The State of Affairs | Jonathan Soltan
Jonathan Soltan analyses the gaming industry as it stands.
With the recent announcement that the original Mass Effect will be released on the PS3, I started thinking how the 360 doesn't have all that many exclusives. With the exception of Gears of War and Halo, there are no other huge franchises. This, in turn, made me look back at E3 this year, the biggest event in the gaming industry, where Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft had their conferences, showcasing their games and plan for the year, but they all had surprisingly different focuses. Sure, they all had games there, but it seems they are travelling down increasingly divergent paths.
If you look back at the last generation of consoles (PS2, Xbox and Gamecube) they all did pretty much the same thing. Yeah, the Gamecube had those weird small discs, but they were all games consoles for gamers. And then the Wii came out and it changed the whole game. Now there were millions of people who had never played games before... playing games! Needless to say, Microsoft and Sony had to get in on the act. Microsoft released the Kinect and Sony came out with the Playstation Move. Neither has lived up to its promise and both came to the market too late to capitalise on the success of the Wii.
Now Nintendo, despite what they told us last year, have their new console (the Wii U) pointed squarely at the “casual” market again. This time however, Sony and Microsoft have decided to steer clear of that market. Sony gave it another go earlier this year with the launch of its latest portable, the Playstation Vita. Sporting a touch-screen and a rear touch-pad, it was greeted with an overwhelming shout of “we already have iPhones for that stuff!”. It seems that Sony have finally learned their lesson and have started making games for gamers with Assassin's Creed 3: Liberations and Call of Duty Black Ops: Declassified, both triple A franchises, coming out in just a few weeks and looking almost as good as their console counterparts. This is actually indicative of Sony's whole strategy at the moment: focusing on games. With thirteen fully-owned development studios of its own, it's not doing too badly in that regard and that's a good thing for us gamers.
Microsoft has decided to go in a different direction entirely and this was plain to see at their E3 conference, with the debut of Xbox SmartGlass. This is an application intended to link together your Xbox, Windows phone and Windows 8 PC in a setup chillingly similar to Skynet. It's obvious that Microsoft are starting to move away from pure gaming and are beginning to morph the Xbox into an all-encompassing entertainment center rather than a games system. And they have the statistics on their side. In the U.S. more people now use their Xbox's for non-gaming activities than gaming ones.
With these three different approaches, it'll be interesting to see how different the next generation of consoles will look and whether or not the Big Three will keep to their current strategies. Personally, I think they'll stay on their current tracks, for a few years at least. But the games industry is always full of surprises, and that's what makes it so interesting.