Disagree a bit with the ecosystem comments.

You're underselling the exclusives on PS3 and X360. For all of the Zelda, Mario, and other first party Nintendo games, you have a bunch of Uncharted, God of War, Killzone, Gran Turismo, Halo, Gears of War, Forza, Viva Pinata, etc. between PS3 and X360. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_exclusives_... - there are a lot of exclusives between the two.

I would just say Nintendo was left out of all of the cross-platform games, which is a shame. Much of the Wii's "unique" ecosystem is garbage.

We may be going through a new "shakeout" period, similar to the 3DO and Jaguar days. As for mainstream adoption, I don't see any of the newcomers (OUYA, Project Shield, Piston) taking off, but it'll be fun to see what happens.

True. Investment in first-party studios is critical to create "great" games. Most often, these are the games that push the boundaries and will be remembered, IMO. Journey(PS3) for example came out of thatgamecompany, an awesome game studio that benefited from Sony's Santa Monica incubator.

First party games are still the "killer apps" of game consoles, although they aren't the only ones (yup, I believe ecosystems are importants, too). Nintendo is sitting on gold mine with the Wii U's MiiVerse, a twitter-like social network, but with drawings added (of course of limited size, only black and white). But it might be "just another app" if they don't invest in it.

I wonder if there's anyone else in my boat..

None of the 360 exclusives are really interesting to me. I've never played a Halo or Gears of war game. A lot of the PS3 exclusives -do- interest me, I'd played the previous games in a few of the series on the PS2.

But I own a 360, and not a PS3. And I don't really feel like getting a PS3 at this point, being so late in the cycle, and owning the 360 version of -most- of the games I play.

I'm in your boat. Except I have a PS3. My best advice: get a second-hand PS3 Slim (a bit better than the last model IMHO), and start playing. The PS3 game library is pretty big now, so I'm sure you'll find what you like.

If Valve makes their new platform the only way to play Half-Life 3... that might be the first game in the series that I'll have to skip. I hate to say that, because I don't doubt that it will be an awesome game, but it's just not enough to sell me on a whole new gaming platform.

I don't see that happening, partially because it would be very un-Valve-like, and partially because it would be stupid.

Valve, in the past, has pushed for more hardware to be able to play its games, not less. Sure, it started out on Windows, but it's made a very respectable delivery platform for the Mac, and now they're on their way to Linux. Saying, "the only way to play our game is on this one specific piece of hardware you have to buy from us" would go against quite a bit of what they've been doing over the past 5 years.

Also, it would be stupid. The people who are drooling over the possibility of HL3 are PC gamers. People who invest cash in gaming rigs, who probably like building their own computers. Saying, "Want HL3? Now you have to buy our hardware!" would be more or less giving their fans the middle finger.

I expect the Steam Box will be hardware, and possibly a customized Linux distribution. And I expect that if you want to "build your own" Steam Box, you'll be able to.

I think the poster's point wasn't that there aren't any exclusives, but that the exclusives don't come down to the console hardware. That a capable team could recreate Killzone or Uncharted on the 360 and the average consumer wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

I'm still very disappointed Google isn't trying to make Android more of a "console platform", and then let a thousand OUYA-like devices bloom under it. Android may not have as many games as the others right now, but if Google was serious about getting game devs for console games, and was willing to spend a bit for that, and then if they made it easier for a lot of device makers to get that game store from them, I think they would end up having some good games in the end, and a pretty competitive console ecosystem.

I mean clearly others, like Nvidia and OUYA, are starting to move towards that anyway - whether Google helps them or not. If Google actually helped them, and allowed many others to do this, it would accelerate the process.

I know Google cares a lot more about the "TV" part of Google TV, because they want the advertising money from TV's, but they should use Microsoft's (probably mostly unintentional) Xbox strategy, where they first got the xbox in 70 million homes, and then started activating TV features. I think it's a lot easier than trying to convince people that they need a "smart TV". It would be better if they thought of it as a bonus to the console.

It would also benefit the Android ecosystem as a whole. Many people still are unwilling to switch from iOS to Android, because are afraid of losing some games. Plus, one of the major reasons people haven't switched to Macs or even Linux over time was that Windows had all the games, and a lot of people wanted Windows for being able to play all the games. So I think this strategy should be a top priority for Google, and not necessarily just something nice to do.

We had Megadrive, SNES and Master System. That's three.

I'm not sure I agree that the market can't support a variety of ecosystems. We already have PS3/Xbox/Wii, millions of people still playing PS2, iOS, Android (yes, they count, and outnumber the console platforms), and PC gaming. That's seven different platforms all doing pretty well.

That's two different generations of consoles: the Megadrive was competing against the SNES, while the Master System was Sega's previous generation console competing against the NES.

There wasn't a meaningfully successful third console in either of those generations, at least none that I recall me or my friends ever playing!

