No one has a crystal ball that shows whether Sony (SNE), Microsoft (MSFT) or Nintendo will sell more game machines in this round of the console wars. But that probably doesn’t matter much anyway. What matters most this time are two questions: Will Nintendo survive as a console maker? And will Microsoft finally challenge Sony’s dominance?
Even before Nintendo’s Wii and the PS3 make their debuts in about a week, it’s already clear that the answers are yes, and yes.
A little background: The video game console market is going through what I think of as its fifth stage. (Gaming purists will say I’m oversimplifying it, and perhaps they’re right, but hey. Everyone needs a system.) The basics below:
1. Pre-NES: This first stage includes Atari, Intellivision, and all of the basic boxes from the ’60s, ’70s and early ’80s.
2. NES: The original Nintendo Entertainment System comes out in the U.S. in 1985 and first pushes console gaming into the mainstream.
3. PlayStation: After its U.S. launch in 1995, Sony proves that the combination of better graphics, attentive developer support and a huge library of titles for teens and adults can propel it to industry dominance.
4. PlayStation 2: In 2000 Microsoft proves a worthy challenger with the graphics-rich, PC-inspired Xbox, and triggers a multi-billion-dollar console arms race that Sony can’t win by simply leveraging yesterday’s success.
Which sets the stage for today. Game software makers, forced to spend more and more money developing games that run on Sony and Microsoft’s increasingly expensive and complex hardware, struggle in a business where developing a blockbuster game now costs as many tens of millions of dollars as producing a blockbuster movie.
Meanwhile Nintendo is clearly unable to match the graphics prowess of the boxes from tech giants Microsoft and Sony, and settles on a risky strategy: It will declare a new era in consoles. It will offer a box that is obviously and unapologetically inferior from a graphics standpoint, that costs less, and that has a motion-sensitive controller that changes the way people interact with a game.
And as if to emphasize that it has bowed out of the testosterone-laced console wars, Nintendo will call its champion the Wii. (It’s pronounced “wee.”)
I shook my head at Nintendo when I first heard the name. It was worlds apart from “Nintendo Revolution,” the console’s working name when it was in development. Nintendo already had a reputation as the wimpiest console maker. Why make it worse?
Months later, I’m prepared to eat my words. In a time of chest-thumping and format wars, the Nintendo Wii has set itself apart as the fun alternative. Why choose between HD-DVD (the Xbox 360 format) or Blu-ray (the PlayStation 3 format)? Why choose between the expensive Xbox 360 and the super-expensive PlayStation 3? All the commotion is enough to make you want to wait until prices drop. In the meantime, you can just buy a Wii and kill time while the titans duke it out.
That’s right: The titans. Microsoft has put itself on equal ground with Sony by building an impressive Xbox 360 console, and engineering an online gaming network that’s well ahead of Sony’s efforts. But Nintendo is clearly accomplishing the more impressive feat – it’s declaring a new day in gaming where it’s not just about the size of your console’s graphics processor, it’s what you do with it.