Virtual Reality War – Part 3 November 20, 2024
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Welcome back to the Virtual Reality War, where we discuss the history behind one of the most recent wars in the current tech landscape, Virtual Reality. As we ended the last part, we discovered that Sony had made a big impact with the Playstation VR add-on for the PS4, and Oculus had made a huge impact with the Rift series of headsets on the PC. Video streaming sites such as YouTube were already allowing users to upload a wide range of 3D, 180, and 360 degree videos online, perfect for streaming to a VR headset. Meanwhile, tech companies such as Samsung were releasing standalone VR products such as the Gear VR, but they were not seeing major adoption outside of major Theme Park venues. As we entered 2020, the first generation of the Virtual Reality War was wrapping up.
After the release of products like the Samsung Gear VR, the public became interested in standalone VR headsets. Let’s be real, even back in the early days of VR, a virtual reality headset had traditionally been only two very small screens and stereo headset with some head position tracking equipment. It was essentially just a 3D screen, controller and headphones in one! To save space, lower cost, make upgrades easier, and cut down on heat, all graphical and computational work would be handled outside of the headset. All the headset needed to do was receive the video/audio signals, and output the head tracking and controller button inputs. In short, a LOT of space was needed for VR equipment. This kind of setup was fine for enclosed systems people were renting time to use as dedicated venues, but with home VR games offering more freedom of movement, having one or more bulky wires between your headset and your PC or PS4 could be a tripping or choking hazard! Thankfully, modern smartphones and tablets made since the late 2000s proved that powerful, low energy CPUs could be made small enough to fit in your pocket, and devices like the Samsung Gear VR proved they could certainly be small enough to fit into a VR headset. Consumer demand was brewing for a dedicated VR headset to be released that did not require tethering to a PC, smartphone or console. Let’s put a pin in that for a second, as Oculus had some plans brewing for this demand. There were a few false starts and minor product releases during this time which would not have very long shelf lives in the retail space. The first we’re going to talk about is something called the Oculus Go.
The Oculus Go was a completely standalone VR headset. It was small and light, and only included a single controller which acted almost more as a remote than as a game controller. It was designed very similar to a smartphone, with the caveat that you could not make phone calls with it. However, you could download dedicated applications to it, such as YouTube or Netflix, and stream pre-recorded content to watch in VR. At a price of $199US for a 32GB model and $249US for a 64GB model, it was cheaper than a smartphone and could do many of the same high-demand functions as a low-cost tablet. The Oculus Go turned out to be a decent Christmas novelty gift, but not much more than that. In fact, I remember my brother-in-law bought a Go for his father one Christmas morning many years ago, and actually let me try it out. I was impressed by the Jurassic World tech demo, and the fact that it had a native YouTube application capable of playing 180-and-360 degree videos, but as someone who already owned a PlayStation VR, other than the fact that I had full freedom of movement, I felt no incentive to get a Go. Support for it would not last very long, and the product is now considered obsolete.
Meanwhile, PC gamers found a lot to be happy about with the new VR equipment that was coming onto the market. The problem was a lot of them still harbored resentment for Facebook and the walled garden they had forced Oculus into adding for their Rift headsets. However, there was a company out there that most gamers could agree was worth giving money to, and that was Valve. Yes, the same company that created Half-Life and Portal ALSO offered one of the most comprehensive online game marketplaces on the web, Steam. Steam ruled the digital PC game marketplace since Half-Life 2 launched exclusively for it back in 2004. Many competitors, even some backed by major game publishers, had come and gone over the years to try to overtake its crown, but by the late 2010s, Steam was the definitive PC gaming hub, and its software could be found on nearly every gaming PC. It turned out Valve had been eying the success of the PCVR market for some time, before the late 2010s wrapped, they announced they would be shipping out a new VR product! It would be made compatible with HTC Vive hardware and include its own wireless motion controllers. It would be referred to as the Valve Index and would be compatible with all PCVR games released through Steam (provided the customer had a PC capable of running the VR game). It would cost a whopping $1499 US but would include everything a PCVR gamer would need in the box (except for the PC).
Steam would also offer PC VR games for sale on their digital marketplace. The killer app for the Valve Index would be a long-anticipated Half-Life title, Half-Life Alyx. Gamers had been clamoring for SOME kind of follow up to Half-Life since the release of Half-Life 2: Episode 2 ended in a horrifying cliffhanger in 2007. Half-Life Alyx was set between the events of the first and second Half-Life game, and served as a prequel to the second game, further fleshing out the fan-favorite character of Alyx Vance. It was also built from the ground up to take advantage of the VR perspective and motion control scheme, and since it required a gaming PC to play, could push the boundaries on what was possible with graphics and game performance. It was the perfect showpiece for what was NOW possible with VR.
The Valve Index hit the market and a major subset of PC gamers who refused to buy the Rift purchased it in droves. Once preorders for the Valve Index began on Steam, it immediately entered Steam’s Top 10 sales lists. I can’t imagine I’m the only person who was shocked at the irony that a digital software publishing company would release a physical product, but I very well may be. Valve had a lot to be proud of. To this day, Half-Life Alyx is considered to be one of the finest Virtual Reality games ever made. Four years later, most people still consider it the best looking VR game ever made. It also has never been ported to any other VR platform, making Steam a must-have application for new PCVR players.
Oculus answered this entry with two surprising announcements. A new Rift headset would be coming out, and a new standalone VR product, would be coming out alongside it, called the Quest. The Quest launched on the same timeframe as the next generation Rift but offered no backwards compatibility with Rift-specific Software. It could play its own standalone games that could be downloaded straight to the headset from Quest’s marketplace, and Oculus did promise that any software purchased for the Rift that was also released on the Quest could be played on both platforms if the user owned both headsets. The release of the Quest should probably be considered the major cutoff point for the second Virtual Reality War, and if that is the case, the winners of the war may just be considered another toss up. Now it was clear that the PCVR market was splintered, with Rift and Index users digging into their respective fiefdoms. Adding the Quest platform with its own standalone exclusive titles should not be considered part of the Rift’s ecosystem in the same way that the Super Nintendo could not play original Nintendo cartridges.
The Rift store would offer some impressive exclusive titles such as the previously mentioned Wilson’s Heart, and newer sci-fi cult classics like Lone Echo and Lone Echo II. Valve’s Steam would offer PCVR ports of many (formerly) Playstation VR exclusives such as Batman: Arkham VR and Psychonauts: In the Rhombus of Ruin (which I still consider one of my favorite VR games of all time). However, Valve and Oculus’s PCVR rivalry would be short lived, as Oculus was not planning on developing for the Rift hardware much longer. With the success of standalone VR products such as the Quest and Go, Oculus’s parent company could see that the path of the Quest would be the future of VR, not the Rift. One year after the release of the Quest, Oculus would answer gamers’ demands, and announced the Quest 2.
The Quest 2 should probably go down in history as the most important Virtual Reality product of the modern age. It would be compatible with all Quest games, and natively run games specifically designed for the Quest 2. Heck, unlike the Quest 1, the Quest 2 would even allow PC gamers to stream their Rift games from their PC with the use of either a Link Cable or dedicated wireless router, and some players had success streaming Steam’s VR games to it as well. Games coming to the Quest 2 would include an incredible port of the PSVR’s Iron Man VR, as well as VR-native ports of the Capcom classic Resident Evil 4. Unfortunately, the Quest 2’s quality was not perfect, its passthrough cameras were only capable of producing a 2D black and white video feed and while it did not require external sensors to track player movement, it could lose track of its controllers if they were out of the headset’s tracking field. At the time, these limitations were considered to be minor inconveniences to keep costs of the Quest 2 down, and within no time, the Quest 2 was becoming heavily adopted by young people worldwide as their gaming platform of choice!
What was Sony doing during this time? Well, they were mostly focused on the PS5, and it was doing them quite well. The PS5’s sales were completely decimating Microsoft’s newest Xbox console, and despite few exclusive titles, nearly every gamer wanted to buy a PS5. The problem was that there was no easy way to get the PS4’s VR headset working with a PS5, you would need to obtain an adapter and use the PS4’s older 3D camera if you wanted to play PSVR games on your PS5. Sony did promise a PS5 native VR headset was on its way, which they called PlayStation VR 2, but sadly, there would be NO backwards compatibility between PSVR and PSVR2 games. This was due to some hardware differences between the PS5’s new camera and the more complex PSVR2 touch controllers. It was also not ready and would not launch until Feb 2023, giving other platforms plenty of time to release new games.
A new war was upon us, but what about the previous war? Between the heavy splintering of VR users amongst the Rift, Index and PSVR users, we’re going to declare last generation’s Virtual Reality War a tie. However, this stalemate was not to last. What happened with the PSVR2 and the Oculus Quest 2? That’s a story for next time!
