Historical impact of the Xbox 360 ?

[kool kitty89]

Alterverse engineering options are not what I was referring to. I'm talking about the Journalist written narrative histories of the current game industry. The ones that write fine sounding arguments like bad old mean Atari was stifling creativity and caused the entire market to crash, but Nintendo saved the industry. Or bad old stupid/mean Sega and Nintendo were only releasing 2D games and Sony came in and blew the doors off with real authentic jaw dropping 3D with the Playstation.

I'm not talking engineering either . . . I'm MOSTLY talking management decisions . . . some of which effect hardware design, but many that are more general in terms of consumer and/or software development (1st and 3rd party), licensing, comptitive vs anticompetitive business practices, etc, etc. (Nintendo's general weirdness would be all of the above in terms of management and engineering decisions . . . and management-crippled engineering decisions )

Like with the PS2 . . . management was predominatly responsible for the way the PS2 got designed/supported and why it wasn't much in the spirit of the PSX. More so, beyond general hardware design, management decisions are what led to a lack of comprehensive software libraries included with the SDKs (especially early on). With such support generally lagging and largely being addressed by the efforts of 3rd party APIs and middleware later on (along with eventual additions to Sony's SDKs as well iirc).

And management must have been involved with setting the PS3's cost/price threshold so high . . . I mean even with leveraging BluRay being a prime concern, THAT part of the system could have been subsidized at least (already deflated by vertical integration), and the rest of it could have had tighter cost constraints. (whether that actually made it any easier to program or port to is a separate matter and more up to other management decisions as well as the engineers themselves)

[kool kitty89]

We could use similar evidence to claim that Sony created an environment that totally stifled new game ideas in every way. Is that definitely true? We need more facts. David Shef's Game Over was, I think, a relatively honest Journalistic attempt to look into the game industry. He comes to a lot of inconclusive decisions, chiefly that Nintendo saved the game industry nearly single handed. It is only these inconclusive decisions that I hope we enthusiasts can find more first hand testimony for.

Nintendo definitely did NOT save the video game industry PERIOD. They reshaped it and certainly led to the Japanese dominance in general, and they revolutionaized video games in Japan while capitalizing on the weakened state following the crash in the US, but there's absolutely nothing to say that without Nintendo we wouldn't have a booming video game industry today.

Also, I hardly see who Sony "created" an environment that stifles creativity and such. The combination of consumer demands, mass marketing trends, advancements in game design technology (especially common use of middleware), shift in paradigm to the US game market (also significant to middleware), and the general nature of big corporate publishers/studios did that . . . Sony contributed to it to some degree, but most others did too (and Sega's hardly innocent there too -what was happened to STI during the latter part of Kalinske's tenure was suspiciously similar to that trend too).
Hell, the same thing was already happened to the likes of Activision as early as the late 1980s, among other things.

This is the very reason you see independent/small studios form and/or splinters from major corporate developers. That's been happening since the beginning of the industry, with the likes of Activision, Imagic, etc, not to mention spinters/moves of talent in the arcade scene or computers for that matter. (same for engineering talent too, with the likes of Zilog and MOS, among others -heh, kind of neat that the 2 dominant 8-bit CPU architectures both came from relatively small spliter/start-ups coming from big corporations -ie Motorola and Intel)


Game over isn't bad AFIK, and more accurate in general (better reasearched) than Kent's UHVG, but certainly much more limited in scope and with some false conclusions. (I tend to ignore the general conclusions and focus on the actual history and quotes)

Curt Vendel and Marty Goldberg's "Atari: Business is Fun" sheds a LOT of light on some of these gray areas and false conclusions with a lot of added context for what was going on in the arcade/console/computer industry as a whole in the 70s and early 80s. However, this book (the first installment in their series) leaves off at Atari Inc's liquidation in July 1984, so all that Nintendo/Sega/etc specific stuff of the mid/late 80s and 90s will have to wait for later books. (unless I've missed it and the 2nd book is out already)

