VR won't be a "meaningful" part of interactive entertainment for YEARS, according to SONY

Among all the languishing and failed VR products, Sony's PlayStation VR stands out as the closest thing VR has to a success story. Sure, Google's Cardboard VR or Samsung's Gear VR may have moved more units, but PSVR has handily outsold all integrated-display VR headsets, combined. The problem is that even those industry-leading sales numbers are far below VR's early projections; worse yet, they were entirely front-loaded, with basically nobody buying in after that first wave of early adopters.

PSVR fans kept showing up for E3, year after year, hoping for a big VR announcement from Sony, only to leave disappointed. The next-gen PS5, which will land in stores only days from today equipped with more than enough grunt for VR, does have a camera module available for sale, but it isn't PSVR-compatible; if you want to use your last-gen PSVR with the next-gen PS5, you'll need an adapter. The only thing that could speak more loudly to VR being low on the priority list for Sony would be some sort of official statement to that effect, from Sony themselves.

And now, as reported by The Washington Post, we have exactly that:

Though immersion appears to be the focal point of Sony’s PS5 push, Ryan says there won’t be any immediate leaps forward from Sony in the most immersive gaming experience, virtual reality (VR). PlayStation was at the forefront of the virtual reality market for consoles, having launched a PSVR headset in 2016. While 5 million headsets were sold by January this year, sales were slowing in 2020. There are currently no public plans for a PS5-specific headset. Instead, Sony is offering adapters to use the PS4′s PSVR headset with the new console.

“I think we’re more than a few minutes from the future of VR,” Ryan said. “PlayStation believes in VR. Sony believes in VR, and we definitely believe at some point in the future, VR will represent a meaningful component of interactive entertainment. Will it be this year? No. Will it be next year? No. But will it come at some stage? We believe that. And we’re very pleased with all the experience that we’ve gained with PlayStation VR, and we look forwarding to seeing where that takes us in the future.”

And that, as they say, is that. The most successful player in the VR game has no plans for a next play, anytime in the near-to-foreseeable future. Stick a fork in VR, folks; it's done.

VR apologists will likely look to Ryan's "at some stage"/"in the future" remarks as signs of life, but don't be fooled; that's just the corpse, twitching. Sony has to say something to assure buzzword-sensitive investors that they haven't given up on one of tech's juicier buzzwords, because admitting that VR's years-long campaign is ending in defeat could cause the share price of whoever admits it first to drop sharply, something which Sony would rather avoid. 

But their reluctance to flee the VR field first should not be mistaken for a desire to keep fighting the VR fight; Sony is done with VR, unless and until somebody else succeeds in convincing consumers to adopt the technology en masse. With the second-biggest player being Facebook VR née Oculus, who have nailed their VR fortunes to the larger platform's declining user count, that's looking less and less likely to happen.

Of all the companies doing VR business, the only one that might have been making money from VR was Sony. What we've now learned is that even Sony are not making enough money from VR for the tech to be worth any more investment. 

Oh, sure, Facebook and Valve have deep enough pockets that they can probably continue to lose money on VR for a while yet, but don't expect that to propel VR into the forefront of the public consciousness; it won't, and neither will the upcoming Ready Player Two (the sequel to VR-advert/movie Ready Player One, which also didn't more the needle on VR).

It's all over save the shouting; how long the likes of Facebook and Valve will keep shouting into the VR void remains to be seen.

Oculus Quest, revisited

It probably didn't surprise you that I wasn't impressed with the Oculus Quest. I was listening to the Dad & Sons Podcast on the weekend, though, and they collectively came up with a counter-argument to my initial skepticism, which basically boiled down to a couple of points:

1. Facebook/Oculus are selling this as basically a VR game console, meaning that its US$400 price tag, with two VR controllers included, is in pretty much in line with their intended competition.
2. People who weren't interested in Oculus' Go or Rift products might just be interested in a US$400 VR gaming console, especially since it won't require them to pay for expensive PC upgrades anymore while still providing acceptable performance.

That got me thinking. The argument still felt wrong to me, but I couldn't put my finger on exactly why. I found myself mulling it over on the bus yesterday, though, and I think I've figured out exactly what my objections are.

As I see it, in order for FB/Oculus' latest product to succeed, it needs to clear all of the following hurdles.

Checking in with Nintendo Switch

In spite of Nintendo Switch's really good sales last year, I'm on record as being skeptical about the system's "legs." Sure, the system surged ahead in the holiday quarter of 2017, but they still didn't manage to out-sell the console sales leading PS4, and 2018 was off to a slow start. A lacklustre showing at E3 seemed unlikely to help, either, taking the wind out of the Switch's sales at a time when Nintendo should have been doubling down on their 2017 success.

Which is why I'm not particularly surprised to learn that the Switch's last-quarter sales are down compared to the same period of last year, as reported by GameSpot:

Nintendo has shared its financial earnings for the first quarter of the current fiscal year, and the Nintendo Switch continues to perform well. The company reports it has sold another 1.88 million Switch consoles worldwide during the period from April through June, bringing the system's total sales up to 19.6 million.

While that represents a slight decrease in Switch hardware sales from the same period last year (down 4.4% year-on-year), software sales grew by more than 120% year-on-year, with 17.96 million units sold during the quarter. Digital sales of packaged Switch games and DLC also grew by 68% from the same period last year.

This is noteworthy for a couple of reasons.

Creativity is officially dead and so is VR

I must have gone to bathroom, or something, when this bit popped up during Sony's E3 event last week:

It's a very pretty video, with very pretty music, and it takes just over two minutes (2:10, to be precise) before actually fading into any gameplay from the game itself. And yes, it's Tetris. Like, literally, just Tetris but with Tron's aesthetics.

According to the game's Wikipedia entry, Tetris Effect has been in development for 6 years. It took them 6 years to add Tron's glowy graphic style to the now-34-years-young Tetris. Oh, and a pause button, or "an all-new Zone mechanic that allows players to stop time," as it's gushingly called by UploadVR.

Available soon on Windows, PS4, and PSVR, Tetris Effect should be all the proof you need that creativity is dead. They spent six years making a VR version of Tetris, in an environment where you can't turn around and spit without hitting a free version of Tetris, and thirty four years after Tetris was first released. In thirty-four years, nobody has succeeded in adding anything of worth or note to the gameplay of Tetris, and I don't expect that Tetris Effect will succeed where everyone else has failed.

The fact that this utter failure of creativity features prominently on UploadVR's list of E3's Biggest VR Announcements should tell you everything you need to know about the state of VR, right now.

Oh, yeah, and the other one: Sony's E3 presser

Well, if I'm going to cover them, I may as well cover them all.

Sony comes into this year's E3 as the clear industry leader. They may have spent last year more or less coasting, but the strong work they put it to build a stable of solid first-party studios has paid off in spades, and this years God of War continued the streak. Really, all they had to do was not fuck it up. So, did they manage to not fuck it up?

A joke that never gets old, by Alanah Pearce

Sony's E3 press conference did some... creative, shall we say? things with its format, which were more bewildering than impressive. Much like last year, actually, when Sony used creative lighting and a full symphony orchestra to propel the proceedings, which also left some scratching their heads. Breaking the momentum of their show while they moved people from one room to another was clearly not a good idea, though; and talented as he was, the banjo player was also clearly not as effective as last year's full symphony orchestra. Yes, it's good to see a company of Sony's size take some creative risks, but the poor logistics should have been obvious, here.

Once they finally stopped walking attendees from room to room, though, and started showing them actual games, things started to pick up.

