kitler53 said:
HappySqurriel said:
kitler53 said:
nintendo has become a laughing stock to the "core" gamer.
sony is plagued by terrible marketing and unimaginative designs.
microsoft has next to no first party to create compelling software.
...all three are really in a weak position if you ask me. next gen could go to any of them or even someone outside of them too imo.
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I would argue that Nintendo is a videogame developer with a very distinctive view of what the direction of the videogame industry is/should be; and as a result their greatest weakness is that they're often at odds with third party publishers/developers who have a drastically different view of the market.
Sony is a hardware developer, and their focus is on producing the "best" hardware in a very limited and linear interpretation of what makes hardware better. You can expect a very advanced feature rich system, but it is often unimaginative and can be lacking in ways that did not fall into the engineer's definition of "best hardware"
Microsoft is a service company, and uses ease of development and technical support to sell their hardware to developers while trying to sell additional services to the gamer through the system. This also tends to be not extremely imaginative, but their focus on developers does lead to a significant attempt to meet their needs; and also leads to gamers being treated like "cash cows" to be steadily milked. To make matters worse, it usually takes people a long time to adopt to services and by the time people care that a service exists your competition may have adapted. As an example of what I mean, Online gameplay is a very important feature for a minority of gamers but has not become a particularly important service to most gamers yet; and even Nintendo (a snail in the race to online gaming) will probably have a service most people deem adequate by the time it becomes a very important feature for most gamers. The same will (probably) be said about digital distribution and social networking services provided by consoles.
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are we having an argument?
i'd have to say i agree with all of your points save one...i think online is already a very important feature. in the console ecosystem live and psn are already very big services to with a majority of the market (when measured in dollars not people) care very much about.
when you leave that ecosystem for the smartphone, pc, or facebook platforms connectivity is every more predominant and important.
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I would say that online is getting to be a very important service, but it certainly wasn't when Microsoft first introduced it (or when Sega introduced it before them); and we're only now really seeing systems being released into an environment where an inadeqate online service might be a significant problem for a system.
My point wasn't really about online anyways, it was more that service adoption is very slow; and (being that online videogames were introduced in the mid 1990s and haven't been of significant importance before this generation) there has been plenty of time for Nintendo to create a competitive online service.
