“When I wrote my first article on the X-Box, I began to see
glimpses into a coming era in gaming, in the Internet, and finally,
what now looms to be a major battle in the future between Sony and
Microsoft. Microsoft has been held as the prototype of the New
Business, fast-moving, aggressive, with strong strategic
positioning. Sony has been held as the prototype of the electronics
industry.”
“Microsoft practices the philosophy of paranoia, and they
are paranoid about the console industry. Rightly so. In the
early nineties, PC games dominated in terms of revenue and unit
sales. When the 32-bit era of consoles started with the Playstation
and Nintendo 64 and their ilk, this began to change. Console game
sales went up every year, and by 1997 easily surpassed PC game
sales. No PC game, not even the holiest of its titles like Quake,
could sell in the millions, the way Final Fantasy did. Console
games like Final Fantasy probably made SquareSoft the richest and
most lucrative game software company on the planet, with Street
Fighter’s Capcom second in line. Most Playstation versions of PC
games, for instance Tomb Raider, easily outsold their PC versions.
The rate of introductions for new titles for console games easily
outpaced PC games, despite the technological superiority and
resources PC games can afford. You only need to go to the newsstand
and look at electronic gaming magazines to see what is happening.
For the developers, console games don’t have much technological
budgets for high polygons and textures, but their platforms are
standardized, so they are much easier to develop for and support.
As you know, development and support time is money.”
“…in the history of computing, we have seen one major pattern
emerge: the meek shall inherit the Earth. In most collisions
between large and small platforms, the small ones win, and every
improving technology favors the small platform over the big one. If
this pattern continues, consoles can and will inevitably win. For
the last few years, experts have predicted the Post-PC era. They
have cited visionary platforms like the Network PC, the Web Device,
or the Web Appliance. … But consoles are different. They are
cheap. They have numbers. They have a large base of platform
exclusive software that justifies their presence. They have
consumer presence, distribution, and identification. They are
everywhere, from K-Mart to Target and back.”