Game Changer

Well it’s finally here.  The PlayStation Vita has hit the shelves and I swung by to pick mine up.  I am really excited about this.  Sure there is the issue of floundering sales in Japan.  After the first week the Vita took a serious dive and last week the older PSP sold 2000 more units.  Sony is confident that this won’t be the case in North America.  PlayStation has been running a serious promotional campaign in major cities across the US to ensure that. What they really have on their side however is a great piece of equipment.  The vita really is a game changer both for Sony and for gaming. 

New Ways to Play

I will give you three reasons why the PS Vita is the game changer that PlayStation is reporting it to be.  The first of which is the device itself.  The device is thin and surprisingly light making it easy to play with for hours on end.  It isn’t the only think that is small, the game cards are small too and the memory cards are ridiculously tiny. 

It features a beautiful 5inch OLED screen that looks stunning.  Combined with its quad core CPU and graphics chip the machine has the nicest looking portable graphics on the market.

Graphics are great but they aren’t what makes it innovative.  There are more ways to play on the PS Vita than any other system out.  Front and back touch screens, gyroscopic controls, six-access motion controls, a set of analogue sticks, and of course the regular buttons you’d expect on a PlayStation product.  

A few launch titles have been accused of gratuitously using these new features but you can’t blame developers for wanting to experiment with these new controls in all the combinations they can think of.  Games no longer have to all about thumbs, now developers can engage players in all new ways.  Take Little Deviants for example, it may not be the best game in the PS Vita line up but it illustrates the abilities of the Vita beautifully.

Uncharted: Golden Abyss is also a great example.  The touch screen can be used to navigate obstacles and solve puzzles while the back touch pad can zoom you rifle or camera. One of the coolest features I found in the new Uncharted title is how, like in other shooters, you can use the analogue sticks to aim but you can use the gyroscope in the device to adjust the aim.  It is the little things that make this device so cool.

Blurring the Lines

The feature that convinced me I needed a PS Vita? Augmented Reality.  AR has been popping up here and there but not this developed.  The PS Vita has a significant number of games in their launch titles geared to use the AR.  The Vita is even being shipped with a set of the AR cards needed to play many of these titles.  It looks like PlayStation is set to support AR.  The Vita takes AR to the next level and more importantly brings it into the homes of everyday people. 

AR lets players blur the lines between their games and their real world.  Letting players set up soccer stadiums on their desks or host fighting tournaments in the park or where else they want.  It is fun and it looks cool.

DOWNLOAD ALL THE THINGS!

The last reason the Vita is changing gaming is the way they are delivering content.  Online game sales and DLC has been around for a while now.  Steam, Xbox Live, and the SEN, formally PSN have been offering these features for years.  With the Vita PlayStation is changing their stance on the issue.  Up until now the SEN offered online games but never seemed to care to much if you picked up the physical copy or not.

An interesting thing happened when I went to the GameStop to pick up my Vita. The guy at the counter asked me if I would like any games with it.  Logical question, I mean I just bought a new system of course I want some games to go with it.  I always knew I wanted Uncharted: Golden Abyss, next to the AR that was other major selling feature for me, but a funny thing happened when he asked: I hesitated.  For a moment, however brief, the idea of downloading the game instead passed through my head.

I snapped back to reality quickly.  The $5 discount didn’t seem worth the lengthy download times and I didn’t want to spring for a big memory card just yet (or though it may be sooner than I thought).  Still this was the first time I had ever had that thought.  PlayStation pushing an online system, I don’t consider myself weak to the marketing propaganda of companies like PlayStation, but I dare say it might be working.

PS Vita Store

Now PlayStation is releasing games online and discounting them to encourage sales.  They are setting up an app store to support their new system, although it doesn’t have to much to offer right now, which means with the right nurturing they may be successful at moving to online only, or at least online mostly sales. With the right memory card a player can end the clutter in their living room and carry their game library on their Vita. No carrying bulky cartridge cases or having to leave some of your favourites behind.

