Sony points finger at the 360. Too many shooters
Category: Industry, Posted: 03/06/2008 at 06:15PM CST by Tim Mellish, Contributor
When one of the head honchos of any of the three major gaming companies decides to sit down and talk, there is always going to be something interesting to discuss. Such is the case with Scott Steinberg, the the VP of marketing for SCEA.
While the majority of what Mr. Steinberg is old news to us who have been following the industry since the launch of the Xbox 360, there are a few gems which make one stop and ponder for a moment.
"The time that they (Microsoft) had to create huge distance and build a massive install base before the PS3 could really take root; that opportunity is over and there's no real capitalization of it. They had a great crescendo moment with Halo and it helped catapult them into a pretty strong position towards the back end of last year, but they were still within a stone's throw of where they were with the original Xbox.
"To me that speaks of a failure to broaden their reach beyond the core first person shooter player who was in their back pocket for Xbox. The question for us is ‘are they really going after the PS2 demographic? Are they stealing share from us?' And the answer is no."
Is the Xbox 360 primarily a shooter's console? Surprisingly, yes. From day one it has been the first person shooter market which has been the driving force behind the Xbox brand. The Halo franchise is arguably the most powerful franchise Microsoft has going for it, and it is an FPS. With the launch of the Xbox 360, Perfect Dark Zero was pushed by Microsoft as the best game to buy along side COD2--both shooters.
Just this past Christmas the biggest games on the Xbox 360 were Halo 3, COD4, and The Orange Box; again all shooters. This shouldn't surprise many people since before World of Warcraft and other casual games, the PC market (where Microsoft came from and is still involved in) was mainly FPS. Will Microsoft ever capitalize other genres? With GTA4 and Gears 2 coming out this year, the perspective of the games are thankfully changing but the core gameplay seems to be locked solid into wielding a gun.
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Well, I never thought I'd say this. But, I agree Sony. I agree.
It's so dissapointingly true...
At least they've been trying to get RPG options out there. Oblivion, Mass Effect, and Lost Oddessy have all done well, and Blue Dragon and Eternal Sonata are out there as well. This year we'll also be seeing some more RTSs this year, the selection of which is pretty thin aross all platforms. I think it's good that they've been making an effort to expand out, but obviously shooters are their bread and butter.
Yep. The controller is easily the best controller design for a shooter ever (I'm talking about actual in-your-hands controllers, not mouse and keyboard. Go away, PC fanboys), and that contributes itself to getting a lot of attention from FPS devs. However, given the wealth of FPSes, many people in places like Japan (who apparently don't like shooting people in the head) don't buy the console, so their local developers don't build games for the console. Now, if Micro$oft managed to get a few good games out of that area, then perhaps they could change the ratio a bit, but given that so many Xbox 360 owners are a bunch of Mountain Dew-chugging, Halo/Call of Duty 4 (and only 4)/Madden players who scream obscenities and hurl immature insults at each other over the speed in the internet, the possibility of change seems rather low...
What I have noticed and my theory is that many Xbox 360 gamers are formerly PC holdouts. These are PC gamers for whatever reasons, refused to buy a console...until the 360 came along. Now since many PC gamers love shooter and the Xbox 360 provides many shooter--voila, you actually have a crossover crowd of PC shooting fans going over the the 360...and hence the majority of games are shooters.
But M$ seems to be on the right track in trying other venues such as the RPG-type games. Oddly enough, the majority of "casual" games for the 360 are actually on Xbox Live Arcade and only will cost you around $10 each. Maybe this is the way they're trying to break the mode of shooters for their machines.