Consoles: Too Good for their Own Good

[Image: xbl]I think that gamertags and gamerscore are two of the best ideas that Microsoft has brought to the gaming table.

A gigantic all-encompassing competitive scoring system linked with a personalized profile which is then widgetized so that you can boast on your blog sidebar? Hell yes. More, please.

The problem is that I won’t pay for Xbox Live (Gold).

I bought a year’s worth, once. Technically twice since I was stupid enough to leave my credit card info in the Xbox and my brother bought another year on my dime. I bought it way back when Live first launched and nobody really knew how it was going to actually work.

It turns out that adding comprehensive online capabilities to a console was a frackin’ good idea. But I am a stingy bastard and I’m not convinced that a year’s worth of Live play is really $70 of fun. I don’t think Microsoft thinks so either, but MMORPGS have taught the game publishing world that gamers are idiots and will pay unbelievable amounts of money so long as you provide free crack and use soothing monthly fees so it slides down the throat like honey.

The problem is that Microsoft has to charge for Xbox Live. The same way that Sony, despite offering a “free” online service, is rumored to be charging publishers to make up their expenditures. The same way that games, in general, are slowly removing the four-player split screen mode. The same way that console game prices go up $10 every time you sneeze. The same way they bundle consoles with games so that you have to purchase three titles with the hardware, and no they’re not included in the price of the console. The same way I framed Roger Rabbit. I shouldn’t have admitted that last bit, should I?

So why is all this happening? Why does Mircosoft have to charge for Xbox Live?

It’s because consoles are too good for their own good. I blame the media and I blame Freud. Or some other psychologist, maybe. Pavlov would probably do in a pinch.

The media is to blame because they like to talk about “news.” And “news,” when it comes to consoles, is largely about who has the nextest-generation of hardware. So the next-generation of consoles, in order to really make the headlines and get syndicated by Reuters and have Sam Frackin’ Jackson (oh the VGAs…) toting around your console or JayZ wearing it around his neck as “bling,” in order to make that happen, you need to have stupidly good hardware in your box. When’s the last time you saw a celebrity wearing a rhinestone-embossed Nintendo Wii? It was probably Twista, and he was only an overnight celebrity. ZING!

The point is that the media encourages console developers to spend inordinate amounts of money on their console hardware. Hell, the natures of the “console lifespan” itself makes developers do that—you have to make hardware that will do “impressive” things for five or six years. In today’s world, that’s like asking Regis Philbin to be funny. So consoles (like any piece of “new” technology) are trying to become “only moderately” obsolete over their lifespan.

The other culprit is psychology. This is linked with the media. Ready for it? People are impressionable. Advertising works. Why do you think companies spend so many millions (billions?) of dollars every year throwing their message around? Why are there ads for milk? It’s not like people don’t know that milk exists. When you advertise milk, people buy more milk.

The same concept applies to games, game advertising, and game media. A disappointingly large number modern gamers are “monkey see, monkey do” gamers, who want “better graphics, more power,” just so they can see the stitches on that football a little bit better. What’s that? Only one or two good games for the PS3 yet? That doesn’t matter! It has eight cores! And Sam Jackson plays it!

How much do you think that costs? If you want a chance of hitting your six-year goal, you have to build your console with hardware that isn’t even on the market yet. Just by way of example, on Newegg you can get an Intel core 2 extreme processor (2.93Ghz) for only $959. That’s a “core 2” (2-core) processor. The processor in the Playstation 3 has eight cores, dude!

Not cheap.

Microsoft did the same thing with the Xbox 360. It’s packed full of hardware that’s going to keep it going for the next six years.

So how come you can buy a console for $400 to $600? Didn’t that processor cost about twice as much*?

Everyone knows that console makers subsidize the hardware that goes into the console, especially at launch. But I don’t think people really understand how much they’re forced to fork over just to make sure the launch hardware is affordable to consumers.

The hope is that by the end of its life, a console’s hardware will have dropped enough in price that each box will turn (a small) profit. In the intervening six years, they’ve got to find somewhere to squeeze some cash out of the operation, or it’s really just a huge battle to gain control of a financial quagmire that nobody should really want in the first place.

The main breadwinner in this equation is publishing games. When Microsoft publishes a game for the 360, which it tries to do as often as possible, they make a tidy profit from each game sold.

So that got them to thinking: hey wait a minute, if we only let people play two-player split screen, we can sell two games when we used to sell only one.

I can only imagine the conversation:

Bob: Hey Joe, let’s cut four-player split screen from this game. Then they’ll have to buy two copies to play four-player on a LAN instead!

Joe: Brilliant—Wait! Gamers will never be that stupid.

Bob: We’ll tell them we’re trying to give each player a bigger screen.

Joe: Brilliant—but gamers are lazy! Nobody wants to set up a LAN.

Bob: Good point. We’ll make an online service and charge them a yearly fee to use it!

Joe: Brilliant—no! Who’s going to pay $70 on top of their internet connection to play games online they can play online for free on their computer?

Bob: Everybody! Let’s throw millions of dollars into advertising and get Pavlov to ring some bells. Suddenly gamers will salivate at the mouth like dogs!

As far as I can tell, that’s pretty much what happened. And I’ll tell you the damnedest thing: it worked. The world ate it up like particularly good-smelling BBQ pork sandwiches.

So now we have all these really cool “services” and “options” springing up for consoles all over the place not because they’re cool ideas (which most of them are), but because they’ve been invented to cover the cost of developing the console in the first place. And to me, that’s just an ass-backwards way to go about it.

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* Yes, I know that’s retail. Yes, I know it’s not bulk. I’m not an idiot; I’m just making a point.