Attention hardcore gamers! It is time for your dose of Kool-Aid. You did not have the correct response to the unveiling of Sony’s “Move”. Therefore, Jesse Divinch, analyst extraordinaire, is here to serve you some Kool-Aid. Drink up!
However, many knocked the PlayStation Move for being a near blue-print copy (with some extra bells and whistles) of current industry standards. My response to that is, “Who cares?”
Our entire industry is based upon conformity and it has been that way for over 20 years. The Xbox played DVDs just like the PlayStation 2; the Xbox controller closely resembled the same scheme as the PlayStation 2, which was originally designed after the PlayStation 1 controller; Sega and Nintendo went back and forth for years in the 16-bit and 32-bit days; PlayStation 3 incorporated Netflix, only after the Xbox 360 did it first; Trophies and Achievements; Guitar Hero and Rock Band; Medal of Honor and Call of Duty; Dante and Kratos; and the list goes on. The point is, there is nothing wrong with replicating another’s successful original idea, as long as you evolve that idea, which is what I believe the PlayStation Move is doing.
Hilarious how you have to go back over fifteen years to find Nintendo competing on the same values (with Sega). But really, PlayStation has always been an imitation of Nintendo sorta like Link’s evil Shadow.
Sony’s advantage is three fold: it can leverage factories and ‘technology’ to make its own console (Nintendo owns no factories), it can leverage other entertainment to its game console like music and movies (Nintendo is only games), and Sony opened the floodgates to third party software (which Nintendo restricted often for quality reassurance reasons).
The PlayStation was supposed to be on the SNES after all. The analog stick Sony took from Nintendo. The rumble Sony took from Nintendo. Aside from the Eyetoy (lol there), has Sony done anything on their own? The answer is no. The “Move” is such a blatant copy.
Divinch says it being a copy doesn’t matter because it didn’t matter before in the past. But stay a while, reader, as I prove this wrong. This generation is obeying different rules than the previous generations (those previous generations are what I call the “Console Wars” Era). Perhaps we can call this the “Expansion Era” since now generations are going to be defined by companies stretching out to new markets rather than fighting over one (so haha you hardcore gamers. Your days are over).
I fully enjoyed Ping Pong with the Wii MotionPlus, but there was an additional element of excitement playing nearly the same game on the PlayStation Move. The PS3 version removed the Miis and had richer graphics, and it just felt more mature; it felt like something I wouldn’t be embarrassed playing when my friends come over, which is why my favorite feature of the PlayStation Move has nothing to do with the peripheral itself, but rather the console it is designed for. And that is one of the reasons the PlayStation Move will succeed, because it does evolve motion based gaming – maybe not from a technical perspective, but it certainly allows developers to introduce motion based gaming into environments not capable on the Wii.
Provided these are the analysts’ genuine opinions (and not junk spewed out to try to influence public opinion), it is very easy to point to where they are going off track. They are assuming competition between the consoles based on the premise that their values are similar. In the past, this was so. Each console was pursuing identical philosophies so they all tended to be like one another. The SNES and Genesis were very similar. The PlayStation, Saturn, and N64 were very similar. The PlayStation 2, Dreamcast, Gamecube, and Xbox were very similar. And now the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 are battling over the same exact values.
But the Wii is something else.
What differentiates the Wii from the HD Twins? Instantly, people say the motion controller. But tell me this, is the motion controller responsible for Wii Fit’s success? No. Wii Fit uses a different controller than the Wii Mote. Is the motion controller successful for Super Mario Brothers 5 success? No, the game uses motion controls only in a very limited way. And Mario Kart Wii, which has outsold Grand Theft Auto IV, doesn’t even need motion controls.
Analysts are confusing motion controls with the values of the Wii. So if Sony or Microsoft use motion controls, then they are competing with the values of the Wii. This is definitely not the case.
The above is Atari responding to the NES. The controller definitely imitates the NES controller… yet it gets the values wrong. While the 7800 is a cool machine, it is not a NES and cannot compare to the NES. The NES was a revolution. The 7800 was Next Generation of your dad’s console.
Back then, there were people who thought the NES lost its advantage because of that controller. And the Atari 7800 had backwards compatibility with the awesome 2600 (hell, the PlayStation 3 doesn’t even have that with the PS1/PS2 games!).
The Console Wars are defined by the game consoles having symmetrical values. The first Console Wars came during the Atari Era with consoles like the Intellivision or Coleco-vision. But the NES was never competing against any game console. It was competing against disinterest. There was such a rich diversity of how to play games on the NES that I have not seen equaled in a console until perhaps the Wii. There were so many different controllers for the NES. I loved them all. And it was great fun to experiment different controllers to different games.
The next Console War Era began not with the Sega Genesis (as Sega was already competing with the Master System) but began when Nintendo made the SNES to ‘go after Sega’. As Nintendo and Sega fought in the red ocean, a greater threat of Sony was watching both of them and would devour one of them in the end.
Console Wars are boring both for the consumer and for observers. Symmetrical values always hold the incumbents winning in the end. Symmetrical values hold that technology and sustaining upgrades will win.
What makes the Wii generation so interesting to me is that competition is now based on asymmetric values. The Wii is a totally different philosophy than the HD Twins. The motion controller of the Wii is only a symptom of those values. It is not the value itself.
People did not buy the Wii purely for motion control. People bought the Wii to play games in new ways they never did before. No one wants to play the same old games but in High Definition. This is why the PlayStation 3 failed right out of the gates. And this is why Move is going to fail right out of the gates. There is no value to a consumer if you say, “This is the same game but in HD!” Yawn.
It is not correct to say that the Move is PlayStation 3’s response to Wii’s motion controls. It is the second response. The first response was the SIXAXIS.
I would love Divinch to tell us why ‘Move’ will excite gamers for motion controls in high definition when PlayStation 3 already has a bundled motion controller with the system once called SIXAXIS that didn’t excite anyone except cheeze-it eating game journalists looking for conflict somewhere.
‘Move’ is not the first Sony motion controller response to the Wii. It is the second. Incredibly, everyone has forgotten about this but not ol’ Malstrom here. I remember all.
Of course, the primary reason the PlayStation Move will succeed commercially is that consumers are infatuated with motion-based games. This industry went to the point of insanity with the Wii, DS, Wii Fit, Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and dozens of other products with unique controls that reached mainstream status. Personally, I remember waiting in-line for a Wii Fit on launch day and I rushed home to play as if it was a new Final Fantasy title. In retrospect, I must have been crazy, because why the heck would someone like myself, who avoids breaking a sweat at all costs, wait in-line for a Wii Fit? Yet there I was swinging that imaginary hula hoop for hours on end—when no one was looking of course.
Wii Fit was new. Wii-mote was new. Motion Plus was new. And Vitality Sensor will be new. But Move is not new. There is nothing fresh about it. And the games mimic what is already on the Wii.
Nevertheless, people will still buy it; we have to, we are just too mesmerized by the possibilities of motion-based gaming.
And so why didn’t people buy PlayStation 3’s other motion based games? Why did the SIXAXIS fail?
Anyway, I am tired of all this Kool-Aid. Slurp it up, hardcore gamers, and parrot it throughout the message forums. Say, “Jesse Divinch, master analyst, says blah blah blah…” Do try to forget that your Kool-Aid is spiked with DRM.
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