Frankenconsole: The perfect game system and why it will never exist
The console wars have been waged ever since Sega started going after Nintendo in the 16-bit era. Many people picked sides to varying degrees of loyalty. You had the "I can only afford one" people all the way up to the hardcore fanboy who would never relent in the position that their console was the best and the other one sucked big time. Almost every gamer, at one time or another, has broken down and proclaimed one system to be greater than the rest.
The arguments continue to this day, people heaping praise or hatred on one console or another merely by the brand name attached to each. Most people have wised up and know that all consoles have their merits and if you only stick to one platform as a matter of principle, then you're missing out on some good games.
I'll admit to have been guilty of this a couple times through the history of video games. And it's not just the fanboys. The anti-fanboys are just as bad. The anti-fanboy being, of course, the gamer who will not play any games on a particular system just because they don't like the brand name attached to it.
But what if we could dissect each of the major consoles and bring them together into some sort of psychotic hybrid, a freak of science and nature? Can we take all the good parts of the Wii, the PS3, and the 360 and leave out the bad?
First, we have to figure out what good parts of the current systems we need to keep in order to make our perfect console.
High-end processing power: Graphics can't make a bad system good, but that's not we're going for here. We want the best of the best to make the cut and it has to look great to do that. The 360 and the PS3 bring this to the table. They've got the raw numbers that most of their proponents proudly tout. Our perfect machine has got to have some great HD graphics. It also has to have the oomph to render those graphics at a decent pace.
Memory storage: Let's face it, we're gonna be dealing with disc players from this point on for a good while, so we gotta have a place to save our game files. We gotta have the nice built in hard drive that Microsoft really brought to the forefront in the Xbox. We can save our games, hold player information, and even have our customized soundtracks. But we have to be able to take it with us. Nintendo's got the right idea with using SD cards for expandable, portable memory, but they kinda dropped the ball on the execution of their use. We'll keep the SD cards instead of proprietary memory cards, but make sure we have a good system to easily transfer files between it and the hard drive so we can take our saved games or create-a-characters over to a friend's house to share.
Innovation: This is almost exclusively Nintendo's playing field, so we'll take their team that comes up with new ideas. Ninty has arguably driven or created most of the important gaming innovations all the way from the D-pad to the Wiimote. We'll take the strength in numbers side from Sony and MS, but as far as creating new and exiting ways to play games, Nintendo's our best bet.
Upgradeability: Pretty much the only factor I'm taking from the PC world, simple, easy upgradability would be great for a console. It'd be nice to be able to just slide out a card from the back of your console and slide in something new when there's been a significant boost in technology to warrant an upgrade. It's what PC gamers have played as their trump card over console gamers from the beginning. You don't have to buy a whole new computer when more powerful games come out.
Backwards compatibility: Sony brought it to us with the PS2, and now it's pretty much expected from all future consoles. But Nintendo is the one who really brought it home. Their current system takes two different sizes of discs with ease and then there's the Virtual Console. Let's be realistic, a game system with ports and plugs for all your different discs, cartridges, controllers, and memory cards would make the thing big and ugly. The VC gives us a great way to play lots and lots of old games on the new system and you don't even have to root through a dirty used games bin at your local GameStop with the angry manager staring at you.
A strong stable of first party staples: This is nigh-exclusively Nintendo's contribution. Mario, Metroid, and Zelda alone have that drawing power. Not to mention the various spin-offs and franchise exploitations. Some people would call this a weakness for Nintendo, but it's one of the things that has kept their finances in the black for so long. And believe me, if MS and Halo had been around with gaming from the beginning, we'd be seeing plenty of Master Chief Party or Warthog Kart Racer games. If you've got that sort of universal name recognition, you've got to use it. But since we're going for the perfect system, this part must absolutely be followed up with
Killer third party support: Sony very successfully stole this part from Nintendo a couple of gens ago. That's why they've lasted. They've got the Final Fantasies, the Metal Gear Solids, the GTAs, and the Tekkens. But they've started to let that slip away into the 360's arena. You gotta have third party support for your console. As much fun as the first-party franchises are, you have to have other people working on other things that have nothing to do with Mario or Master Chief. And if you can get them as exclusives? All the better.
