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Preys-World - 2007- A system Retrospective

Wednesday 9th of January, 2008 - 20:05:45 GMT

Now that we are heading into a new year, it seems like a good time to look at where we currently stand with the various consoles and the PC and where each platform needs to go in order to be successful in 2008.

As always, sales figures will no doubt show that yet again we have had a bumper year and that the industry continues to grow. In 2007, publishers and platform holders found even more ways of parting us with our money with micropayments and downloadable content really becoming almost as popular as the free mods you see for PC gaming. With most top games now having a Special Edition release with a more expensive price tag with a tin box and the promise of exclusive content standing alongside the normal release, the industry has really coined it in. Overall, it’s handshakes and back slaps all around, but how has each individual system performed. Are the console wars over and the PC dead, or is it all coming nicely to the boil?

Nintendo on top

Undoubtedly the success story of 2007 was the Nintendo Wii. Nintendo’s motion- sensing marvel has managed to sustain high sales throughout the year despite being continually nigh-on impossible to walk into a British retail store and pick one up off the shelves. Prices on Ebay peaked at around the £500 mark over the Christmas period, even higher than the average £300 bundle price, as parents struggled to get little Jimmy a Wii for Christmas and showed that demand refuses to abate. Numbers wise the Wii managed to surpass worldwide sales of the Xbox 360 according to Vgchartz in August with sales of 10.57m compared with 10.51m for Microsoft’s console. The Wii also now has a larger installed base than the 360 here in the UK.

However, despite all these crazy sales numbers, the story on the software side still shows the same depressing picture. The Wii continues to suffer from the same problem that plagued the Gamecube and the N64 before it, namely poor third party support. As the first console chart of the year will show, eight out of the top ten titles are in-house with only Sega and Activision publishing two other (albeit top-selling) titles. Whilst many publishers have come out in support of the system, Ubisoft in particular, so far no one but Nintendo has really been able to get the most out of the Wii. There is the odd exception, but most third party games are poorly conceived with badly implemented motion controls. As shown by this chart, the best(selling) games by far are still those made by Nintendo and its partners.

Another concern is that many of the new casual gamers who are buying the Wii are only buying the system for a specific experience, for which they no longer need to buy any more titles than those bundled on day one. This has been borne out to a certain extent in the software sales this Christmas with the all formats chart
being made up predominantly of Xbox 360 titles with banner Wii games such as Mario Galaxy struggling to say in the top ten for any length of time.

So what are the challenges facing Nintendo heading into 2008? Realistically they seem to be the same as they always have been. Their job is to find a way to get top third party developers to make good games for their system not just pieces of shovelware that don’t sell and reflect poorly on the system. In the past the problem for Nintendo in this regard has been that not enough people have bought their console and so there is no incentive for third parties to develop for the system. This situation has changed this generation though as the Wii is the market leader, but a new problem has arisen. Now if someone like Ubisoft or EA wants to put one of their top titles on the Wii they have to devote a separate team to it as a multiplatform approach with one development team for all three consoles no longer works as the Wii is such a different proposition. Added to this is the lack of titles from Nintendo themselves for 2008. So far the only top tier games we know about are Mario Kart, Wii Fit and Super Smash Bro: Brawl. Other than that, Nintendo have been very quiet about what their internal studios are currently working on.

So in 2008 Nintendo needs to provide a consistent stream of decent software for their machine, whether by convincing third parties to devote proper resources to the system or by ramping up production internally. The Wii could hit a wall pretty soon if there is no decent software to play on the system.

Microsoft consolidate

Microsoft currently sits in second place in the console standings with worldwide sales of 16.02m according to Vgchartz, though final adjustments for Christmas have increased this slightly to 17.7m (source: BBC). 2007 has seen Microsoft consistently release one big game roughly every month and each time the title has gone straight in to the top ten sales charts. Currently, Xbox 360 users are buying the top title for that month as soon as it comes out and then migrating to the next one when it comes out, all in one big mass group. What this means for Microsoft is that they have managed to attract that most lucrative group of people, young male adults with disposable income, who every month will go out and buy the latest releases thereby guaranteeing Microsoft good software sales and a large dollop of cash. Even though the Xbox 360 has been overtaken by the Wii in hardware sales, Microsoft has sold a lot more software for their system than Nintendo..

However, all is not so rosy heading into 2008. Whilst Microsoft chose to focus on games being released in 2007 at most of the press events last year, the lack of titles announced for 2008 has started to cause some concern. This concern has been compounded by the way Microsoft carelessly lost a number of high profile developers to competitors in the year just gone. Bungie, makers of Halo, become independent from Microsoft in October and earlier in the year Bizzare Creations, developers of the Project Gotham Racing series, were absorbed by Activision Blizzard. This meant that two of the developers who worked on Microsoft First Party games are now free to make games for other systems.