No, Microsoft's original vision for the XBox One was not "right"

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

So goes the famous quote from Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, known in English simply as George Santayana. He wasn't talking about Microsoft apologists, but OMFG, he may as well have been.

So, I was doing some simple YouTube searches, trying to gauge the reaction to the XBox E3 presser, when I came across this bit of revisionist history.

It's a lovely little think piece about how visionary Microsoft were the only ones preparing for a world of connected, online gaming; about how everyone saw it coming, but only Microsoft acted on that vision. They've suffered unjustly, is the clear implication here, for being such visionaries, and the gaming industry would be a better and healthier place if they'd just done a better job of selling their vision to consumers.

This is 100% bullshit. It quite simply isn't what happened. At all.

Nintendo Switch scores 10 million sold

As any regular reader of this blog knows (yes, all two of you, ☺), I did not think that Nintendo would pull this off.

After a whole year of production and supply-chain problems, and with no clear or specific indications from Nintendo themselves that they'd actually solved those problems in time to capitalize on the busy holiday shopping season (their CEO recently responded to questions about this XMas' Switch supplies by talking up their plans for the 1st quarter of next year, for fuck's sake), and with them only sitting at 7 millions sold by the end of October, I really didn't think they'd sell another 3 million units by the end of December, a pace which was 3.42 times faster than the 875K per month that they'd averaged all year to that point.

And, guess what? They didn't do 3M more in sales by the end of December.

They did it by the end of November.

As reported by Erie News Now (who got the story from CNNMoney):

Nintendo just confirmed what we already knew: its hybrid gaming system is a hit.

The company said on Tuesday the Nintendo Switch -- one part mobile, one part home console -- has sold 10 million units since its March 2017 launch.

The announcement comes less than two months after Nintendo increased its fiscal-year projection, ending March 31, 2018, from 10 million to 14 million units sold. Nintendo expects operating profit for the year to hit $1.06 billion, up from its original projection of $572 million.[...] By contrast, the Wii U sold just over 13 million units since its 2012 launch, before it was discontinued earlier this year.

It would seem that there were plenty of Nintendo Switches available for sale on Black Friday, after all, and that basically all of them were indeed sold. Even if this recent number is slightly padded, and even if there aren't a lot of Switches left to sell for the rest of the month (something I wouldn't bet on, anymore, BTW), it's now entirely possible for Nintendo to exit 2017 on a solid pace to hit their end of March target, after all.

With their 2DS line, the NES Classic, and the SNES Classic also selling really well, there's just no doubt about it: Nintendo are having a hell of a year, and their big gamble on the Nintendo Switch really has paid off, in a way which should be sustainable long-term. The fact that they're now seeing some solid third-party exclusive releases for the Switch, like the recently-announced Bayonetta 3, cements the situation for them. No wonder Sony finally decided to take the Switch seriously, in the form of some serious price cuts to their PS4, PS4 Pro, and PSVR.

So, congratulations, Nintendo! You've pitched me a strike already, and we're not even close to the end of the year yet.

Prognostication Scorecard: 1-1-4

One right, one wrong, with 4 as yet To Be Determined.

Nintendo Switch Prediction: 

• The Switch may move another million or so units over the holidays, but it won't hit the 10 million mark by the end of December, and will fall well short of Nintendo's 15-million-by-March target. WRONG! (See above.)

PS4 & XBOX Predictions: 

• Sony will try harder, now that they have a PlayStation head who isn't retiring, although exactly what a Cloud-based PS4 will look like, or how Sony chose to react to the challenge from Nintendo, if at all, remain to be seen. RIGHT! Price cuts count as trying harder. Cloud-based PS4 offerings are still pretty fucking vague.
• PSN/Steam crossplay is a possibility here, especially in light of Valve's recently-announced trust-based CS:GO matchmaking system -- House was against crossplay, but Kodera might change course. TBD. We might not know this one until the end of 2018.
• Microsoft simply didn't get the XBO-X to market in time; it will sell well enough this holiday season, but not well enough for them to gain ground on Sony, and Nintendo's Switch will outsell their XBOX throughout the coming year. They'll still end 2018 as the #2 console, but not by much. TBD. XBOX seems to be selling well enough, but no numbers yet.

VR Prediction: 

• No developments for at least three months, if then. VR will continue to not be a thing. TBD. We might not know the outcome of this one until the end of March.

Windows 10 Prediction: 

• No big developments for at least three months here, either. TBD. NMS's recently revamped numbers look slightly better for Windows 10, but don't show a huge swing yet.

Prognostication

December is coming... and with it, what is (traditionally) a slow time for news.

In a normal year, everything that will be announced this year has been announced by now; results for this quarter won't be known until January, so there are no meaningful numbers to analyze; and everyone in the news business is only weeks away from the annual crop of year-end top story roundup articles, which normally hit just before everyone goes on holiday for a couple of weeks.

As such, I wouldn't normally be expecting to have too many new developments to blog about for the rest of the year. Of course, 2017 hasn't been a normal year, and it's always possible that the fast-evolving gacha/loot box story will continue to have legs, but I'm guessing that now's a pretty safe time to make a few predictions before taking a bit of a break myself.

So... prediction time! At least regarding the topics that this blog has mostly been about for the last couple of years.

VR:

Let's start with a nice, quick one.

Having languished all year long, VR will continue to sell poorly this XMas season. Thanks to HTC's just-announced Vive Focus, the Microsoft-backed Mixed Reality headsets have managed to be obsolete before properly hitting the market, and the original Vive, Oculus Rift, and PlayStation VR are all basically dinosaurs now...  and it's not like consumers were all that interested in them before. Sales of VR should continue at this same poor level, with no new major announcements or releases until the new year at the earliest. [UPDATE: June 17th, 2018: RIGHT!] E3 has just happened, with nothing of note being announced for VR, in either hardware or software. Oculus Go's release has had no measurable effect, either.


Prediction: No developments for at least three months, if then. VR will continue to not be a thing.

Windows 10:

November and December are a high-volume time of year for most businesses, when disruptive system-wide OS rollouts are generally considered to be a bad idea; many companies don't even allow new system launches after the end of October (my employer deployed a new order-tracking and -fulfillment system on October 30th, and are coming to rather regret that decision). Basically, this means no new Windows 10 deployments for the rest of the calendar year, and this no Enterprise-driven shift away from Windows 7/Server 2008.

New deployments won't be happening at any brisk pace to start the new year, either, as companies come to realize that keeping pace with Microsoft's overly-aggressive update schedule is simply too difficult and too costly - the Windows-as-a-Service model has some serious problems that Microsoft badly need to solve. January is also not normally a big season for major system changes; many companies have synced their fiscal calendars to the taxation year, which means that the end of the year is also the end of their fiscal year, so January is normally spent on year-end book-keeping -- again, not normally a good time for a disruptive, company-wide new OS rollout.

Individual users won't be migrating to Windows 10 en masse, either. PC sales have been declining steadily for years, so I don't expect to see a wave of XMas PC purchases this year, and users with older PCs have made it very clear that they have no intention of switching unless and until they absolutely have to.

Add one and one and one, and you get no major shifts in the OS market until next February, at the earliest... which mean no big change in NetMarketShare et al's reported statistics until the first of March. Any changes that happen will be marginal, and Windows 10 won't overtake Windows 7 until next year, no matter how badly tech media bloggers want it to happen. The real test will be the period from next March to next November; if Windows 10 is going to take off, it will have to be then, when big companies with fresh budgets can do deployments with the least amount of disruption. If it doesn't happen then, it won't happen until closer to Windows 7's end-of-life in 2020.

