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MS AND SCEA Honchos Talk About MMOs in Xbox and PS3 |
Listed in: PS3, Xbox 360 Tags: playstation 3 updates, Sony
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significant number of gamers have been wondering how much effort MS and
Sony put in creating MMOs for their consoles that are almost as good,
if not better, than the real thing. So to give you the answer to that
particular question are Sony' Kaz Hirai and Microsoft's Peter Moore;
just by reading their responses to that particular inquiry, clearly
there's a distinct difference in opinion between these two. When asked about it, SCEA honcho Kaz Hirai said "given the fact that online is going to be an integral part of the experience, MMOs I think are a natural fit in the world of PlayStation 3. I certainly think consumers can expect a lot coming out of PlayStation 3 in that particular genre. We've gone down that path already, even with PlayStation 2, and it's been very popular. There's no reason why we would suddenly say, 'PlayStation 3, no MMOs.' ... This time around it's right around the box for online, so I think there's a lot more in terms of opportunities for content creators to come out with MMOs."
As for MS's top man, Peter Moore, said "there obviously is a resurgence driven by 'WOW' (World of Warcraft), and we love it because it's driving PC adoption. The question is, is it a console experience? They've never really done tremendously well on the consoles. There's a lot of stuff you need to do. The content constantly needs to be refreshed. There's patches, there's updates. We could do it ... but it's always been a keyboard-and-mouse, kind of lean-in experience. You look at 'Guild Wars,' you look at 'WOW,' obviously. ... Now, we're going to an MMO with Marvel. I think that is a nice bridge because it's familiar characters and a familiar environment, a kind of comic-book look and feel. But for a lot of people, still, MMOs are a little too intense and a little geeky at times (to make sense for a console)."
With the war between these two consoles looming, it's really worth noticing how they plan to cover every inch of the gaming world. Perhaps sensing that the MMO market is a vital part towards both companies' goal (of toppling the other one), they were both more than willing to venture towards developing technology that can give the same experience as MMORPGs. Well, one of them's bound to 'succeed' less than the other one, I wonder...
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Comments
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Only problem, cost! If I pay for a £30-£50 game I don't want to then have to pay for subsequent subscription every month. I want to be able to just play a la Guild Wars!
But please, why do we keep talking about what it might have, it just makes me concentrate less on what I should be doing and just staring at pictures of the PS3 whimpering.
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What is interesting about Peter Moore's answer is that Microsoft made a very big effort to convince Square to get Final Fantasy XI on the 360. What would Peter Moore say to that I wonder - probably something like "well we only did that to placate the Japanese market."? The fact that WOW has 6 million subscribers means that there are a fair number of mainstream gamers who like MMOs, which means there's probably plenty of interest for online gaming.
I see a pattern in that Microsoft is coming back on a number of things that they were sure of in the last generation. Seemingly too busy learning from their mistakes and unaware of changing realities, they've made the Harddrive optional, they force every gamer to use the controller (they've got an active no-keyboard / no-mouse policy for games), and force every third party controller manufacturor to let Microsoft handle the drivers.
I think the main issue here seems to be however that Microsoft very much does not want the console to replace the PC - right now, if people buy both an Xbox and a PC, that's better for them. If the Xbox would make the PC redundant in most households, that would mean they lose half their revenue.
Sony on the other hand is interested in making their console more PC like. If indeed it comes with a full Linux distro installed (and I healthily take a wait and see approach), that is going to be very interesting. People may be able to make do with that instead of a PC for a lot of things, it may greatly affect the penetration of Linux in households, and it could significantly boost the Cell as a mainstream processor.
So there seems to be a very fundamental difference underlying these differences of opinion.
Apart from that though, together with the games announced for the machine so far this is yet another indication that the Playstation is going to be the most versatile gaming platform yet again, with the most diverse range of titles and genres covered to a wide extent.
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