Virtual Reality War – Part 2 June 4, 2024
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Welcome back to Virtual Reality War, where we look into the history of Virtual Reality, and share our insight behind the scenes. As we begin the second part of the series, two major Virtual Reality companies have entered the gaming space, Oculus with the Rift and Sony with their PlayStation VR (PSVR). Unlike previous console wars we’ve talked about, the VR war started out with the major players on great terms with each other. The Rift and the PSVR each had their own method for functioning (one required a gaming PC and the other requiring a PS4) and either headset had their own dedicated fanbases that did not seem to overlap or conflict. At this moment in time, we’ve considered the VR War to be at a wash, but a winner, as well as new competitors, may be soon to emerge.
At launch, the PSVR had dedicated exclusives but within no time, multiplatform VR games began getting released. While it was easy to acknowledge games played on the Rift had a graphical advantage, most PSVR owners knew it was due to the fact the Rift required a high-end PC to work, and the Rift users with those high-end PCs were happy to see their expensive computers push graphics to a new level. In short, players were happy. Even more, the future for both platforms looked bright, as it was clear more games and new features were on the horizon.
Oculus was getting ready to innovate, with innovations in motion controllers being nearly perfected since the days of the Nintendo Wii, there was a demand for wireless hand controllers on PC. The PSVR shipped with dedicated PS Move controllers that were already capable of motion control, but many PC gamers had not taken the motion-control plunge just yet. That changed when Oculus announced the first Oculus Rift Touch Controllers. At a price of $200 US at launch, these stand-alone Bluetooth-Compatible controllers allowed PC gamers to interact in the VR space. The cult-classic Twisted Pixel game Wilson’s Heart would be the one of the first major games to take advantage of the new Touch Controllers.
Outside of the gaming space, a new generation of enthusiasts were slowly discovering the possibilities VR offered. VR was also becoming a new form of general entertainment, and venues like theme parks were beginning to offer VR as a way to augment their existing rides. They were able to accomplish this by creating dedicated smartphone applications and attaching those phones into a relatively inexpensive pair of goggles. Parks like Six Flags offered a VR experience when riding their roller-coasters, hoping to entice former guests to make return trips. This was a popular promotion for a time, but due to regular technical issues, delays with making sure all guests had their headsets properly attached, and half of the guests choosing to opt out of the experience altogether, VR at theme parks would not last.
Now was the time for a new player to enter the game. Smartphones in the mid 2010s already had great screens, gyroscopes for motion tracking, microphones and speakers. It was perfect to be the heart of a VR headset. In 2015, SAMSUNG created the Gear VR headset to work with several of their selected Galaxy and Note line of smartphones. If you happened to have a compatible SAMSUNG smartphone, you could put it in a Gear VR headset and have a standalone VR experience. However, this method would not see a wide adoption. The wide range of smartphone sizes, shapes and performance capabilities made producing a consistent VR experience for players difficult. Meanwhile, other major smartphone players such as Apple would not natively adopt VR features, cutting out a huge portion of the smartphone owner market out of VR.
Over on the PC, the Oculus Touch Controllers were not an enormous seller. In 2016, most PC players were happy to use their traditional keyboard and mouse controls while in VR, and the price for the controllers were considered too high in comparison to the price of something like the PlayStation Move. Eventually, Oculus lowered the price of the controllers to $100 US. Not all games would take advantage of the new control layout, but once games from the PSVR started getting ported to Rift, motion controls eventually unified with the VR experience.
Once gamers realized that the high-end smartphones of the time were powerful enough to provide decent VR experiences when attached to a comically inexpensive pair of goggles, and be able to play a virtual reality game or watch a VR video on a headset that lacked all external video cables, a very vocal subset of gamers began demanding companies start to produce dedicated VR headsets that could operate independently from a PC or Console. For a brief time, smartphone solutions like the Gear VR were able to fill this niche, but that would not continue for long. What was needed was for a major player in the VR space to release a standalone VR headset. That, dear readers, will be coming in the next part.
Virtual Reality War Part 1 May 23, 2024
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We’re dipping back into gaming history and beginning a brand new series on the History of Virtual Reality (VR). While VR is still considered a niche component of a greater video game landscape, a small war has been brewing for over half a decade focused around several companies who claim to have the BEST Virtual Reality device. Along the next several parts of this series, we’re going to talk about the history of VR, and offer our perspective on which companies have been offering the best VR device! So buckle in, ladies and gentlemen, because this war is going to get very complicated.
As many of you who may be children in the mid-1990s, you may remember a time in arcades known as the “Virtual Reality” craze. A company called Virtuality had created a fleet of real-time 3D stereoscopic VR pods exclusively for commercial use at venues like arcades and theme parks. For five dollars you can rent a grand total of five minutes in an entirely digital space. For some people, using Virtuality’s VR equipment was an INCREDIBLE look into the future, but others had a lot of problems with it. The Virtuality headsets were big and bulky. This was unavoidable, as gyroscopes were not as small as they are today, so a special magnetic array around the pod was used for real-time head tracking. Nothing can cause motion sickness faster than an inconsistent or stuttering framerate, so the developers had to implement caps to ensure stutter could not happen. Due to computer processing limitations of the time, the resolution on the headsets could not exceed 640×480, and the frame rates of the games would typically cap out at around twenty frames per second. Regardless of the low resolution and framerate, VR games still required exceptionally high-end custom PCs, averaging around $20,000 US, to run their lineup of custom games.
Despite the costs and hardware limitations of the time, the technology WORKED. Virtuality headsets were featured in major Hollywood films like First Kid, Ghost in the Machine, and Hackers. Experienced gamers that were able to adapt to the gameplay quickly would find themselves having an enjoyable experience they just could not get at home! Inversely, the non-technically inclined or less experienced players did not enjoy it. In the mid-90s, VR was something that no players would have previous familiarity with, and five minutes was just not enough time for a human being to learn how to play a VR game. Many first-time players were unable to adapt to the medium’s controls in such a brief gameplay time.
I would be remiss to neglect to mention Nintendo’s Virtual Boy during this time, however I would remind you that we did discuss it briefly during our Console Wars series. The Virtual Boy had an awful launch with a game library that failed to take proper advantage of the hardware that Nintendo had designed. Within a year of its release, due to poor sales, Nintendo pulled the plug on the Virtual Boy, and its failure was considered a permanent nail in Virtual Reality’s coffin.
By the late 90s, mass audiences walked away from VR as a fad, and viewed the whole medium as a negative. Virtuality eventually ceased production of new or improved VR pods, and there have been reports the company tossed a lot of unsold units in the trash. That’s where the medium remained for at least the next twenty years. However, computing performance improved exponentially during that time. High end PCs capable of high-resolution high-performance games were very affordable in the early 2010s. Hollywood was releasing a new generation of 3D films to entice audiences to watch movies at the cinemas (at a premium price), and for a brief time they were very popular. 3DTVs were starting to get offered for sale, but due to a lot of very bad executive decisions, the complexities of actually watching a 3D movie at home on one of those 3DTVs ensured 3D home theater viewing was not widely adopted. VR seemed the perfect alternative solution for 3D films and games, but it had been defunct…until…
In 2012, Oculus came forward using a new mass-investment website called Kickstarter. They promised that if they received a mass monetary investment from gamers across the world they could produce a modern Virtual Reality headset that could work in conjunction with a modern PC. Their VR headset would be called The Rift. Gamers, like always, were skeptical of the company’s claims, but based upon a lot of goodwill, and a major need to see a full revival of the medium, gamers began to sign up for Kickstarter to prepare to send investment money to Oculus. The Oculus Rift Kickstarter launched on August 12th, 2012 and in no time at all, not only had Oculus had their Kickstarter request funded, it was so funded MAJOR technology companies began to take notice. Perhaps VR wasn’t as dead as everyone originally believed it was?
Influenced by the success of the Oculus Kickstarter, Sony was also interested in offering their own Virtual Reality hardware. As one of the biggest technology companies in the world with the highest selling video-game console of three out of the last four gaming generations, Sony believed they could release a VR headset that would use their PlayStation 4 console to generate all of the game’s graphics, similar to how Oculus was using the PC for all the game’s graphics processing. The problem was the PS4 was not originally designed to take advantage of a VR headset, and so any headset designed for it would need to take advantage of the PS4’s existing ports and hardware limitations. To make the PSVR work, Sony needed to use the PS4’s existing 3D camera to act as a method of external head tracking, so all PSVR users would need to have a camera. The PS3’s PlayStation Move controllers excelled at real-time 3D hand position tracking, so Sony decided to re-release the Move as a PSVR-native controller. PS3 owners with Move experience felt right at home with the familiar controllers. The working name for Sony’s VR headset was Project Morpheus, and while Sony promised that it would run a lot of the same third-party VR games that you would be able to play on the Oculus with your PC, it would offer an exclusive library of first and third-party titles.
