14 DAY TRIAL // It's common knowledge that 65 million years ago an asteroid crashed on earth and life almost went extinct. Only the strong survived and gradually evolved in the present form. It's also a common belief that another one will hit sometime in the future. The debate is not if but when it's going to hit. The same goes with consoles and I do believe that owners today should really enjoy the experience because it is going to be a mere memory pretty soon. I'm using a technology scale here as people still play Commodore 64 so present day consoles will probably still be around for 10-15 years. I have no bones to pick with Sony and Microsoft and I'm sure they both have great products under the belt and some of the games announced for these platforms will dazzle the gaming community.
My conviction is that consoles will ultimately prove to be a broken concept but not because people will suddenly come to some realization that negates the purpose of a console, but because in the next 2-3 years the PC will be pushed as the vanguard of entertainment and customers will have to comply. There are several factors to be considered here, some more important than others, that I think we should mention and I'm going to argument each one.
The first reason is a trend to globalize all the appliances of a home. Very soon Microsoft will push this feature into the next operating system along with multi-touch controls and there is no way a console can become the central brain of entertainment. For this task you need a more versatile machine and I can only think of a PC (or Mac). Some might think this is still a little bit science fiction but we are a lot closer than you think. Just picture all the gadgets we are synchronizing and connecting now with the PC and remember what the situation was like 3-4 years ago. It's only a matter of time before really fast Wi-Fi connections will be available to the public and pretty soon there won't be a device on the market that won't feature Wi-Fi connectivity, from ovens and washing machines to TVs and even home illumination.
The second reason is parental controls. For someone who isn't connected to the media every single day is hard to get a bigger picture of the gaming world today. We keep hearing about "crazy" lawyers (Jack Thompson and such) who constantly bash the public image of certain companies and there are tons of studies saying that violent games are related to violent behavior in kids. I'm not suggesting they are right but at the same time there are a lot of them and you can't really discard them all. And then there are overweight kids that get worse as a result of staying home and playing. More and more children don't leave the house until they finish one last level and not even then. The public pressure is mounting and even if this pressure is too diffuse right now to be felt we aren't far away from serious injunctions on these matters. The public opinion is currently occupied with other important topics like the war in Iraq or the ever rising gasoline prices, but when all these problems we see in kids will reach a boiling point and the public will change its focus, there will be massive repercussions.
The third and the most important reason is, of course, a financial one. I see all kinds of hate going around on the internet, mostly from console owners towards PC fans. All I can read these days is how they have exclusives, how controls on the PC are worth nothing and how the PC is a wounded and dying animal. Most of these "people" are kids or teens who don't know any better and in fact they are accentuating a problem that's not even that big. They are doing the PC an immense service and they are pushing their console closer to the end. Let me make this a little clearer. The PC market is huge compared to the console market and I'm not talking here about the gaming section. PC's are sold for gaming purposes in a small fraction and most computers ("ordinateurs" for the French readers) are exclusively going to the business market. Granted, most of them are equipped with puny graphics cards that barely manage to run Counter Strike but nonetheless they generate a lot of income for Intel, AMD, MSI, ASUS and other major companies. When people prophesize the end of gaming as we know it on the PC, they are not actually talking about the PC as a whole but more about exclusively developed games and even about games that will never make it to PC. This platform will always be here, even if only to use it for developing console games. You don't really think that console games are developed on? consoles?
The most important argument used to bash the PC user is the constant investment needed to keep the system up to date. This kind or reasoning will slowly push people to stop buying parts for the PC like memory and graphics cards and turn towards the "cheapest" option, a console (which is completely false, but this is a subject for another bashing article). We have reached the hot spot: can you imagine how much money will be lost by companies that build video cards and other components if people drift away for other products? This leads to another problem, Microsoft. One of the main reasons people buy operating systems from Microsoft, and probably one of the biggest selling points, is their gaming support, as 99 % of the current games that run on a PC are developed specifically for Windows. This triggers a domino effect: people aren't buying components (bankruptcies follow), therefore they are not playing anymore and consequently stop buying operating systems with Windows as logo. We can't really have that, can we?
In the coming years a silent (or not even that silent) coalition will form that will slowly bury the console concept. PC Gaming Alliance is such a coalition even if it's quite small at this time. There are a lot more money to lose than to gain from consoles. In the end, just like the movie "The Fly" a weird hybrid may appear that has the functionality of a console but at the same time can be used to write "weekend bashings". I'm sorry for all those console owners but your time has come to an end. It was nice while it lasted. If I were you I'd start practicing my typing, you never know when you're going to need it.