Prediction: No big developments for at least three months here, either. [UPDATE: June 17th, 2018: RIGHT!] Or, mostly right, anyway. Microsoft parted ways with the former head of their Windows and Devices division, and broke that division up across the company, which means that they've abandoned their Windows-focused strategy entirely. The fact that this was necessary says all that needs to be said about the strategy itself; even Microsoft finally gave up hoping that it would start producing results. That OS market is still not shifting significantly, with Microsoft themselves no longer expecting that to change, confirms my prediction.

Nintendo Switch:

There's no doubt that Nintendo's having their best year in a long time, but the Switch's first year hasn't been without its problems... chief among them, of course, being the production issues which prevented Nintendo from meeting any of their production milestones, as far as anyone can tell. In a recent presentation to shareholders, Nintendo's CEO answered questions about whether Nintendo would have enough units in stores for the upcoming XMas season by talking about the quarter after that... never a good sign.

I read that as Nintendo not having nearly enough units in stores to sell this season, which is a problem since the period from Black Friday to Boxing Day is when most retailers (in NA, anyway) post up to 50% of their year's sales (October to December can be up to 70% for some retailers). Failing to have enough units in stores at this time of year is a huge misstep, one which Nintendo will not recover from until well after the post-holiday hangover -- consumers normally don't spend much in January or February, with sales not picking up again until March.

Nintendo, of course, were bullishly predicting that they'd hit 15 million units sold by March, but there are a lot of assumptions that seem to underlie that prediction, including the pace of sales remaining more or less constant in spite of supply problems at a critical point in the year, and the traditional early-year sales slowdown. Nintendo are also assuming that every Nintendo household will be buying multiple Switches, something which seems like an unrealistic expectation.

Of course, the Nintendo Switch could become a full-blown craze, just like the original Wii did, but events like that are incredibly rare, and most companies only ever get one of them. The Wii became a craze because it appealed to people who'd never gamed before, in the same way that the PS2 became the best-selling console of all time by also being the cheapest DVD player on the market when it launched; there's no evidence yet that the Switch appeals to anyone except early adopters, longtime Nintendo fans, and core gamers who spend a lot of time travelling and who are willing to buy their favourite games a second time in order to have a version to take with them.

The Switch boasts only two games with real system-selling potential, and both of them are aimed at long-time Nintendo fans who were always going to buy the Switch, anyway; if you're not a long-time Zelda or Mario fan, the platform doesn't have much to offer except the opportunity to spend more than retail (because cartridges, for fuck's sake) buying games for a 2nd time that you either already own, or can buy more cheaply on Steam without incurring several hundred dollars of additional expense. And since Nintendo's gaming handhelds have declined in popularity every year since 2009, largely replaced by the smartphone for most users... well, suffice to say that I think a full-blown craze is unlikely.

The Switch will almost certainly outsell the WiiU, but that's a low bar to clear, frankly. If the Switch is still selling 2 million units a month after it passes the 20 million mark, I'll concede that it's remarkable launch has strong enough legs to keep running; until then, I will continue to regard Nintendo's plans to double production, and then double it again, to be just so much PR bullshit -- statements aimed more at their shareholders than anything else. The Switch is probably here to stay for a while, and will certainly avoid the ignominious fate that claimed the WiiU, but it won't be equalling, let alone surpassing, the PS4's market share anytime soon. And they won't be launching in China, either, no matter how badly analysts want it to happen.

Prediction: The Switch may move another million or so units over the holidays, but it won't hit the 10 million mark by the end of December, and will fall well short of Nintendo's 15-million-by-March target. [UPDATE: December 12th, 2017: WRONG!]

PlayStation & XBox (or, XBO-X):

Sony began 2017 with a commanding position in the console gaming market. Although Steam was still dominant on PC, and had more than twice as many installed users as PS4, Sony still had 53.4 million PS4 users worldwide, and was projecting 18 million more over the course of the year; they had the best-selling non-smartphone VR headset on the market; they had pushed their updated PS4 Pro console out a full year ahead of Microsoft's Scorpio; and they had successfully crushed Nintendo's WiiU, which had launched poorly, sold worse, and finally gone out of production. Sony were winning; all they had to do, to keep winning, was keep their collective foot on the gas.

And so, naturally, they decided to spend the year coasting, instead.

Sony coasted while Nintendo announced, and launched, the Nintendo Switch, a handheld/console hybrid that outsold all other consoles combined last month, at least in the U.S., in spite of persistent supply issues; apparently still stinging from the failure of PS Vita, Sony have no plans to contest the handheld gaming space with an updated machine of their own. Sony coasted while Microsoft announced one consumer-friendly initiative after another, from Play Anywhere to backwards compatibility to cross-play, something on which Sony are still dragging their feet; they kept coasting while Microsoft debuted the XBox One X, the "most powerful gaming console ever made," which can actually outpower and outperform the PS4 Pro -- thus giving Microsoft the hardware performance edge, for the first time this console generation.

With all this coasting, one might be forgiven for thinking that the people in charge of Sony's PlayStation division had basically stopped caring... mainly because that was pretty much what had happened. Even though I'd never heard his name before this year, I wasn't at all surprised to learn that Andrew House, the head of Sony's PlayStation department, was retiring; the whole of Sony's past year felt like the work of someone playing out the string until they could finally retire and spend the rest of their time bass fishing. Sony's gaming division lost a lot of momentum in 2017.

Whether they can regain that momentum in 2018 in anyone's guess. Sony's new PlayStation head, John Kodera, plans to take Sony's gaming efforts into the cloud, a strategy which aligns well with general trends in the videogame industry, while also being something that the Nintendo Switch's damn-it-all cartridges and tiny onboard storage seem poorly positioned to do. Whether they also decide to update the PS Vita with a new, cloud-powered version remains to be seen, but it's almost certain that the PS4 will get another hardware upgrade, the name of which will also be stupid. Sony is still the dominant player in console gaming, with the PlayStation 4 sitting at 64.9 million sold worldwide (compared to the XBox One's 31.25 million, and Nintendo Switch's 7.02 million), and will continue to occupy the #1 spot for a while, but they'll need to work harder to stay on top.

Microsoft, meanwhile, will continue trying to make XBox Live relevant to PC gamers who mostly game on Steam, while pushing 4K gaming to consumers who mostly doesn't own or want 4K televisions. The XBox One X (or XBO-X) will sell well, because it's new and in stock during the XMas shopping season, but it's really only appealing to people that already own 4K TVs and are also already invested in the XBL ecosystem, which may not be as many people as Microsoft thinks it is. With Play Anywhere equalling the end of actual exclusive XBox One games (anything released for XBox is also released for Windows by default), the only remaining move is for Microsoft to (a) ramp up in-house game development, to try to make the XBL/Microsoft Store look like a more inviting place to buy games, and (b) push the development of Mixed Reality gaming. The first will yield no results at all next year, since games take years to develop, and the second will yield no results at all, period, because VR (see above).

Predictions: Sony will try harder, now that they have a PlayStation head who isn't retiring, although exactly what a Cloud-based PS4 will look like, or how Sony chose to react to the challenge from Nintendo, if at all, remain to be seen. [UPDATE: December 8th, 2017: RIGHT!] PSN/Steam crossplay is a possibility here, especially in light of Valve's recently-announced trust-based CS:GO matchmaking system -- House was against crossplay, but Kodera might change course. For their part, Microsoft simply didn't get the XBO-X to market in time; it will sell well enough this holiday season, but not well enough for them to gain ground on Sony, and Nintendo's Switch will outsell their XBOX throughout the coming year. They'll still end 2018 as the #2 console, but not by much.