They have obstacles of course, price is the main one:

• Price of both the cards and the content online.  
• Another is the somewhat unreliability of the SEN on occasion. Large downloads take a while and connection issues abound.  
• The third and last is the content itself.  It is still early but, as I mentioned before, there is not a lot up there. 

These are not impossible obstacles; in fact let’s stop calling them obstacles. We can call them challenges and hope PlayStation rises to the occasion.  Online content may very well be the future for gamers and the Vita is doing its part to make it so.

So there you have it.  The PS Vita: A Game Changer.  At least as far as I see it.  

Brave New World? Part 2

So what do we learn from all that in last weeks episode? Well it seems like the technology of next generation system is all over the place. Con: we are still far from anything conclusive. Pro: the sky is the limit. What about the software?  Surely the future of games themselves is a little clearer?

J.J. Abrams (Jim Merithew/Wired.com)

Well if you are hoping for a definitive “yes”, you would be disappointed.  Downloadable content has exploded over the last couple of years, becoming almost a standard for any genre and driving the interest in downloading entire games. What does that mean for game delivery of the future? Are we still going to swing by the local GameStop for our copies of Uncharted 4 or Mass Effect 5? Will we be paying for online pay? What will the game collection of 2015 look like really?

Downloading appears to be the future.  It makes sense; companies can save on all that packaging and shipping while the players are stuck with the costs of media, namely hard drives.  Distributing networks such as Steam or Sony’s SEN charge the same price for games as you would find in store despite the reduced cost of distribution.

Current models are skewed in favour of the publisher that is clear and there will have to be some considerations from those publishers if complete game downloads is the path of the future. The problem with this system is that players are not dumb.  In an age when you can price check a product within seconds online using a computer or your phone pricing a product the same, or in some ridiculous cases more than a physical copy is a hard sell. 

From the players perspective they are getting less for the same price.  That is even before you consider that games today are not small and media isn’t cheap.  If I downloaded everything I bought I would probably fill a hard drive or two a year. For systems such as Sony’s new Vita with proprietary memory cards a mere 16 gigs will cost you $60. Downloading games begins to look more expensive than the previous system.

This is what companies are pushing for. Let us focus on the Vita for a moment because it is a good case study for future systems of game distribution. PlayStation released games on their network for the system before they sold versions in stores. They have also announced they will not be bringing their UMD transfer system to the US.  This does two things, first it makes the Vita not backward compatible and second it sends the message that digital copies of games are better for you.  After all you could still play your copy of Killzone Liberation if you had downloaded from the online store instead of heading to GameStop.

Before the system is even available in North America they are creating an ecosystem that supports the downloading of titles over purchasing of physical copies.  A high profit margin, there is no sharing games and more importantly there is no selling the game back to GameStop for credit. There are good things about downloading you games however.  If there were some compromise on the price points online purchases are better for the environment and mean less clutter for living room.

We just hit an important and controversial issue in the game industry.  The used game industry is a large one and some say it is a destructive one; which is likely why the game industry, or more specifically the publishers and console makers are trying to dismantle it.  Online game sales are just one approach that could leave half the shelves in your local GameStop empty.

Console makers and publishers are looking for ways to reduce the used game industry, one that accounts for a large part of GameStop’s profits that the publishers get no part of.  One approach is the pay to play system that has been appearing in some big titles of late.  EA has developed an online pass system used in titles such as Battlefield 3 and Dead Space that gives first time buyers free online play but players who buy the game used can’t play online unless they pay $10 for the privilege.

EA's Online Pass Info Page

They are not alone; Sony has released several titles in the past few months, Uncharted 3 and Resistance 3, with similar system. Nintendo has pledged to setup their online system with the Wii U and is thinking about engaging a similar as well.  Gamers hate it because who likes paying for anything? It does appear, however, to be a compromise.  This way EA gets a cut of the used game industry and players can continue trading games.