I think the poster is from Brazil, which had a very long and very interesting Master System history, which lasted well into the 16-bit era.

But you are correct, the SMS and the Famicom/NES were from the previous generation, which btw also has the same 2 ecosystem feature I've been talking about above. The Atari 7800 came in a distant 3rd to a distant 2nd dominated by the 1st place player.

the wii's attach rate was really low, so in the end developers opted not to develop for it. Talking about the software ecosystem is talking about the handful of first-party games.

To somewhat disagree, the Wii lacked the staying power I think of the other consoles because of the low end hardware it simply couldn't keep up with where software was going.

The resulted in fewer ports.

Plus if you compare the Wii ecosystem to the 360/PS3, the install base on the latter is much larger and the systems are more similar from a user POV. It's worth it just port between those two while the Wii isn't really worth it.

You're right, but I don't think that's the full picture. Even if the Wii was up to performance with the 360/PS3, there still wouldn't have been many ports because they cater to fundamentally different gameplay. Most Wii players never owned the gamepad, only the Wiimote and nunchuck combo.

I think the Wii's problem was only partially related to its performance, and much moreso related to the fact that motion gaming was a fad that ran aground fairly quickly.

It wasn't just the Wii either, remember when the iPhone came out and developers imagined a crappy future where you'd practically fall out of your chair playing a racing or flying game.

Once the novelty of Wii Sports wore off, the Wii was dead in the water. The DS in contrast was a much stronger, much longer-lasting platform that could keep its player base interested for more than a few months.

> By and large, with the exception of a few exclusives, the 360 and the PS3 have more or less the same set of games. Both were incredibly advanced and were a logical progression of the course that these systems were going. But they both more or less have the same software ecosystem. Most of the library available on one is available on the other.

You know, this part still blows my mind--and that's really my age showing, because this is one of those "new normal" states that anyone born recently won't even question: Sony spent untold amounts of R&D money making an 1+8 core system at a time when that amount of power was unheard of. Microsoft put commodity PC hardware in a plastic shell. And yet you don't see any games that are exclusive to one or the other because porting is technologically unfeasible. (On the contrary, the only "exclusives" are that way because of licencing agreements.) Does this mean that people still aren't taking advantage of the systems' respective unique hardware, after all these years?

I would say no. Instead, it seems more that an increasing trend to make one's SDK something that runs on commodity PC hardware--instead of an expensive, dedicated, serial-connected tester unit, as in previous generations--has fostered all the disadvantages of commodity PC hardware on the developer. It's hard to developer for 8+1 cores if you don't see the speedup on your own machine. So game software is now, by and large, PC software--software for a CPU with some small number of cores, some large amount of RAM, and a pretty massive GPU for everything else--not software targeted at special tile-drawing and sprite-drawing and audio-synthesis chips.

What this means, I think, for the next generation of consoles: ignoring UX differentiators like the Wii (and it seems like they're still the only ones differentiating on UX), the rest of the systems will probably all have roughly the same set of games. Portability is now easy, because every console is basically a PC. We don't include special hardware any more, because nobody's gonna program for it. For consumers, this means console choice will come down to something like price-point + brand-recognition, rather than any question of "what games will run on this."

The obvious exception is the one I mentioned above--platforms with enough leverage to make exclusive licensing deals. But this is, at least currently, a declining relic of a bygone age: I can see first-party (Nintendo, Valve) and fully-owned subsidiaries (Bungie) as continuing to create exclusives, but even the most heavily one-platform-at-a-time companies (Square-Enix) are now branching out all over the place, because that amount of power over the consumer is decreasingly relevant, and it captures more of the market to have some games on every platform, than to target one console's market and get "guaranteed" consumption because you're the biggest fish in the smaller pond.

In other words, in a way, console software is being "globalized" between markets, just like movies and music are being globalized between the US, Europe and Asia. You can't just release on one and then perhaps re-release on the others at some later date; you'll be missing out if you aren't everywhere.

Actually, the 360 does have a custom architecture. It has a tri-core PPC based CPU and all custom ICs for the GPU and southbridge. It was the original Xbox which was Pentium based and very close to a commercial PC, although with custom GPU and southbridge ICs as well.

I think it's more simply just an extension of the old note that no-one really hand-codes assembly anymore.

You can. And those who are really good can still see performance gains. But most people who try spend a lot of time and effort to get results that are indistinguishable-to-worse as compared to the compiler.

So it is with custom architectures. If the compiler can utilize a gaggle of DSPs or specialized GPU cores? great! Everyone wins. But if it takes some special effort to really make them sing, most people won't bother because they know that for most projects you don't have the time/expertise to pull it off.

It doesn't mean there's no point to doing specialized hardware. It just means that the SDK, compiler and libraries need to deliver enough performance to justify their inclusion.

And, anecdotally, Sony did not with the PS3.