Generation Gap

There are few constants in the video game industry, but console release dates used to be one of them. The closest thing to a law in the business was that a new generation of consoles gets released every five years, as they have since the early 1980s. But although Microsoft’s Xbox 360, the oldest current-generation console, will be turning five soon, none of the three major console makers has announced a new model. The tacit consensus among the big three to put off releasing new hardware may seem like a disappointment, but it is actually a blessing in disguise. Even though power gamers won’t get new hardware to play with, the next few years will likely be filled with incredible games.

Prospects for a new console announcement this year are dim. Rumors circulated that Nintendo might announce a new console at the Game Developers Conference this week, but Nintendo denied that this would be a new version of the Wii, which it hopes still has room to grow. Microsoft has proposed that its video motion-tracking system, Project Natal, will help extend the life of its console until 2015. Natal may be an amazing piece of technology—and a potential paradigm shift on par with Nintendo’s motion-sensing Wiimote—but it’s hardly the leap forward in rendering technology that power gamers crave. Finally, with Sony expecting to turn a profit on its PlayStation 3 hardware by 2011 at the earliest, it’s a bit of a stretch to think that its next console is less than another five years away.

One fortunate consequence is that, for the next five years, at least, gamers won’t have to shell out big bucks for hardware in order to stay up to date. Consoles are already prohibitively expensive for some gamers, and it’s hard to imagine that console makers could put a significant improvement over today’s technology on the market without a significant price hike, as well.

However, an even bigger reason why the console freeze is a boon for gamers and developers is that it will help spur innovation. Without the ability to wow gamers with technical wizardry, developers will be forced to think harder about different styles of play to keep their games fresh.

Take rendering, for instance; photorealism has been the goal for the past decade, and as polygon-pushing power has improved, games have inched closer and closer to a facsimile of the real world. Games that simulate life by rote copying can be very immersive, but developers need to improve constantly the accuracy of the simulation to prevent gamers from being disappointed. If developers aren’t able to cram more detail into their lifelike worlds, they’ll be forced to take the art direction of games away from reality to keep their games fresh and exciting. Games like Team Fortress 2, the most recent Prince of Persia, or even Braid make good use of unconventional rendering styles, but the door is wide open for wilder experimentation.

The console freeze may also lead to better games because it is easier for developers to work on systems that they already understand. Learning how to use the accelerometers in the Wiimote, for instance, may take years, and developers who have already made several titles for the Wii are more likely to understand how to use the controller to innovate or enhance immersion.

Similarly, the PS3 is a powerful but complicated system that rewards long-term effort. Online features like matchmaking are unnecessarily and sometimes deliberately complicated on the PS3. Functions performed easily by the graphics card on the Xbox have to be implemented on six smaller cores surrounding the main core, forcing programmers to have detailed experience with parallel computing. However, a studio that has had time to learn all of the idiosyncrasies of PS3 development may be able to better take advantage of the console’s strengths. Of the three consoles of the current generation, the PS3 has the greatest technical potential, and giving developers more time to understand it will only mean better games in the future.

More generally, having just a few console makers who release major upgrades less frequently and focus more on quality games is a better situation for the industry as a whole.  Video games famously hit rock bottom in 1983 from oversaturation. Developers had flooded the market with new consoles, each with a large library of games that were mostly low quality. Atari’s heavily promoted ET game, for instance, stunk so badly that Atari had to bury unsold and returned units in a New Mexico landfill. The state of affairs today, with only three well-differentiated systems, bodes well for the industry beating its current slump and returning to form by next year.

Keeping console technology trapped around 2006 is not without its drawbacks. As graphics cards and processors available for PC continue to outstrip the console technology, developers may handicap their triple-A PC titles to conform to outdated console specifications. But for an industry that has been evolving at a breakneck pace for all of its short existence, extending the life of current consoles will be a relief to gamers and game makers alike.

Adam R. Gold ’11, a Crimson editorial writer, is a physics concentrator in Adams House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.