Meanwhile, social media website Facebook took a lot of interest in Oculus and ended up buying the company outright following the successful Kickstarter. How did this purchase affect the gamers who funded the Oculus project through Kickstarter? Technically, their early investment through Kickstarter should have given them SOME rights into the company they had invested actual money in. Shouldn’t they have been entitled to a financial payout from the Facebook purchase? Shockingly, the answer was no, they were not. It turned out that while Kickstarter prided itself as an “investment platform”, any “investors” through the site were entitled to no actual financial or creative decisions in the company. Facebook did promise they would honor Oculus’s Kickstarter rewards, and investors who had put down money for a headset would still be getting their orders fulfilled. Their plan was to use the Rift as a bedrock for launching a whole-new medium for social interaction. Most of the Kickstarter investors were quite unhappy about this result, as many of them hated Facebook as a company and were not users of their website. Regardless, they had no outlet for this disagreement and to this day, I refuse to ever fund a Kickstarter project on principle because of these events.
As the mid-2010s progressed, Sony was preparing to release Project Morpheus, now officially referred to as the PlayStation VR. At the same time they were also preparing to launch the highly-anticipated PS4 Pro, which was an enhanced 4K PS4. While the PSVR could work with either the PS4 or PS4 Pro, the downside was that the PSVR’s expansion box could not work with a new feature that Sony’s other divisions were beginning to push, High-Dynamic Range color (HDR). HDR provided a much wider color palate than traditional HDTVs offered, and many have considered it to be an essential component to the success of a new line of 4K Ultra High-Definition (UHD) televisions. The PSVR itself could not support HDR, but Sony did promise their second generation PSVR would restore the ability to pass HDR content to supported 4KTVs.
Given the fact that Oculus offered early Rift prototypes to Kickstarter backers, it is difficult to pinpoint the exact launch window for the commercial version of the Rift. However, the first Rift orders shipped out to the Kickstarter investors would get very positive initial impressions. The Rift required a high-end PC to function, and early adopters were given access to a VR enhanced version of the Doom 3 BFG Edition. Doom 3 held the gold standard for PC game graphics when it launched in 2004, and its terrifying atmospheric environments were a perfect showcase for the new medium of VR. Also, since Rift was designed to work with PC, most players were happy to develop and share VR-enhancement mods for their favorite games.
Sony launched the PSVR in 2016 with a deep lineup of early exclusive games such as Until Dawn: Rush of Blood, Batman: Arkham VR and Psychonauts: In the Rhombus of Ruin. As predicted, the PSVR was a great VR solution for the time for gamers who lacked the ability to afford a high-end PC. While some of the games that initially launched as PSVR exclusive, such as Batman: Arkham VR and Psychonauts: In the Rhombus of Ruin, that exclusivity would not last and both games were re-released on several PCVR digital platforms. But most important to remember, while the graphics and performance on the PS4 could not surpass what was theoretically possible with Oculus Rift on a PC, the PSVR’s owners just did not care. Console owners have known for decades that their consoles may not be able to produce graphics as good as what they could get on PC, but they could at least be guaranteed a lower entry point, and hardware optimizations. By 2016 nearly every gamer already had a PS4 in their homes, some PlayStation Move Controllers, and a PS Camera, getting a PSVR was not a difficult sell for many interested in rejoining the VR medium. Also, since PS4 supported 3D Blu-Ray Disc playback, players without a 3DTV could watch 3D films fine just using their PSVR. The only major problems as the lack of the HDR pass through support, so many 4KTV (UHDTV) owners decided to hold off until Sony released their second hardware revision.
So as we wrap this story, its the end of 2016, two major competitors have released their own VR headsets, each with their own focus, their own perks, and their own die-hard supporters. Because of that, we feel it is still too early to bring in a winner, so we are declaring this first step into the VR Console War a tie! As we enter the next part, a new competitor will enter the VR space…and it will bring with it the support of the biggest online digital marketplace on the planet. What will happen next? Stay tuned to the next part and find out.
Console War VII (Part 2) January 31, 2023
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Welcome back to the Console War where we are quickly headed into the present. As we start this story, Microsoft had announced their next console and Google’s Stadia was essentially dead on arrival. Pokemania’s second wave had started to cool, but the Switch platform was still going strong. Even the Switch Lite had fantastic ongoing sales, as the lower price point was a big incentive for players who had no interest in owning a modern HDTV. What was going to happen next? Sony was about to announce their next console, the PlayStation 5.
In due time, Sony announced their next console would be the PlayStation 5. The first talk about it was mostly technical details, and some of it focused on 3D special audio capabilities. Eventually, two PS5 consoles were revealed, and the only difference between them was that one would include a disc drive and the other would not. Otherwise they’d still be able to play the same games at exactly the same visual standard and performance.
Like the Xbox Series could support Xbox One titles, Sony announced users would be able to play PS4 games on the PS5 through backwards compatibility. Unfortunately, unless the user was engaging in backwards compatibility, PS4 accessories would not work on the PS5 with the exception of the PlayStation VR. However, the PS5’s camera was incompatible with the PSVR, so VR owners would need to obtain an adapter to get their old PS4’s camera working on the PS5. This adapter could be gotten for free on Sony’s website and would be sent out if a user provided Sony Support their PSVR’s serial number.
When Microsoft announced they would be releasing games for both the Xbox One and Xbox Series moving forward, Sony did as well. Major titles including Spider-Man: Miles Morales would get released on both the PS4 and PS5. When Microsoft announced any Xbox cross platform game would only need to ship on a single game package, Sony refused to go this route. Instead of releasing multiplatform games in a single package or offering one-purchase-both-platform digital sales for PS4 and PS5 games, Sony would continue to publish separate PS4 and PS5 disc packages to retail and charge a premium upgrade fee for several titles that shipped on both consoles. PS4 games would typically play on a PS5 using backwards compatibility, but PS5 discs would not work on the PS4. Some PS4 games (such as Control: Ultimate Edition) would offer the ability to play the PS5 native version of the game natively, but it wasn’t always certain if your game would actually launch as a PS4 or PS5 game even if you inserted a PS5 disc into your PS5. Also, saves from PS4 games would not be compatible with their PS5 version, and developers would need to create a conversion tool inside their PS4 games if they wished their users to carry over their progress to the PS5.
Despite these issues, expectations were high for the PS5. As the PS4 was declared the winner of the previous generation of the console war, Sony was walking into the PS5’s generation as the clear frontrunner. Both the PS5 and Xbox Series consoles launched in Fall 2020, but even if you were a hardcore gamer it would be difficult for you to even know it. As I mentioned before, most major titles for the new consoles would have previous generation releases. Unlike the PS4/Xbox One generation that completely cut new releases for the PS3 and Xbox 360 on day one of the PS4/Xbox One launches, games are still coming to the older Sony and MS platforms to this day. Sadly, multi-generational releases weren’t the only reason most people didn’t realize the new consoles were out and I think now is the time for us to address the elephant in the room.
Most people didn’t realize the Xbox Series X or the PS5 released was because you couldn’t find any of them in any store for years after they officially released. In 2020, one of the worst pandemics humanity had ever seen was running wild, forcing most people to stay home. Since the most common activity for people to do while staying home was to play video games, for several months most people did exactly that. Knowing this, several “opportunistic” individuals focused on buying up as much of the stock of game consoles as they could. I believe their intention was to hoard their purchases with the intention to resell at exorbitant price increases. Since there was no difference in the minds of most people, ALL game consoles, be it a Nintendo Switch, a PlayStation or an Xbox, would be bought up almost as soon as they made it to retail for the purpose of a quick resell.
For two years, new consoles were nearly impossible to find at retail. This was a major problem for gamers interested in upgrading their equipment, or people with existing consoles that failed on them and needed to be replaced. This also makes it difficult to keep track of the console war’s pacing, as due to the resale market, it was literally meaningless to track sales during this time. Since none could be found on shelves, all a sales figure would tell you was how many consoles were MADE as of the time it was recorded.
At the height of this demand for new consoles, Nintendo made the announcement they would release a new Switch revision, a Switch with an OLED screen. This new Switch was capable of playing all existing Switch games on a beautiful OLED screen. However, other than including a built-in Ethernet port, everything else about the OLED Switch was the same as the original model and it still output in a 1080p while docked. Gamers everywhere had been clamoring for Nintendo to launch a Nintendo Switch capable of outputting in native 4K resolution and the Switch OLED just could not do that. However, the new screen was absolutely beautiful and the influx of new stock of consoles helped Nintendo have product on retail shelves in time for the Holidays.
