| KBG29 said: Hard to say how the development game will play out. One thing is for sure though. If Sony and Nintendo want to survive, they are going to have to find a way to make their ecosystems viable products for the basic tasks needed in Home and Mobile computing platforms. If they do not adapt, their consoles will end up in thesame posistion as their handhelds. You have to offer at least the basic standards of the industry. I eant Sony and Nintendo to survive, and I want native playback to live on in the handheld and console form factor. Right now MS is the only current Console player that has an ecosystem that looks set for the future. Sony and Nintendo have a lot of work to do. |
I tend to agree with you. However, I'll note that MS has been talking about making XB the center of the home for 15 years, without success. So, while I think we're going to move past this point where it truly is just about the games, I think it is going to take another change first - the end of the closed ecosystem. I think we'll end up in a spot where we choose our consoles based on the UI/OS, controller, or something else that isn't exclusive software.
MS has already started doing some of this on their own. Going forward, we don't need XB to play Halo or Gears. They have one of the biggest games on planet earth - Minecraft - on all systems. They hope we'll choose XB for reasons beyond exclusive software. As for how successful this strategy will be......
Anyway, yeah, it does seem that MS is playing the long game here. Nintendo is being Nintendo and doing their own thing (I have no idea how to predict what Nintendo will do, or to what extent the public will like it). Sony, while kicking ass right now, seems like more of a great publisher that has largely ignored their "ecosystem". They'd probably prefer that gaming stay the way it is now, as they don't have the deep pockets of MS and Google, so may have trouble keeping up as things change.
On the other hand, I feel like we could have had this conversation a decade ago. But, we're still here, playing on closed ecosystems, (in many cases) putting disks in boxes below our TVs.
In any case, it certainly is an interesting time to be a gamer.
