huron :
companies willing to take a loss (huge for some of them) on the hardware
Actually, as far as I know,
this has only happened three times in the history of video games: with the Xbox, Xbox 360, and PS3. Nintendo has always made a profit from the start, and Sony made a starting profit on the PS1 and PS2. As far as track record go... The Xbox never turned a profit, though the 360 started to around 2007, after the first CPU die shrink helped cut costs.
I have the impression that after this generation, we won't see this occur again, at least to a severe extent. A daring company MIGHT take a small initial loss to try too boost allure, but it's been shown that the whole tactic of "sell it at a big loss and sell tons of games" is complete crud; attach rates for each console have been surprisingly close to each other, all in the 7-9 range, meaning that even with the $10US surcharge Microsoft and Sony charged on games, that means JUST NOW they've amassed an extra $70-90 through this tactic... Not enough to really recover the loss on hardware.
badaxe2 :
Name one PS3 exclusive (which happen to be some of the best games available on any console) that is on PC.
DC Universe Online? There aren't that many PS3 exclusives... Almost all happen to be because they're made by Sony. Looking through the popularly-bandied exclusives... MGS4, quite frankly, sucks. It's a shame to the rest of the franchise. The
God of War series is likewise over-rated.
Gran Turismo is pretty good for a racing game, but granted, it's got tons of competition; there's other multi-platform giants like
Need for Speed, plus not one, but TWO Xbox 360-exclusive racing franchises of rivaling quality. (PGR and Forza) Oh, and
Killzone? Hardly even a remarkable game, given that aside from the inexplicable darkness, it
Looks like every other darn FPS these days.
So that leaves...
Uncharted and
LittleBigPlanet. The former isn't truly GREAT, but is definitely a good first-party action game. LBP has managed to do with a bit more uniqueness, and yes, is a first-party exclusive that adds definite value to the PS3.
But really... Two worthwhile true exclusives? Hardly a selection worthy of being called "some of the best games available on any console." I concluded that three of the major ones (GOW3, MGS4, KZ) are all definitely over-rated by their fans, and have little appeal to those not in said fangroups. Likewise, GT is good, but hardly compelling, as its genre is extremely competitive, with at least 3 other franchises laying equal claim. And two games are actually what grant good merit.
fball922 :
The constant struggle going on with consoles is finding the balance between giving freedom to developers, while maintaining quality control. Nintendo seems to have removed all quality restrictions these days... Their game market is saturated with boring titles that sell only a few copies. Nintendo makes a few dollars, then its over. The problem I referenced with Atari was that their market, too, was saturated with cruddy titles that constantly failed to deliver ANYTHING (E.T. comes to mind).
For one, E.T., had it been not on a cartridge-based format and with unreasonable expectations, would've been a commercial success; it DID sell 1.5 million copies, making it the fifth-best-selling 2600 title. The major problem was that 5 million cartridges had been prepared, at hefty cost. Ironically, the #1-selling title of the entire pre-NES era was the 2600 port of Pac-Man, at 7 million copies, which happened IN SPITE of being widely considered a very horrible port that was nowhere near as good as the original arcade version. It, too, failed to meet its estimates (And hence prepared cartridge quantity) by at least a few million.
This is where we see that what befell Atari cannot befall Nintendo anymore; while a game cart ran a sizeable cost, and hence posed a risk if it didn't sell, DVDs can be stamped for a penny or so apiece; even once you throw in packaging, it's all under a dollar. This is compounded by the fact that unlike cartridges, you can ramp production up to meet demand, so you needn't prepare millions of copies in advance; you could control production to respond to sales on a weekly basis, so if sales plummeted, you'd have few extra copies unsold, which further could still be sold profitably even if marked down to $5US apiece, which'd fix that. That's a big improvement over the old cartridge system, where a $30-50 cost of physically making a game made "bargain bin titles" unprofitable.
That said, there has been a growth of lower-quality titles; due to the reasons I outlined above, they have, unlike
Pac-Man and
E.T., still yielded profit for their makers and Nintendo. However, there have still be lemons exclusive to the 360 and PS3, such as
Sonic the Hedgehog,
Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust, and the ever-dreadful
Bomberman: Act Zero. In this case, it appears to be a similar trend, with a different face; developers want to easily cash in, so on the Wii, they shove in motion-control gimmicks, and on the 360/PS3, they go for "nostalgia" while raping the old series' time-tested gameplay and theme in order to be more "edgy and mature." Likewise, the problem that existed then with obscene-content video games (like
General Custer's Revenge) has been thoroughly met, as there is the ESRB in North America, and even worse, MANDATORY ratings agencies in other countries. (where governments can directly BAN games that go to far, or ban their sale to minors)
Nonetheless, perhaps I remain optimistic, that in spite of the potential dangers on ALL sides, I don't think we'll ever see a crash like what happened in 1983; the industry was in that infancy at the time, so any collapse on one side here would just get met with competitors taking advantage. The main elements that let it happen just aren't there anymore: we have no cartridge format, there's no longer the hype craze over the entire industry, there's a lot more established norms and expectations, and there's at least some degree of oversight from the ESRB and other regulatory agencies.
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