Category: Gaming

…I think Sony, frankly, suffers a little bit from this problem, which is they’re spread really thin across all these areas. And trying to do PSP, competing with Nintendo, PSP to DS; competing with us, 360 to PS3, I think it does strain — it would naturally strain any organization.

This rather insightful comment was made by Microsoft’s Entertainment division president Robbie Bach. In a recent interview discussing the entertainment division’s projects, he suggests that Sony is overextending itself (obviously). Something historical about land wars in asia and fighting on two fronts comes to mind. So the question is, is this suggestion valid? Is Sony really overextending by trying to fight in the console space against Microsoft and Nintendo, the portable console space against Nintendo, and win the next-generation video disc standard? It certainly seems likely, and the recent struggles Sony has had are evidence of this.

[tags]Sony overextending?[/tags]

Way back, when rumors started circulating that Microsoft was getting into the console business, there were also rumors that the big MS wanted to break in via acquiring Nintendo. Years later, the truthiness of that statement comes out (yes, I said truthiness – I like the word and know it’s not a real word).

Now it can be told. Before the bloody next-gen console war began between the Xbox 360 and Wii, Microsoft actually wanted to bag Nintendo! According to what is now part of corporate history, MS didn’t want to build a game console from scratch. Instead, the company wanted to purchase a company already in the business of making game consoles. And Nintendo was just shiny enough to catch MS attention.

“I wanted to acquire Nintendo,” recalls Rick Thompson, former vice-president of MS hardware business. However, Xbox overlord James Allard decide to do the whole project in-house. We don’t know how much MS wanted to pay for Nintendo back then, but should they re-consider buying the maker of the outrageously successful DS, it will burn a hole in their pockets the size of US$ 6.378 billion. That’s how much Nintendo will be worth a few months from now.

Honestly, I’m glad MS didn’t purchase Nintendo. I’m fairly confident that with MS in charge, Nintendo would have worked on the “escalating performance metric” console style, rather than the “just make gaming more fun for more people” console style. We’d now have PS3 vs. XBox360 that way. The way things are now, we have those 2 vs. Wii (which to let you all know, I would like to receive as a Christmas gift, so start saving – you only have a few weeks to buy and ship it to me).

[tags]Microsoft wanted Nintendo, Console wars could have been two-way instead of three-way[/tags]

This, in a nutshell, is Sony’s problem: they’ve all been acting like arrogant dicks.

I really can’t say it any better than Bill says it. He talks about what Sony is doing to make the PlayStation 3 succeed or fail.

Sony’s entire future rests on the strength of the Playstation brand, because every Sony executive who’s opened his mouth in the last nine months has acted like a complete fool. Their execution has been incredibly poor, they’ve made major strategic and tactical errors, and incredibly, they’ve managed to piss off almost everyone in the process.

So we’re about to see if a brand name can overcome complete and utter incompetence. It should be interesting.

[tags]Sony’s problem, How will the PS3 fare?, Bill gets another Sony shot off[/tags]

For the past six years, Wright has been working on a new game, which will be released in 2007. It is anticipated with something like the interest with which writers in Paris in the early twenties awaited Joyce’s “Ulysses.” At first, Wright called the project Sim Everything, but a few years ago he settled on the name Spore. The game draws on the theory of natural selection. It seeks to replicate algorithmically the conditions by which evolution works, and render the process as a game.

Covering briefly the start of videogaming and the god-game concept, this New Yorker article about Will Wright has information about how Wright works, what meeting with him is like, what he does to get creative, and so on. Anyone who has interest in the backgrounds of gaming’s better known creators will probably like this, long though the article is.

There is also some information on Wright’s new game, Spore, and its published, Electronic Arts, but for me, the real interest to the story is Will Wright himself. Beware – this is a long one, running 4 pages and many thousands of words.

[tags]Will Wright – game god, The New Yorker on Will Wright and Spore[/tags]