If you put all of this together then you start to ask if there are going to be any major first party exclusives coming from Microsoft this year. Currently a browse of their Microsoft Gaming Studios website shows just Alan Wake and Too Human as the only exclusive games coming from Microsoft with obviously Banjo Kazooie 3, Fable 2 and Halo Wars also due some time this year. Whilst all of these games have the potential to be great games it is nowhere near the same amount of games that we knew about at the start of 2007. The one ace that Microsoft does have up its sleeve though is that of price. Unlike Sony they didn’t significantly drop the price of the Xbox 360 this Christmas and it is still roughly around the same price as when it launched, give or take £30. So if sales start to flag later in the year Microsoft have the luxury of being able to knock the price of the system down. This could prove to be a huge advantage around the time of the release of GTA 4. Grand Theft Auto is one of those series that people buy systems to play and if the Xbox 360 is significantly cheaper than the PS3, then Microsoft are in a great position to tempt gamers to buy their system to play GTA 4 on.

Still much like Nintendo they need to star announcing some first party titles that are due for release this year, which will get gamers excited and interested in buying an Xbox 360.

Sony, a year to forget

Next we come to Sony. Everyone knows the troubles they have been having in 2007 with the Playstation 3, from stupid comments from executives to constant price and hardware changes including making backwards compatibility a premium feature rather than commonplace, the PS3 has struggled to sell significant amounts. Consequently as we start 2008 Sony are in a unique position. Not only are they trailing a distant third in terms of hardware sold, but the image of the Playstation brand has suffered a knock. No longer is it all powerful and the constant PR gaffes have managed to alienate previously loyal gamers. Despite all of this, the main problem for Sony in the last year was the lack of exclusive software. With the delay of Metal Gear Solid 4 there was nothing with the pull of Halo 3 or Mario Galaxy with which to entice gamers to buy Sony’s black box. There were some solid titles like Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, but neither of these games are system sellers despite the former reaching no.1 Added to this, third party sales of cross platform games were greater on the Xbox 360 than the PS3, something that was not wholly down to the former’s larger installed base.

These factors mean that despite the improved sales of movies on Blu-Ray than HD-DVD, 2008 is a make or break year for Sony and the Playstation 3 on the games front. They have to get their exclusives out which means at least two of the following three titles need to see the light of day this year; Metal Gear Solid 4, Gran Turismo 5 and Final Fantasy XIII. Sony will continue to struggle to shift units without these titles and with no further price drop possible for at least another six months. There are other interesting first party titles due out exclusively for the PS3, titles like Little Big Planet and Africa, but like Uncharted and Ratchet they aren’t really games that make a large number of people buy consoles to play them.

The pressure is on Sony to get their marquee titles out this year in order to drive hardware sales. If they don’t close the gap on Microsoft this year then we might see a few more previously PS3 exclusive titles jump ship, something Sony can not allow to continue to happen if they want the PS3 to be a success.

PC survives

Finally we come to the PC. 2007 was an interesting year for the beige box. It started well with World of Warcraft seeing its first expansion in The Burning Crusade. This add-on helped to further drive sales of the original game and pushed subscriber numbers north of nine million. Games such as Crysis and STALKER showed that once again the PC was the place to go if you wanted a top of the line FPS experience and Crysis in particular demonstrated that the PC is once again top dog when it comes to graphics.

Despite all this, media outlets continued to harp on about the demise of PC gaming as software sales lagged further behind those of the consoles with sales numbers of Unreal Tournament 3 and Quake Wars, among other, being proffered as proof of this. However these cries continue to be nothing more than misinformed nonsense. Sales numbers still don’t take into account online sales either through online retailers or digital distribution, something that has really taken off this year on the PC. They also disregard the masses of online subscribers who regularly pay around £9 a month to play their favourite online game, and online is where the PC continues to go from strength to strength. 2008 could well be the breakout year for digital distribution. With Valve showing that this form of delivery is perfectly viable through the success of Steam, and with services like GameTap and Metaboli continuing to grow no longer are retail and online stores the only place to buy your games.

Games wise, this year is looking as strong as ever with top titles in all genres due for release. In the RTS canon you have Starcraft 2 and Empire: Total War; RPG wise there is Dragon Age, World of Warcraft’s second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, and Warhammer Online; for FPS fans Far Cry 2 ,Project Origins and maybe finally Duke Nukem Forever. All of these titles are tantalising prospects. Finally we have what could be the biggest game of the year across all platforms, Spore.

All you PC gamers out there have a lot to look forward to this year. Don’t listen to the doom mongering, the PC is in rude health and 2008 looks like being a cracking year.

It's all about the games

So there we have it. When I first sat down to write this article and look at what each platform had to do in order to succeed in the coming year I thought I would end up with four platforms with four different objectives. However the key to each platform being successful is pretty much the same across the board, it’s all about the games, and I suppose that this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise as at the end of the day that is what the industry is all about. People want to play good games and in order for your system to be successful you have to give consumers what they want. So whichever platform you prefer, 2008 is sure to be a great year as the format wars hot up and manufactures vie for your money with what looks like a veritable smorgasbord of quality titles.


-Nat I