Veknoid_Outcast said:
Well, yeah, but those are all terrible things. The rise of gaming as a service, DLC, online subscriptions, DRM, etc. Increased brand loyalty and consumer entrenchment is a bad thing, as is the erection of a wall separating the video game faithful from "casuals," who are so quickly dismissed as feckless and disloyal.
I don't mean any offense Intrinsic, but this essay reads like something dreamed up in a corporate boardroom on how best to manipulate consumers, make them loyal to a brand name, and bleed them of their money one microtransaction at a time.
If the console market is indeed the behemoth you describe we should all be fighting back against it, not celebrating it. |
Thats the thing though, we hsve to think bigger. The problem isnt brand loyalty, the prpblem is that the gaming industry is still so competitive that we even still have brands. Look at steam, on the PC scape you have Nvidia, and and Intel. These are all companies striving to provide the means for gamers to do the same thing; play their games. Yet we don't see brutal fanboy wars over which GPU you choose, or which store you buy your games from.
in a perfect world, there won't be a PlayStation/Xbox. Just like there isnt Blu-ray and hddvd still trying to put movies in our homes. I mean the HD twins are just that, what's really the difference between a PS4/XB1? Does that difference justify all the drama it causes?
Yes, I know my post seems pro corporate, but that's not really the posts fault lol; I think it's a good thing that the corporate heads are trying to consolidate their userbase, especially across generations. Eventually, we will lose more players, eventually one brand will be so strong that it will make little sense for their to be more than one.
Either way, something happens, and I see that something being one console and then the PC market.
Mummelmann said:
This development towards paying for every scrap of gaming and needing paid subscriptions to get the most out of your software, is not generally good for consumers. It's an adaptive model that came as a response to the market branching out and production costs rising steadily in the past decade or so, and it's costing you and me a lot more, sometimes for inferior experiences at that. Not to mention the prevalence of huge technical and security issues since the PS3/360 era.
And there will be a general market contraction, you can call it becoming more focused if you choose, but the fact remains that the combined PS4 + One installed will likely be considerably smaller than the PS3 + 360 base, the same goes for overall software sales.
Gaming has grown, but console gaming has shrunk, there's a connection of course, the fringe customers have many options now and consoles are actually less streamlined than they used to be in the PS2 era.
The market has evolved but the thread title is downright false; the console market is contracting, not only will it be smaller than in the 7th gen by a huge measure, but even if you take away the convenience segment consumers for the Wii user base, even the 6th gen is a lot bigger, even bigger than the 7th gen.
The console market is contracting, no amount of semantics will change that, but I agree with the overall message of the OP, even if the thread title is faulty.
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it's about perspective. Say after 8yrs, the 7th gen put up numbers like these:
- 250M consoles sold
- $30B in sale revenue (games and services)
and say after 8yrs the 8th/9th gen put up these numbers (mind you, blurring of gens means there really isn't an 8th/9th gen but rather a period of time:
- 200M consoles sold
- $60B in sales revenue (games and services)
Would you look at that and still call it a contraction? Or a decline? Making more from less isn't necessarily a bad thing if it means the less in question are the people that really carry the gens along because those are the type of consumers that really spend on gaming. And the 6th gen is only bigger if again, you only look at hardware sales. But the 6th gen wasn't as service or dlc heavy as the 8th gen. Its a very different market now. Dare I say, I wouldn't have bought an XBox and a PS2 in the 6th gen if I had to also pay for PS+/XBL back down and could download my games instead of buying discs. Oh and then we had piracy, lots of countries in the world then where people bought a PS2 but never once bought a single original game. (believe me I know)
SvennoJ said:
Veknoid_Outcast said:
Well, yeah, but those are all terrible things. The rise of gaming as a service, DLC, online subscriptions, DRM, etc. Increased brand loyalty and consumer entrenchment is a bad thing, as is the erection of a wall separating the video game faithful from "casuals," who are so quickly dismissed as feckless and disloyal.
I don't mean any offense Intrinsic, but this essay reads like something dreamed up in a corporate boardroom on how best to manipulate consumers, make them loyal to a brand name, and bleed them of their money one microtransaction at a time.
If the console market is indeed the behemoth you describe we should all be fighting back against it, not celebrating it. |
Agreed, these are all tactics to try to hold on to the biggest slice of a shrinking pie. No efforts at all to expanding the market, rather the opposite.
And Intrinsic, why make the consoles profitable (and weaker) from day one instead of subsidizing the hardware if you're only after the loyal hardcore?
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But they are expanding the market, just not how they typically do so. Now its more of a waiting game.
firstly, the PS3 showed that the subsidized model just doesn't work anymore. New tech is simply too expensive and when in competition with people willing to come in at lower prices, you are just making things unnecessarily hard for yourself.
so make a console that is priced right but good enough and get those that are willing to jump in in at the time. The PS4/XB1 selling better than any PlayStation/Xbox respectively is proof that this is the better strategy to take.
Then expand by adopting an iterative model. When the Neo/scorpio is released, most people that own a PS4/XB1 today will upgrade. And sell their perfectly fine consoles for as little as $200 in some cases, or even less. The cost of the current PS4/XB1 could even at the time be at around $250/$300 new. The lower price points of the used and new "8th gen" consoles puts them in the hands of people that wouldn't typically have spent $400/$500 for a console. While those that are willing to spend that much can jump into the "9th gen" iterations of those consoles.
In one move, you expand by reducing the general cost of entry while also providing more expensive versions for the hardcore crowd. You keep everyone happy so to speak.
