Playstation 4: The Last Of The Gaming Consoles?

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PlayStation 4: The Last of the Game Consoles
BY CHRIS KOHLER02.22.135:12 PM


Still from the PlayStation 4 event livestream.
There’s an excellent chance the PlayStation 4 will be the last videogame console ever, at least as we understand the term.

On Wednesday, Sony unveiled (sort of) the PlayStation 4, its next home gaming platform, at a lavish two-hour event in New York City attended by over 1,000 journalists and fans. While the embattled electronics maker did not yet have an actual device to show or even a ? form factor, it spent the time talking up its philosophy behind the system. PlayStation 4, a constant stream of presenters reiterated, was for gamers: sick new graphics, ungodly amounts of RAM and cool new gaming-centric features like the ability to stream gameplay videos in real time.

Somewhere jammed in the middle of that two-hour orgy, Sony gave the tiniest of cursory nods to the idea that a PlayStation box is now expected to serve up streaming movies and television, too, with a single slide that announced support for all the major providers like Netflix, Amazon, et al., which was whisked off the Jumbotron faster than the human eye could process all of the logos. Movies aren’t games, so who cares?

“We’re focusing on that core gamer, the gamer who wants the ultimate experience and lives for gaming,” Sony Computer Entertainment America CEO Jack Tretton told Wired contributor Steven Levy after the event. “If you’re not a gamer, I don’t think you get it.”

Not a gamer? Beat it, loser. We don’t even want you buying PlayStation 4. So what is all this, then? Why is Sony rallying the gamer troops under its banner? PlayStation 4′s reveal preceded the as-yet-unscheduled announcement of the next Xbox. And it’s clear that Sony is attempting to preemptively define itself against Microsoft.

Over the last few years, Microsoft has been attempting to change the way people think about its Xbox 360. It launched it in 2005 as a game console, the same way Sony is talking up the PlayStation 4 today. But now it wants you to think of it as an ecumenical home entertainment system, capable of streaming television, movies, music and everything else. Depending on your cable provider, you can use Xbox to control your live TV experience too. Microsoft has opened a new studio in Los Angeles — not to produce games but to produce Hollywood entertainment content.

As I was in the middle of writing this, I got an e-mail from the Xbox public relations team. A new videogame? Ha ha, of course not. “Watch the red carpet coverage from the Academy Awards on Xbox 360 this weekend,” it read. It’s all over: We’ve gone from “Have you played Atari today?” to “Who are you wearing tonight?”

With all this in mind, there should be no question that Microsoft’s pitch for its eventual new console, right from the off, will be: This plays games, but it’s not for gamers any more than an iPad is just for gamers. Everybody watches TV, so everybody wants an Xbox to give them a heightened experience. If someday you find yourself caught in a downpour and duck into the nearest doorway and thereby accidentally enter a Microsoft store, you would be able to buy an Xbox on a cellphone-style plan, paying $99 for the box if you subscribe to two years of the Xbox Live service. That’s today. What if that’s the whole pitch for the next Xbox? What if Sony’s machine is $500 and Microsoft’s is $100? That would be the Bambi vs. Godzilla of console wars.

The big mistake Sony seems to be making is the assumption that this is a zero-sum equation.
Microsoft, I believe, thinks that gamers are tapped out, and the only way to grow is to expand the audience. Sony’s plan is to paint this as a negative. Surely part of the reason why its PlayStation 4 reveal was missing so much information was because it wanted to unveil it extra early, beat Redmond to the punch. It wanted to set the terms of the debate: We’re all about gamers, so what about you? And its response to Microsoft’s eventual unveil will be: “We’re not making a TiVo so your great aunt Tillie can time-shift The X Factor. We’re making games for gamers, and if you’re not a gamer, you don’t get it.”

But the big mistake Sony seems to be making is the assumption that this is a zero-sum equation, in which a lack of other entertainment options means you are by default better at games. There’s no reason the next Xbox can’t be an awesome gaming device even if Microsoft achieves its goal of broadening the scope of the product. It’s so costly to make videogames today that none of the handful of publishers that are not yet bankrupt would fail to put their games on both platforms. ? gamers are not hard to please, at the macro level. They are insanely expensive to please, but not hard: They want shooters with 1080p graphics, the same controller they’ve been using for the last decade, and seamless online play. It is not within the realm of possibility that Microsoft fails to deliver that.

Sony does make better platform-exclusive games than Microsoft. It doesn’t have a shooter as popular as Halo, but Microsoft doesn’t have an Uncharted, a Heavy Rain, a Journey or an Infamous. Sony is killing it with first-party content. But ask Nintendo how that works out for you. It’s not a sufficient condition for success.

From what we know now, Sony’s stance is more rhetoric than reality. It wants the gamers, but it’s not doing anything significant to get the gamers that Microsoft won’t match. Perhaps Sony will unveil more gamer-centric features prior to the launch of PlayStation 4. But it didn’t show anything so earthshaking on Wednesday. Nice features like the ability to power the system off and on and have your game resume right where you left it, sure. Or the ability to automatically download updates while the system is off. But nothing that ruins Xbox (and nothing Microsoft might not also be planning).

All of Sony is in trouble. The whole corporation has bled money over the past few years and has struggled to come up with exciting new products that can make it a power player again. Games are one of the three core competencies that new CEO Kaz Hirai wants to focus on. In a sense, it’s not just betting the future of Sony Computer Entertainment on the PS4, it’s staking the whole company’s future on it. Sony’s going to Vegas, putting all its chips on “Gamers,” and letting it ride.

Who knows — maybe it’ll pay off. But if gamers don’t flock to Sony’s rallying cry, what then? There’s a good chance Sony may realize all too late that it was Microsoft that got it right, and that you actually can sell far more game machines into people’s homes by broadening the appeal of the device beyond “the gamer… who lives for gaming.” Sony might find itself having to change course and play catch-up again, like it did when PlayStation 3 showed up empty-handed to the online-gaming party that Xbox Live was throwing in 2006.

And if that does happen, and the future is all-in-one entertainment boxes, then PlayStation 4 might be the last traditional gaming console ever released.