A Gamer’s Guide to the Gaming Industry – Part 3
The issue keeping it from truly competing with the likes of the PlayStation Portable and the Nintendo 3DS is the fact that they do not possess the depth and dedication required for the core gaming demographic.
One could liken it to a young girl who has just discovered makeup or a young boy who finds himself in a team full of less-skilled players and suddenly sees himself becoming a star. The foundation is there but in order to compete with the rest that extra
something is needed (see we are not stereotyping or generalising).
The reason is because smart phones are advancing so fast that even John Carmack, the brainchild behind the upcoming Rage, went so far as to say that the platform is well on its way to becoming not just ‘a’ but ‘the’ major player in the industry.
We would like to see if he changes that statement when the PlayStation 4 and the next Xbox release in a few years, though for the time being, things do seem to be heading in that direction.
It may be too soon to judge whether smart phones are just a fad and if the next major breakthrough in technology will change the way the product is developing. The way things are with phones these days, the product lifecycles live shorter lives than West
Ham United’s title hopes.
For now, it seems that the distant cousin of core video game platforms, the smart phone, is still trying to compete with the portable gaming segment of the market and making steady progress. However, whether or not it can compete with the PlayStation Vita,
Sony’s next generation handheld, beauty of a gaming, device could be the defining point.
Let’s just hope that smart phones do not forget their primary purpose: making phone calls.
Moving on from the too smart ‘for their own good’ phone to three video game consoles in the market: Microsoft’s Xbox 360, Nintendo’s Wii and Sony’s PlayStation 3.
None of the aforementioned are the ‘first child’ of their respective companies. Nintendo had the Dreamcast among others, Sony had the PlayStation and the PlayStation 2 and Microsoft had the Xbox, which was a direct competitor to Sony’s second console.
The experience was there and when the PS3, 360 and the Wii were announced, the differences in direction the three were taking was quite staggering. Each console, although still focused on gaming, seems to have completely different approaches as to how they
wished to go about developing their products.
While we will look at each console in detail it is important for readers to get a bit of background at this point.
The PlayStation dominated the video game console market as it was the only device, apart from the PC, which could run games on a CD format. While this may seem rather unimpressive to some, especially with HD-DVDs and BluRay Discs of today, back then it was
hailed as an important evolutionary step.
When Sony released the PlayStation 2, it was around that time that Microsoft decided to give them a run for their money and launched the Xbox. What neither knew, or maybe they did, was that it was the start of a fierce rivalry that literally started splitting
gamers into a number of groups.
There was the PlayStation fan boys, the Microsoft fan boys and then the rest, who to be honest no one really cared about.
To find out how the PlayStation 3 was developed for the long term, how the Xbox 360 doubled its lifecycle and why the Nintendo Wii sold like hot cakes on a chilly morning, read on in the next part of this article:
A Gamer’s Guide to the Gaming Industry – Part 4 - Feature
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are the writer’s own and do not reflect the editorial policy of Bettor.com
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