Somewhat unexpected:

Wow. If you'd told at the start of this year that I'd end it having more to say about the Nintendo Switch than about Windows 10, I'd have said you were crazy, but here we are. I guess Nintendo's comeback console is just much more interesting than anything Microsoft is doing, these days.

Which goes to show the value of prognostications: more often than not, they're wrong. They're still fun, though, and worth writing down -- after all, a prediction that you can later deny having made is kind of cowardly. I'll still check in from time to time, and blog about anything that does catch my eye, including the normal OS market share check-ins on December 1st and January 1st, but that should be about it for the year. No best-of, worst-of, or top-story roundup lists here!

Unless of course, something of interest does happen. And with a year like the one we've been having, it honestly wouldn't fucking surprise me.

Sony won't vie with Nintendo with a handheld gaming device

Considering how the PS Vita has failed to thrive, and how dominant the PS4 is in the console space, this probably isn't that much of a surprise, but it's still noteworthy that Sony is going to just let Nintendo enjoy a monopoly on the handheld gaming device market. Even more noteworthy is their rationale for doing so.

As reported by US Gamer:

According to a Bloomberg interview with Sony's Andrew House, the head of Sony's gaming division feels that the mobile phone market has essentially put a hold on mobile gaming. Talking about the last mobile gaming device Sony released, the PS Vita, House said, "The Vita experience was that outside of Japan and Asia, there was not a huge demand. The lifestyle shift toward the dominance of smartphones as the single key device that is always with you, was the determining factor."

Likewise, Sony is quick to point out that the Nintendo Switch, which has seen plenty of success since launching in March, is not a true mobile console. "The Nintendo device is a hybrid device and that's a different approach and strategy."

So will Sony abandon mobile for hybrids? Nope. According to the interview Sony's current strategy involves delivering more products for home consoles along with VR and non-gaming entertainment like original TV content and music.

[...]

However, analysts and developers still express hesitation for the Switch, questioning whether it has lasting potential like Pokemon Co. head Tsunekazu Ishiharu suggested earlier this year.

It's pretty much all the same points that I was making when the Switch was first launched. Outside of the diehard Nintendo faithful, smartphones have pretty much destroyed the demand for dedicated handheld gaming devices, and (again, outside of Nintendo's diehard fans) there's no proven demand for a hybrid console/handheld gaming device, either. The Switch is off to a decent start, and is certainly doing much better than the WiiU did at launch, but Nintendo haven't been able to put enough Switches on shelves yet to really test how much demand there is beyond Nintendo's most ardent supporters.

Nintendo's ardent supporters have spent years lining up to fail to buy Amiibos, NES Classics, SNES Classics, and Switches, thus proving to Nintendo that they'll suffer any indignity in pursuit of the latest Nintendo thing, but it needs to be emphasized that this is not normal consumer behaviour. The Switch may be the next Wii, with appeal that extends well beyond Nintendo's fan base into the broader consumer market, but then again, it might not be, and we don't have enough data yet to be able to say for sure, one way or the other.

For Sony to decide that they'll wait and see whether console/hybrid consoles are enough of a thing for it to be worth their while to make one, makes total sense to me. Nintendo's handheld and console sales have been declining since 2009; trying to recapture that lost ground with a single hybrid device is a huge gamble for them, a cure-or-kill approach which will either create an entirely new category of consumer device, or kill Nintendo's hardware business completely. I don't blame Sony at all for refusing to cover that action.

The 12 Best Games For The Nintendo Switch, revisited.

Kotaku has posted their revised list of the 12 best Nintendo Switch games, which gives us a great opportunity to compare it to their previous list, and see what's changed.

This was the end of June:

1. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Switch)
2. Disgaea 5 (PS4)
3. Snipperclips (Switch)
4. Thumper (PC)
5. Puyo Puyo Tetris (*)
6. The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth+ (PC)
7. Minecraft (PC)
8. Cave Story+ (PC)
9. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (Switch)
10. Jackbox Party Pack 3 (PC)
11. Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove (PC)
12. Arms (Switch)

And this is mid-August:

1. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Switch)
2. Snipperclips: Cut It Out Together! (Switch)
3. Thumper  (PC)
4. Puyo Puyo Tetris (*)
5. The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth+ (PC)
6. Minecraft  (PC)
7. Cave Story+ (PC)
8. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (Switch)
9. Jackbox Party Pack 3 (PC)
10. Splatoon 2 (Switch)
11. Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove (PC)
12. Arms  (Switch)

So, what changed?

• Disgaea 5 (PS4) has dropped from the #2 spot, to a spot off the list completely. (I guess it wasn't actually the second-best Nintendo Switch game? Were Kotaku perhaps padding their top 12 list, just a little bit?)
• Snipperclips (Switch), Thumper (PC), Puyo Puyo Tetris (*), The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth+ (PC), Minecraft (PC), Cave Story+ (PC), Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (Switch), and Jackbox Party Pack 3 (PC) all move up one spot, thanks to Disgaea 5's sudden and total fall from Kotaku's good graces.
• Splatoon 2, the only major release since June, debuts in the #10 spot.

Basically, the Switch's game situation is unchanged. Their "best game" list includes one new Switch exclusive, but Splatoon 2 is largely regarded as being more-or-less identical to the original Splatoon, and is only the 10th best game on the platform. And all five games that were first released on the Switch are from Nintendo themselves; none are third-party titles, and only Zelda is a system-seller.

This is a crucial point. Nintendo need to sell systems; games sell systems, ergo Nintendo need system-selling games to be released for the Switch. Yes, Nintendo have sold a copy of Zelda for every Switch, but Splatoon 2 is not a system-seller; the WiiU had the original Splatoon, and still tanked. The same applies for Snipperclips (cute, but it looks like a mobile port, in spite of not being one) and Arms (widely regarded as mechanically interesting but far too light on content).

Long story short, Nintendo's Switch game situation has not improved. Granted, July and August are normally slow months for game releases, but even so.... damn.

UPDATE:

It turns out that July and August aren't all that slow a period for game releases after all, although it may still be a slow period for quality game releases.

From Kotaku:

Since Steam Direct—which allows any developer to submit a game to Steam for $100—launched seven weeks ago, Steam has added over 1,000 new games, per figures provided by Ico Partners’ Thomas Bidaux (via GamesIndustry.biz). Of those, 215 arrived in the first week of August alone. Since mid-July, the number of games releasing per week has increased precipitously:

When Steam Direct launched, Valve predicted that, thanks to games still caught up in the arcane gears of the Greenlight system, there would be “an initial surge of new submissions and then a new rate somewhat higher than what was coming through Greenlight.” The upswing in releases, then, could be a heaping helping of Greenlight leftovers, or it might be a sign of things to come.

This puts something of a spotlight on the Switch's dearth of titles. When competitors' platforms are seeing thousands of releases every couple of months, Nintendo need to see more than one notable game for their console. They're already behind; they need to avoid falling even further behind.

Is the Switch losing momentum already?

In spite of its decent launch, Nintendo's Switch is far from being out of the woods. Persistent manufacturing and supply problems, a dearth of good games, and an abundance of caution on the part of third-party game developers, all seemed to be conspiring to turn the initial rush of excitement into frustration. Which is a problem, because prolonged frustration can easily turn into boredom, and then apathy. Nintendo needed to solve the Switch's problems quickly, before that could happen.

So, how soon is soon enough? Have Nintendo already taken too long to fix their supply problems, if they really wanted to capitalize on that initial positive buzz? Those are the questions, and other people are starting to ask them.

From Dion Dassanayake at Express:

For the second week in a row, the battle between the Switch v PS4 has been won by Sony’s console in Japan.

