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Editorial - 'The Game's No Longer the Thing'

by Thomas Leaf on Dec. 12, 2005 @ 3:07 a.m. PST

By now, gamers are either playing their Xbox 360s, gawking at a friend's X360, waiting for the next shipment of X360s, or pouting and touting the PS3. European and Japanese gamers are getting their first taste of Microsoft's offering with the first ever nigh-simultaneous system launch of a gaming console. After all things considered, Microsoft and its partners have a right to feel good about themselves.

By now, gamers are either playing their Xbox 360s, gawking at a friend's X360, waiting for the next shipment of X360s, or pouting and touting the PS3. European and Japanese gamers are getting their first taste of Microsoft's offering with the first ever nigh-simultaneous system launch of a gaming console. After all things considered, Microsoft and its partners have a right to feel good about themselves. They've designed a good product with excellent capabilities and the promise of strong support in the near and far future. There have been hiccups, annoyances and wonderments ever since the hours counted down in the week prior to the North American launch, and the hype across the average consumer and casual gamer market was enormous. No matter what anyone says or theorizes, the Xbox 360 did just what Microsoft had hoped it would do: sell out in minutes and leave those without still wanting it. The X360 looks to be more than just one of the hot items for the holiday season; it is a glimpse at how gaming is evolving home entertainment in a way that no one seems to be acknowledging.

Even so, grumbles abound. Chat rooms, news groups and message board rumble with mutterings of "Microsoft dropped the ball" and "Xbox 1.5" and "the games aren't good." The last complaint is a matter of opinion for the most part, but the first two criticisms reveal a lack of vision. Most gamers and some critics are focusing on the launch list as the major failing of the system's launch, and many criticize the worldwide launch as well, but I see things differently. The games should be easy to forgive for a simple reason: every system's launch lineup is riddled with rushed games and games that do not fulfill the new system's potential. Yes, every EA Sports game that launched was merely a tech demo showing off simply for the sake of screenshots and demo films to stream off of websites. It was truly disappointing, but it is to be expected when EA was developing six X360 games all at the same time within an extremely short window with limited access to tool kits.

Does this excuse EA? No. EA made a business decision long ago that this was how the launch titles would be: visually upgraded ports of existing games, and gameplay features would be cut or pared down to make the November 22nd launch date, no matter what. Lest gamers forget, gaming is an industry, EA is a corporation and there are millions upon millions of dollars at stake with every title that is launched. Now that gaming is an entertainment industry sector that generates more profit than the movie industry, the paradigm of game design has shifted irrevocably. EA knows that at the end of the day, the average gamer is wowed by screenshots, movies, and hype, which in turn makes sales. Were this not the case, then the best-selling games would be of likes of Ico, Psychonauts or Condemned: Criminal Origins.

Furthermore, look at the launch titles for Xbox, PS2 and PlayStation. Of each system's launch, out of the dozen or so available titles, how many would be considered truly evocative and memorable games? Can anyone readily rattle off the starting lineup for the past three console launches? Today, the X360 has Call of Duty 2, Project Gotham Racing 3, Perfect Dark Zero and Condemned: Criminal Origins, each of which hails the system's potential quite well and in different ways. By February, the system will also have Dead or Alive 4, Lost Odyssey, Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, and Battlefield 2, each of which will make good use of the system's capabilities and introduce "next-gen" gameplay. To say the X360's initial offerings are anemic would be a harsh criticism, considering that it will boast equally credible games early on, as did the Xbox, PS2 and GameCube.

The criticism that Xbox 360 is no more than version 1.5 is most lacking in vision. While everyone has focused on the worldwide launch as being the unprecedented maneuver on Microsoft's part, the Xbox Live Marketplace is more daring and will be more important and effectual on gamers. Live isn't just a lobby or chat room for gamers to meet up and play a match; it's now an arena for content delivery, direct consumption, and marketing. Until now, you had to get game demos from a CD or DVD packaged with a magazine. Until now, you could only stream or download music and movies to a PC. Until now, you only existed online as a name and a rank, whereas now you have a history and a reputation based not on a single game, but everything in which you play and perform well. Xbox Live brought gamers together en masse two years ago, but it's grown up now and is doing more than bringing gamers together – it's now allowing gamers to get more, do more, and be more.

Its sounds like propaganda, but wait and see what happens. You may not know it, but Microsoft isn't just throwing down the gauntlet at Sony or Nintendo; indeed, Microsoft isn't wholly concerned with Sony and hardly threatened by Nintendo. The real target is the Mac. Mac? How? Why? Microsoft has just brought iTunes to the living room. Live Marketplace and Live functionality, no matter how small, for every launch title and every game to come out after launch signifies a major move in a direction that is only hinted at so far. With the ability to not only play games online but also download and stream content, Live Marketplace will be the place for people who didn't have or use anything like iTunes or Napster to finally explore direct content delivery.