Two years into the console war, the resale market would start to crater, and the new generation of consoles could finally be found on retail shelves for people to purchase. Not including Nintendo Switch, the first console to eventually be able to be found on the shelves of normal retailers was the Xbox Series X, several months later gamers could find PS5s. At the same time PS5s began showing up on retail shelves, Sony released several incredible PS5 exclusives, including God of War: Ragnarok and a remaster of the PS3 masterpiece The Last of Us. Sales for the PS5 and the new games coming for the platform pushed it ahead for this generation.
So why was the PS5 outselling the Xbox once again? It came down to the games. Most of the major games coming to the Xbox platform haven’t generated much interest, especially with Microsoft’s major focus on microtransaction-filled multiplayer arena titles. Halo: Infinite, a major poster child for the Xbox Series launch, was delayed several months past the console’s launch. When it eventually did release, it was a disappointment. Sony, on the other hand has been continuing their tradition of producing epic single-player adventures with a major focus on plot and story.
Why did Sony have the best exclusives? After getting burned badly in the initial launch period of the Xbox One, most third-party publishers ceased doing exclusive games for Microsoft. They knew Microsoft’s market share would not allow them to generate enough sales to warrant an exclusive game, regardless of how much Microsoft offered them up front. Microsoft’s only answer to solve the problem of all these companies refusing to produce exclusive games for them was to just outright buy their companies. Microsoft has purchased not just several independent game developers like Double Fine, they also bought several major publishers including Bethesda and as of this writing they’re trying to get approval to purchase Activision. However, while that may be a winning strategy for them in the long term, in the short term it hasn’t been working out.
Microsoft also devoted itself to making all of its major first-party releases multiplaform. That meant you didn’t need to play Halo: Infinite on the Xbox Series X or S, you could play it on the Xbox One or PC. While this was very consumer-friendly, it meant major titles were left unoptimized for the individual platforms. People who did play the game on the Series X, myself included, were disappointed with its graphics and performance on what was supposedly Microsoft’s high-end console. Meanwhile, Sony’s games took full advantage of the hardware capabilities of the PS5.
At the end of 2022, Google announced they would be shutting down the Stadia service. It turned out the expectations of literally every gamer aware of their history had come to pass, and Google realized they weren’t generating enough income with their individual game sales to justify continuing to operate the expensive service. With the shutdown, gamers who made Stadia purchases would be completely locked out of their games. To relieve the concerns (or possibly to avoid lawsuits) Google announced they would refund ALL Stadia hardware and software purchases made during the platform’s lifespan. They would not, however, refund gamers who paid for the monthly premium Stadia service. Gamers with existing Stadia hardware could continue to use their Chromecast Ultras without Stadia functionality (something I can attest most people were doing already) and Stadia Controllers worked fine on conventional PC games. As a last gesture to generate goodwill, Google released a hardware update for the controllers to enable wireless Bluetooth capabilities, but they also worked fine with their provided USB cable.
As we move into 2023, both Sony and Nintendo could argue their way into the frontrunner positions, and Microsoft was not counting themselves out of the game just yet. Stadia is dead, and will live on as a memory of failure in nearly every way conceivable. Sony has recently revealed their next generation PSVR, that they’re calling the PSVR2. Who’s to say what will happen next?
Console War VII (Part 1) January 27, 2023
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It sure has been a while hasn’t it? Welcome back to our ongoing history series on the Console Wars, where we tell the story of our time! When we last left off, the Nintendo Switch, and its spin-off the Switch Lite, had seen tremendous success as a console with the capability to take anywhere. Nintendo wasn’t going anywhere. However, Microsoft and Sony were gearing up to replace their PS4 and Xbox One platforms with entirely new consoles, and a new Console War was about to Dawn. Let’s get started, shall we?
In 2019, the Switch platform was selling very well, and plenty of developers were still producing games for it. When it was first announced, I theorized that the Switch could have been the most ideal platform for a Pokémon game to ever be released on. The original strength of Pokémon was its ability to take it anywhere. For the Game Boy, it was common to play in one on one situations before the mass adoption of online gaming for consoles. With the Switch, a user could play their game while on the go, and when the player brought their games home, they could dock their Switches and continue their solo progress on their big-screen HDTVs. Pokémon Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee proved that method could work in 2018, and those were just remakes of the original Pokémon Yellow. The time was right for an all-new Pokémon title created for the Switch from the ground up. Nintendo announced Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield.
At the reveal, the Pokémon Company offered a glimpse of an entirely new region that offered the ability to interact with Pokémon that was actually visible in the game world. There would even be open “wild areas” where trainers would need to avoid high level Pokemon they would not be able to capture. It looked fantastic. Sadly, before Pokémon Sword and Shield released, it found itself in a controversy. Unlike what was possible with previous games, The Pokémon Company admitted they weren’t able to allow the ability for play and trade every Pokémon that had ever existed, including many popular and fan favorites. With the previous generation’s announcement for cloud platforms for storing Pokémon like Pokémon Bank pushing the idea players would be able to keep their Pokémon forever, this news they would not be able to bring older Pokémon into their newest games set off a slew of negative publicity from the gamers who had literally completed their Pokédexes. They were also concerned it would set a dangerous precedent for future titles. However, in November 2019 the negative reviews of the old guard of players were absolutely eclipsed by the sheer volume of copies Sword and Shield ended up selling. That said, the fans were now split on their previously unified enjoyment of the franchise. It seemed the second wave of Pokemania was starting to wane.
There’s another contender I’d like to briefly touch upon in this article, and that was Google’s Stadia. While not technically a console, in a lot of ways it might as well have been. In 2019, Google came forward to announce they had created a game streaming service of their own. It was capable of hosting most of the major games of the time including upcoming titles like Marvel’s Avengers, but unlike other successful streaming services that charged per month for access to a library of titles, Stadia required users to pay full price for each individual game they wanted to stream. Unlike other consoles, despite ones that failed badly, gamers knew immediately if Stadia did indeed fail, their full priced games would become completely unplayable the second support for it ceased.
Google offered Stadia bundles which included a special 4K Chromecast Ultra and a Stadia controller that directly connected to your Wi-Fi hotspot. At launch, next to nobody bought a Stadia bundle. and those who did complained of latency and overpriced games on sale. To compensate, Google attempted to literally give Stadias bundles away, first to the Gaming Press and then to gamers at events like the 2019 Game Awards.
During the same event I received a free Stadia, Game Awards 2019, Microsoft revealed their next console, the Xbox Series X. It was absolutely massive, capable of delivering 4K HDR games at 120hz (depending on your display). While Microsoft did not have a large amount of exclusive games to show for it, they promised it would also be capable of playing Xbox One games, on top of original Xbox and Xbox 360 games that had previously been made backwards compatible on the Xbox One. They followed up the news later on by announcing a second slimmer, cheaper console, called the Xbox Series S. They promised it would be able to play digital versions of the same games made for the Xbox One and Xbox Series X, but the catch was it had no disc drive and could only display at 1080p resolution.
As information about the Xbox Series launch ramped up, Microsoft made an incredible stand for their retail game strategy. They would release any game that supported Xbox One and Xbox Series a single disc. Some existing Xbox One games could even be ported to become native Xbox Series games with a free patch. They assured customers the console would know what version of the game to install, and since Microsoft automatically cloud-synced save files since the days of the Xbox One, they promised save files from one platform would be able to seamlessly transfer to another. This was probably the most consumer-friendly decision Microsoft ever made.
However, the Xbox Series X was at least a year away from release and in the meantime, Microsoft wasn’t planning to release any exclusive games at launch. Even the next Halo game, known as Halo: Infinite, would also be released on PC and Xbox One. To bide time for launch, gamers were encouraged to either buy Xbox One games for it, or prepare to buy access to Microsoft’s new Xbox Live Ultimate service, which bundled Xbox Live Gold support with monthly access to the full version of many great Xbox titles. Essentially, Microsoft was employing the paid business model Stadia should have used!
2019 was a big year for gaming. While Microsoft was considered to have finished last in their generation, they were still in the fight. However, Sony, the winner of the last generation, was waiting in the wings to make their next console’s announcement. What happened? That’s a story for part 2!
Video Game Handheld War Part 13 March 21, 2020
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Welcome back to our chronicle of the Video Game Handheld War, where we tell the story of everything related to handheld consoles. In the last part, we devoted an aside to talk about the history of smartphones and tablets, and their place in the handheld gaming war at this time. Today, we’re picking up from where we left off in Part 11, where the Nintendo 3DS was absolutely dominating the Playstation Vita. Now, we are about to enter the beginning of 2013. Smartphones and tablets were starting to make it clear that the majority of games that were going to be available on them could no longer be considered games, and game developers were slowly realizing dedicated handheld gaming consoles still had their place.
