The War of the Consoles

A few weeks back I realized that I had become a dinosaur as far as the world of gaming was concerned. The last game I had played was over 10 years ago on my Intel Pentium PC, the Lucas Arts smash hit, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Playing a puzzle game without the benefit of a walk-through gives a completely different gaming experience that gamers today may find interesting. Enough nostalgia!

An ex-gamers re-union resulted in one of my friends, Ashwin, bringing over his X-Box. A few hours of playing with it, A sad truth dawned. The PC was dead as far as gaming was concerned. Inspired by the X-Box another friend bought a PS2. Now before you say, "hey there, don't you know that the X-Box 360 and the PS3 are out. Go get one and do some real gaming", let me delve further into the heart of my post.

10 years ago, if my friend had a fun game, I could swap it with him and we could both play. Gaming 10 years ago was not a multi-billion dollar industry that it is today. Microsoft was just getting in to the turf hitherto ruled by Id, EA to name a few. It is also not that consoles did not exist, they very much did. My first games were in fact played on an old Atari console. So there, let get all those assumptions out of the way.

Cut to today. My friend on the PS2 can't swap his games with my X-Box friend. The controllers are vastly different. However the consoles themselves are not much cheaper, At about Rs. 16,000 for an X-Box 360 and Rs. 32,000 for a PS3, these things are not exactly cheap. A game costs anywhere between Rs. 2,000 to Rs. 3,500 and online gaming is the rage!

All of which reminds me of enterprise hardware vendors such as Digital, IBM and HP, who in the 60's, 70's and 80's tried very hard to lock their customers to a particular platform. History while noting their success for a good 30 years also records their eventual convergence. A matter driven more by market forces and less by noble thoughts.

I believe that a similar situation is going to occur on the console front as well. While companies such as Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo will try hard to lock their customers into their consoles and have/will succeed in the short term, in the long run, convergence is inevitable. The field is ripe for gaming standards. Its in the interest of consumers and media companies who create these games. It offers unparalleled gaming convenience for the former and access to larger markets for the latter. I am sure every X-Box'r has a PS2 friend who he wanted to play against.

Already mod-chips, allow gamers to unlock the potential of their consoles. Emulators allow PC gamers to play console games. It is only a matter of time before we see universal consoles. What shall we name them? PoX? or XS2?

The future holds exciting options. Will the console lords listen?