Backwards Compatibility: How it hurt Sony, and why it’s still important.

For the uninitiated – “backwards compatibility” is the ability of a new video game console to play the games of the proceeding video game console. For eg., the ability to play your PS1 Final Fantasy game discs on your PS2.

With that outta the way, lemme tell you a story.

I’ve been playing Persona 3 on my Playstation 2 for about 4 years. That’s how I play games. I’m no completionist, when it comes to finishing games, though I do like to purchase complete sets of games. Like most 30-something gamers with full-time jobs, there just isn’t the time to get hung up on finishing games. So I play bits and pieces of as many games as I can. Those games good enough to stick out, I return to over and over again for years until one day, maybe, I get to see the ending.

Persona 3 is one of those games. It’s quirky enough to relate to my tastes, but has gameplay elements deficient enough to require significant breaks in order to complete it. Maybe once a year, I’ll dedicate a weekend to it, and it will be months before I pick it up again.

I’ve played, and finished, most games this way, although, like many gamers, I only finish a tiny minority of the games I start. In fact, I can’t even seem to keep entering all the new games I start into my “backloggery”, let alone hope to ever finish a quarter of them.

Consequently, I have a comparatively enormous collection of games. Obviously there are millions of gamers out there with more games than I have… but many of those folks actively trade their titles in for new games. I don’t. I purchase games with a collectors mentality. (It drives my spouse crazy, though she’s also comparatively tolerant, hence the ongoing success of our relationship.) I buy games that I like to see on my shelf. It’s a vainly difficult concept to explain, but my geek-ego benefits as much from the presence of countless obscure RPG titles with female protagonists, as it does from the distinct absence of anything remotely resembling Madden or Call of Duty.

There is a contradiction in my style of play, however. Although I bounce around from game to game, in most cases, I won’t begin a sequel until I’ve played the pre-requisite games. The Metroid Prime series is a great example. I have had, on my shelf, wrapped in plastic since Xmas 2007, an unopened copy of “Corruption,” the third game in the series. It will remain unopened on my shelf until I can bring myself to finish the two games before it. It’s quite possible I’ll never get to the game. It’s also unlikely that I’ll ever sell the copy, because I like the Metroid series, and I derive the same please from seeing it on my shelf, that I suspect a hockey-card collector experiences from seeing a particular card in their binder. What’s important to the game industry, however, is that I bought the game.

So it’s worthwhile exploring why I bought that game for the Wii, and why I haven’t bought Persona 4 for the PS3, (or a PS3 for that matter.) The first two titles of the Metroid Prime series are GameCube titles, the final title in the series was released on the Wii. I felt justified buying the whole series, knowing that I may never get around to playing it, because in my mind it’s a nice easy intuitive process to play all three on the Wii without having to dig one of my old GameCubes out to have a go.

Persona 3, on the other hand, is a PS2 title. The PS3 does not play PS2 discs, so were I to buy one, I’d have to reconnect the PS2 to start chipping away at the series again.

Many have poo-pooed this “swapping-console” complaint as a non-issue. Modern TV’s have multiple video inputs, they say. It shouldn’t be the hassle it’s made out to be. Hooking up a new console to my setup, however, IS a legitimate hassle. I’ve rigged it so that the cables travel through wholes in the wall, behind cabinets, and in-and-out of drawers. Each change to this setup is a significant hassle. It simply won’t happen. I have three slots in the TV stand, one for each of the major game companies. I have a 360, which plays most of the Xbox back-catalogue. I have a Wii, which plays the GameCube back-catalogue. And I have a PS2, which plays my old PSOne catalogue. Great games like “Legend of Dragoon,” which I’m playing now, in addition to a pile of old Square titles I revisit periodically.

Swapping out the PS2 for a PS3, immediately removes two-consoles worth of games I’ve purchased from my immediately playable library. This complaint has been posed to Sony multiple times, and their response goes something like this: “We’re confident the quality of our new PS3 titles will convince our customers that there’s no need to revisit their old games.”

