Blog FeedGames of 2007: A Debate by Mail
Head881,
Let’s make this the last exchange. I don’t really have that much to add to your second points except for a few things. For one thing even relative to their time period my argument about the graphics still applied. Like the day Bioshock came out it was one of the best two looking games on the platform. On the day Deus Ex came out it was not like a visually stunning game see Quake 3’s curved surface laden space dungeons one year before Deus Ex or No One Lives Forever’s realistic environments the same season.
I thought we’d close this with a sort of 2007 report card for the big three and a chance to give each of them a homework assignment for 2008. So in chronological order of founding we’ll begin with Nintendo.
Nintendo gets an A+ for 2007 and the only reason I don’t give them higher is because the scale can only go so high. The DS sold somewhere between a bajillion and infinity and the Wii sold every copy they could make. They did a pretty good job peppering them with software, especially the Wii which got Warioware, Super Paper Mario, Brain Age 2, Zelda Phantom Hourglass, Metroid Prime 3, and Super Mario Galaxy among other first party games.
If you’re a hardcore gamer like me and buy several hundred dollars worth of games though and you just own a wii you probably found it to be slim pickings. Capcom turned out an alright copy of RE4 and Zak and Wiki but those are just about the only good 3rd party games I can think of from the past year without looking things up. And that really ties into their homework assignment for 2008.
The one thing they really need to do next year is somehow make the eco-system for 3rd party games more capable of supporting life. It’s true that the budgets on Wii are smaller and they can port from other systems but other than Guitar Hero we’ve not really seen much in the way of 3rd party games cracking the top 10 NPD in America and that trend doesn’t look to be reversing itself anytime soon. If they could create a 3rd party ecosystem like the one that’s on the 360 they would be able to have the whole industry by the throat but even as it is they’re doing really really well.
Sony on the other hand doesn’t fare quite as well and only earned themselves a gentelman’s C. If I was just grading the PS3 then it would be a gentleman’s D and I would have been being generous. There year was terrible but it did have some bright spots. The PS2 still had some big legs left with God of War 2 coming out early in the year and it was a great game by all accounts an improvement on the original game and actually was pretty stunning for running on the PS2. The PSP also really despite reports of its failure continued to sell well and can be seen as a success by every measure except in comparison to the Nintendo DS which is just in another league. When you actually look at the data the system sold very well and some really nice games came out for it.
The PS3 spent most of the year an unmitigated disaster. People didn’t want it and execs said stupid things. In one issue of the US magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly SCEA headman Jack Tretton promised 1200 dollars to find a PS3 on store shelves when they were at just about every store i went to. The low point was probably in August when the game Lair came out to some of the worst reviews of a high profile game in memory and Factor 5 CEO Julian Eggebrecht was quoted boasting about how the games controls were so good that they worked eight out of ten times. Yeah they really should have made the game controllable with the flight sticks instead of motion controls.
But it’s always darkest just before dawn, or so they say, and the PS3 actually did fairly well for itself down the stretch with some really nice first party games which highlight how big it’s first party studio system is. Warhawk turned out to be a really snappy multiplayer game and Ratchet and Clank, Heavenly Sword and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune gave the system a respectable starter set of exclusive games so you could be proud to own one. Throw in a price cut and it looks like the PS3 may have may have more fight in it than we would have believed in the summer time.
The assignment for Sony is simple for 2008. Get games out that people care enough about that they’ll buy the hardware for. It’s that simple they need to get some killer apps out there, and they need to get parity from 3rd parties. If they can do those two things it could be on in a big way. If they can’t it becomes a two ring circus going forward instead of a three-ring.
Microsoft is the hardest to grade. If you’re a hardcore gamer and play tons of shooters and stuff like me they get an A+, if you’re a super casual gamer and think Wii play is totally rad they get an F. And if you’re somewhere in the middle their grade will be somewhere in the middle. But in the interest of fairness they get one grade too and that is a B-.
They really failed in a lot of ways in 2007. Like a lot of other analysts they really saw the race as between them and Sony and as such they got blindsided by the Nintendo Wii and all the things they planned on leveraging against Sony simply weren’t going to work on the Wii. The price-point wasn’t in their favor, the early mover advantage didn’t work because the people buying wiis weren’t widely interested in the kinds of games that Microsoft could churn out. The Red Rings of Death certainly hasn’t helped them either as there is this perception out there that they all don’t work and that’s not entirely bogus but it is by most accounts improving considerably if you get a system with the HDMI output and they put forward a billion dollars where their mouth was an extended the warranty for 3 years. And lastly they saw several key developers lost to them as Bungie moved out of Microsoft Games studios and Bizarre and Bioware who had been developing big second party games were bought up by Activision and Electronic Arts respectively.
That said it wasn’t all bad news. They had one of the best holiday lineups in memory. Their games were fantastic from Crackdown, Forza, Halo 3 and Mass Effect. Even their somewhat disappointing Blue Dragon was a game that could appeal to a specific kind of consumer. Xbox Live has been great for a while and it’s continued to be great, the quality of live Arcade games went up in a big way with a lot of new games like Puzzle Quest rising to fill the void between 60 dollar games and PC flash games. And every month the 360 would have a game that’s doing well because if the 360 does one thing well it’s that it moves software regardless of what the hardware is moving. The audience has a voracious appatite for games to the tune of 6:1 tie ratios with a strong install base.
The Assignments for 2008 are daunting. First off it needs to break out of the only for hardcore. One analyst recently compared getting a Xbox for a casual gamer is like buying Alienware for your office—you just wouldn’t do it. I’m not sure if I know how to do this or they know how to do this but with millions upon millions of dollars riding on the answer it would behoove Microsoft to do this. The other big challenge is non-English Speaking territories in Europe. I think everyone agrees that Japan is a lost cause for Microsoft this generation…again but there is still hope in mainland Europe that they could salvage something. The sales have been great in the US, good in the UK and not so hot on the European continent. I wish I had a surefire prognosis for how but again with all that money riding on it they need to come up with one before it becomes Fortress America.
Anyways that’s what I have to say about the year that was. Take it home Head881,
- Vermouth