A great online system: Xbox owns this part, hands down, so we'll be taking their Xbox Live infrastructure for our perfect console. They've done almost everything right with it. It runs smooth, it's pretty much seamlessly integrated, and because it's so well done, it's got the large online community to go with it. You gotta have lots of people using your online system if you want other people to use it. And you get there by building it right from the ground up. You can't rely on individual game publishers to have their own online servers, because player support for those die off once the game isn't mega popular. With Live, you can still find people online to play older games because you can see what everyone is playing.
Financial backing: We all know the story about MS and Sony losing money on every console sold, but they can get away with it because of their other business areas. Sony's got all their other consumer and industrical electronics, and MS has, well all of MicroSoft to fall back on. You have to have that safety net of money for the bad times. Unfortunately, if Nintendo drops the ball as bad as the PS3 did, that's it for them. They'd be going under, and fast. To go hand in hand with this part, we'll wrap up with
Affordable price: $600 bucks for a game system is a joke. I know it, you know it, Sony knows it, the stock market knows it. We all know it. To move units, you have to have a price that isn't going to scare everyone away except die-hards and eBay sellers. Even $400 is pushing it, but the 360 has backed up that number with the other areas they're excelling in. But $200-$300 seems to be the magic number for a home system. And yes, I am ignoring future inflation, present dollar value and all that nonsense because it's mostly irrelevant. Sure, that stuff is important when buying a house or investing in stock or something, but you just don't care about it when you're buying video games.
Now, that's a pretty tall order to fill, wouldn't you say? It's impossibly tall to fill, and for a few reasons.
First of all, a few of the qualities mentioned above are incompatable or mutually exclusive by definition. The most obvious contradiction is the low price/high end coupling. We see it right now in the current 3 systems. If you want high end electronics, you're gonna pay a high end price. Stronger, better, and faster necessarily means more expensive. Only through some sort of miracle combination of a few more of those items would we ever get some kind of low priced super hi-def, high speed system. This is the only way I can see it happening, and it's still a long shot after that: You want the big graphics, right? Well, without paying an arm and a leg for them, the company has to have the serious financial backing to basically pull off a self-subsidy from its other non-gaming divisions. The problem is, both Sony and MS are already in that situation and their systems are still expensive. Not to mention they each are taking a loss on every unit sold. We have to throw some innovation into the mix to have the R&D department find new and creative ways to get that high-end feel but with lower cost hardware. That's only going to go so far, so we have to get some serious scratch coming in from the first-party games. That's where Nintendo makes its money. But I still think that's not quite gonna put us down into the $200 range. So here's a wacky idea to throw on top the pile: Service Contracts. Cell phone companies do it, for a while, computer manufacturers were doing it partnered with various ISPs, so why can't video games do it? Bring down the price of our magic PlayStation Wii60 by offering discounts or rebates if you sign up for 2 or more years of Live.
The high-end hardware is going to be a barrier to the backward compatibility as well. We've seen with the 360 and PS3 that making a new system with new hardware can make emulation of older systems difficult. The upgradeability function would also be difficult to create without jaking up the price even more.
Also, the logistics of bringing every single one of these wishlist items to the table would be a nightmare. To be able to have enough people to have the sheer manpower to make each of these pieces as strong as the next would require a massive workforce. And once you did get all these teams assembled, you're going to have a hell of a time managing all that and making sure each team knows how the other team is working and how their piece will fit into the end product flawless with the others. And to be able to have a system like this put together, the company making it would definitely need the autonomy of being a games-only company, not having to worry about answering to corporate execs or even other divisions. So that eliminates the whole financial backing aspect.
Finally, the idea of having one perfect game system would mean that it's one company making it. And history has shown that whenever one company is the exclusive owner of any particular product, the consumers suffer. Competition is needed to make sure that each company is trying the hardest. They want to be the only game in town, so they have to try to beat everyone else. That's where the best gaming comes from. We need the console wars to keep going so we, as gamers, can reap the benefits.
So what have we learned from our little exercise in fantastical futility? Basically, learn to enjoy what you have and don't limit yourself to only one branch of the gaming experience. We need those fanboys there to keep driving the console wars keep the industry going, but we can only pay them so much heed before things get out of hand and we face the next big games crash.
What say you?!