The PS4 has been the top selling console in Japan for the past two weeks in a row, edging ahead of the Nintendo Switch, according to GamingBolt.

The most recent figures show the PS4 selling 29,771 units compared to the Switch’s 26,256.

The news comes after in May the Switch lost out to the PS4 in the latest chart wars from America.

In one sense, this isn't really news; PS4 has been outselling Switch for a while now. Also, it needs to be said that week-by-week sales numbers in July aren't normally something that retailers lose a lot of sleep over. Don't get me wrong, sluggish sales are sluggish, and retailers hate that, but fall is the big retail season, with the October-to-December period often accounting for as much as 70% of a retailer's annual sales (and, yes, I do work in retail, although thankfully not in gaming retail). There's still lots of year left for Nintendo to sell consoles, including the busiest months of the retail calendar, and they'll have more games on the shelf by the fall, too.

The Nintendo Switch's situation isn't your normal retail scenario, however. Nintendo are trying to jump-start their console and handheld sales (both of which have declined steadily since 2009) with one device, and right now, what they need more than anything else is momentum. Nintendo were forecasting 10 million units of Switch sales for this year, a number that they've since increased to 15 million, but Sony were forecasting that PS4 sales would decline slightly this year, to 18 million.... and that's on top of the 60+ million PS4's they've already sold. The Switch doesn't necessarily need to outsell the PS4 every single week, but if the ongoing sales trend ends up putting them further behind the PS4, rather than gaining ground, then skittish third-party game devs may decide to stay on the sidelines, rather than spend extra time and money downsizing their games to fit into the Switch's profoundly limited resources.

And that could easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy, with fewer third party games coming out for the Switch because there aren't enough third-party games on the Switch to lure in increasingly frustrated, bored, or even apathetic consumers.

Nintendo really have bet the farm on the Switch succeeding. There are already signs that the Switch is eating into 2DS and 3DS sales (which, again, have been declining for years anyway), and their last console, the WiiU, flopped hard. If Nintendo's hardware business is to survive, then the Switch must succeed; Nintendo aren't a small company, but they're not Microsoft-sized, and able to write off a second hardware platform in a row, especially when it's rapidly becoming the entirety of their hardware business. Two weeks of bad sales could just be a coincidence, but a third straight week of sub-par sales numbers could be the start of a trend that Nintendo will have a heck of a time reversing.

I'm not sure how much time Nintendo's Switch will get, here, but one thing's for sure: they're running out of time a lot faster than many people expected.

Nintendo's 3rd party developer problems might run deeper than anybody knew.

From Destructoid:

Speaking to Kinda Funny, [Oddworld creator Lorne] Lanning states that he has "no faith," in the Switch, due to "experience," and having seen how the Wii and Wii U played out. To clarify the condemnation of the former he explains that both consoles weren't successful for third parties, and that Nintendo ended up making all the money at the end of their runs. He experienced this with what he claims is lackluster promotion for New 'n' Tasty on the Wii U.

While praises that it's mobile he doesn't think people are going to go through the effort to work on an "under-powered console" (a sentiment THQ Nordic shares), and that in conjunction with their alleged efforts to ignore third parties to better themselves, it'll end up hurting studios.

It's something a lot of developers are struggling with right now -- whether or not to call out Nintendo after the Wii U situation. The Switch is doing great so you don't want to burn that bridge, but some studios have claimed that even after they've tried to make games for it Nintendo hasn't reciprocated. If more developers aren't willing to speak out like this and share their opinions we'll continue to be in the dark.

Nintendo alone simply weren't able to release enough games to save the WiiU, so the general consensus is that Nintendo's Switch will either live or die depending on the amount of support it receives from third party developers. The fact that previously-burned developers are hesitant to invest heavily in developing for the new platform is basically the opposite of what Nintendo need to happen, in order for the Switch to succeed where the WiiU failed.

It doesn't help that the Switch is simply underpowered compared to competing consoles, either. In a world where the Nintendo's competition consists of Sony's PS4 Pro, Microsoft's XBO-X, and even more powerful gaming PCs, the Switch can't even keep pace with a vanilla PS4 or XBox One. Most of the Switch's 3rd-party games are ports of old PC titles, but even that well could run try quickly as developers continue to wrestle with the limitations of the Switch's underpowered hardware.

The Switch managed a decent launch, but Nintendo still have a lot of problems still to overcome in order for their new device into have the kind of legs that they desperately need it to.

The Nintendo Switch's big problem, nicely illustrated

Kotaku posted a list today of the 12 best games currently available on the Nintendo Switch. You can read their list yourself, along with the reasoning for each game's inclusion, here; for my purposes, though, I'm just going to type out the list in bullet points, along with the system that each game was originally released on. See if you can spot the pattern.

1. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Switch)
2. Disgaea 5 (PS4)
3. Snipperclips (Switch)
4. Thumper (PC)
5. Puyo Puyo Tetris (*)
6. The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth+ (PC)
7. Minecraft (PC)
8. Cave Story+ (PC)
9. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (Switch)
10. Jackbox Party Pack 3 (PC)
11. Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove (PC)
12. Arms (Switch)

Puyo Puyo Tetris is the one oddball on the list, a crossover between the Puyo Puyo and Tetris franchises. It has a gameplay mode which involves alternately playing both games side-by-side, or something? It's supposed to be quite fun, but I'd hesitate to describe it as "new," and PPT's two component games date back to 1991 and 1984, respectively, making them just slightly less old than dirt.

Of the other 11 games on the list, 6 are ports from PC, and one is a port from the PS4, leaving only 4 games that are actually seeing their first release on the Nintendo's new console. The Switch-first games are all first-party titles, published by Nintendo themselves. Of these, Zelda is the only proven system-seller, although it's unclear just how many systems it will sell, beyond the same Nintendo fanbase that wasn't enough to keep the WiiU alive. That leaves Snipperclips as the 3rd-best game on the console (and, be honest, has anyone that doesn't already own a Switch even heard of this game?), Mario Kart 8 in the obligatory Mario Kart spot (quite good, I'm sure, but still only good enough for the #9 spot on a list filled with PC ports), and Arms (at a rock-bottom #12, and again, hardly the image of a system-seller).

That's it: four games seeing their first release on the platform, all of them made by Nintendo themselves, including two gimmicky tech demos that only hardcore Nintendo fans will even care about, one game that every Switch owner already owns (and which can only drive so many console sales by itself), yet another Mario Kart game, and Puyo Puyo Tetris, which is a retread of two of the oldest game franchises still alive. That is the Nintendo Switch arsenal of system-selling titles.

And, sure, Super Mario Odyssey will probably find its way onto Kotaku's list (and other best-of lists) when it comes out this fall, but that's yet another Mario title, and another first-party Nintendo release for their own console. Nintendo only have so much money to spend making games, and we already know from the WiiU that their output alone cannot keep a platform afloat. If the Switch is to survive, then third-party developers have to buy in. So far, the new only third party title that I've seen announced for the Switch is Square Enix's Lost Sphear, which is releasing simultaneously on PS4 and Steam (although not on XBox).

This is a problem, and with Nintendo struggling just to get product onto store shelves, it's just one of many hurdles facing the Switch. Nintendo's managed a fairly successful release for the Switch, and there's quite a bit of good buzz around the console for the moment, but continued supply problems are already turning excitement to frustration, and if Nintendo kill their own console's buzz before they achieve widespread, third-party developer support, then the Switch could easily go the way of the WiiU. Nintendo are a big company, but they're not Microsoft-sized, or Sony-sized; a second failed console in a row could easily be the end of their hardware business.

