Why The Next Generation of Consoles Are Doomed To Fail

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bmulligan

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Well, maybe. I read a story in USA today that half of HDTV owners don't even know how or what an HD broadcast is supposed to look like or whether they actually have the right equipment to receive an actual HD broadcast. Scientific-America Study Link

While the current user base of HDTV capable sets in the US is at about 4 million and expected to rise in the next year*, saying the HD generation is here doesn't really fly in my opinion, especially when half of these people don't know the difference between 480p and HD. And touting your next gen console's HD capability isn't going to set sales records when only a small group of people will be able to take advantage of it's features. Having played the 360 on a SDTV, I can vouch for the lackluster improvement in the graphics department for the average consumer or casual gamer who still plays games on a regular TV set.

And Sony wanting to put dual HDMI outputs in the new PS3 for the 3 people in America who actually have 2 screens capable of using it spells disaster for the console market in the near future, IMO. With any luck the price drops will happen early in 2007. So, in the end, it may be a good thing for us cheap asses that the big wigs are banking on new technologies before the public even knows what they mean.


* C-net link on current HDTV user base
 
nintendo would agree with you.

i dont think hdtv will be as big as microsoft and sony think it will be this generation... maybe the next one
 
I think this is very indicative of the nature of American purchasing. Everyone just has to have the latest and greatest thing but they don't even know a thing about it or how to use it.
 
I heard that sometime in the near future they are going to stop making SDTV's as the television channels all move over to an HD format.
 
So, because people don't know anything about HD, the next gen game consoles will fail? Did you think that maybe the quality of the games may have something to do with it? And maybe the lackluster improvement in graphics is only for the launch titles?
 
I fall into that category. I have a 27" flatscreen CRT I bought from Wal-Mart and still use the old RWY combo. I might move up to S-Video for this next gen.
 
Dude scientific-america also said that soccer is the most unpredictable sport in the world and we are watching the wrong sports meaning NFL and college football. Please, people might not know about HD but they are selling like "hot cakes" so as long as people are buying HDTVs I'm sure Sony and Microsoft will do just fine. HDTV and the HD focused consoles work hand and hand, if someone buys a Xbox360 they'll probably buy and HDTV as well or vice versa.
 
[quote name='evanft']So, because people don't know anything about HD, the next gen game consoles will fail?[/QUOTE]

we have a winner.
my thought exactly.
im sure i will buy all 3 of the next gen consoles at some point, the rev i will buy at launch 100%. it seems like the focus of sony and ms has been on all this hd crap and muscle (so far the games dont do crap for me)
 
[quote name='kill3r7']Dude scientific-america also said that soccer is the most unpredictable sport in the world and we are watching the wrong sports meaning NFL and college football.[/QUOTE]

Not sure what your point is. Given the large number of sports in the world, I doubt soccer is THE most unpredictable, but certainly it is far more unpredictable and far more full of imagination and creativity than sports like American football where each play is fully planned out and practiced beforehand.

As for any sport being "wrong" to watch, that is just dumb because how much each person likes any given sport is subject to that person's preferences.
 
[quote name='evanft']So, because people don't know anything about HD, the next gen game consoles will fail? Did you think that maybe the quality of the games may have something to do with it? And maybe the lackluster improvement in graphics is only for the launch titles?[/QUOTE]

Yeah, that was kinda my point. I played a few 360 games on a SDTV and I could not tell the difference between them and a regular Xbox games, hence not giving rise to upgrade to a 360, at least not for another year or two when upgrading to an HDTV.

Out of the 100 million households that have a TV, 4% of them have an HDTV. While that number is guaranteed to grow by about 50% next year, it's still a very small user base to actively promote HDTV features in a new console in 2006. All I'm saying is that console makers are getting ahead of themselves and maybe should have waited another year for a next generation release.
 
[quote name='bmulligan']While that number is guaranteed to grow by about 50% next year....[/QUOTE]

50%!? That sounds crazy. I know I'm not updating my set unless 1080p (which PS3 supposedly be able to) comes way down in price. Even then, it better be able to play an old NES and Genesis without a hitch.

