The human element to war?

[J_Jay2000]

baka said: There are plenty of other stances to be sure, but most people seem to fall into the aforementioned camps. Some fall into multiple camps, although it's usually possible to pick out one. Who's to say which is the most correct? They're all based on personal preference, even if the preference is how much one wants to spend, and as with any product game companies will design their console based on their vision of the most desireable item on the market.

I completely recognise these stances and agree with you whole heartedly that these groups exist. The theory i'm proposing was that the winner of this gen of consoles will also understand this. By understanding this, and the human element they will be able to make people come to the camp of their choice and hence drive sales. Why are the graphics people so graphically driven? Competitiveness and a sense of pride in owning the superior console? I would think so. This sense of pride in superiority is however driven by companies in order for them to achieve sales and profits. Why are graphics touted as such a big driving factor in games, because the consumer is told that they are. If a company can however reverse that trend by understanding the human element, then they not only stand to be very competitive, but to pick up the pieces of a disbanded market segment and increase their own sales. There in lies the trick. The reverse is also true. Have the market beleive that the way of the future is hardware performance increases and graphical output and capture the audience. There of course needs to room for SIGNIFICANT improvement AND INNOVATION amongst all of this however (the two have to go hand in hand). Did Zelda or Mario64 need better graphics than they had to suspend your disbelief about their fantasy worlds? Look at TV. How much change has there really been in TV since it was first produced as a consumer item. Very little in the grand scheme of things. However now that companies have to fight harder for your money, they want you to believe you need a new TV, a bigger TV, and so you become a true CONSUMER, which equals profits for them. Either way, i suppose what i have been really trying to drive at is that human emotion, the human element in general, and which company best understands it and manipulates it, will decide the winner of this gen. Hardcore gamers in the true sense of the term should be those people at the cutting edge of gaming. If the cutting edge of gaming had been defined 10,15 or 20 years ago as game size and complexity the console race/war would not be on hardware graphics possibilities, but rather on game length, size on disk/memory, complexity, or maybe some other random factor and gamers ability to stick to it. Ther is no money in that though, so of course hardware is pushed. So Ninty this time around have tried to push hardware in a direction that would really re-define what a gamer and what a hardcore gamer are, sony have done the same, but theirs is an image thing, rather than re-defining the actual terms. Now a hardcore gamer to Sony is a business man who can watch a BluRay movie on his HD LCD TV and then afterwards let out a bit of steam playing a console that also matches his sleek surroundings.