Hey guys,
Well I've been thinking. Is it too late for another console to join the console wars with any hope of success, or has the market been closed out? And does it even matter what machine games are being played on, so long as the developers make quality games? Is it like saying that Ray was a great movie at Village Cinemas but it wasn't anywhere near as good in Hoyts? I figure that it costs a fortune to develop a console, then convince developers to make games for it and then several times that budget to market the thing. Sony and Microsoft are multinational corportations that have money pouring in from worldwide and diverse investments, whereas Sega and to a lesser extent Nintendo have had to survive primarily on game revenue only, which has led to a decline in sales (but not neccessarily quality).
Can anyone realistically afford to enter the console war at this point in time? Maybe Richard Branson's Virgin enterprise could afford it and market it properly, but I think the combatents are firmly entrenched and the only possibility is for someone to maybe make some headway in the handheld market, though time is running short there too.
Your thoughts?
Starting up a new console has been tried and tried again (phantom anyone), it?s not as unlikely as one might think. Just look back 8 years when VCD?s came out, back then it was SEGA Saturn vs Nintendo 64.
Then out of the blue came Panasonics 3DO and Sonys Playstation, after a year it was Playstation vs Nintendo.
There?s a case in point, the main reason for Sony?s success is that you don?t need to get their approval to make a game, unlike SEGA and Nintendo.
In a bid to jump ahead in the race SEGA released a do or die console the Dreamcast, what some people don?t know is that before they did SEGA branched off into two sister companies.
?SEGA? was restricted to just producing and publishing games and ?Dreamcast? was the centre for developing hardware. That way when Dreamcast failed and went bankrupt SEGA could still produce games, and has done so ever since.
Maybe the fate of Nintendo?
So developing new hardware isn?t as difficult as it sounds, you just have to have a system that allows cheap and easy development of games.
Plus a huge distribution base doesn?t hurt.
That's all well and good Nick, but the industry was nowhere near as big then as it is now. Playstation is not only a household name, it's almost a household appliance. It would be much harder in today's market to overthrow the current competition now as it was then when the market base was predominately made up of hardcore gamers.
Much like Microsoft, people are so ingrained with the Playstation brand that any other system would need to be a) cheaper b) have an enormous initial line-up of instantly recognisable titles and c) be marketed as the next big thing BEFORE PS3 or even PS4 finds itself a comfortable nook in the lounge rooms* of the world.
*Lounge rooms are often referred to as dens in the US, if you're that way inclined.
I don't think the industry can support another console, and the costs involved with introducing a new console now would be a big inhibitor. The amount of money they would have to pour in, from research, production and marketing, would be in the billions. And that's not even enough yet. Building an infrastructure for online play/patches/support/communication/payment (Xbox Live, Sony's station.com), dev kits support, and other things that the consumer base will expect as standard when the next gen machine specs and services are revealed.
And with game development costs being the concern for nextgen, I doubt developers would want to port their game to a fourth console format, particularly when the new console doesn't have the numbers or support behind it. It's just not worth risking.
Microft before they started making the Xbox attemped to buy out Nintendo for what i thought to be a stupid amount of money (20 billion if i remember right). I think that Nintendo may already be regreating the choice not to. I don't think that there is really even room for 3 consoles in the market, and Nintendo seems to be the weakest player at the moment, i can't see them dissapearing in the next few years but i also can't see them lasting another decade.
Once again the power of having an endless suply of cash for marketing will be what wins the war, not which system is the best or most user friendly or even i doubt who has the best games, it will just be who can afford to pay Britney Spears and hords of other celebs to say "play [insert console name here] and you'll be cool like me"
RIP sega, beta video and the 8 track.