I think I'll stick with my 32" S-Video. Works well enough at this point in time.
 
[quote name='Pijaibros']50%!? That sounds crazy. I know I'm not updating my set unless 1080p (which PS3 supposedly be able to) comes way down in price. Even then, it better be able to play an old NES and Genesis without a hitch.

I think I'll stick with my 32" S-Video. Works well enough at this point in time.[/QUOTE]
Not to 50%. By 50%. Meaning it will go from 4% to 6%.
 
that article is probably true.

consoles won't fail next gen though. Sony and MS are pushing HD quite a bit but they are not relying on it. If not uses the HD features of either system, it will still sell like crazy. They are just preparing for the future.
 
[quote name='bmulligan']Yeah, that was kinda my point. I played a few 360 games on a SDTV and I could not tell the difference between them and a regular Xbox games, hence not giving rise to upgrade to a 360, at least not for another year or two when upgrading to an HDTV.

Out of the 100 million households that have a TV, 4% of them have an HDTV. While that number is guaranteed to grow by about 50% next year, it's still a very small user base to actively promote HDTV features in a new console in 2006. All I'm saying is that console makers are getting ahead of themselves and maybe should have waited another year for a next generation release.[/QUOTE]
I don't see how the topic relates to the articles. Just because so few right now have an HDTV doesn't mean the consoles will fail. The reason that these consoles are HD is so that when cable shows are forced to switch to HD and the HDTVs become more cost-friendly to the average consumer, the consoles will be right there ready for them without any need for special adapters or upgrades if they were kept at SD from the launch. This generation will last for the next 5 years or so and HD will be much bigger than it is today, so none of them will fail based just on their HD ability.
 
I read that a Iraq has a fuck load of WMD's. HD is going to take over no matter what, Sony and M$ are pushing HD because we are at as good as where going to get in the graphics dept as we can get on a SD TV. In order to see the little details like rips and cuts,tire treads,hairs on someone's head or anything neat on in game models you need to have a display with the right resolution. People that make MS and Sony MONEY are graphic whores.

Nintnedo is IMO in a tight spot, they 1: have a dwindling fan base, 2: have two big time competitors unlike the Sega days, and 3: Cant afford to lose money per system ala there competitors. They seem to want to make a system that is cheap and it seems like A main selling point of there system is playing old games from previous generations. Now if they support HD they would have to update each game individually to look good in the higher resolutions or the scaling would make the game look craptastic.

As a Cable installer I can tell you HDTV and DVRs(tivo) are the at the top of the list of what customers want.I spend all day installing HD boxes and HDDVR's and it's a shock to see that not only younger people are upgrading but older late 70's+ as well.

My point : Not thinking that HDTV is a good idea is like saying evolution is not a good idea.
 
I think the next generation of games will actually help promote the purchase of HD. The only thing that can kill games if the publishers put out a lot of crap and charge us $60-$70 for it. That probably won't happen, I actually think that games will come back down to their $40-$50 price by the end of the year.
 
[quote name='bmulligan']Well, maybe. I read a story in USA today that half of HDTV owners don't even know how or what an HD broadcast is supposed to look like or whether they actually have the right equipment to receive an actual HD broadcast. [/QUOTE]

Speaking of this... I have a family friend who told a story over Xmas about showing off their spiffy wide screen HDTV set to some people at a party. Talking about how great the HD looked, when a party goer said 'Hmm, that doesn't look like true HD...' picked up the remote and flicked over to the upper channel networks (where the programming actually was in HD) 'Wow, that REALLY looks good!' :rofl:

[quote name='sevdustflyer']I heard that sometime in the near future they are going to stop making SDTV's as the television channels all move over to an HD format.[/QUOTE]

You're probably thinking of the cut-off when all over the air broadcasts must switch from analog to digital. But Congress is funding about $5 Billion to make sure people will have converters to receive the digital signal on analog sets. Talk about your pork... And this only affects people that actually use rabbit ears.
 
