Have the Big Three Learned from the Saturn's Mistake?

Has SEGA's failed platform taught Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony anything?
3/8/2008 7:10 PM | 0 Comments | Page 3 of 5

Yu Suzuki's AM2 team did a pretty fair job of it with Daytona USA and the Virtua Fighter games, but Suzuki publicly complained that it was hard to program for two separate processors.

Enter PS3 with its incredibly powerful and complex cell processor. The potential for power is there, no doubt about it; but Madden 08 and The Orange Box suffered from frame rate issues, as have other games on the system. Sony has received all kinds of complaints about the difficulty of programming PS2. With PS3, the general consensus is that things got worse.

As pointed out earlier, Sony as also abandoned that $599 price point, dropping down to a one-third-less-painful $399. This price may not be low enough, but it does place Sony in the ballpark.

More importantly, Sony came out swinging at E3 this year. Sony has pretty well written off good games for 2007, but the 2008 lineup looks promising. In fact, of the three console makers, Sony showed the strongest plans for next year. That said, Nintendo has an aggravating habit of playing its cards too close to the vest, then pulling unannounced rabbits out of its hat. Microsoft has a lot of exciting games coming up, but too many of them may be of the same variety for general audiences.

So has Sony been Saturnized? Hell, yes! But the company is showing great signs of recovery.

Has Xbox 360 been Saturnized?

The short answer is no, not yet. The Saturnization process is not complete. Microsoft has shown a tremendous talent for stepping on all the landmines that SEGA tripped 10 years ago, but there is still room to turn back.

Let's begin with the adaptability issue. During the Genesis era, SEGA noted that gamers did not necessarily want to stop gaming when they left their tweens. Sony did SEGA one better, making games attractive to the college crowd. This left Nintendo in a lurch. Years later, while Microsoft and Sony battled for control of the college-crowd market, Nintendo looked remarkably silly pushing a purple box with a big black handle that mostly played to kids.

But in this generation Nintendo has turned the proverbial tables on everyone. Microsoft has gone out of its way to endear itself to older gamers and Sony will be content if it can just survive the year. With Sony and Microsoft pigeonholing themselves in their fight for gamers ages 26 and up, Nintendo, the true veteran of the game industry, has come in like a new and aggressive upstart, positioning itself to appeal to the broader market.

The ghosts of Saturn-day SEGA seem to be traveling the halls of Microsoft's Millennium Campus -- home of the Xbox division. When it comes to family-style games, Microsoft has released three in two years -- Scene It?, Viva Piñata and Viva Piñata: Party Animals.

Microsoft has released Halo 3 and Mass Effect, and it has the driving game front covered with the Forza series and the Project Gotham franchise. The games market is expanding. In the early 1990s, the U.S. market was worth $6 billion; this year, people are saying it could reach $18 billion, and Microsoft only seems interested in collecting cash from one large segment of that market.

If there is one point on which Taylor is most vociferous, it is Microsoft's need to diversify.