So what I'm actually going on is more limited snippets of information and quotes I've pulled from dicussions with Curt and Marty, and some more commonly available information/quotes fron articles at the time. (including a fairly commonly cited newspaper article with quotes form Nintendo, Atari, and Sega in Summer 1986, regarding the general market status and how the 3 were seen as pretty much even competition at that point -and including context from Katz on the boom in 2600 demand in 1985)

But sheath, Atari did stifle creativity and cause the market (or at least part of it) to crash. People who were there said so, and there is evidence to back it up like Atari making more games than systems they had sold. If we can't paint a picture with these things then what can we use? I hear a lot about revisionist history on these forums, but I'm not seeing a lot of evidence to back these claims up.

All big console companies (or big software companies too for that matter, or hardware companies, etc) tend to end up limiting innovation and creative freedom to some extent, some more than others . . . and more often then not limited more by external forces (like status quo or legal precident) than actual internal company policies. (ie most/all will get away with as much as they can)

Nintendo and Atari were particularly bad with that due to lack of general legal precident . . . though Atari was quickly countered by Activision setting a precedent for unlicenced publishing. Atari/Warner DID end up leading the market into the crash (though not totally alone in the mistakes that led to that), but limiting creativity or such had nothing to do with that at all. (it's totally down to poor management of distribution channels, sales statistics, and projected demand leading to an inflated market bubble that most of the industry fed into, led to overproduction and overpromotion, and general overinvestment with actual market growth being considerably lower than perception in '82/83)

I'm not saying journalists are always right or that they don't put their own spin on things, but when Dan Rosen is quoted as saying that the Master System was shelved until they saw how well Nintendo was doing I kind of have to take it at face value.

I find that somewhat hard to believe (and I assume you mean Dave Rosen, not Dan). GIven the Master System was released less than a year after the Japanese release, and at a time when Nintendo was just starting to scratch the surface of the North American market.
Honestly, I'd buy more that Atari's (and the entire market's) general upturn in sales in the 1985 holiday season had more impact than Nintendo's successful expanded test markets in early 1986 (the NY test was considered mediocre and unimpressive by the industry -hence why Nintendo was seen as a nobody at the Winter CES in '86, but a real competitor by the time of the Summer CES, following the expanded test markets that spring).

I do know that Nintendo's market presence had little to no impact on Atari's decision to ramp up game/console production in late 1985, since their own sales were more than enough to convence them of that. (2600 demand was exceedind capacity by a good margin in late '85 according to Michael Katz)
What Nintendo DID spur Atari Corp to make a major change in happened a bit earlier: in early 1985, with Katz setting up the new entertainment division and preparing the 7800 for market, he discovered that Nintendo had a lock on nearly all major arcade licenses (and Japanese console publishers in general), and thus switched to targeting computer game licenses almost exclusively. (not sure why that didn't extend to European computer stuff though -or why it took until 1989 to get the 7800 out in Europe)

Nintendo didn't have anything to do with revitalizing the American video game market . . . they DID manage to take advantage of the weakended market in general and push very hard during the critical '86/87 market expansion/recovery period, extending their Japanese monopoly to North America. (that, and they'd spend 1983 through 1985 trying to get the Famicom onto the NA market, and undoubtedly learned a lot about the nature of the NA market during that period -probably one of the things that gave them an edge in marketing over Sega)

[Da_Shocker]

Not sure how Sony stifled creativity with shit like this

[Yharnamresident]

The N64 sold 20 million units in the states. Had the Saturn sold 20 million units in the states they'd would more than likely be still making consoles to this day.

Its always fun to rub in the fact that Sega sold more Saturns in Japan, than the N64 did. Considering the U.S. and Japan are the biggest markets for game consoles.

Imagine if the Saturn did as good in the U.S. and Europe, as it did in Japan:

Japan: 6.4 million
U.S. 6.4 million
Europe: 6.4 million
other: 3 million

= 22.2 million Saturns

Even that Japanese success was hindered, because of them ditching it right after the Dreamcast launched.