That makes no sense. It completely ignores the fact that once the new systems are out, the latest and greatest games won't be coming out for Xbox, PS2, and GCN. People will want to play new games, and in order to do so, they'll need to buy a new gaming console regardless of whether they own an HDTV.
 
Maybe if every single game had glitches on standard TVs. Cough King Kong 360 version Cough.

Otherwise, something like low HDTV percentages doesn't mean to much.
 
Pffft, whatever. People will buy the consoles because they think they're going to get an HD experience even though they may not have set it up properly. It's like the placebo affect - thinking that they have it enabled will be enough for the vast majority of the consumers.
 
[quote name='elprincipe']Not sure what your point is. Given the large number of sports in the world, I doubt soccer is THE most unpredictable, but certainly it is far more unpredictable and far more full of imagination and creativity than sports like American football where each play is fully planned out and practiced beforehand.

As for any sport being "wrong" to watch, that is just dumb because how much each person likes any given sport is subject to that person's preferences.[/QUOTE]

Dude I played soccer and trust me, soccer is by far the most predictable sport out there. Just so you know there have only been 7 nations that have won the world cup since its inception. My point being that I wouldn't trust everything scientific-america says, same applies to the analysts who try to tell you which system will fail and which one will flurish.
 
Scientific American wasn't making any predictions, I was just opining on the lack of knowledge of HDTV and linking it to a decline in console sales. Maybe not a decline, but a non-system selling feature as M$ and Sony have predicted.

Somebody mentioned something about digital broadcasts a few posts ago and I just had to relate that most people don't even understand that digital broadcasts have nothing to do with HDTV either. In fact, I'm very dissappointed with digital signal SDTV, I think it looks like crap compared to analog in it's jaggie and pixilated splendor.
 
[quote name='kill3r7']Dude I played soccer and trust me, soccer is by far the most predictable sport out there. Just so you know there have only been 7 nations that have won the world cup since its inception. My point being that I wouldn't trust everything scientific-america says, same applies to the analysts who try to tell you which system will fail and which one will flurish.[/QUOTE]

Um...the "unpredictable" label comes from the number of upsets in a sport over the last century, not who wins the world cup: http://inhome.rediff.com/sports/2006/jan/05soccer.htm

It's official. Football has been the most exciting sport for the last 100 years, but baseball is catching up.

A team of scientists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico studied a string of sports to discover which offered the most unpredictable and surprising results -- and football was the winner.

"If there are no upsets, then every game is predictable and hence boring," Eli Ben-Naim told New Scientist magazine.

He and team members Sidney Redner and Federico Vazquez analysed results from more than 300,000 games over the last century from the U.S. national hockey, football, basketball and baseball leagues and the top English football league.

Their results showed that the "upset frequency" was highest for football followed by baseball, hockey, basketball and finally American football.

But there was a twist in the tale for football fans.
When the team studied data from just the last 10 years, English football and American baseball swapped places, suggesting that football had become more predictable over the past decade.
Click to expand...
 
yet another retarded article. If no one KNOWS what HDTV is than why can myself and millions of other people sell the fuck out of them to these people? Another stupid opinion by a author who's run out of stories. Remember Y2K guys remember.....
 
[quote name='Maynard']yet another retarded article. If no one KNOWS what HDTV is than why can myself and millions of other people sell the fuck out of them to these people? Another stupid opinion by a author who's run out of stories. Remember Y2K guys remember.....[/QUOTE]
How many HDTVs have you sold this past week?
 
I bet quite a few DVD players were chosen over competing brands due to having some mystical "progressive scan" voodoo. Then the buyers promptly connected the player through their VCR since their TV only has coaxial RF inputs.
 
[quote name='kill3r7']Dude I played soccer and trust me, soccer is by far the most predictable sport out there. Just so you know there have only been 7 nations that have won the world cup since its inception. My point being that I wouldn't trust everything scientific-america says, same applies to the analysts who try to tell you which system will fail and which one will flurish.[/QUOTE]

See evan's post. And no need to "fill me in" on the game since I probably know a hell of a lot more about it than you, no offense.

