@theRepublic
Thanks for finding the presentation, I was wondering about this "shrinking market" idea.
What strikes me about it:
- it's dated 2005
- I see a big difference between "household penetration" and market, and anyway the household penetration ratio seems practically constant. Even considering that multiple consoles owned inside a same household bring less software sales than the same number of consoles sold to less related customers, the absolute number of software sales are going to increase as a constant percentage of households means a growing absolute number of them.
Thus I can't really say how this translates to a "shrinking market" in any way, not hardware nor software-wise. What can be said is that it hints to a bigger potential market.
- It highly depends on how the "penetration" thing was measured, ie what constitutes a "household". What about consoles in college dorms, for example? How are they counted? Was this a poll over a pre-defined set of households, or was it made on an individual basis? I know several of my friends had a console back at parents' and a console with their house-mates where we attended university, while others only had one back home or one that they moved all the time.
- this is US only. I'm pretty sure that the penetration of 8-bit and 16-bit era consoles was lower in Europe and has seen a way greater increase in following generations, especially since the PS1 onward. No, I don't have the hard numbers, I hope every reader who was there finds this reasonable.
@bdbdbdbd...
A thought about the online gaming issue. Just as when it comes to controllers it's all about the software using them, so online is not about having a modem or an ethernet port or wifi in your consoles. But it's not even only about enabling online in your games.
Let's give credit where it's due: MS did a great job in pioneering an infrastructure.
You say that we would have online gaming anyway, but there's a quantum leap between ad-hoc per-conole solutions (and that's all Nintendo is still offering currently) and a centralized, expandable set of services offered to users. The point is not that remembering your friend code is harder than remembering your gamer id. It is that MS and Sony are offering a centralized service where the user is abstracted from the hardware console and the particular copy of the game. Or take things like voice chat: it is obvious that MS was the one who gave the biggest importance to this service, so much that it's part of the standard console software and regulated by general guidelines for all developers.
Online gaming would exist today if MS hadn't entered the scene, in the sense that you could put a tick in a feature matrix. But it wouldn't most probably be the same user-centered (and friendly) experience that I hope all consoles will manage to provide.