The Nintendo 3DS was fully backwards compatible with Nintendo DS cartridges, just as the Game Boy Color had been with Game Boy games a decade earlier. Because of that, even though the 3DS had launched in 2011, the newest Pokémon Games, Pokémon Black 2 and Pokémon White 2 released on the DS. Game Freak did take some advantage of the 3DS’s capabilities by digitally offering a companion app, Pokédex 3D on the 3DS’s eShop. They also sold a digital mini-game in the form of Pokémon Dream Radar, which allowed players to use the 3DS’s AR functionality to “catch” legendary Pokémon that could not be easily found in the games. With the help of the 3DS’s game card reader, anything caught in that application could be transferred to the newest games.
I don’t normally get personal in these articles, but the time has come to switch perspectives. If you remember one of the earliest parts of this article, Pokémon was the MUST OWN handheld game franchise. By the late 90s, everyone had a copy of Pokémon Blue, Pokémon Red or even Pokémon Yellow. This time period is what I like to call the first wave of Pokémania, and it existed between the US launch of the original games, up to the release of Pokémon Crystal for the Game Boy Color in 2001. After 2005, very few people I knew talked about Pokémon out of the context of it being a game for kids. It wasn’t openly played at my local college, and the animated movies which used to be summer blockbusters at the local cinema were now choosing direct-to-video or made-for-television. It was not a great era for the franchise, although new games were being released on a regular basis for the Nintendo DS, the games were only played by either children or devoted fans. That was about to change.
By 2013, fans were clamoring for a Pokémon resurgence. The Generation 5 games were very good (I would argue the best games of the entire franchise to this day), and fans all over the web were starting to produce their own independent video retrospectives and reviews reminding people of just how great Pokémon was, and how big a phenomenon Pokémania was. As Nintendo released their first Direct of the year, Satoru Iwata (Ed Note – RIP) deferred his time to the President of The Pokémon Company who revealed the very first Pokémon games for the Nintendo 3DS, Pokémon X and Pokémon Y. Most of Nintendo’s Pokémon-loving customers had a 3DS by this point, and the time was right for Pokémon to come back into the mainstream, and return it did.
The PlayStation Vita was down, and due to its high price and limited library had little to offer potential customers. However, instead of ending their support for the Vita and cutting their losses, Sony tried one last play to bring the Vita out of obscurity. Smart TVs and streaming boxes were slowly gaining popularity at this time. While game consoles had offered access to services like Netflix and Amazon Prime in High-Definition for half a decade and newer “Smart” HDTVs came preloaded with access to those services without the need of a separate box, many older-HDTV owners of limited means turned to cheaper mini-streaming boxes (like the Apple TV or Amazon Fire Stick) to access these entertainment services. They were much cheaper options than gaming consoles, supported the HDMI standard so picture and sound on them were good enough, and so they sold very well. The interesting component about that story, at least in Sony’s eyes was, is the rules of a streaming box is not all that dissimilar to that of a handheld. The components had to be small and yet still be able to pack a central processor, internal memory, WiFi and video chip. The Playstation Vita already had all that, only it had a beautiful screen nobody was willing to pay a premium price for and lacked a video out. In 2013, Sony made the decision to create a television streaming box based around the PlayStation Vita. It would be called the Playstation TV.
The Playstation TV launched in November 2013 and absolutely floundered at retail. Even die-hard Vita owners, who may have already had either a Smart TV or streaming box, were hesitant to buy it. The biggest problems with the PlayStation TV was price and limitations. If you didn’t have a wireless Dual Shock controller, the PlayStation TV cost $125US, a hefty price for a mini-streaming box only capable of 720p output at that time. While it had a slot for Vita game cards, it was incompatible with many of the Vita’s best exclusive games, including Uncharted: Golden Abyss and Silent Hill: Book of Memories. Had the PlayStation TV supported ALL Vita games, and worked with any third-party PC Bluetooth controller or remote, it might’ve done better in sales. On top of that, Sony was also releasing the Playstation 4, and many gamers chose to save their money to buy a superior console that took full advantage of their 1080p HDTVs with a new library of games that were guaranteed to work.
By 2014 a second wave of Pokémania was taking over, fueled by excellent 3DS remakes of the Generation 3 games, Pokémon Omega Ruby and Pokémon Alpha Sapphire. However, by 2015 game developers were starting to have problems with the 3DS’s limitations. Having only one analog stick was becoming an enormous control problem, and the 3DS XL’s Circle Pad Pro accessory (which was designed to solve this problem) was enormous and unwieldy. The 3D feature was being underused, as most players who couldn’t get comfortable with viewing the 3D screen at the proper angle would turn the feature off. On the other side, the 3DS’s CPU was starting to bottleneck newer games, especially when it came to making use of the 3DS’s Home Screen while a game was active. The solution was clear, Nintendo would release a New model 3DS which offered an enhanced CPU, better battery life, a second analog stick, and face tracking to adjust the 3D screen to match the player’s eyeline. This New 3DS would be called…The *New* Nintendo 3DS.
The New Nintendo 3DS handheld would only be released in Japan. In the United States, the 3DS XL had come out as the superior form-factor based on sales. In fact, I never picked up the 3DS myself until the XL was released. The US and Japan would get the *New* Nintendo 3DS XL, which boasted all the *New*’s features in the XL’s larger and more comfortable XL size. Games across the board ran better on the *New* 3DS, and the second analog was able to replicate circle pad pro functionality better than the original accessory did.
However, there were some problems. Some games, including Xenoblade Chronicles 3D, shipped as *New* 3DS exclusive and would not function on an earlier model console. SNES-ported Virtual Console eShop games, including Super Mario World and Earthbound could only be downloaded on a *New* 3DS. Many gamers in the US (for some reason) preferred the size and form factor of the original 3DS and refused to purchase the larger XL. Personally, I felt the XL form factor was the superior 3DS in every single way, and to this day I can’t comprehend the outcry over Nintendo’s refusal to bring the Non-XL to the US. Eventually, 3DS players either chose to make the upgrade or they moved on.
2016 was going to be a big year for Nintendo, as it with the 20th anniversary of the Japanese release of Pokémon, and the second wave of Pokémania was still in full effect. In February, Nintendo released digital ports of Pokémon Blue, Pokémon Red and Pokémon Yellow on the Nintendo 3DS eShop, where they sold like crazy. If you asked me, they should have done that three years sooner, but it was better late than never. The Generation 7 Pokémon Games, Pokémon Sun and Pokémon Moon, sold well, but Nintendo released “Ultra” versions of the games just a year later with new features making the vanilla games feel more obsolete sooner than I felt was needed.
At the beginning of 2017, Nintendo announced the Nintendo Switch, a combination game console and portable tablet. It was later released to incredible success, surpassing the install base of the Xbox One. You might remember I talked about it’s launch in the last part of my Console Wars articles, so why am I talking about it here? Because, while the Switch can be considered a dedicated game console like the PS4 or Xbox One, its TV-out functionality is entirely optional. Like the Sega Nomad decades earlier, which played Genesis games on the go but also had a TV-out function, the Switch fits the definition of a handheld better than a console. Why would Nintendo release the Switch to function as both console and handheld, especially since they were dominating the handheld war with the 3DS? Well, I have my own opinions on that, but these are just that, opinions.
My opinion is that Nintendo wasn’t satisfied with being compared to Sony and Microsoft as a game console maker. Their company’s philosophy has always been to provide a unique product for recreational activities. The Wii U was a complete miscalculation that was marketed incorrectly and due to its lower power yet unique touch screen gamepad could not be fairly compared to either of the consoles on the market. However, time and time again, Nintendo made the right decisions when it came to the handheld market. Even back in the days of the Game and Watch series, Nintendo’s handheld products were juggernauts. By designing a handheld to be something as powerful as a game console, Nintendo could bank on what they were historically best at, handhelds, and still have a library of high-quality exclusive titles ready for it.
The final games released for the 3DS was an English translation of a previously Japanese-only game which was being adapted as a Summer Theatrical Blockbuster, Pokémon: Detective Pikachu. The game was an adorable sendup to the point and click adventure titles I played on the PC as a kid, which took place in a new region of the Pokémon World. Ports of Pokémon Gold, Silver and Crystal from the Game Boy Color were also released on the 3DS eShop. For some reason Nintendo chose to stagger the release of Crystal, they did include access to the Celebi DLC campaign that never was activated in the US, and that was good.
With the release of the Nintendo Switch Lite phasing out the 3DS line, and with Smartphones and Tablets capable of providing casual games on the go (alongside all the other major features they already offer), the Video Game Handheld War has concluded. At this point, I am ending this article series and bringing future installments into the Console War series as the progress of the Nintendo Switch evolves.
Thank you for joining us through this incredible thirty year chronicle that has taken half a decade for me to write. The winner, forever more, is Nintendo, but I like to think that gamers are also the winners here as well.