While the original Xbox was a stripped-down PC, it only boasted half of a PC's capabilities in so much that you could use it to play software and games online. The X360 will allow you to do anything short of word processing and spreadsheets. Given keyboard and mouse support, you'd have a fully functional gateway from the couch to gaming and consuming, and even the possibility of supporting any game genre, not just those conducive to a game controller with eight buttons. Imagine if World of Warcraft extended its market beyond the PC gamer and was able to be played through the X360. Whereas before it was unfeasible fancy, now such an idea is most likely being worked out conceptually.

What Microsoft has done with the 360 which is truly revolutionary is that it has managed to bring a fully realized and supported online experience to everyone. This is not Nintendo talking about online support and then forgetting it ever happened. This is not Sony, veterans of running EverQuest, saying, "We'll leave online gaming to the developers." This is Microsoft saying, "This is what can be done," and then giving the collective gaming industry a push through the door.

No one likes to be dictated to, and Microsoft has long been maligned for dictating terms to its end users and developers and for practicing draconian measures on the "little guy." Some might say that Microsoft's online gaming and content plans are merely a ploy to make more money, and those voices would have a keen grasp for the obvious. Microsoft is a business. Gaming is an industry, and when it comes down to it, whether you're Cliffy B, John Carmack, J. Allard, Seamus Blackley, Ken Kutaragi, Hideo Kojima or Shigeru Miyamoto, this is about making a product that is popular and that sells.

Microsoft has made a bold, compelling and promising product that promises to not only expand on what can be done with games, but also to expand which games can be done. For small developers who don't have the clout or name to design a 15-million-dollar opus, they can get their leg up and their name in the door by creating smaller games to be streamed through Live Marketplace.

One of the best games you can get for Xbox 360 is only available from Live Marketplace, and that is a simple game called Hexic. Try it out, and you won't be able to stop. Where else would you find room for such a game? Do you know how much money publishers spend on securing retail store shelf space? A game like Hexic would never be considered as a retail product unless it had a place like Live Marketplace to be sold. Simply put, Microsoft's X360 will become the place for start-up designers and developers to go, since the overhead and resources needed for games marketed over Live Marketplace will be even lower than developing a game for current-generation hardware.

As it stands, by the time you have read this, the X360 will have launched and sold out in Europe, with long lines winding around European malls and store fronts. While 300,000 units to sell through may not be a lot in retail numbers, it will be enough to get X360s in the hands of the public and not enough to satisfy all demand, so that there will be want for the system throughout the remainder of the year and into the new year.

Multiplayer gaming that swept across North America during the reign of PS2 and Xbox did not reach the same heights in Japan and Europe, where widespread broadband internet access was not common. This year, Microsoft hopes that broadband access is the standard as it is in North America. Much remains to be seen as to whether or not Japanese gamers will move beyond their historical prejudice of American games, as American gamers have gradually opened up and embraced Japanese franchises. Gaming has never been as popular or widespread in Europe as it has been in America and Japan, but this may be the first time that both of these mitigating factors might be mitigated themselves.

While the launch list of games did not wow, they reflected promise of what will be, whereas Live Marketplace is already showing gamers something never seen before. The hardware is more than capable, reflects a thoughtfulness of design not yet experienced by consoles, and the software and interface is just as elegant as the hardware. The future of gaming's landscape will not be known until Sony and Nintendo have had their say, but once they have, Microsoft's voice will still be ringing because Microsoft has fully embraced a realm of gaming that Sony and Nintendo are either too unwilling or too frightened to do, and that realm is the full integration of online connectivity and the commons associated with it.

All that remains is whether or not gamers can see it. Notoriously shortsighted and narrow-minded, gamers know only love what they know and know what they're told. Gaming is a business fueled by these gamers' purchasing power. All that remains to be seen now is whether or not you see what Microsoft has done … and buy it. The industry is growing, as investors see how much money is moved by this business, and as it evolves, new ideas on how to not only create but also deliver games, media, and entertainment content will emerge. The X360 is showing the world that evolution, but sadly, no one seems to notice and just keeps asking when Halo 3 will be released. The answer's simple: the same day the PS3 launches. The notion supposes that all things being equal, it really is all about the games. Only this time, not all things are equal because Microsoft has evolved far more than anyone else realizes.

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