Will the PS3 and 360 gap grow or close in 2011?

[NotStan]

jhuff394 said:

NotStan said:

jhuff394 said:

I'm thinking that when some of the big exclusives come out for ps3 this year, the gap will close....

The kinect hype has already died down and is clearly not the least bit interesting to Europe or Japan at all...

PS3 dominates Europe... It dominates Japan.... But Americans seem to have become attached to buying an American console....

In fact if you really think about it... Microsoft really needs to make sure the xbox keeps smackin the PS3 in America every month... cuz without its great U.S. numbers... It will fall second to ps3 world wide every month..

Y'know you could at least try to be less biased and more reasonable. It's unbelieveable you know. I am more and more baffled by your posts.

You are right...

It does usually end up sounding biased... but i did take note to say that xbox keeps smacking the ps3 in America.

I really do love the microsoft company and believe it or not, own both consoles...I guess I'm just bothered by the "casual" direction that the xbox 360 is taking...

It worries me that one day all games will be casual.... why bother spending massive money, massive development, and doing exteremly difficult programming  if much simpler games sell even more...

I like the Uncharteds and the Killzones and Crysis and Gears, and i dont want them to end.. and the way the industry is heading it seems like sooner or later these developers will realize they can make just as much profit with half the effort and resources.... ya dig?

The casual direction won't effect 360 in any major way. If you think about it the drought of core exclusive titles could be blamed on the fact that quite a few of them were released in the 2009/2010 period, if a game is great it'll get a release every 2-3 years rather than annually. Considering MS released most of it's IPs in 2010, it's understandable that the 2011 will be a droughty year, hence the casual direction I think, because of the amount of shovelware that can be produced to maintain the high software sales to make up for the lack of exclusive that will likely appear in 2012/2013 area. If you look at the PS3 lineup, it is beastly, and that's because of the fact that most of them have been released 2009. If an exclusive has annual release then in most cases, it's not a very well made exclusive with slight tweaks to it's design that would not justify the full pricetag.

At the end of the day, Sony just have way more IPs from the days of PS/PS2 to dig into whereas MS only has the XBox library to go by, most of which was multiplatform as PS2 was just too big of a machine to be ignored. I don't think MS will give up on the core audience, as it is after all a core console and even the original Xbox was aimed at the "mature" audience rather than general audience. Ie 20-30 age group. It's just now Live is infested with f'ing kids left and right.

It won't ever get to the stage where developers will just stop producing those games. Most of them do something they like and what makes profit for the business, as long as those franchises continue to sell I don't see the reason to switch to producing loads of random Kinect/Move titles that are mainly aimed at the casual audience.