It is certainly a more reasonable approach than that of the Future Xbox 720.  The system is rumoured to feature technology that will not play used games at all; A blow that could destroy the used game markets. In defence of game companies the used game market represents a great deal of potential revue lost by game publishers.  It was estimated $2 billion in lost sales last year 2011.  WOW, I would be a little upset with companies like GameStop too if I saw it that way!  

Some developers, such as Saints Row developer Jameson Dural, are praising this claiming it could save the industry. Now if the industry is really in trouble is also highly debatable and brushes up against other issues like piracy. I mean in 2014, Digi Capital estimates the video game industry will earn $44 billion revenue.  All of a sudden $2 billion seems a bit trivial.

Plenty of people have come out opposing standard industry excuses such as lost sales.  A few developers on the consumer side. Halo developer, Matthew Karch, and Witcher 2 developer, Adam Badowski, have both expressed concerns about the fairness of a system that doesn’t allow players to try games. As a great piece of literature once said, DON'T PANIC.  Nothing is set in stone we are still far from a new Xbox.  

Could controls over games drive users to downloading titles? or could downloading you games help relieve industry concerns over used games.  After all you can't trade in DLC.  Personally I am not crazy about downloading games.  My bandwidth is allocated else where and there is something comforting about having a physical copy of an object (even if I don't own it any more than the downloaded content).  I would not be opposed to it though, really the pricing issue is the biggest obstacle to downloading full titles.

The moral of this story? Game companies, console makers and publishers alike need to develop systems that make it easier for users to get their content not more difficult.  They can't treat players like criminals and they certainly can't take advantage of them, at least not so obviously.

SONY: What is Going on Over There?

Last week was a bit crazy for poor Sony.  They started the new month with by announcing a brand new CEO, Kazuo Hirai, who formally headed up Sony’s Consumer Products & Services Division. This reshuffling of Sony's board of directors will see Hirai moving up to CEO April 1.  Sony has been responsible for a great deal of innovation in its lifetime but of late the tech giant has been experiencing difficult markets.  Competition from companies such as Samsung and Apple has hampered the company’s growth. 

Kazuo Harai (by Ko Sasaki for The Wall Street Journal)

A leadership change may be just what Sony needs.  Last week poor Sony also announced a massive $2.1billion loss in the third quarter.  This seems even more incredible since last year they posted almost a billion dollar net profit the year before.  I am not an economist but that sounds like a $3 billion loss to me.   Sony blamed flooding in Thailand as well as loses in the Products and Services division which lost half of that (Hmmm maybe Hirai isn’t the best choice?).

I kid of course, Hirai was instrumental in the success of the PS3 in North America and you can’t help but like him when he presents at E3.  Hirai is looking to make changes to the corporate structure and do some serious cost cutting. What that means is a little unclear right now but Sony needs to make some bold moves if they want to maintain their legacy of innovation and reputation of being an exceptional electronics manufacturer.  The good news is that Hirai recognises this which is half the battle:

“The foundations are now firmly in place for the new management team and me to fully leverage Sony’s diverse electronics product portfolio, in conjunction with our rich entertainment assets and growing array of networked services, to engage with our customers around the world in new and exciting ways.”

For those of you concerned for about to be former CEO Howard Stringer, don't worry he is just moving to a different chair on the board.  I for one am looking forward to the changes Hirai might bring about.  There is hope on the horizon for Sony and I really hope that translates into cool new gadgets for all of us.

In slightly unrelated news but still on the topic of “Sony: What is Going on Over There?” there is the news of the PSN, or PlayStation Network getting a makeover.  In an effort to streamline user accounts across Sony, PlayStation is rebranding their user network accounts to the “Sony Online Entertainment” accounts.  It will incorporate the PlayStation Network, Video Unlimited, and Music Unlimited into one system.

The change shouldn't affect users at all really but that doesn’t stop the panic in the gaming community. The PSN has been giving users some issues of late with extended maintenance sessions.  Hopefully the SEN will resolve some of these issues.  The PSN has been criticized for connection issues and a lack of features in comparison to Xbox.  It is free people, remember that! But even I think that is not an excuse for bad service. This rebranding is an opportunity to turn that around and get support from the player back.