running in the background, or networking issues, or whatever.

Console games MUST be plug-and-play. They sell to the mass market, to people who already struggle with rudimentary menus and for whom any kind of glitch means a tech support call.

I’ve had issues with modern games with video drivers, joystick drivers, mouse drivers, audio cards, etc. To support multiple graphics cards they have to have pages full of options for turning on and off graphics features to ensure the game works with low end cards while taking advantage of the high end cards. A console game can’t tolerate that kind of stuff.

36

What are you talking about? He can’t play those games, because he doesn’t have a gaming PC. Even so he manages to play many games.

I really don’t know what API’s and how they help developers have to do with non-gaming PC’s.

Care to enlighten me?

37

Since when? Not this gen, that’s for sure. Just take a look at ANY forum board where the topic is consoles games and you’ll see similar issues. Stuttering, frame drops, poor performance, etc. Red ring of death much? How about updates to firmware or games that mess up online gameplay, or ruins saved games?

This gen has had a lot of growing pains.

38

That’s precisely what Airk is talking about. Because of his particular configuration, he can play some games but not others. Which is always an issue with PCs, but never (or at least, shouldn’t be) with consoles.

39

But that has nothing to do with the original point of discussion I was responding to. Hence my question as to what his point is.

The main point was “Developers have to program around millions of perturbations on PC”. My response was that no, programmers use the API’s to abstract the hardware.

I also pointed out that yes, devs do have to target a wider range of hardware, but that that effort is not such a big deal, given that indie studios with shoestring budgets can manage it. Of course, a game that is targeting a mid-range to a high end PC (say ARMA II) is not going to be played on a netbook. Again, I’m not sure what that has to do with the original point.

40

This is overstating things from the console perspective just a bit.

Games that have “stuttering, frame drops, poor performance, etc.” are poorly made games. Console games (and PC games) have been made that way for decades. The only difference is that now console game publishers can push out a patch to fix them.

And yes, I believe PC gamers put up with this shit a lot more. It’s a running theme in the Penny Arcade newsposts. In fact, Tycho wrote something to this effect just the other day.