XBO-X? XBox One X garners a curiously muted response.

For months, gaming media sites have been waiting with bated breath for Microsoft to actually debut the XBox Scorpio. The specs were teased months ago, of course, but questions still abounded.

• What would they call it? 
• What would it cost? 
• When would it go on sale? 
• Would any XBox exclusive games debut along with it?

The answers, it turns out, are:

• XBox One X (which Kotaku immediately dubbed the XOX, pronounced "Zox," although XBO-X may end up being the more obvious abbreviation);
• US$499, which is exactly double the XBox One S (henceforth referred to as the XBOne S);
• November 7th, and
• no, not really, since XBOne runs Windows 10 anyway, so everything released for the platform will also be coming to, at the very least, Microsoft's Windows Store on PC.

The one remaining question: Will enough people care about XBO-X to revive it as a viable gaming platform? The answer to which seems to be: Probably not.

As a gaming console, the new XBO-X is very technically impressive, and if Microsoft had launched with the more impressive specs at the start of the current console generation, it might have made a real difference to the way things unfolded. But they didn't, and we're now several years into Gen8, and Steam is the dominant platform in games, with Sony's PS4 as a solid #2, and Nintendo's Switch occupying the "new hotness" niche nicely. Considering that the average consumer only buys one gaming platform each generation, it's pretty fair to say that gamers have all picked their horses for this race, already, with only the Nintendo fans getting a changes to switch to a better horse mid-race.

So, XBO-X doesn't have the same sales job to do that XBone did; it doesn't just have to be the best console, starting out on an equal footing with all the other consoles, and with consumers having yet to make up their minds. It has to change peoples' minds, convincing them to buy a 2nd console at the highest console price point at a time with Steam and PS4 are dominant, with Switch ascendant, and XBO-X not even available until November. Oh, and everything it can do, your PC can also do, without costing you anything extra.

Everything, that is, except for 4K gaming, which may be why Microsoft harped on it so much, apparently oblivious to the fact that basically nobody has 4K TVs. 4K is not a thing, people; 4K gaming isn't going to become a thing, anytime soon. Seriously, VR has a better chance of becoming a thing than 4K does, and VR's chances suck.

The new XBO-X is a decent-enough, $499, budget-to-midrange gaming PC that sits in your living room and runs Windows 10. If that's what you're in the market for, then the XBO-X is a decent-enough option, and the end of Moore's Law means that it will continue to be a decent-enough option for years, so Microsoft will eventually sell enough of them to be able to declare XBO-X to be a success. But I don't see it changing any PlayStation owners' minds; if you've already picked a different horse for this race, there's nothing here that can justify switching now. And if you already own a better-than-average gaming PC, there's really nothing here for you, either.

Meanwhile, big game publishers like Square Enix are dropping the XBox logo from their new releases, having apparently decided that the XBox brand isn't relevant to the current gaming marketplace anymore. And did I mention that XBO-X isn't available until November?

It was a pretty slick presentation, I'll give Microsoft that much, but it's several years too late, and this gaming generation has already passed XBox by. People have been asking for months if "Scorpio" could turn things around for XBox, but the big assumption underlying that question was that the market would stand still until Microsoft could releasing the thing. But the market hasn't stood still for them; Nintendo have successfully cast the Switch as Gen8's console comeback kid, and Microsoft have just been too slow getting XBO-X out the door. Time will tell, of course, but I have the feeling that XBO-X is just a little too little, and a little too late.

Sorry, Microsoft. It was almost good enough, and almost soon enough, but now? It's just not enough. And I doubt you'll get a 3rd chance to make this 1st impression, either.

The Nintendo Switch's fast start may not be fast enough

When it comes to Nintendo's Switch, everyone seems to agree that it's off to a good start, with Nintendo hyping its first month sales results at every opportunity. And there's no two ways about it, those numbers are pretty good:

In the 12-month period ended March 31, Nintendo earned ‎¥‎489 billion ($4.4 billion) in revenue, slightly down on the ‎¥‎504 billion it earned in the previous year. However, net profit increased from ‎¥‎17 billion in FY2016 to ‎¥‎103 billion ($925 million), beating Nintendo's own forecast by 14%.

The company said that the difference was down to better than expected shipments of the Switch, which sold 2.74 million units in March alone. That figure was attained by Reuters, which attended a press conference with Nintendo CEO Tatsumi Kimishima in Japan. Kimishima said that the company expects to sell a further 10 million units in the current financial year.

So far, so good. Where I start to have issues with the hype, though, is when Nintendo start trying to draw parallels between the Switch's launch and that of their previous console success, the Wii:

According to Reuters, Kimishima said he was "relieved" by the console's early performance. "If the 10 million target is achieved ... that means the sales momentum would be close to the Wii," he said.

There's a problem with that comparison, though: the Switch is not the Wii, and the market that it's launching into is not the same as one that the Wii launched into.

Nintendo's Wii was a pop-culture phenomenon. Launching in 2006, at the start of its console generation alongside Microsoft's XBox360 and Sony's PlayStation 3, and prior to PC gaming renaissance, which didn't really get going until 2010, the Wii didn't have to vie for market share with established competitors. Everyone was starting from zero; no platform was coming into the year with tens of millions of customers who already owned huge libraries of compatible games.

The Wii had a couple of other features that gave it a competitive edge. One was its price point; the Wii was cheaper than its competitors. Its control scheme was also unique, and intuitively easy to use; children too young to read, and whose hands couldn't really wrap themselves around the standard XBox or PS3 gamepad, could still grasp and wave around the Wii's baton, as could older players who might suffer from, say, arthritis.

The elegance and simplicity of that interface also made it easy for non-gamers to use. You didn't have to know from experience which buttons normally did things in games, or work through a lot of tutorials to learn how to control the games. The result was a platform that could connect players from three to ninety-three; children could play with their grand-parents, allowing multiple generations of families to all equally access and enjoy gaming, really for the very first time in the history of video games.

The result was lightning in a bottle; people who Microsoft and Sony hadn't bothered to design for and market to were suddenly interested in gaming, connecting to and with the Wii in a way that they simply couldn't for the XB360 or PS3. Nintendo really couldn't make enough of them to keep pace with that early demand; stores couldn't keep the Wii on shelves. The only similar example of a game console success was Sony's PlayStation 2, which flew off shelves, in part, because it was also the cheapest DVD player on the market, in addition to being a game console.

None of that is really true of the Nintendo Switch, though. Gamers who'd previously discovered gaming thanks to the Wii have now outgrown it, and are demanding more variety and sophistication in their games, along with better performance. The gimmicky control scheme of the Switch isn't really a selling point, either, with many Switch owners ditching their Joy-Cons for the Switch's Pro controller's better ergonomics. 

Unlike the Wii, where the quality of the unit was at least comparable to that of its competitors, the Switch looks and feels cheap, with a plastic screen that gets scratched by its own included dock, controllers that need extra insulating foam installed in order to work properly, and inadequate storage that make it essentially incompatible with the digital distribution that is taking over the industry... the issues just keep coming.

And while none of these might have been crippling if the Switch were launching onto a level playing field, the market that it's launching into isn't a level playing field. Thanks to Steam's 125 million users, PC (which wasn't a factor when the Wii was launched) is dominant in the current market, and Sony's PlayStation 4 isn't just outselling the XBox One, it's also still outselling the Nintendo Switch:

Sony Interactive Entertainment sold 20 million units of its PlayStation 4 console in the last fiscal year, boosting revenue by 6% and operating income by more than 50%.

[...] 

