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 4 of 5

"What is a 13-year-old kid going to be playing on Xbox [360] in about six months?" asks Taylor. "In about six months, when the PS3 presumably is going have a little better traction and the supply constraints on Wii are going to be removed, you will have a fair fight, and you will have a better sense of why people are buying what platform.

"The question I ask every day is, What is Microsoft doing to broaden the market? Well, Microsoft may be doing a lot of things to broaden the market. One of them is Scene It?, and we will see how it does this holiday timeframe.

"The Viva Piñata game did not connect. For whatever reason, it did not connect."

In 1995, Sony made gaming mainstream and SEGA faltered because it mostly courted hardcore gamers. In 2007, Nintendo is making gaming more mainstream than ever before, and Microsoft is focusing on hardcore gamers.

Microsoft has not made the pricing errors that SEGA made -- that particular landmine was well triggered by Sony. In fact, making the $279 Xbox 360 Arcade System was a pretty slick move by Microsoft, though its lack of a hard drive is disturbing.

Saturn came out first and had a good lead in Japan, then watched it ebb away. Wii has already overtaken Xbox 360. Priced at $599, PS3 was never a competitor; but after dropping $200 from the price and with a more aggressive lineup for 2008, Sony could very well give Microsoft a run for its money.

But Microsoft also has strengths SEGA never had. Nintendo may have gotten good publicity out of releasing NES, Super NES, Genesis, and TurboGrafx games online; but it is Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade that has revolutionized the online world for console owners.

"You have to give Microsoft credit for driving the whole online thing," Taylor said. "That gets millions of people in a really sticky way every year."

With Xbox 360, Microsoft has made its online presence an integral part of gaming. Not only has Microsoft created a community online, it has also built up quite a library of online games -- both classics and originals. In fact, many people would agree that the most influential game during the 360 launch window was Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, a game that was available exclusively online.

The blind defeating the blind

I must say, I am not very impressed with any of the hardware makers so far in this generation.

As much as I loved Twilight Princess and Super Mario Galaxy, the Wii is another Nintendog in my book when it comes to games. It's been out for a year and has two games that I like -- Brawl will likely lift the list to three once it finally emerges...shades of GameCube and N64.

Okay, I play one other Wii game -- Wii Sports, the only game that uses the Wii remote in a way that does not seem contrived. If Nintendo released Galaxy and Twilight Princess using a standard controller, that would be just fine with me.

When you look at Wii, you see a tie ratio that is really stuck at 3.4x -- cumulative software divided by cumulative hardware for the last five months. People who buy the Wii buy it to play Wii Sports and maybe pick up a title here and there, but they are not using it as their game machine. It's a party machine," Taylor said.