Wednesday, February 02, 2005
The Future Of Gaming - Part II
In addition to all the stuff from Part I, there is still the issue of backwards compatibility to think about.
And though it's never been an issue for console systems before, I think this time around it will DEFINITELY be important. This is a problem the PC industry has been dealing with for at least 10 years now. Especially in the last 5. The problem with the PC industry is, "we have all this new technology - new chips, new OS ideas, new interface paradigms, new network paradigms or implementations (IPv6 anyone?) - now how do we get everyone to forget that we just convinced them to buy a system at 200% margin LAST YEAR, and get them to throw that all away and buy all this new stuff?" All real PC people want everything to move to RISC chips, get rid of the legacy of PS/2 and parrallel ports and serial ports and floppy disks and PCI and ISA busses, move on from the original desktop metaphor, (popular) existing filesystems suck, mice suck, qwerty keyboards suck, traditional aspect ratio monitors suck (thank you Apple for stunning 16:9) but no one wants to move on.
I think it was an extremely good move for Sony to allow compatibility between their PSX games and their newer PS2 system. A brilliant move.
I think they will make the PS3 be able to play existing PS2 AND PSX games, but instead of playing them natively (as the PS2 does) it will emulate the PS2 and play the old games that way (thanks to these awesome new CELL processors).
XBox will not be backwards compatible if Microsoft can help it. As a company, it goes against the very core of their business philosophy. Never give away something for nothing - I will expect them to do something like selling an "XBox Classic" in a smaller case (like the PSOne).
Nintendo has NEVER done backwards compatibility before. Until GBA, that is. I love that the cube's games are on 3-inch discs instead of 6-inchers. I think it would be a really really big mistake for Nintendo to go ahead with the Revolution and have it NOT play GameCube games. A BIG mistake. As in, it could be something that Nintendo could never truly recover from if it turns out that they make the wrong move on this issue.
Don't get me wrong here though, folks. I think that pretty much the only thing holding the PS2 in there right now is that it got such a head start by being PSX compatible. The XBox would be pretty much dead if it weren't for a few hits (Halo anyone?) and it's amazing XBox-Live setup. The real innovation in the market right now is almost entirely all in Nintendo's platform, and it's mainly in the GBA arena, though GameCube is having some great stuff come out too. Most of which is being built by Nintendo themselves.
Again, don't get me wrong - I think they're all great systems that do their own things very well. That's what's kept them all alive for the past three years - they found three unique approaches to gaming that all had fairly large audiences. I just hope they can all three carve out thier own niche in this next round as well and keep the competition going.
And though it's never been an issue for console systems before, I think this time around it will DEFINITELY be important. This is a problem the PC industry has been dealing with for at least 10 years now. Especially in the last 5. The problem with the PC industry is, "we have all this new technology - new chips, new OS ideas, new interface paradigms, new network paradigms or implementations (IPv6 anyone?) - now how do we get everyone to forget that we just convinced them to buy a system at 200% margin LAST YEAR, and get them to throw that all away and buy all this new stuff?" All real PC people want everything to move to RISC chips, get rid of the legacy of PS/2 and parrallel ports and serial ports and floppy disks and PCI and ISA busses, move on from the original desktop metaphor, (popular) existing filesystems suck, mice suck, qwerty keyboards suck, traditional aspect ratio monitors suck (thank you Apple for stunning 16:9) but no one wants to move on.
I think it was an extremely good move for Sony to allow compatibility between their PSX games and their newer PS2 system. A brilliant move.
I think they will make the PS3 be able to play existing PS2 AND PSX games, but instead of playing them natively (as the PS2 does) it will emulate the PS2 and play the old games that way (thanks to these awesome new CELL processors).
XBox will not be backwards compatible if Microsoft can help it. As a company, it goes against the very core of their business philosophy. Never give away something for nothing - I will expect them to do something like selling an "XBox Classic" in a smaller case (like the PSOne).
Nintendo has NEVER done backwards compatibility before. Until GBA, that is. I love that the cube's games are on 3-inch discs instead of 6-inchers. I think it would be a really really big mistake for Nintendo to go ahead with the Revolution and have it NOT play GameCube games. A BIG mistake. As in, it could be something that Nintendo could never truly recover from if it turns out that they make the wrong move on this issue.
Don't get me wrong here though, folks. I think that pretty much the only thing holding the PS2 in there right now is that it got such a head start by being PSX compatible. The XBox would be pretty much dead if it weren't for a few hits (Halo anyone?) and it's amazing XBox-Live setup. The real innovation in the market right now is almost entirely all in Nintendo's platform, and it's mainly in the GBA arena, though GameCube is having some great stuff come out too. Most of which is being built by Nintendo themselves.
Again, don't get me wrong - I think they're all great systems that do their own things very well. That's what's kept them all alive for the past three years - they found three unique approaches to gaming that all had fairly large audiences. I just hope they can all three carve out thier own niche in this next round as well and keep the competition going.