Across the entire year, 20 million units of the PS4 were shipped, 13% more than the 17.7 million units in the previous fiscal year. Given that the PS4 had 40 million confirmed sales in May 2016, that puts the total PS4 installed base somewhere around 60 million - possibly just below, but certainly not very far away.

[...] 

Looking ahead, Sony expects PS4 shipments to decline to 18 million next year. However, it expects the GNS division to improve in general, with a 14.6% increase in revenue and a 34% increase in operating income.

Remember, Nintendo are saying that they'll be thrilled to sell 10M units in 9 months, a pace of roughly a million units a month on average; Sony, on the other hand, are forecasting sales of 1.5 million units per month for the same period, and that's down slightly from the PS4's sales performance of the previous year. Sony are starting with a 60 million lead in player base, and will probably increase that lead even if Nintendo's Switch performs as well as Nintendo is hoping.

At this point, it's worth remembering that the WiiU had a player base of 13 million when it was discontinued, because developers couldn't be bothered to make games for its different OS and weird control scheme when it didn't have even half as many users as the XBox One... which itself still has only half as many users as the PS4. And the only game of note that the Switch has going for it right now is Zelda; yes, ports of Skyrim and Shovel Knight will probably sell reasonably well to Switch owners who have nothing else to play and a desire to justify their Switch purchases, but ports of games that most interested gamers already own on other platforms aren't going to sell Switches to the skeptical.

And when it comes to Nintendo's own new-game releases for the Switch... is the obligatory new Mario game going to be a better system seller than Breath of the Wild? Will anyone care about the new Mario game that doesn't already own the Switch? Are gamers really desperate enough for gimmicky tech demos like Arms to drop hundreds of dollars on a new console just to get them?

I know that Nintendo fans (and shareholders) have a lot of hopes pinned on the Switch changing Nintendo's fortunes in the highly competitive gaming market, but... how does that happen, exactly? Unless the Switch suddenly starts selling faster than the PS4, fast enough to regain some of the ground that Nintendo lost with the failure of the WiiU, I just don't think that the Switch can ever have anything like the momentum of the original Wii.

And, failing that, I don't see how the Switch does anything but follow the WiiU into irrelevance and eventual obscurity.

[Quotes from gamesindustry.biz.]

XBox Scorpio's specs revealed! Do you give a shit?

XBox One is getting clobbered in this round of the console wars. Actually, all of the consoles are kinda getting beat by Steam, which currently boats 125+ million users who remain users even if they upgrade to new hardware, which handily beats even Sony's (2nd place) PlayStation 4. But XB One never really did recover from a terrible launch event in which Microsoft talked about nothing but TV and DRM, and was only selling half as well as PS4 when Microsoft announced that they wouldn't be announcing their console's sales numbers anymore. Ouch.

The Slim version sold slightly better, but Microsoft's hopes for maintaining a presence in the living have pretty clearly been pinned on their new Scorpio console for a while now. We've been hearing for months about how Scorpio was going to be the most powerful console ever made, but details have been sparse, and genuine hype has been hard for Microsoft to maintain. Apparently they're aware of that problem, though, so they're doing everything they can to make as big a splash as possible when Scorpio is actually rolled out, which should be any day now.

Which brings us to those specs.

The specs themselves look impressive enough... for a console. And apparently performance is also pretty good... for a console. But are the specs impressive enough, and is the performance good enough, so lure gamers away from their PS4's and Steam accounts, and back to an XBox environment which Microsoft has very strongly tied to Windows 10?

Probably not, at least according to Gizmodo:

We finally know the specs for Microsoft’s supercharged Xbox One: the Project Scorpio console. They’re impressive. The GPU has nearly four times as many compute units as the original Xbox One and the memory on the console will be 108GB/s faster than the memory in both the Xbox One S and Scorpio’s primary challenger, the PS4 Pro. On paper this thing reads like lightning.

In practice it means jack shit.

As proven in many previous console wars, specs alone aren’t enough to win the race. A system needs a lot more if it wants to unseat a challenger. According to Superdata there are twice as many PS4 consoles in the wild as Xbox One machines. A report earlier this year suggest that Sony has sold 55 million units of its next-gen console to Microsoft’s 26 million unit sales. That’s not just a win from a sales perspective. It makes it appealing for prospective console owners too. If they’re investing in a console for Overwatch or Destiny 2 or any of the other multiplayer games available (or soon to be available), then they’ll have twice as large a base of players to compete with on a PS4. Sony is winning, and it’s not just because it got its souped up console to market nearly a full year before Microsoft.

[...] This highlights Microsoft’s fundamental console problem. The company knows how to make its product shine. Beating the PS4 Pro to market with a console that doubles as a UHD Blu-ray player was smart. And announcing the specs for its new souped up challenger two months before it’s officially revealed at E3 is a great way to build hype. But all that polish on the Xbox One, One S, and Scorpio can’t cover up the console’s biggest problem—games. [...] Microsoft’s exclusive Halo and Gears of War franchises are a good draw, but they lack the allure of Sony-only blockbusters.

Sony has Naughty Dog’s excellent Uncharted 4, and the gorgeous Last of Us remake (as well as the upcoming sequel). Those aren’t just critically-acclaimed games for this console generation—they’re considered outright masterpieces. The same might be said of February’s Horizon: Zero Dawn or last year’s Bloodborne.

[...] So the great specs Microsoft announced earlier this morning? Those aren’t going to be enough to help it scramble back to the top of the console heap. But its certainly a start. Which is more than Microsoft could say yesterday.

Yes, four years after launching the XBox One, Microsoft are finally starting to actually run in the current race for console domination. Sony, meanwhile, has already lapped them, killed off Nintendo's offering the process, and is winning the sales war on VR as well (something else that Gizmodo mentions), all while making it look easy.

I have to agree with Gizmodo's take on today's Scorpio spec reveal; they're very shiny specs, but it's a little late in this race for Microsoft to be leaning on specs alone. Especially not if you're a PC gamer... which, statistically, most gamers are (125+ million Steam users, 55+ million PS4 owners... do the maths).

But don't take my word for that. From PC Gamer:

How does all of this compare to our PC platform? It's a bit apples to oranges, since we have the ability to customize all of our components. The best approximation of the performance offered by Scorpio is our budget PC build, which includes a Core i3-7100, 8GB RAM, and an RX 480 8GB graphics card. It also has a larger case, PSU, and a 500GB SSD, and it costs around $700.

[...] Put another way, the current Xbox One has hardware that looks positively pathetic in many areas. Sure, it has eight CPU cores, but each CPU is about one third the performance of a single i3 core. Eight of them working together might, maybe, match a Core i3 in a few specific workloads. The graphics meanwhile is like an HD 7770, a chip that came out in early 2012 and which would struggle with modern games.

[...] Now triple the performance of the Xbox One, and you can see how this might challenge a desktop PC for gaming prowess. It doesn't have the raw power a PC has, but it makes better use of its power.

[...] Today's top-end PC GPUs like the GTX 1080 are still much better suited to 4K gaming at high and ultra settings, and CPUs like AMD's Ryzen and Intel's Kaby Lake are much newer, more efficient architectures. If Scorpio ends up a capable 4K 60 fps gaming machine, that should only mean good things for PC gaming: we should expect all the ports from Microsoft's console to meet that standard on PC, too.

So, it's a budget PC for a budget price, meant to compete with PCs, released at a time when PC sales have been in decline for years, and that lives in your living room. You can't upgrade it, which is a bit of a bummer but not as big a deal as it would have been while Moore's Law was still driving PC upgrade cycles. It only runs Windows 10, but most PC gamers seem to be OK with that, anyway (alas). But... if your gaming PC pre-dates the Obama administration, and you're in the mood for a budget PC that will probably be good enough for your gaming needs for years to come, and have a nice, big TV to connect it to, then I guess Scorpio could be decent value. It will probably sell a few million units this year.