Console War VI Part 4 March 19, 2020
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As we entered 2017, the PS4 was dominating the sales charts over the Xbox One, but Microsoft was showing no sign they were throwing in the towel. Nintendo, on the other hand, was. Sales of the Wii U console were in the toilet, despite its incredible library of exclusive games and the imminent release of Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Nintendo was preparing to shift their focus to their next console, the NX. Due to the fact it would not be released in time for Christmas 2016, Nintendo took the unprecedented step to not reveal their console at E3 that year. Since E3’s foundation, no new console had ever missed an E3 showing and after the Wii U’s poor sales performance, many mainstream pundits wrote the NX off as Nintendo’s final product just as they had with the Wii nearly a decade earlier. We would find the answer very soon as Nintendo held a press event at the start of 2017. Their topic would be the NX.
Nintendo took the stage to announce the Nintendo NX was going to be coming to retail as the…Nintendo Switch. But what was the Nintendo Switch? Was it a console follow up to the Wii U or a handheld follow up to the 3DS? It was actually both. As the console was presented on stage, it appeared to be a fully functional tablet with detachable motion controllers. Then, it was placed into a charging dock where the game being played moved over to display on the adjacent HDTV. The Press dropped their jaws. There was no latency and no loading time in the transition between tablet and television, and Nintendo also showed the transition from television to tablet was just as seamless.
But what about the games? The Nintendo Switch would launch with a series of exclusive titles and ports of beloved games from the Wii U. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which had already been shown on the Wii U, would get a native Switch version at launch. Mario Kart 8 from the Wii U would also get ported to the Switch at launch as Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. This Deluxe version included all of the Wii U version’s DLC and some new features. This was good because the Switch was completely incompatible with the Wii and Wii U’s games and controllers. The Switch didn’t even have a disc drive, so retail games would ship on game cards, similar to the carts used for the DS and 3DS. It also had 32GB of internal memory, but its memory could be expanded if the user installed a microSD which had a transfer speed of 65-95Mb/s. The downside was the Nintendo Switch, even docked, could only produce a maximum 1080p image, making 4K UHD gaming out of reach for the Switch. Even after all that, the final price of the Nintendo Switch in box with controllers and a dock would be just $299 US.
The Nintendo Switch released in March 2017 and sold like hotcakes. Within no time it even surpassed the known sales of the Xbox One. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was a must-own launch title (as expected) but one of the games brought over from the Wii U, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, was a big system seller and became the de facto multiplayer title for the Switch at launch. Players like myself were impressed with the Switch, but we were looking forward to some of the later games that were announced for the system including Octopath Traveler, Splatoon 2 and (of course) Super Mario Odyssey. No new Pokémon game was announced for the Switch, but Pokémon’s arcade fighting game Pokkén Tournament would get a Switch port in the form of Pokkén Tournement DX, and it would include three new characters that until that point had only been seen in the arcade version.
E3 2017 came and Microsoft finally revealed the final specs of the 4K-native Xbox One console they had previously been teasing as Project Scorpio and its name, the Xbox One X. This 4K native X console would feature an improved GPU and CPU and promised superior performance over the PS4 Pro bundled into a console that would have the capability to play 4K Blu-Ray movies on disc. It would be coming in November 2017 for a price of $499 US, a $100 premium over the PS4 Pro. Not a single first-party title was released alongside the Xbox One X to show the possibilities of the increased horsepower, but Microsoft did release a free patch for Halo 5 near the X’s launch to bring the game 4K 60fps support on the X. Other third-party developers also took the time leading up to the X’s launch to prepare patches for multiplatform games they already enhanced for the PS4 Pro including Final Fantasy XV. Since the Xbox One X had an improved CPU as well as a GPU, Microsoft assured players their new console’s performance was just as good as the PS4 Pro, and in some cases might be a little better. That was good since it had a nearly $100 premium over the PS4 Pro.
While few PS4 owners chose to trade in their original PS4s for the newer Slim model, many of them were more impressed by the Pro and made the more expensive upgrade to the 4K console. Sony was even nice enough to add a data-transfer feature into the PS4’s operating system using the console’s Ethernet port. People who chose to upgrade to the Slim or Pro from an earlier PS4 found the transfer process painless if time consuming. At a base price of $399 for the Pro, which was still $100 cheaper than the Xbox One X, PS4 games across the board looked so much better on it. In fact, Sony partnered with companies like EA and UbiSoft to make sure that their third-party titles could take full advantage of the Pro’s improved GPU, so games like Battlefront II and Watch_Dogs 2 would launch with full 4K Pro support when they released. By E3 2017, Sony’s entire lineup of first-party titles including Detroit: Become Human, Marvel’s Spider-Man, and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy would all preview in 4K on the show floor. While The Last of Us Part II would need more development time, all of the other games I listed shipped with PS4 Pro native support, and those games looked fantastic.
After the Nintendo Switch launched, Nintendo allowed its early adopters the chance to play their multiplayer games online for free, but they needed to sign up for an online account because the fact it was free was merely temporary. However, games like Splatoon 2 and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe had great online functionality gamers enjoyed. However, even gamers who loved their Switch were getting more and more frustrated by the Switch’s limited features. Game saves could not be backed up, which for a handheld (that could be lost or dropped) was a serious issue. Downloadable classic games from Nintendo’s back catalog (which was a big reason why I bought a Wii and a 3DS back in the day) were not offered for sale on the Switch’s digital marketplaces. On top of all of that, The Pokémon Company had not yet announced if an all-new Pokémon game would be coming to the Switch. Pokémon games pushed Nintendo handheld sales unlike any other release, and since the Switch functioned as both a handheld and as a console, I could not imagine a better design for a platform a Pokémon game to be released on than the Switch.
Nintendo assured players this issue would be rectified when they launched their premium online service, Nintendo Switch Online. When it launched, it would allow subscribers to resume playing multiplayer games online, and offer them new features including cloud save sync for selected games and access to a select catalog of NES games. At merely $20 per year, the price Nintendo asked for put the $60 a year price for Xbox Live Gold and PlayStation Plus to shame. In 2019, The Pokémon Company finally announced an all-new Pokémon generation would be coming to the Nintendo Switch which would use Nintendo Network for online functionality, but that is a very long story that is not going to be addressed in this article.
As this generation’s console war comes to a close, the winners are clear. Sony’s PS4 is the winner, Nintendo Switch (despite being a late entry) receives the Silver, and the Xbox One comes in third with the Bronze. The Nintendo Wii U can be considered as coming in 4th place, and receives no medal.
So how did the PS4 come out on top? A few reasons, but I think it can be boiled down to price and superior first party offerings. Microsoft made a lot of mistakes this generation and it cost them deeply. At launch, the PS4 was $100 cheaper than the Xbox One and ran multiplaform games at better performance. The exclusive titles Microsoft hoped would help the Xbox One overcome that price premium were critical flops full of microtransactions gamers were not interested in playing. Great exclusive titles like Quantum Break and Sunset Overdrive were not considered enough to put an Xbox One in people’s homes. Those games would have to make up for lost sales when they released on the PC. After third parties looked over just how much they were losing in sales by being Xbox One exclusive and Microsoft did away with the Kinect, no third-party publishers were willing to make exclusive titles for the Xbox One by 2016. This was devastating for the console.
In 2019, Microsoft did their best to cut their losses by releasing a new version of the Xbox One S that lacked a disc drive. This was arguably one of the dumbest calls Microsoft has ever made for two reasons. One, the 4K Blu-Ray Disc player was a major reason why people bought the Xbox One S in the first place, and a disc-free console essentially removed what was the ONLY positive the console had over the PS4 Pro. On top of that, at the same time the disc-free Xbox One S reached retail at a price of $250 US…it had to compete with the thousands of Xbox One S consoles that were already on most retailers shelves…that were at the same time selling at discounted prices far below $250. The budget-minded gamers Microsoft was trying to attract with a disc-free Xbox One S would not pay for a $250 console when they could pay for a superior one that had a major feature they wanted for $50-100 less!
Meanwhile, PS4’s own exclusive titles were considered some of the finest games of the entire generation and Sony refused to fill them with microtransactions. God of War (2016) and Marvel’s Spider-Man went on to critical acclaim and even though it is still too early to tell, could be considered games that will be talked about for years to come. Microsoft can’t say the same about the exclusive titles that were released on the Xbox One. Even Halo 5: Guardians, has been considered by Halo fans to be a disappointment and the worst game of the franchise. Even though the Xbox One X could deliver superior performance to the PS4 Pro on multiplatform titles, by the time it released in 2017 it was far too late in the console war for anyone to care. Now, you could probably find a Xbox One X at retail for $299, whereas the PS4 Pro still commands a full price of $399, and people are still buying it.
