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regift_of_the_gods writes:
"The results from the 2013 holiday season through January are leaking in, and they look grim: not great for Sony, bad for Microsoft, terrible for Nintendo. The PS4 seems to be outselling the Xbox One but both are far behind their respective sales totals of 2006/2007, when they faced off with the previous generation of consoles. An anonymous developer quoted in the TechCrunch piece notes: 'There are 2+ year old GPUs that outperform these boxes, and even budget GPUs releasing now in the $150 range outclass these machines... This means whilst the casuals are moving to mobile/web, the high end enthusiasts are moving to PC where games are better looking. The traditional consoles are caught in a pincer movement.'
Sony has just completed a round of layoffs at its Santa Monica game studio. Meanwhile, the future of Xbox within Microsoft remains cloudy, with the departure of CEO Steve Ballmer and the ascension of Stephen Elop as head of the Devices and Services group, which includes the Nokia/Lumia handsets and the Surface tablet as well as Xbox. There are rumors that Microsoft is negotiating to sell the Xbox division to Amazon, which seems to be trying to enter the game platform industry. Elop wrote the (in)famous 'burning platform' memo when he was CEO at Nokia, as a prelude to abandoning the Symbian and MeeGo operating systems in favor of Windows Phone; he also stated last year that he would consider divesting Xbox and Bing if he was named CEO."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by internetguy on Monday March 10 2014, @08:08AM
Microsoft implied that they were going to focus on games for kids and families for the xbox360. A majority of the games available for the xbox involve violence and subject matter not appropriate for minors. The kid games that are available are unfortunate examples of commercialization in our children's culture (Mickey Mouse, Looney Toons, etc) and they are not fun. What ever happened to great game consoles like Atari?
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(Score: 4, Informative) by lx on Monday March 10 2014, @08:49AM
Have you played an Atari 2600 game recently? Atari was great because we were ten years old and it was more or less the only game in town. 8 bit home computers were vastly superior to the games machines made by Atari and Coleco and by the mid 1980s it looked like consoles were a thing of the past.
Then Sega and Nintendo came along and took over gaming for a decade or so.
Perhaps we are in a similar period where the current generation console makers will leave the market and new players will eventually take over.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10 2014, @11:35AM
Steambox! anyone?
Bonus: Can't remove OtherOS... The game happens in OtherOS! ;-)
Well, one can dream.
(Score: 2) by hatta on Monday March 10 2014, @02:57PM
Have you played an Atari 2600 game recently?
Yep, they're still great fun. People make money today publishing games for smartphones that would work fine on the Atari 2600, with fewer colors and blockier graphics. People write homebrew games for the Atari 2600 that would be considered high quality games on smartphones, if they had higher resolution graphics and more colors.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by biff on Monday March 10 2014, @08:58AM
It's up to indie developers to make games for kids, I think. The big studios want to put a lot of money in and get predictable money back. But then something like Minecraft sneaks in and cleans house and you realize there's still a massive market for non-shoot-em-ups. Well, at least console publishers have opened the door to independents.
But we're close, technology-wise, to being able to realize some really cool things in the edutainment space. I saw the concept of putting together a "multiplayer" virtual chem lab -- imagine such a thing with an Oculus Rift and Kinect interaction. Or a Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego type game where one player is a fugitive and the others are trying to find him/her. It'd be nice to see big names involved in making these things happen instead of hoping a professional team is able to attract enough interest from Kickstarter...
(Score: 1) by internetguy on Monday March 10 2014, @03:36PM
>> The big studios want to put a lot of money in and get predictable money back.
"Predictability" from big studios is probably the problem and that is why we don't see many exciting games for kids. My kids tends to enjoy the games on cellphones more than console games if that tells you anything.
Sig: I must be new here.