It's not game-changing, though, and I don't think that Sony need to be worried. Kudos to Microsoft for not giving up, but I doubt that this is going to move the market in any major way.

Vulkan will have multi-GPU support on Windows 7 & 8, after all.

This is good news for people interested in the Vulkan API, and in competition generally, at least when it comes to gaming.

From Dark Side Of Gaming:

Last week, we informed you about Vulkan support multiple GPUs only in Windows 10. Well, it appears that won’t be the case as the Khronos Group has announced that Vulkan will also support multi-GPUs in Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 (as well as in Linux).

As the Khronos Group claimed:

“The good news is that the Vulkan multi-GPU specification is very definitely NOT tied to Windows 10. It is possible to implement the Vulkan multi-GPU extension on any desktop OS including Windows 7, 8.X and 10 and Linux.”

The Khronos Group has also commented on its GDC 2017 slides that, obviously, mislead us.

“Some of the Khronos GDC presentations mentioned that for Vulkan multi-GPU functionality, Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) must be in Linked Display Adapter (LDA) mode. That was not a very clear statement that has caused some confusion. And so it is worth clarifying that:

1. The use of WDDM is referring to the use of Vulkan multi-GPU functionality on Windows. On other OS, WDDM is not necessary to implement the Vulkan multi-GPU extension.
2. On Windows, the use of LDA mode can make implementing Vulkan multi-GPU functionality easier, and will probably be used by most implementations, but it is not strictly necessary.
3. If an implementation on Windows does decide to use LDA mode, it is NOT tied to Windows 10. LDA mode has been available on many versions of Windows, including Windows 7 and 8.X.”

I don't know what happened here -- whether Kronos Group's previous communication on this was just unclear, or just so unpopular that they decided to reverse course on this one -- but either way, this is a positive development for Vulkan. And more competition is likely to be a good thing for gamers, too, especially those wanting to game with Linux, or with Linux-like platforms like MacOS/iOS, Orbis/PS4, and Android.

XBox Scorpio is unlikely to shift the balance of the console market

Microsoft have been pretending for a while now that their soon-to-be-released new console, code-named Scorpio, will once again make XBox a player in this console generation, even as Phil Spencer talks openly about the entire concept of console generations being outdated. But the reality is that Microsoft's XBox division stumbled badly coming out of the gate for this leg of the console race, and it simply may be too late for them to recover.

From GamingBolt:

Yesterday, we reported on Michael Pachter’s assessment that Sony will not release a new bit of hardware to counter the more powerful Xbox Scorpio. At the time, we agreed with what he had to say- we noted that given Sony’s massive lead, as well as the momentum and inertia that they have on their side, they are guaranteed to stay ahead of Xbox no matter what, and their best course of action was to, well, stay the course.

This is something glaringly obvious to everyone and everybody- if the Scorpio is intended to compete against the PS4, it is going up against a system with a four year head start (or around 1 if you count the PS4 Pro), and an install base likely to be north of 65 million by the time the Scorpio does launch. People this generation associate PS4 as the default console- much like the Xbox 360 the generation before that. Even if the Scorpio ends up being more powerful, it is unlikely to unseat the PS4 from the throne that it occupies in the mainstream gamer’s consciousness- precedence for this phenomenon exists with the original Xbox and PS2.

Not only are the stark realities of the console market working against them, so are the technical realities of having multiple consoles on the market at the same time, with the same brand on them, but with different specs and capabilities. The PS4 Pro has experienced all sorts of technical headaches, with many games actually running worse on the more powerful PS4 console, and only Horizon: Zero Dawn, so far, really showing off the full capabilities of the new hardware.

These issues are old hat to PC developers who have long had to cope with, and program for, the wide range of hardware on which users might be trying to play their games, but for console developers, this is new, tricky, and expensive ground. This was one of the advantages of consoles as a platform, remember: the hardware was always a known, stable quantity, helping to keep development costs down. That advantage is now gone for PS4, and with Scorpio, XBox is about to follow suit.

Of course, XBoxes just flat-out run Windows 10 now, so developers have the option to just stop making games for the XBox per se, and instead make UWP games. That would seem to be part of Microsoft's strategy, here, but it would also, in and of itself, mean that the Scorpio has failed to regain XBox's influence in the console space. It also doesn't solve the problem of developers with nothing but console expertise suddenly needing to develop a significantly expanded skill set to cope with the added complexity of PC game development... and a way of coping with the extra costs involved.

Also, there's the problem of Scorpio not even being out yet, with the first games that will truly showcase its power being at least a year away, if not more. Again, nothing new for a new console... except that new consoles don't normally launch several years into a new console generation, with the market leader having already overcome these new-console growing pains. Nintendo's Switch, incidentally, will face this same problem.

Yes, Virginia, this really is the last console generation

It remains to be seen if Nintendo's Switch can reverse a decade-long decline in sales of both consoles and handhelds for the company, but barring a repeat of the pop culture phenomenon that was the original Wii (unlikely), it really is looking more and more like we've seen the last of true video game consoles. Even Sony's PS4, which is the best-selling "console" of the current generation, is more of a media centre PC than a true video game console, and Microsoft have already announced that they're abandoning the generational model for the XBox product line.

The question really isn't, "Is this the last console generation?" The question is, "How long will it take for games journalists to start reporting it as such?"

It looks like we may not have to wait much longer for the answer.

Up to now, talk of video game consoles has mostly revolved around the question of which console is winning this round of the console war. It's past time to stop talking about consoles as a separate thing, though, and start talking about video games as a general thing. Sony already says that the main competition for the PS4 is the PC, not the XBox, and I think they're right. All that remains is for gaming journalists to catch up to the reality.

Scorpio may not be 90 FPS VR capable, after all

Either that, or VR just isn't the selling point that it seemed to be, a year ago.

From TweakTown:

One of the main selling points of Microsoft's new high-end Project Scorpio--besides delivering "the highest res at the best frame rates without no compromises"--was its virtual reality capabilities; Microsoft was keen on pushing a higher-end VR experience that would eclipse what Sony offers with its PS4-powered PlayStation VR headset. Xbox General Manager of Game Publishing Shannon Loftis has said that Project Scorpio can deliver high-fidelity VR at 90 FPS.

But has this changed? Has Microsoft shifted gears away from premium VR gaming with its new console? All mention of 'high fidelity VR' has been erased from Project Scorpio's website. This is particularly interesting timing because Microsoft has recently hired many of the industry's top tech-makers like ASUS, Acer, Dell, Lenovo and HP to create Windows 10 powered VR headsets. I postulated that this move would help foster Project Scorpio's own ambitious VR plans, but it appears that instead of pushing things forward, these OEMs might have encountered a snag in the progress, thus affecting the console's VR-ready status. 

One thing that's also different is that Microsoft no longer claims that Project Scorpio is the "first and only console to enable true 4K gaming." This is likely at the behest of its own community and Sony fans, especially considering the PS4 Pro can deliver upscaled 4K gaming as well as VR.

I doubt this development will affect Scorpio's reception much, one way or the other, but it is interesting. It either points to (a) VR having a much higher cost in graphical processing power that Microsoft expected, or to (b) VR being significantly less attractive as a selling point that Microsoft expected, back when Scorpio was first announced. Both of these may say more about the problems facing VR, than about the problems facing MS's new XBox model as they attempt to claw their way back into competition for the current "console" generation.