From a business perspective, I can understand why a bunch of Corporate hacks in the Sony boardroom would decide to remove any disincentive for customers to purchase new games. This is how they view backwards compatibility. However, just because I can understand how they came to that decision, I can’t agree that it makes an ounce of sense. When I purchased both my 360, and Wii consoles, I did so knowing that I’d be able to swap the new console in for the old, and still be able to play all the old games I’d invested in. Yet somehow, this did little to stop me from putting thousands of dollars into each of the two markets. I have shelves of 360 and Wii games to add to my Xbox and GameCube titles. My ability to play the old titles on the new consoles seems to have done little to limit me from buying new games.

And now that we’re reaching the end of the life cycle for all three consoles, (at time of writing, we’re one-week ahead of the Wii U launch) I still haven’t bought a PS3. This is odd, considering that I purchased, (and still own) every major game console since the NES. Looking back on this generation in its entirety, I can confidently say that backwards compatibility remains the only reason I haven’t purchased a PS3.

But aside from the issue of space on the TV stand, why is this so important? in a word, confidence. With the video-game market increasingly moving towards digital distribution, gamers have questions about how their previously purchased games will survive once a hardware generation advances. How Nintendo handles the transfer of digitally-purchased Wii games to the new Wii U console will be telling. Will customers have to pay a transition fee, like Sony customers have had to do in the portable market? In the mind of a gamer, it boils down to this. Can we feel safe piling loads of money into a digital distribution service, only to find out during the next hardware cycle, that all of those games cease to exist? With Sony’s refusal to respect the previous investments their customers made in previous console generations, the outlook here is not good.

So in the future, when asked, “how can I play my PS2 version of Persona 3 on your new console?”

…if Sony’s response remains: “forget Persona 3, we’ve got Persona 4 on the new console,”

…then for gamers like me, they will cease to be an option.

My Love Letter to Microsoft re: Cross-platform functionality in Canada.

Originally posted here: http://bit.ly/ju0U5F

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Can't find a forum on the WP7 or the Zune websites, so sorry to post this here. Figured it would be ok, since various Microsoft departments must communicate with each other quite well right?

Bought a WP7 phone recently. Have two 360 consoles, and 3 PC's running Windows 7. 

Was really looking forward to the standardization of media across all platforms. 

Then I found out a couple things. 

1. No Zune Pass in Canada. 

2. Zune is incapable of searching for, and subscribing to podcasts through it's marketplace in Canada. 

3. No ability to update podcasts wirelessly on the road through Zune,.

What!?

How can something iTunes has been doing for years simply not be possible through Zune across an entire country?

This, for me, is the core functionality of the entire platform. 

I can understand why the Zune Pass may be on hold. I know Microsoft doesn't have total control over all the silly copyright issues at play, and that it takes some time to sort out. (though Netflix seemed to get it all squared away.)

But the lack of podcast functionality is beyond comprehension. I have been able to manually enter RSS feeds to subscribe to podcasts that way, but there's far lighter freeware programs out there that would do that. I was looking forward to the browsing features of iTunes, and the social aspects of Zune. None of that is available, and I'm very quickly running out of patience. 

I resisted moving to an iPhone, while all my friends did. I also resisted adopting the Android platform, which was very attractive as I use a lot of Google's apps. Instead, I limped along with my Windows Mobile 6 phone for two years after my contract expired, because I was so certain WP7 would integrate so well with every other piece of Microsoft hardware in my house. I even held on a bit longer after the WP7 launch, thinking that, "these guys will get the functionality worked out... it's just a matter of months."

No such luck. It looks like all the warnings of my friends are beginning to come true. My questions to a Zune support staff resulted only in the answer: "We have no information on any of this."

It's really unfortunate. It's doubtful there are more loyal Microsoft customers out there than me. But even my patience have their limits. I have a few months remaining on my Xbox Live subscription, and if the three items above aren't remedied by the time it expires, I'll feel like I gave WP7 and Zune the best chance that could be expected. I'll exercise the ability in my carrier contract to swap my WP7 out mid-term for another platform. I won't renew my Xbox Live subscription, and I'll start investing in another platform entirely. 

