Arms Race

Maybe I'm falling for it by even linking to it, because there is so little to it that you'll notice my link goes directly to the third and last page. Summary: the "console war" is not good for gaming, and the rapidly growing "arms race" is going to result in another Soviet Union - of the gaming kind. I'm not sure what the gaming equivalent of the Soviet Union could be, perhaps Chinese Lineage II players.

Overlooking the fact that this guy probably got the article linked to on Slashdot just to increase the ad views crammed into the three pages of text (which in a word processor document would amount to maybe 3/4 of a page) and the other fact that the article says a whole lot of nothing, there is the question you can ask: are consumers benefitting from competition?

While I'm not sure where the author got the idea that Sega had anyone else to blame for Dreamcast tanking, or that N64 and Gamecube were like nuclear bomb blasts (the systems' software lineups were as remote as Los Alamos, but Nintendo doesn't care and they made a lot of money on those products) I will say that competition is certainly a good thing. All you have to do is look at the sorry state of portable gaming or how bad the pricing is on music CD's to realize how bad monopolies are. That is to say nothing of the computer software market, because lets face it, that is a bit of a "duh!" statement.

Competition is always good. Or at least it should always be good. Which brings me to this very facietious statement: "It is a good thing all this competition is providing us with low software and hardware prices." Think about it. The video game industry is in the unique position of being a three horse race - or maybe a 2.5 horse race (I'll explain later) - but who is benefitting? This November I could go out spend $1,200 on two new and one repackaged console, and I still have all of one NFL game to chose from over the course of the generation. There will probably be more handball games to chose from, and that is quite a bit less popular than the NFL, unless you have a particular perverted definition of "handball." There are no longer any good NBA games (which I guess makes sense seeing as where the quality of the league has gone), the fighting franchises that are good now are the same ones that were good ten years ago (or were crappy ten years ago if you count DOA and Mortal Kombat). You're going to see a lot less in the way of quality platform games, and to be honest, I can't blame the developers on that one. There is no incentive these days for Naughty Dog or Insomniac to make them when they can put out generic games where you shoot people and sell many more copies. I'm a fan of FPS, but really, there are enough teams dedicated to that genre. "Resistance" and ND's currently untitled project will no doubt be great games, but it is sad that such good developers had to climb onto such overly crowded genres to get any attention at all. Speaking of competition - when was the last time any other than FPS got some attention at the now defunct E3?

So with three companies making consoles, the choices are a system that is pathetically underpowered, a system where a majority of the games will be missing content so it can be sold to you later, and a system that is trying to do too much. One thing really needs to happen for competition to really benefit consumers: the companies involved have to competing for the same goal. None of them have the same goal. Microsoft wants microtransactions. Nintendo wants you to pay for the same crap warmed over twice. Sony wants to win the hi-def movie format war. I'm not going to criticize the business plan of any of these companies. It is not my place, and anyone who is a gamer should not care. There are already plenty of people who do this, some from within one of the companies itself. But is really is amazing to look at where games are going: hardware that wasn't that great in 2000 from one company, charges for content and services not worth anything from another company, and a murky sense of who they are competing with from the market leader.

Old hardware. Outlandish service charges. No clear goal. All this "competition" has done is hand out three shovels to dig a ditch we were trying to avoid in the first place. You don't need to scrawl "monopoly" in the dirt once you've covered up the corpse, but at least leave some of that fake looking funny money near the plot. Somebody in D.C. decided ugly money was a good idea, and you're going to need it if you want to benefit from all of this wonderful "competition" we're seeing.