As for Nintendo, the success of the Switch was unprecedented in this generation, but its late entry and the already massive existing install base for the PS4 kept them out of contention for the Gold, Nintendo still needs to be commended. They have proven time and time again when they’re more interested in creating a product that can enter the console war at a unique angle, they will succeed. They did it with the DS and Wii to great success, and now the Nintendo Switch is doing it again. The failure of the Wii U will go down as a black mark against the company, but with the Switch it is clear they learned from each of the Wii U’s failures to release an incredible product.
In 2019, Nintendo released the Nintendo Switch Lite, a slimmer Nintendo Switch tablet with integrated controllers and a longer battery life. It was only $199 US but it had a lot of downsides. It had no TV-Out functionality, making the Switch feature of something called the Switch moot. Its integrated controllers lacked rumble, making it incompatible with some launch titles and putting some hurdles into players interested in couch gaming. However its price, size and battery life were major strengths and the Switch Lite sold as a popular alternative to the Switch. Nintendo didn’t care what their customers were buying they were making a profit on each Switch that was sold.
And that is where we will wrap this generation’s console war. As I type these words out Microsoft and Sony have already revealed their successors to the Playstation 4 and Xbox One, and if all goes according to plan we will find those consoles on shelves by this Christmas. There have also been rumors a 4K Switch might be in development, but those are unconfirmed at this time. Stay tuned, because in the next generation we will be pitting the Playstation 5 against the Xbox Series X, and the Nintendo Switch is still very much in the game. What will happen? Only time will tell.
Console War VI Part 3 March 13, 2020
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It was 2016, we reached the midway point of the Console War, and we had a clear race. Sony’s PS4 was in the lead, Microsoft’s Xbox One was in second place, and Nintendo’s Wii U was in the far third. At around the same time in the PS3/Xbox 360/Wii generation, Sony and Microsoft had decided to mix things up by adding in new motion control peripherals for their consoles. After the painful launch of the Xbox One with the Kinect, that was not going to be repeated. Something else would need to take its place.
In the PC space, another revolution was making way. Virtual Reality gaming was a big deal in the mid-90s, with enormous headsets that promised to put their users “inside” the game. However, while the headsets of the time could replicate 3D head tracking, the primitive computing technology of the time was far too limited to create detailed real-time 3D environments or characters. By the early 2000s, VR gaming had been passed over as a fad and companies no longer invested in it. However, over the 2000s, PC hardware was becoming more and more powerful, and the Kinect, Playstation Move and Wiimote has proven new methods of motion control tracking were available. By the mid 2010s, PC gamers everywhere started to ask, “The time is right to do VR correctly! Why isn’t VR back?”
Before this time, only multimillionaires had the power to finance major products. But the world had just given birth to services like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, which allowed millions of regular people to pledge financial support for potential products. A company called Oculus decided to test the waters and asked for financial backing for an all-new VR headset designed to take full advantage of HD gaming on high-end PCs. To say the campaign was a success would be an epic understatement and Oculus would go on to be purchased by Facebook. Even after the successful backing campaign, it would take a while before Oculus would end up on store shelves, but in that time many major companies including Sony and Samsung, stood up and took notice.
There was some disagreement over what kind of hardware would work best with the VR headset. Oculus argued the PC should be the best VR component. Sony, however, argued the PS4 would be the best option for VR, and revealed they were working on a VR headset specifically designed for the PS4, Project Morpheus. Even though the PS4 wasn’t as powerful as a top of the line PC at the time, Morpheus would be able to run most of the same software as Oculus, and get its own exclusives. Soon, Morpheus would get an official name, Playstation VR, and it would be compatible with all PS4s at a price of $399US. Besides the headset, gamers would still need to buy a Playstation Camera and Move controllers to play VR games, but that would be included in the headset’s bundle pack. Plenty of games were announced for it, including a VR sequel to Psychonauts and a VR game that took place in the Batman: Arkham universe. Also some standard PS4 games could ship with VR modes.
In 2016, few had high hopes for Nintendo. The Wii U was floundering at retail despite a lineup of great exclusive first party games and Nintendo had seemed to completely give up on the Wii U. At the time Sony and Microsoft started revealing their PS4 and Xbox One hardware revisions, Nintendo was musing about their next console, dubbed the “NX”. Only one Wii U game was shown at E3 2016, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, with the caveat that it would also come to the NX when it launched. The game impressed everyone who demoed it, but it did not move Wii U sales. Instead, most gamers wanted to know more about the NX, but Nintendo was not talking about it yet.
On the other technology front, 4K televisions capable of Ultra High Definition (UHD) resolutions with High-Dynamic Range (HDR) color had hit the market months earlier (at very reasonable prices) but lacked hardware and content to natively take advantage of all the extra pixels in the television. There were no UHD channels (heck even to this day most HD networks don’t even broadcast in 1080p) and content providers did not have 4K capable cable or satellite boxes to offer customers who bought these new TVs. Most UHD TV home users would have to be satisfied with plugging a high-end PC into the TV to get native 4K content. This was not really the best option. In the last generation, the Xbox 360 and PS3 pushed the sales of HDTVs by offering customers the opportunity to take full advantage of their new televisions. The time was right for that to happen again.
Almost as if it was back to back, Sony and Microsoft announced new hardware revisions to their consoles were coming to retail and 4K would be at the forefront. Sony announced two new consoles would be coming to stores by that Holiday, a slim version of the PS4 that would be functionally identical to the original model (just smaller), and a 4K native PS4 Pro. The PS4 Pro would not only support all PS4 games, Sony promised they would allow developers to make their games run natively in 4K HDR. If a game had already been released, developers could bring 4K HDR support to their game in the form of a free patch. However, while the PS4 Pro could stream movies and video off the internet in 4K, the system would not support the new 4K Blu-Ray Disc format. To prove to their users that the base PS4 could still handle itself, Sony released a free firmware update for the PS4 to give gamers the chance to enable HDR on supported televisions. The catch was that HDR would sadly not work if the user had a PSVR connected to their PS4 although they promised PSVR games played on a PS4 Pro could look or run better.
Microsoft also announced two new console revisions were coming for the Xbox One, but admitted they would not be available at the same time. The first would be the Xbox One S, a slim Xbox One that unlike the PS4 Slim would support UHD Televisions, but only through upsampling their game. However, unlike the PS4 Slim or the PS4 Pro for that manner, The Xbox One S would ship with a 4K Blu-Ray Disc player. They also announced a Xbox One would be coming that would natively support 4K UHD games, and they were calling it Project Scorpio, but it would not be ready for a while.
The PSVR launched in October 2016 with a lineup of exclusive games and multiplaform titles ported from Oculus. Some games got positive praise including Batman: Arkham VR and Until Dawn: Rush of Blood, but Arkham VR received negative points for being a brief game. VR enthusiasts unable to afford a high-end PC bought the PSVR headset day one, but very quickly it became clear that VR-enthusiast market was smaller than Sony expected. Ultimately, it’s high price, small catalog and hardware limitations did not push the PlayStation VR out of being considered a niche accessory to the mainstream consumers, but the users who bought it were very pleased and were eager for more games to come to the platform.
The PS4 Pro launched in November 2016 and eventually sold incredibly well, but not at first. There were stories of hardware issues with the first lot of Pros, although Sony would honor their warranty and replace units when needed. However, despite the improved graphics and native 4K gaming support, the PS4 Pro still used the same CPU as the original PS4, and some games updated for the Pro (like Final Fantasy XV) had minor performance issues the standard PS4 did not have. This made some current PS4 owners decide to wait on upgrading to the Pro. These performance issues would eventually be worked out, but it took time.
The Xbox One S launched around the same time as the PS4 Pro and went on to become the first major positive step for Microsoft in this generation’s console war, due to the fact it was cheaper than the PS4 Pro and could play 4K Blu-Ray Discs. This introduced 4K UHD TV owners interested in buying an inexpensive 4K Disc player the opportunity to also play a hefty library of Xbox One and Xbox 360 games. Since the Xbox One S was merely upsampling its games, performance was pretty on par with the launch model of the Xbox One. However, the Xbox One S lacked the port for the Xbox One’s Kinect sensor, essentially killing that peripheral. Some users would be lucky enough to ask Microsoft to send them an adapter to make the Xbox One’s Kinect work on the new hardware, but Microsoft made VERY few and they disappeared from shelves quickly. This made current Xbox One owners hesitant to upgrade to the S, and many (including myself) decided to wait for Project Scorpio.
The PS4 Pro, PSVR and Xbox One S would all be out by Christmas 2016. The lines were drawn, and consumers were preparing to trade in their consoles for new systems. After 2017 began, Nintendo finally struck. It was going to be a VERY busy year, and that will be a story for next time.