In any case, I didn't even mean my comment in a more quantifiable way (although evan has pointed that side out pretty well with facts), but in the way that the game is played. The other biggest sports around the world are all far more planned and regular than soccer (football). For example, American football, baseball, cricket and the like have well-defined plays that can be planned out. Basketball players regularly use plays called by the coach throughout the game. The closest to the unpredictability and imagination required in soccer/football is in ice hockey.
 
[quote name='iheartmetal']nintendo would agree with you.

i dont think hdtv will be as big as microsoft and sony think it will be this generation... maybe the next one[/QUOTE]

out of all the people i have talked to 80 percent of them have or plan to buy an hd tv for the 360 or ps3.

graphics on a console cant get any better with out higher resolutions, play the 360 at 480i, then on the same tv play it at 1080i, you will notice a difference.

HD is the future with a national conversion date set around april 2007, and some states setting the date a little earlier, SD is about to be phased out, just like cassette tapes, VCRs, and vhs tapes.
 
[quote name='capitalist_mao']How many HDTVs have you sold this past week?[/QUOTE]

him i have no idea, but i sell on average about 10-12 a week and im one person out of our 7 person crew
 
[quote name='bmulligan']And Sony wanting to put dual HDMI outputs in the new PS3 for the 3 people in America who actually have 2 screens capable of using it spells disaster for the console market in the near future, IMO.[/QUOTE]

Actually, Sony has pulled the second HDMI port from the spec already.

And I have to agree with everyone else. Supporting technology that has yet to become mainstream isn't going to kill a console or the video game industry. Lackluster games will.
 
I'm getting a set-top box in 2010 (when analog signals are predicted to stop). Why should I throw away a perfectly good 27" set (times 3 of them)? Better yet, maybe I'll just boycott TV and watch nothing but DVDs or net downloads.

Screw the corporations.... they just want to take more money from our wallets by forcing us to upgrade, when we don't want to.



BTW this "only 4% have HD" nullifies the "Nintendo not supporting HD output will kill it" argument. Sounds like 96% of Americans don't need HD-quality gaming.
 
[quote name='daphatty']Actually, Sony has pulled the second HDMI port from the spec already. [/QUOTE]

When did they do this? Link?
 
[quote name='daphatty']Actually, Sony has pulled the second HDMI port from the spec already.

And I have to agree with everyone else. Supporting technology that has yet to become mainstream isn't going to kill a console or the video game industry. Lackluster games will.[/QUOTE]

While this IS true since we're talking about TVs, developers probably have to worry about future marketshare, so they better perceive that the mainstream will catch on to whatever emerging technology we happen to talking about. HDTVs will EVENTUALLY be the future. This is however while people are apprehensive about 3rd parties supporting the Revolution.

The developers THEMSELVES also have to catch on and support it, or else it might actually lead to the lackluster game scenario you're talking about, or less/no games (tech: multi-core processing. name: Sega).
 
[quote name='Michaellvortega']
[Nintnedo] seem to want to make a system that is cheap and it seems like A main selling point of there system is playing old games from previous generations.
[/QUOTE]

Oh, right. I completely forgot about the controller.....
 
Problem with predicting the future is that you sometimes miss the mark. Dreamcast including an expensive modem for online gaming...... which is fine, but they did it about 5 years too early! The demand was not there for an expensive console w/ online capability.

I think that was Scientific Americans point: X360/PS3 are charging big bucks for options that the consumer is not demanding...... they are too early in the tech curve.

troy
 
It's really weird how a lot of people here say HD is the future of gaming yet there are a lot of people who grasp onto their SNES like its a fucking gold brick. HD looks nice. It's cool because HD is there for the people who want it now but luckily for people like me who could care less consoles still come equipped with A/V cables. No one is really losing anything. The choices are there.

If anything is going to make consoles fail it will be yearly sequels, lackluster games, and the desired effect to make your gaming console everything but a gaming console. Just give me some kick ass games and I'm happy...I don't need all the extra fluff.
 
