20 Nov 2006 0721H

2007 Game Consoles for Dummies

You have three choices, and you can choose none of the above, or some of the above. There will be a number of gamers who will choose some of the above but not initially.

Sony Playstation 3: lot of hype on the technology. But we’ve seen over the last six generations of game systems, technology does not win the day. “It’s the games, stupid.” If there’s bad 3rd party product, as one of my bosses once told me back in the Sega Genesis days, it’ll kill the system. And it did in the case of the Atari VCS. If the emphasis is solely on technology (the Magnavox Odyssey 2, Mattel Intellivision, all the Sega machines, the Coleco Adam) it will fail.

Nintendo Wii: Correctly zigging with innovation instead of zagging with better graphics technology, there’s lots of fun designed into the system, but it’s untested. I think they’re still hedging alpha on their younger audience, which they fell back on after they lost market share to the Playstation. Time will tell if they really are innovative or not. The name sucks.

XBox 360: Their race to lose. Neither innovative nor best of class graphics, and the games aren’t much to speak of either. I’m biased because I’m going on my 3rd XBox 360 console due to manufacturing problems. And it was outsold last year by the Playstation 2, a previous-generation game console. That’s . . . not good. But if you want to play Halo 3, or online, you better get in bed with them.

The summary judgement: There’s no first mover advantage with this generation. If you can wait a bit, do so, until some really good things emerge from the fray. Then you can make a decision based on the games you want to play and those that are available for each platform. Why? Because back in 1982, we sat for hours in front of a wood cabinet TV with crappy resolution and some burn in, shooting with blocks at other blocks on-screen, pretending they were tanks, or planes, or spaceships. And we thought that was cool. It’s still all about the games.

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