Xbox 360 vs. PS3
Back in 2005 I wrote an analysis article for Computer Power User magazine on how I thought the battle between the PS/3 and Xbox 360 would shake out. Reproduced here for historical reference… and keeping me honest, is what I said about the last generation console war before they were launched in late 2005.
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09-26-2005 03:07 PM
It’s my favorite time in the gaming industry-the launch of the next generation consoles! On these occasions, there’s always a huge frenzy of speculation about the capabilities of the new hardware, but on occasions like this, I like to try to pull my head out of the transistors and look at the bigger picture. None of the big console players are executing their strategies with flawless precision. Microsoft is rushing a half baked Xbox 360 to the market, Sony has spent billions on an unnecessarily crazy chip architecture of ambiguous value, and Nintendo remains chronically confused about the importance of online gaming. That said, Sony has probably made the most fatal error. Historically, console transitions have always been major upheavals as the market leaders who have spent years accumulating market share, a development community and a staple of titles sacrifice all of their market momentum to introduce a completely new console that leverages little or none of the preceding generations established market share.
Several years ago, as Xbox was readying to launch, Sony’s then CTO(and creator of the PS1 and PS2), Okimoto-san paid me a visit in Redmond to talk about what it meant for Microsoft to make a game console. I explained to him that Microsoft would link the console to the PC’s momentum, create tools that allowed the large and persistent PC development community to easily span their development efforts to the console and predicted that Microsoft would ultimately try to make online gaming the differentiating feature of its console, thus forcing Sony and Nintendo to try to compete in extremely unfamiliar territory. I told him then that I thought the best way for Sony to compete with Microsoft was to take the PS2 architecture and then add memory, add an alternative graphics path for next generation video features, increase clock rate, and call it a PS3. Doing so would make the transition to next generation features seamless for consumers and developers without sacrificing any of Sony’s market momentum (or the vast investment developers already have in PS2 game engines and authoring tools). It would leave Microsoft perpetually fighting an uphill battle to acquire market share against Sony’s established momentum.
The problem with the next generation of consoles is that when you look past the exciting hardware specifications with lots of memory, mhz and 3D features, what you find is wacky hardware architecture with few tools. Nobody knows how to write games for an asymmetrical, asynchronous parallel super computer. nobody has tools that help create, debug, or optimize games for such crazy hardware. Sony’s only possible salvation may be that Microsoft dug itself into the same hole but to a lesser extent with a dual-processor Xbox 360.
Why do console companies make such wacky architectures? Many years ago Sega’s Yu Suzuki, who was in the process of designing the failed Sega Dreamcast, also a dual-processor console, explained it to me. First, the Japanese see the complexity as a way of giving the console longevity in the market. Each generation of games will look better because it takes developers many years to master the hardware and develop tools that let them take full advantage of it. This also gave Sega Studios a competitive advantage over other game developers on their console because they had the earliest experience developing for their own hardware. Second, its a form of piracy protection, hard to duplicate hardware based on proprietary chips makes it hard for people to crack games and run them on other platforms. Third, basing the consoles on proprietary chips and cheaper components makes it easier to reduce cost of the console over its lifetime so that a console that starts its life at a $300 price point can reach $99 five years later. This very Japanese mentality to console design is severely flawed in a world where the cost of creating a leading edge game is so great that publishers can’t afford to divert resources from creating quality content to dealing weird hardware. Microsoft will have the better developer tools, the better online support, and the least “wacky” hardware architecture in the next generation and therefore is likely to acquire a much larger share of the next console market no matter whose console has the most inflated hardware specs.
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…and of course the 2008 prediction that it would be a LONG time before we saw another generation of consoles if ever… it took another 5 years…
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/80864-alex-st-john-consoles-as-we-know-them-are-gone/3
Oh and here’s a snarky reference to one of my interviews that I’ve been waiting until this day to repost;
I wouldn’t want anybody to forget how “daft” I am. 🙂 Interestingly the “last” generation of consoles before 2020 ARE actually PC’s and of course nobody had imagined an IPad or social gaming back then. Today PC gaming actually generates roughly 88 billion dollars/year in revenue (35% of it is gambling) dwarfing the entire console game market. At the time I made these remarks World of Warcraft was generating more revenue than all XBOX game sales combined. By 2011 WildTangent had become the #1 largest online game site in the US according to Comscore matching Zynga’s borrowed Facebook audiences. Regrettably WildTangent didn’t execute well against it’s online console product after I stepped down, but Valve did, generating hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue from downloadable core games.
Lastly, a prediction from the 1994 strategy document titled “Taking Fun Seriously” written by myself, Craig Eisler and Eric Engstrom outlining the strategy for Microsoft to focus on gaming and my earliest predictions on what the outcome of Microsoft investing in gaming would ultimately be; (Written three years before the first graphic MMOG, Ultima Online was published on Windows and eight years before the online “Casual Game” market emerged on the Internet)
“Connectivity will be one of the most powerful and compelling revolutions in gaming. Most games are isolationist. Certain types of fantasy and escapism are private things, but there are many forms of escapism that are social. Competition and explorations are more fun with real people. The number one selling console games are one-on-one combat between two or more real players. The number one selling PC game DOOM, is most fun when it is networked. Connectivity combined with other technologies may fundamentally change the business model of the game industry from writing 50$ throw away applications, to building vast extensible server based game universes for many players. Multiplayer games could be bigger business on the set-top than on demand video if enabled. Social interaction also offers broader appeal in game play. Explorative, multiplayer universes are likely to me more appealing to women than traditional stand alone conflict driven titles.”
“Beating the consoles
Consoles are vulnerable to cyclical volumes and obsolescence. they rely on each console maker creating the best overall synthesis of 3D, audio, CD, blter, and input device hardware. A bunch enter the market and only a few survive to gain the volume sales necessary to generate a profitable platform. They live a few years and then have to be discarded for a new platform, there is no upgrade. The PC has a persistent installed base, and therefore when console ISV’s are languishing between installed bases the PC is always there, and always a reliable market. By ensuring that the PC is also a LARGE market we ensure consistent title support from these ISV’s, which in turn assures the consumer that the PC will always have the coolest titles shipping on it, regardless of who’s selling the hot console that week. Ensuring that our platform is always capable of being a complete superset of any 300$ children’s toy, and that we have the best tools for cross platform migration makes it hard to build a title for anything else without also being able to sell it on the PC. Better still are tools that “tap” titles off other platforms. Because a platform company can’t be a platform without distinguishing titles. In a race between Sega, Nintendo, and Sony we believe our best strategy is one which “taps” Sony titles for these reasons”
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