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I say to you today, my friends, so even that we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow that I still have a dream. I have a dream that one day our people will rise up and truly say "no one system is innately better than the other." I have a dream that on forums across our illusory cyber world, Xbox loyalists and Playstation Lifers can discuss their choices without constant need to reference the supposed sexual preference of the other. I have a dream that one day, tech support and downloadable content will be the same for all systems, regardless of the color of the system's casing. I have a dream that my little systems can grow and enter a society where they are judged not by their infantile and irrelevant symbolic differences, but by the content of their software.
I have a dream.
I have a dream that hardware manufacturers will come together to create a universal console. That they will pool resources to make their collective child strong, inexpensive to produce, and easy to develop for.
My dream is, of course, complete and utter nonsense. The drive within the video game market comes largely from brand competition in hardware. Hardware manufacturers are as tied as anyone, and more so than most, to the success of a particular system, campaign, or game. They compete desperately to ensure their own absolute distinction. Halo kept Xbox afloat while it picked up a following in a manner gamers haven't seen since Mario first slid through tubes to fight princess seizing dinosaurs back in the olden days. The result is Sony's desperate need for their own exclusive shooters, such as Killzone games. While not deal breakers, Nintendo and Microsoft likewise realized, and have been able to act on the realization that the PS2 utterly obliterated them in the RPG market last generation.
In theory, this competition in software development drives the industry to improve itself but I'm not so sure. To continue using the analogy of FPSs, given their incredible popularity in the last five years or so, I've never met anyone who actually preferred Halo 2 or 3 to Call of Duty 4. And yet Halo outsold Call of Duty by leaps and bounds- even though it was not a system exclusive. The PS3 exclusive Killzone games received extremely high marks and also couldn't hope to compete with Halo's sheer sales. Yet the sad truth is, even though so many games seem created purely to compete with another system's exclusive, they aren't competing. Or if they are, not in any constant sense. Instead, a polarization has occurred. Polarized feelings on systems are nothing new. I remember having bitter lunch room debates as far back as 1991 about which was better, the Super Nintendo or the Sega Genesis.
Yet, at the time, I owned both. I simply played my Super Nintendo more, but every game was a toss up. Consider the Adventures of Batman and Robin. On Super Nintendo, it was an impressive, in depth platformer and action/adventure. On Genesis it was a ho-hum run and gun. Meanwhile, Sparkster for Genesis was fast paced, exciting and bizarre. The Super Nintendo version was slow and dull, feeling more like a poor Megaman clone than the game it was a sequel to, the Genesis only Rocket Knight Adventures. Back then, the games were, for me, in direct competition.
Unfortunately, my PS3 cost me as much as both those systems combined, and the cost per game has increased back to the levels they were when video games were a rarity, an absurd hobby to be found only amongst nerdy suburbanites. The systems are expensive to make because they feature hardware so advanced no developer can actually make use of it. That doesn't stop them from trying, and the high production costs that follow result in high price tags for the games as well. You might expect that fewer, but higher budget titles would push the industry to make greater and greater products. Yet it can and often does misfire. Movies cost more to produce than television, but what was a more valuable asset in 1996- Seinfeld, or the Tom Arnold movie The Stupids? The sheer number of mediocre and not especially innovative games that still carry absurd new price tags is staggering. Honestly, is anyone really arguing over current gen Iron Man or Golden Axe? Does anybody care? Only a handful of ultra high budget games are produced, and in an increasingly polar gaming community, it is primarily the systems, and not the games, which compete directly, as most gamers cannot or will not buy both systems. Not that it matters as much as ardent fans would have you believe. System exclusivity used to be the norm, and now is just a rule of thumb, only studios that are actually owned or directly supported by one of the hardware giants unequivocally agree to make exclusives. Notice how often an "exclusive" makes the jump anyway- Eternal Sonata and Final Fantasy XIII to name a couple games closer to home than many of those I've mentioned. Even in the case of DLC, the hardware is what often competes. It's a well known fact that PS3 owners have gotten the shaft big time in the downloadable content department for Fallout 3, and Bethesda is far from shy in saying "Blame Sony."
Some might argue that better hardware will pave the way. Playstation and Playstation 2 were successful due to the relative ease of programming games for them, and how much cheaper discs were to produce than cartridges. Yet Xbox 360 competes with Playstation's legacy despite notorious hardware problems which have taken years to fix. Meanwhile, Playstation 3's hardware is unnecessarily expensive. Sony turned its back on developers, making their system difficult to develop for and as a result, had a less than stellar startup with its current system. As a result, we're left with an unclear winner, and no way to break the deadlock, while the same problems that the systems had at their first release persist. Not only that, it has allowed Playstation 2 to compete with a successive generation years after it was to be replaced, and its life is only now beginning to run down, as it rapidly approaches its tenth birthday and its third year competing with its own successor. This is as much a testament to the impracticality of the current generation as it is to the practicality of the previous one.
It isn't likely that Microsoft and Sony will suddenly declare a love-in and start working on the X-Station. There's a genuine Console Cold War going on. And yet, how many of us ignore the debate entirely? How many of us are increasingly turning our attentions to the handheld systems, unable and unwilling to put up with the high costs, hardware failures, and pissing contests? Without reversing this trend, Microsoft and Sony are only damaging their own consoles by herding developers away from consoles and into the handheld market in which Microsoft has no foothold, and Nintendo has a massive lead on Sony.
Honestly, they could have just shot themselves. It would've been faster.
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