360 = Going Round in Circles

Failure. It’s not a concept that any company wants to have associated with their products. Just look at the furore surrounding Toyota’s recent accelerator-happy death traps on wheels. Turns out, people like it when their cars stop when they tell them to.

Similarly, people like it when their games consoles work. I was very unhappy, as a young ‘un, when I managed to spill strawberry milk into my Gameboy Colour, promptly and unceremoniously killing it. I was equally unhappy when my PS2 decided it preferred to produce disk read errors rather than operate on top of my booming soundsystem’s basslines.

But those were my fault. The Xbox 360, however, is another matter. The 360 is a better investment in the long term as a doorstop than it is a games console. They simply don’t stop breaking.

This is the part where I’d usually tell you about the mate of my mate’s who’s been through eight 360s in four years (true story). But there’s no need. Because as it turns out, the recent results of a survey of gamers  by No Fuss Reviews.com has resulted in some shocking evidence.

Of the 500,000 surveyed, the number of Wii owners that needed a repair is an impressive ‘less than 1%”. For PS3 players, that number jumps to a worrying 8% (that’s 800 people in every 10,000 consoles – far too many). But the 360? A staggering 42%. That’s almost half of all 360 owners. For ‘3 repairs or more’, the number is still an unbelievable 39%.

39%!? So, over a third of Xbox 360 buyers will need to have their console repaired three times or more? It's not even five years old yet. Compare that to the PS3’s 2% or the Wii’s 0% and the figure seems inexcusable.

These kind of failure rates are simply unfathomably huge. When you consider that the 360 has sold nearly 40 million, it must be considered that a shade over 16 million of those will break. That’s a lot of unhappy customers.

Surely, then, the Xbox 360 is the Toyota of the games industry – except Microsoft haven’t reacted to try and rectify the situation, haven’t apologised and, er, haven’t even fixed it yet, as new 360s still seem to die as easily as the old models did. Great.

Obviously, I’m not having a go at anyone who did buy a 360 – and there are a lot of people out there, more than the PS3 – but you have to wonder whether those customers would have stumped up a bit more cash for Sony’s offering if they knew about the appalling failure rates of Microsoft’s console. It’s a great console because of its wealth of excellent exclusives – Halo, Forza and Gears of War, to name just a few – and its frankly brilliant online service and achievement system. But technically speaking, it’s not a great console. It’s a dreadful, rushed, noisy, ugly beige box prone to random death at any moment, made viable as a purchase only for the efforts of Microsoft and other developers in furnishing the console with a ton of games and features at an affordable price. If the fragile Xbox had to get by with PS3’s early range of games and online services, it would be long dead.

People should not have to put up with it, though. Sony’s system has caught up in most regards, and excels in some others (Hello, Uncharted 2). Microsoft should be made to pay the price for rushing an untested system to market knowing they’d just have to fix them all later.

I love gaming, and that’s why I can’t love Microsoft. Go and make a console that I can actually game on, consistently, and I'll buy it instantly. But I can't accept the inherent faults built into half of all Xboxes, and other gamers shouldn't have to, either.

When The Music Stops

Plastic-axe shredders are a fickle bunch, it seems. No sooner than the Guitar Hero franchise exploded into multi-billion dollar sales, churning out titles quicker than Nintendo re-releases portables had the rhythm action genre suddenly died, like an exploding star that fell in on itself.

Harmonix this week announced that Viacom, one of their complex-legal-license-partners for Rock Band, had asked for a refund ofa bit of bonus money they’d handed them. $200 million, if you want the precise figure. The reason? Flat-lining music game sales that had seen RB’s revenues plummet.

This is obviously a problem, not least for the company being asked to repay almost a quarter of a billion dollars that were bonuses – not loans or agreed finance – but for the games industry as a whole. The games economy is too reactionary, throwing money at anything that looks popular then quickly cutting off the cash supply when players have lost interest.

Case in point: ‘casual’ Wii titles. There are literally hundreds of the things. Baby Shopper Party, Family Potato Farmer, Dress My Kitty and such drivel. Not even I'm sure if those are real or I just made them up. It's gotten that bad. So bad, in fact, that last month, Best Buy, a large American department store, announced they’d no longer stock ‘casual’ or ‘mini-game’ titles. The market, it’s clear, has become oversaturated.The games economy simply isn’t set up to take the kind of hits that result from these sudden changes of plans. Activision blew, it’s rumoured, over $100 million on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Luckily, the game shifted ten million copies a second, roughly, but imagine if it hadn’t. Imagine if the games-playing populace had already moved on to the ‘next big thing’? Only a couple of years ago, Halo was the shooter of choice. Stretching back a couple of decades, the likes of Doom and Quake were the top trigger-happy titles.