For me, the selling point for the 360 is the HD. I cant wait to get it and see how it looks on my phatto bo batty 50 widescreen HDTV yo.

Well, not selling point - more like getting it free - but whos counting.
 
Besides making graphics crsiper what else does High Definition do?

Or is that just it? The game industry needs to be shaken up a bit so I hope the first year for all the next gen systems minus the Rev is below their expectations.
 
[quote name='Michaellvortega']I read that a Iraq has a fuck load of WMD's. HD is going to take over no matter what, Sony and M$ are pushing HD because we are at as good as where going to get in the graphics dept as we can get on a SD TV. In order to see the little details like rips and cuts,tire treads,hairs on someone's head or anything neat on in game models you need to have a display with the right resolution. People that make MS and Sony MONEY are graphic whores.

Nintnedo is IMO in a tight spot, they 1: have a dwindling fan base, 2: have two big time competitors unlike the Sega days, and 3: Cant afford to lose money per system ala there competitors. They seem to want to make a system that is cheap and it seems like A main selling point of there system is playing old games from previous generations. Now if they support HD they would have to update each game individually to look good in the higher resolutions or the scaling would make the game look craptastic.

As a Cable installer I can tell you HDTV and DVRs(tivo) are the at the top of the list of what customers want.I spend all day installing HD boxes and HDDVR's and it's a shock to see that not only younger people are upgrading but older late 70's+ as well.

My point : Not thinking that HDTV is a good idea is like saying evolution is not a good idea.[/QUOTE]



Nintendo can't afford to lose money per system? You may want to take that up with the Big N because last I checked they had PLENTY of money to throw around.
 
All I gotta ask is when the average person will stop going apeshit everytime something pretty comes out and look for what's important: Gameplay.

Sure, I like pretty games also, but if the game is complete crap, then who the fuck cares?

I admit, DOA4 looks better on HD than my TV at home. But it still looks damn good on my TV.

Anyway, if I want pretty and pretty only I'll go look at models in bikinis.
 
[quote name='Kuros']All I gotta ask is when the average person will stop going apeshit everytime something pretty comes out and look for what's important: Gameplay.[/QUOTE]

I think this will begin to happen with the coming of the Revolution
 
[quote name='jkam']If anything is going to make consoles fail it will be yearly sequels, lackluster games, and the desired effect to make your gaming console everything but a gaming console. Just give me some kick ass games and I'm happy...I don't need all the extra fluff.[/QUOTE]
Yearly sequels have been around for over 10 years, so it's not the problems. They're able to need only a year of work after they get the engine built for the first game, so that they can focus on content for sequels. Jak X or Ratchet Deadlocked, can't remember which, only took 10 months to finish because the team was so well versed in their game engine and getting all the necessary content into the game.

People bash Sony so much over their supposed hard on for their console's graphical abilities while Kaz Hirai talks about how important getting great games for the system is the most important thing that they need to succeed.

The industry is in a much better position than it was over 20 years ago during the last crash, so the crash talk ia unfounded IMO.
 
Maybe this thread's title should be changed to: "Why I want to boycott the gaming industry".

I don't see the video game industry stopping any time soon. However, I do see a bunch of the ultra gamer community fans getting all huffy about these new systems. That being said, there are plenty of good games out there that are fun. People were going gaga and having hardons for plenty of games that came out this year.
 
Does anyone else find it appalling that because the government administers and basically controls the airwaves themselves, that they can change the standards whether the market (the citizens) wants them or not. If this ever happens (it has been talked about for years), every TV in America will need a set-top box just to receive a signal.

Now I’m all for letting people get an HD signal if that is what they desire, but aren’t they going to be getting their signal from either digital cable or satellite, and not from an antenna anyway?

I just don’t understand why the US government should be wasting its time with a TV format war. Imagine if they told us that our DVD players would have to be phased out for either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD?

Less government, please.
 
you misunderstand. The government is changing the standard from analog to digital. Not to HD. The change is for th einterest of efficiency, since the digital signal will take up less bandwidth.
 
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