I remember a good few years ago being told how consoles are the way forward with gaming and pc gaming is dead, today we are seeing increase reports like Kotaku’s recent posting “Weapons of Mass Disruption #3: How and Why Consoles Will Die” on how consoles are dead and pc gaming is the way forward.
What annoys me is that it’s this continuous battle between the two, while we all know pc gaming offers more intense visuals but ultimately cost us an arm and a leg to buy, consoles offer a means for those who are not made out of cash to buy a small machine dedicated for gaming in the living room on the big screen. While both systems allow for entertainment it’s usually the consoles that have the best interactivity for such apps, due to short boot up times most people would prefer a console in their front room to watch Netflix than a pc, it’s also less noise.
But this saying that consoles are dead is completely misunderstood, the current generation of consoles has hit its end of life, this is where we will begin to see possibly later this year at E3 big announcements such as new consoles or at least a small glimpse of the new generation of gaming/entertainment consoles.
While it may cost more to manufacture these consoles you have to think these are big companies with billions so it’s very unlikely to see for example Microsoft who has sold over 70 million Xbox 360’s suddenly go bankrupt because they didn’t recover the loss from manufacturing such devices, that’s because they recover the losses from other products and services such as their Windows franchise and variety of other services they offer. These are the common things that are often over looked in some of these articles because they assume that the company will never be able to recover the losses.
The interesting point Kotaku actually made in this article was at point 3 half way through the paragraph Ben Cousins writes:
“This mainstream sector of the market bought a console because it offered them the best balance of price/performance/convenience. Let's call these people "mainstream console gamers." They are the types of people who buy hits only—Madden, FIFA, Call of Duty, Halo only, i.e. not Kotaku readers. In fact, they probably don't visit any gaming websites.”
Now I’ve been a console gamer since I was introduce to the Sega Megadrive which was indeed many moons ago, I’ve been a PC Gamer for 4 years, and for someone who still plays console games this paragraph infuriates me, because I buy Call of Duty and Halo, and I’m an avid reader of many gaming sites such as IGN, 1UP, Kotaku, GameTrailers oh and I’m also part of LagSpike TV. Now some will say how I’m one person out of a few who visit such sites, but I’m part of a community of over 350+ many of my real life friends even my fiancée read such sites and buy many “mainstream” games.
Smartphones and tablets are increasing in sales because it offers entertainment and a variety of different activities on the move, the ability to link multi-devices together is on the increase. This is something we understand here as we increase the integration between social sites and streaming services into one location. While these devices get more powerful we will see things like the NVidia’s Project Shield appearing, which truly is innovative and offer’s multiple opportunity for both gamers and developers.
This is something that is beginning to happen especially as technology advances a lot faster, and with new technological materials being made such as “Graphene” new technology will be made available and become cheaper allowing for all sorts of new possibilities.
So if you’re a console gamer don’t fear console games are not dead it’s just an end of a generation heck same thing could be said about the stupid Mayan calendar about how the world was going to end it’s just a flip of the calendar and all is good. So I predict we will indeed see some kind of announcement this year at E3 of the next generation of console gaming/entertainment devices.