Video Game Handheld War Part 12 March 9, 2020
Posted by Maniac in Histories, Video Game Handheld War.add a comment
I know I promised in the last part that I would talk about the great resurgence of Pokémania in 2013, but I felt that since this whole series is focused on video game handhelds, up until this point I had been ignoring a major elephant in the room, smartphones and tablets. Because of that, I wanted to devote this part to talk about personal computing devices and their place in the video game handheld war at the time of the PS Vita and 3DS generation.
In 2007, Apple Co-Founder Steve Jobs (Ed Note – RIP) went on stage to announce new products that Apple would be releasing over the next year. Since he had returned to Apple in the early 2000s, the company had seen a tremendous wave of success thanks to the release of the iPod and OS X Mac computers. As he concluded his speech he announced a series of features Apple intended to sell to the public that year, all in a product Apple had never provided before. A personal music device that could allow its user to read emails, browse the Internet, and make phone calls! It had a twelve hour battery life, a camera, and could function from a cellular connection! It would be called, the iPhone.
The first generation iPhone was revolutionary but it suffered numerous setbacks. It had a $500US price tag, which was quite expensive for a phone at the time. While it was more capable, its interface was not as user intuitive as other phones on the market. It also had many of the same limitations of the iPod. It could only work with Apple’s proprietary iTunes program, it had no replaceable battery, but the biggest issue was there was no third-party software support, which meant the phone was reliant on Apple to provide its users all its features. Tech geeks and Apple enthusiasts purchased the iPhone on day one, but the mainstream was not impressed with it yet. That would change, and quickly.
Nearly a year after the iPhone’s release, Steve Jobs took the stage again to reveal new features that would be coming to the iPhone. Apple was improving the iPhone’s interface, allowing for easier access to things like its camera. They were also adding in support for third-party applications, both free and paid. This meant that GAMES could be written specifically for the iPhone, and many major developers looked forward to the challenge of designing a game entirely around a touch screen interface. At the very least, ports of old PC games looked inevitable. Apple assured users they would be testing EVERY application that would be sold on their phone, making the chance of programs leaking personal data much slimmer. While they intended to ship these new features in an all-new improved iPhone, Jobs revealed most of the software features he demoed would work on the original iPhone. Oh, and the price was being slashed by several hundred dollars thanks to subsidies by the cellular providers.
Now, the public took notice and major companies including Blackberry, Microsoft, Palm and Google prepared to release their own phones to compete against Apple. This started what has been dubbed as the smartphone revolution. Palm, having been one of the first companies in the personal data assistant space, was heavily favorited to release a phone that could compete against Apple. Eventually, Palm released the Pre. While it could do multitasking in a way iPhone could not, it was clearly rushed to market and was paired up with a poorly designed phone. If there was going to be competition against Apple, it would not be from Palm. Eventually, Apple would get some real competition once phone makers began to ship phones loaded with the Android operating system. Android was developed by Google using Linux code and while its interface was nowhere near as elegant as Apple’s, Google allowed their users to run their own third-party programs, including ones Apple would never sign off on. For non-Apple smartphones and tablets, Android was the go-to operating system. By the end of the smartphone wars, only Apple and Google survived.
Apple would eventually fall into a pattern of releasing yearly hardware updates for the iPhone line, bringing some of the new software features to older devices when they could. Despite the massive success of the iPhone line, Steve Jobs was not merely satisfied with total domination of the phone market, his company’s next major product was going to be something that had only been seen in Star Trek: The Next Generation, a fully interactive portable touch screen computer. Basically Apple was making a BIG iPhone, and it would be called the iPad. The iPad launched in 2010 and was slow to be adopted by the mainstream. However, the iPad was cheaper and lasted longer on battery than a laptop of the time, and could handle simpler tasks like web surfing and email on the go just as well as the iPhone could. It also supported a line of third-party games from major publishers like EA. Apple’s continual support of new features including the video chat program FaceTime, slowly made the iPad a must-own device. Once it was clear the iPad was also going to dominate the market, competitors like Samsung, Microsoft and LG released their own similar products which became known as the newly minted tablet line of computers. While Microsoft’s own products shipped with their own tablet versions of Windows, most third-party iPad clones used Google’s Android operating system.
So if these smartphones and tablets were as revolutionary as I’ve described them up until this point, and their hardware specs have made them perfectly suitable for gaming, why haven’t they been included in this list up until this point? The answer is complicated but we can try to simplify it here. The modern smartphone or tablet can be classified more as a PC than it could be a gaming device. While today’s smartphones can certainly be capable of running unique games, like with the PC, gaming is not their mainstream purpose. Also, like the PC, Apple and Google regularly release new features and security updates to their products. While this is a great thing, these updates have had a tendency to downright break programs, even purchased ones. Once a device update breaks compatibility with a program, only the game’s developer can fix it. Sometimes, especially if the game is old, they just won’t do that. However, if the game was somehow still making its developer money, the chances it would stay supported was much higher. But how would that get determined?
I mentioned earlier in the article that when Apple launched their support for third-party applications they would offer iPhone owners both free and paid applications. As you could imagine, free applications were far more popular than paid ones. By the time the third iPhone was released, both Apple and Google allowed developers to charge users to unlock in-app content. I’m sure the mainstream believed this feature could be used to allow users to purchase full versions of a program from its demo or unlock expansion packs with new levels or content (like PC gamers would buy back in their heyday), instead developers discovered this new feature could be used far more often than anyone could have expected.
Inspired by browser-based games like FarmVille (which can barely be considered a game by most dedicated gamers) game developers discovered they could charge users money to complete simple in-game tasks quicker than they otherwise could. These purchases were eventually dubbed Microtransactions, and the games that used them, since they were free to download, became known as free-to-play. Within no time, developers discovered that releasing their games for free and charging people for essentially using in-game shortcuts were earning them more money than if they had charged them up front for the game. This gave certain games designed to take advantage of it a consistent monetary income flow. Developers quickly realized they had an excuse to keep games that supported this kind of an income flow running, and would regularly release new updates to keep free-to-play games functional even as other traditional pay programs stopped working.
This inconsistency is why we haven’t been addressing the smartphone and tablet platforms in this history to this point. As of the time this has been written, nearly all games being released on Apple or Google platforms revolve around a free-to-play design. The ones that haven’t eventually stop working, even if you initially paid for them. This, as far as I’m concerned, disqualifies them from further consideration on this list. I know major publishers have attempted to bring these income-driven game mechanics to mainstream PC and console games over the years, but a vocal subset of the gaming community have vigorously opposed it.
Thanks for joining us for this aside in the Video Game Handheld Wars. When we return, we will be going deeper into the domination of the 3DS, the disappointment of the Vita, and what might be the final chapter of this series for all time. Stay tuned.
Gaming History You Should Know: Who Created Video Games? February 7, 2020
Posted by Maniac in Gaming History You Should Know, Histories, Uncategorized.add a comment
I think there are a lot of people out there that want to know more about the history of gaming, but don’t know where to begin. I do not believe I would be any good to anyone without a full history of the industry I’ve been covering on this site for over the past year, nor do I think anyone should dare put a key to the keyboard that isn’t fully versed on what they’re writing about. As someone who has been following the history of gaming for the past ten years (and sharing some of that information with all of you) I would like to share with you a few of my favorite sources for gaming history.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of disinformation out there (even from normally genuine sources). We live in a world where I saw a documentary on The History Channel call the original Playstation the first (compact) disc game console, and that’s just completely incorrect. Compact discs have been used in game consoles since the days of the CD-i, 3DO, and Sega CD, all of which came out around 1991 (some of those first came out in Japan) whereas the original Playstation launched in December, 1994 in Japan.
So where can one find good information about gaming history, and where did gaming start? Well, I don’t want to give a whole lecture about the history of games in general (that might be for another day) but I would like to float out some great sources I’ve found over the course of my life which still hold up.
There has been tons of disagreement over who is the first creator of video games. The first video games were created by the late Ralph Baer, a television engineer who’s family fled to America from Germany in the 1940s. He was the creator of the “Brown Box” a prototype game console which through its controllers manipulated a television’s blanking signal to produce a two-player game of tennis. Here’s a look at some old footage of how his prototype worked. Props to the videogamesfoundation for hosting this video.
A replica of his original Brown Box is currently on display at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. I was fortunate enough to see this display in person and take these pictures.
Nolan Bushnell, the father of Atari and Chuck E Cheese, witnessed Baer’s early demonstrations of the Brown Box. We know this because his name was written on the sign-in sheet. The prototype functioned very similar to the game PONG, which was a game that would go on to turn Bushnell’s Atari into an overnight sensation.
Once the legal matters were settled over who owned video games (Baer’s patents held up in court), the spark to create video games ignited into a multi-billion dollar industry with profits that eclipse all other forms of entertainment.
If you’d like to watch a full documentary about the life of Mr Baer, I recommend seeking out the defunct channel G4’s Icons documentary about him.
May he Rest In Peace.
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