I’ve been wondering about the state of the gaming industry as a whole lately and there’s been one major news development that has been getting a lot of discussion lately that I really wanted to process in my own way.
It’s not a big secret that Xbox has been porting several of their heavy franchises to competing systems. Considering Xbox was born out of putting a dedicated compact gaming PC in the living room, getting high profile xbox games on PC has always been the norm. While console makers have all dabbled in putting some of their franchises or IP on competing consoles, especially console makers putting games on competing companies handhelds has been a common practice, I am never that surprised when a big game from Microsoft or Sony gets a PC port. Nintendo is the last hold out who generally refuses to put their games on PC, even if they have been putting more games on mobile than you would expect from them. Still, I have vivid memories of the system chock I experienced the first time I played a Sonic game on a Nintendo console. So when I hear Halo, the flagship Xbox exclusive that made the brand viable in the first place is now coming to Playstation forever I was a bit taken aback.
The first issue I want to tackle is the dangerous amount of consolidation that has been taking place in the gaming industry, not to mention entertainment as a whole. We all know that the biggest cancer in capitalism is the religious practice of putting profits first. However we’re gonna accept that as reality for now and focus on why less competition is always bad for everyone. The obvious first negative is less competition means higher prices for everyone. In technology driven fields like gaming, it’s even worse because it also means less innovations and less effort put into making everything the best it can be. Instead the industry as a whole has settled into the lowest common denominator as the norm. Back in the early days of gaming you had tremendous competition.
Back in the 80s and early 90s if you were a gamer you had far more choices for gaming devices that we could fathom today. Sure we have PC, Mac, Android and iOS on the PC side and we have Nintendo, Xbox and Playstation on the console side. However we used to have dozens of competing home computer platforms, dozens of competing dedicated gaming consoles and countless competing arcade machines. If you wanted to play every game you either had to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars on buying multiple gaming computers, consoles and either owning arcade machines or dropping countless quarters into arcade machines at the local 7-11, etc. And this was a better world because there was so much innovation. Even though the Turbografx-16/PC Engine was not a tremendous success worldwide out the gate, NEC took a huge risk developing a CD Rom attachment for it to enhance the gameplay possibilities. While this didn’t pay off for them, it absolutely was beneficial for gamers because it forced developers to make the best games they could. If you weren’t satisfied with the simplistic 8 bit pixal art of the NES, then you could choose to invest in a Turbo CD unit and get enhanced multimedia focused story driven games with enhanced, at the time, cinematics. Even if not everyone bought it everyone beneffited from developers going out of their way to make the most out of it. Not just because those games would eventually get ported to more successful CD based systems like Sega CD and eventually Playstation, the fact they were developed at a time when the industry standard was Mega Man and Super Mario Bros is a huge deal.
Today you have the hindsight of which consoles and PC’s reached mainstream success and which ones were left in the dust. Looking back on the 80s you wouldn’t be blamed if all you think of is Atari 2600, NES and Commodore. Those were by far the most successful platforms. Except you still can’t discount the other systems just because they didn’t achieve the same sales figures. The fact the Colecovision and Intellivision existed at all still forced Atari to make better games to squeeze the absolute most out of the 2600 even if it outsold more powerful hardware. Some of those truly impressive Atari games never would have been as impressive if Atari didn’t have to innovate to be competitive. Same thing for Nintendo. Sure in North America and Europe the Famicom Disk System is just an oddity that we vaguely knew about but had no first hand experience with it never would have existed in Japan at all if NEC hadn’t already been bringing larger disk storage to consoles with their CD Rom upgrade. Nintendo wasn’t ready to invest into CD Rom quite yet but they were willing to roll the dice on the industry standard and much cheaper to develop floppy disk technology. While they did develop a proprietary floppy disk for the FDS, it was still based on and depended on pre-existing floppy diskette technology for its development in the first place. Technology that itself only existed in its inexpensive and mass market penetration form in the first place because there was so much competition in the PC market. Again everyone remembers the standard 1.44mb floppy and the 502kb larger floppy that preceeded it from their Apple 2 days, there were dozens of other storage technologies being developed at the time that allowed those two form factors to find their footing as a result of direct competition. Today in the PC space, we don’t have that. We’ve settle on flash storage as the sole technology. It’s used in Flash cards, flash drives and SSD’s. There are no competing tech companies trying to push the envelop by developing a new tech that could theoretically be superior to flash, we’ve just been focused exclusively on increasing read speeds, durability and storage sizes of flash devices. No innovation, just incremental forward progress. While in the PC world there is a need for some industry standard universal tech that doesn’t need to innovate, like USB that is a tech that we can be grateful took off so we don’t have to worry about PINS and cable types. The old serial/parallel/PS/2 days for peripherals was a nightmare, but the days of zip, cd rom and compact flash trying to dethrone the floppy as the go to for portable storage were all huge innovations that while they didn’t all find mass market success, they absolutely did force the development that did eventually lead to flash becoming the standard. That never would have happened if there wasn’t competition.
