It’s interesting to have moved to a town like Seattle where people are very sensitive about speaking in anything other than the most glowing terms relating to Microsoft products. I’m not used to sugar coating opinions based on facts, so this has lead to some awkward situations where they have felt that I called their babies ugly.
It’s not the case. I was just sharing factual market conditions.
What is surely the case is that a lot more Xbox 360s have been sold than Playstation 3s. Xbox has a lot more titles, many of which I don’t particularly enjoy like console-based first person shooters. I tend to enjoy more Japanese-centric games as they tend to be more difficult and challenging and have a greater depth. In many cases, the Japanese game makers actually dumb down their games so that Western audiences will enjoy them.
Besides my long time gamer proclivity to continue to enjoy the Playstation controller I know so well and not really enjoying the aesthetic of the huge xbox controller, I have a list of other less obvious platform considerations that I’ve brought up many times in conversation.
First, my list of things I don’t like about 360s:
- No built-in wireless networking
- Predominately populated with a borderline retarded annoying teen gamer demographic
- Controller design is only ok
- You have to pay a membership fee to play online. Ridiculous!
- Seems to be poor quality hardware and warranty support
One thing I do like is that they have the whole achievement application support thing down. I’m seeing some of my gamer friends Facebook profiles update when they unlock achievements on their games. That’s pretty neat and is something that the Playstation people should get around to doing soon. As seen in this thread, Sony isn’t being very smart about cultivating community interest:
The only thing you can do right now is pay for the Playstation 3′s SDK. $250,000!
Or, pick up the PSN SDK for around $50,000.
The price on the SDKs might be cheaper now. I haven’t checked in the last 6 months or so.
That’s a pretty serious commitment to make cute community application toys. It is no wonder that no one has made anything equivalent to the xbox application. Does Sony actually expect someone to pony up that amount of cash up front to make a social networking application supported by ads? They should be able to do better.
Some non-obvious things I like about the Playstation 3 include:
- An older demographic. Something that is particularly hilarious is playing MotorStorm with a bunch of backwoods hillbillies on bluetooth headsets with nearly incomprehensible accents. It’s bizarre and awesome.
- More ridiculously hardcore japanese gamers. The level of skill in the average Japanese fanboy seems to be several times that of the average western fanboy.
- Wipeout HD
It seems we have entered the age of nickel dime annoyance for every little chunk of downloadable content, but it’s understandable given the amount of money spent on support and generation of these HD games.
Xbox has been spending a lot of money to get exclusives on downloadable content. That’s a pretty nice selling point, but as a consumer, you are paying for it with your never ending membership fees. Given the same problem, I’m content to wait a little longer and play on a PC system.
There are a lot of really bad games being released now. More money is being spent to develop them than at any other time in history. For this reason, in addition to the fact that I’ll likely be playing them anyway, I’m going to begin writing game reviews for Diehard Gamefan next year. It’s a fairly small group of guys, but they are very cool and I fit a somewhat uncommon niche so I feel that I can make a contribution.
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