Times change fast, and every shift only hurts the industry when the big guns and the little guys bet on their game making big bucks and lose. Activision will undoubtedly give Modern Warfare 3 an even bigger budget, and it may well pay off, but if gamers have moved on by 2011, they’ll be in big trouble.

 It looks highly doubtful that Final Fantasy XIII, out next month, will recover the multi-multi-million dollar development costs from the four years it took to make, what with the slightly cold reception it's received from its initial reviews.

The games industry, then, needs to calm down and get better at predicting the tastes of tomorrow rather than aping the top titles of yesterday. Brain Training clones soon saw that market stagnate, and the landslide of shooters we’ll see over the next two years may see the same thing happen to the FPS genre – MAG, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, MW3, New Call of Duty Spinoff, Killzone 3, Spec-Ops: The Line.The list goes on and on. If racing, or action titles (like Uncharted 2 and Assasin’s Creed II) become more popular, for example, all those FPS developers will just be shooting themselves in the foot.

As with the fall in popularity that rhythm action games have suffered, no doubt due to the sheer volume of plastic-banding titles released recently (GH:Metallica, GH: Greatest Hits, GH: World Tour, GH:5,GH: Van Halen, Band Hero, Rock Band: The Beatles...), if the gunfire ceases, it sure won’t be pretty. Games developers need to learn the Guitar Hero lesson before it’s too late.

Why Nintendo's Next Console isn't DS2

Rumours. You have to love ‘em. From Rockstar’s gentle teasing in GTA game manuals to the dark-room-dwelling crackpots who spew spurious nonsense because they know someone who knew a guy who passed Microsoft's headquarters once, the games industry is built as much on rumours as it is on actual announcements.

Which is why the recent 'New Nintendo Platform' leak is such big news. Yes, it may well be a load of tosh perpetrated by bored geeks, but - as is so often the case in an industry brimming with speculation and quieted whispers - we might just be on to something here.

DS2 is most people's first guess. It's not a bad one either. The original handheld released in 2005, making this its fifth year, and the thing's already seen three iterations - four if you count the DSi on steroids that is the XL. In normal videogame tradition, this means that the game is nearly up for the creaky old handheld, especially if the rumblings of a Sony PSP2 are to be believed. Nintendo don't want to kill DS sales, which are still absurdly strong, but they don't want to be left behind, either. And then there’s Apple’s iPhone and iPad.

Falling by the technological wayside is really the main issue. Nintendo aren't going for graphical clout this generation, as we all know. But a DS would surely be shamed by a PSP2, especially if the latter throws in a touch screen and motion sensors for good measure. And the iPhone is already cutting sharply into Nintendo’s target demographic.

But Nintendo will release a Wii HD instead, except with a catchier title. Why? Well, the Wii is in a similar predicament. Increasingly ignored by third-party devs at a time when HDTV adoption is skyrocketing, the little white box is starting to show its age. Nintendo won't want to stilt Wii sales but they won't want Microsoft's Xbox 360 or Sony's resurgent PS3 to steal its thunder, either. In fact, when Xbox 360 gets its controller-free camera, Natal, and PS3 gets Wiimote-alikes this year in the form of its new ‘Arc’ controllers, the Wii will face its sternest test yet.

Going HD would go some way to drawing the three systems onto a level playing field once Wii loses its greatest advantage - its novel controller. Iwata recently hinted that HD alone wouldn't be enough for the Wii's successor, which is why there'll almost certainly be more to it than that. An HD Wii, with Motion Plus built into controllers and another new way to play - be it a Natal-esque camera, or some crazy new idea? It'd maintain Nintendo's advantage at a critical time, stop Microsoft or Sony from making Wii feel outdated, and draw third parties back to the console.

As for the DS? Well, that's simple. DS2 is already here - it's called DSi. Nintendo's newest dual-screen has four times the memory of the DS, for example, and twice the processing power. Nintendo have even promised DSi-enhanced and DSi-exclusive titles at some point down the line. The recent announced of Pokemon 5, the next true sequel to Diamond/Pearl, could fit the bill perfectly. With the hidden technical improvements of the DSi, there's simply no need for a new DS altogether when so many people are walking around with a more powerful DS in their pockets already.

Imagine this at this year’s E3: new, exclusive DSi titles announced to seamlessly transition the DS to a new generation without stifling DS sales - whilst remaining fully backwards compatible - and a Wii HD to keep the home console fighting in the face of fresh competition. This very much could be where Nintendo goes from here.

But for now, keep it quiet. I might just be a babbling crackpot, you know.

-- Alex Evans, February 6^th 2010