Today we do have some competition in PCs in the fact we have different companies ma,king components and prebuilt computers but they’re all running Windows, all using flash storage, all use WIFI for networking and all rely on USB for peripherals and devices. There’s nobody trying to find a better storage tech than flash because there’s no incentive to. The entire industry has just settled on flash and nobody is going to go against that. This is bad for everyone but we’ve just accepted it.
This is even worse in the video game space. In the 80s, yes they didn’t all achieve mass market status, they still existed and impacted the gaming industry and somebody still bought them, we had atari 2600, 5200 anf 7800; we had Intellivision, Colecovision, Odyssee 2, SMS, NES, C64 GS, XEGS, Astrocade, FDS, TG16/PCEngine, Genesis, PC CD Rom/Turbo CD. ALL of these had their place in the industry. Each one sold to someone, had someone making games for it trying to be competitive. Someone was seeing what they were doing and trying to make their own products better. Even though the vast majority of those systems failed to reach mass market doesn’t mean they weren’t viable in their time even if it was only briefly. Also we absolutely know the companies that were successful were so because they were forced to innovate and experiment trying to make their own games the BEST, their own controllers the BEST, their own add ons the BEST. This is so much better than today where we have 3 competing companies. We see this most obviously in the Playstation and Xbox dynamic as those two machines, since their inception, have been so close together in terms of tech and specs that their basically the same prtoduct, so yeah it makes sense to put Xbox games on Playstation because there’s no distringuishing factor that gives XBox the edge over Playstation other than it’s exclusives. From a company stand point, Microsoft can’t keep losing money on Xbox forever and GamePass is a great product, it’s not paying the bills either. So from a Microsoft perspective it makes sense to sacrifice the potential future Xbox hardware sales to maximize software sales by getting them on as many platforms as possible.
Here is the problem. We know that Sony and NIntendo cannot follow this practice. Sure Sony can absolutely afford to put some of their games on PC to get more sales but they knows thats because PC gamers aren’t interested in consoles so there’s no risk of lost hardware sales for them as those gamers aren’t even potential console gamers anyways. But everyone who buys and Xbox is one less person buying a Playstation and with all the consolidations everyone else in the tech and entertainment world, Sony cannot afford to lose hardware sales because Playstation in the cornerstone of their entire business. If it fails, they fail. If xbox fails Microsoft writes it off on their taxes and moves on, no hard done for them. It’s even more prominent regarding Nintendo because their just a gaming company if their hardware fails, they’re truly done for and that’s it we’re left with JUST Playstation and that is the nightmare scenario NOBODY should want.
Whenever someone talks about the desire to have all games on a single platform the example they bring up is movies. They argue that there was a time when everything was just VHS and there was nothing else. This is very not true. Again while they didn’t have the highest sales as VHS, BetaMax, LaserDisc, CED, CD Video, Video CD, CD DV, Movie CD, Video8 and a few I am sure I forgot, did exist, did achieve their own sales and absolutely forced innovation in VCR hardware makers forcing them to constantly improve the VHS technology. Same thing with DVD. It didn’t just arrive and replace everying in a vaccuum. It was still competing against, briefly, DIVX, Movie CD, Super Video CD, and Digital VHS before HD-DVD and Blu Ray even came on the scene. Yeah today we have countless streaming services but even that isn’t new. Again competitions is GOOD for everyone. Yes we ALL just want to pay for Netflix and they have everything because it means we get everything in one place. But if everyone else goes out of business then we have fewer movies and TV shows to watch as then we’re stuck with just whatever Netflix produces and they’re not going to make the best TV and movies they can if they don’t have anyone to compete against. I’m not going to get into the problems with dozens of streaming services because I’ve beaten that dead worse into dust by now. But it’s still better in the long run because YOU get to CHOOSE which service you invest in, ideally the one that has the content you desire the most. Plus, because they ALL have monthly plans you just cycle one to another each month and you get access to everything for roughly one monthly fee anyways, ya know if you’re smart and stop bitching about a non problem you’ve just made up in your mind just to have something to bitch about.
Is it GOOD for gamers that Xbox puts their games on Playstation, yes and no. It’s good for the gamer that doesn’t want to buy 2 machines to get all the games. I’ts bad for gamers that want innovation that competition facilitates and we’re already facing near monopolies in the industry as is with so much consolidation. So no a ONE machine that plays everything has NEVER existed EVER in any media in any decade. We’re getting dangerously close to that but Sony isn’t going to innovate based on what Nintendo is doing, their two different markets the have no reason to because the gamers buying the Nintendo system are not the same as those buying Playstation/Xbox anyways. But they absolutey do pay attention to what Xbox is doing and if they no longer have to even bother worrying about Xbox that means they can just stagnate even further than they already have and then the PS6 is going to be the most useless “upgrade” of all time. The PS5 is already a disappointment compared to PS4 because of the lack of competition. If they don’t have to even care what Xbox does then there’s no incentive for them to invest in pushing technology, they’re just going to cheap out and go the easiesr route which is BAD for gamers in the long run. So yeah getting Halo on Playstation looks good, today, but it’s a domino falling over that’s going to lead to a worse world in the near future, and THAT is why we should be worried about it, not celebrating it.
Stephanie Bri 