Haven't really felt this way since Sega released the 32X, Saturn and Dreamcast within months of each other, without any thought to how these devices would work together. 

Really hope you guys can pull the platform off, and make it a success. It really does have so much potential, with cross-platform functionality at it's core. 

Consumers, of course, can only be expected to endure so much. 

Why Buying Stocks in the PS3/360 "Wii-Mote" is Financial Suicide

So, the same company which brought that golf game with the toy golf club to the PS2: In2Games, has raised over 15 million in revenue to develop their new "Fusion" controller for the PS3 and Xbox 360 consoles in an effort for Sony and Microsoft to come up with an answer to Nintendo's wildly popular Wii-mote.

Apparently, the long of the short of it is, it's a baton that you can clip ends onto, like a tennis head, a baseball bat head, a golf club... etc. Not unlike many of the third party bits of plastic for the Wii-mote you can find destined for the bargain bin around places like EB Games and Toys R Us.

And if you listen to the official message from In2Games, this controller is so technologically superior to the Wii-mote, than gamers will be making the switch to the other two consoles in droves.

But here's why buying stock in this venture will put you in the poorhouse.

1. Wrong Demographic:
The majority of gamers who have a 360, or who have shelled out dough for a PS3, didn't do so because they wanted a Wii, but had to settle for something 2 or 3 times more expensive. The Wii-mote never appealed to them in the first place. They are the so-called, "Hardcore Gamer" demographic, and waving your hands around in the air to play a game is for pansies. Give them a traditional controller with a couple analog sticks, Gears of War, or God of War II, a HD TV, and they're set. Let the seniors and kiddies wave a frickin' TV remote in the air like fools all they want. The closest this hardcore bunch will go to using a more active style of controller, is to whip out Guitar Hero for a few licks. But that's different. Chicks dig it.

2. Cost Prohibitive:
Developing games that actually use the Fusion controller will be cost-prohibitive for third party developers. Particularly in the case of the PS3, where its cost prohibitive programming for the cell processor without having to spend extra resources trying to code everything to work on some controller made by another company all together. It's so much cheaper to develop that same game for the Wii, and since there's already nearly as many Wii consoles installed worldwide (more in Japan) ins a quarter of the time as the 360, the guaranteed profit margin is far higher. It's very unlikely that we'll see any more games produced for the Fusion than we did for EyeToy. And how many of you even know what that is?

3. Lame Ripoff Factor:
Sony went through a great deal of ridicule just over it's motion sensing six-axis controller that they so obviously rushed through development as a last minute effort to steal some of the hype of the Wii during launch. Nobody really thinks very much of the SixAxis controller as a credible peripheral. Sony has even backed off showcasing it as a key selling point of the console. Some developers incorporated some token shaking into their early launch games, but it's generally underused already. No matter how "technologically advanced" Fusion is compared to the Wii-mote, it's always going to be seen by gamers as a blatant ripoff meant more to take the unique shine off the Wii, than to actually function as an integral part of next gen games from the 360 or the PS3.

4. Same Failed Marketing Pitch:
It's obvious, that reading any statements from In2Games, about the "technological superiority" of the Fusion controller, that they have learned nothing from the mistakes of of Sony with the PS3. If powerhouse technology meant anything to gamers, the Wii wouldn't be the runaway success of this console generation. The PS3 would already be the winner hands down. But Nintendo's little David just outsold Sony's Goliath by 6-1 in June, in both company's home turf: (Japan.) Sales in that country are usually a pretty good litmus test for how the overall console market will play out per generation. If the best In2Games can come up with is that it's technologically superior to the Wii-mote, they've failed before they've begun.

The Wii has never been about technology. It's a Gamecube in smaller packaging for Christ's sake! It's always been about getting people together, and having fun. And it's not even the Wii-mote that is accomplishing that for the console... it's the ways in which Nintendo's programmers have been able to use it. And unless In2Games has a room full of Nintendo-level software designers kicking around... they might as well rename their new controller, "Virtual Boy."