While hazily turning on my PS3 and plugging in my used $9 USB headset that works like a charm, I got to thinking how things used to be. Back in the dark ages we called the 90's when hardware did one thing and one thing only, the expansion of a consoles original capabilities were considered to be a huge deal. Remember when you saw a friend with a TV antenna attached to his Game Gear? Sure, no one ever used that piece of crap, but it was a tremendous step towards the future. For the longest time, people were actually using their CD-based consoles like the Playstation, Sega SC, and Saturn as an integral part of their sound system because they didn't have to fork over the extra cash to buy a CD deck for their rooms.
Behold, the future!
These days, we come to take for granted the things we can do with a cell phone or our PS3's. Now that there are hardware or software standards out in the open, we have expectations that we never used to have. A Game Gear was never designed to be a TV for obvious reasons, but now we expect YouTube to be accessible to any device with a screen. It's boggling, however, that some companies choose to forget that we're beyond the experimentation phase. Having gone through over 30 years of innovation, trial, and error, there are certain things that should just be accessible out of the box no matter what company you choose to support.
Now, I know that I slammed people for complaining that the iPad doesn't come with a camera, so there's going to be some hypocrisy on the way.
The fact is, we're living in 2010, and consoles just aren't meeting up to the basic standards we should be expecting out of our hardware. It's not that the Big 3 can't afford it, either. Each one of them is making enough money off of their investments these days to justify the extra $10-20 a console it would take to get some of the most basic functionality, and this is part of the reason why Microsoft is doing the happy dance right now.
First of all, a camera. Yes, there's the Playstation Eye, and Natal is on the way, but seriously, webcams have come an incredibly long way since the dawn of Skype. We tend to think of megapixels as a sign of quality, so let's put this into perspective. At Wal-Mart, Target, or Best Buy, you tend to see cameras in plastic cases that are deemed to be value cameras good for anyone just looking to take the occasional snap shot. Those cameras are 5 megapixels. That is over twice the quality in pixels of a single HDTV image, and it costs $30-40 to get. Even cheaper is a .3 megapixel camera, which costs $10 or under and is usually marketed to little kids. Did you know that .3 megapixels is exactly the quality of a still-shot from regular, pre-digital TV?
In other words, to incorporate a camera of decent quality into a gaming system would cost the Big 3 pennies, yet they don't. The Eye costs about $33, and Natal is rumored to cost about $200. While I'm not bashing Natal's potential capabilities, the point is that a camera should have been in the box years ago. The most basic idea of doing video chat on the internet and incorporating that into games is just common sense. Instead, we get those black "no camera" boxes when taking someone out in Burnout. Not only that, it's literally bottlenecking their own system's potential. A virtual dressing room should be one of the easiest things to incorporate into a system, and being able to pop bubbles on the screen with your child should really just be a $5 downloadable game. Instead, they are repackaging the idea of a camera and marking it up 1000% just so they can immediately forget about supporting it or the developers that could actually have done something with this 5 years ago. Seriously, telling your fan-base that your console "only does everything" and half-assedly trying to say that people can replace their computers with it is a joke. A camera, just a cheap $1 one that does basic TV-quality images, should be on every single gaming device known to man.
Next up would be the microphone, and this really goes without saying. It cost be $9 to get a USB headset used, and that's not breaking the bank, but it's completely unnecessary. If my iPod has a microphone, your console should have a microphone, and that's just common sense. Not only that, but these are gaming systems we're talking about here. If somebody truly wants a headset, they will get one because of their personal gaming style, but considering how many people play online games these days, it's a wonder why it's so impossible to slap a mute-toggle on a controller and either put the microphone there or in the box. Once again, we're talking about pennies here. A Playstation 3 controller is truly a beast, but it also costs $55, and you're telling me that you can't get a microphone onto it? Please. You could even overcharge by $4 and make them cost $60, and having the microphone incorporated into the design would actually sell a few extra controllers that weren't going to sell anyway because...well, they cost $55. Seriously.
Data storage is also a premium lately, and the finger is always pointed at Nintendo for failing in this regard. Yet, I'm not so quick to say that every device needs a hard drive, because they really don't. The trouble with this glut of hard drive space is that developers now feel like they need to use that space up, and it's becoming just as much of a problem for gamers as having small flash storage, but I digress. SD cards are an absolute must, and while I appreciate Sony's desire to end piracy, these things have to be functional in some way. Nintendo included an SD slot with their system, and while it's useful for the most basic of media, it works and you can move your downloaded games to and from the SD card if you need to. It's not the most practical way of doing things, and I understand that changes have gone on since I ditched my Wii, but it did work. As media gets bigger, so do the SD cards, and at the very least Nintendo games have the good graces to be small and to have patches to major games be even smaller.
For the other 2 guys, this is beyond a joke. SD cards are easy to carry around and to dump media on to, and flash readers are basically given away free with any PC purchase. Why could we not have kept the SD card? I understand that the USB flash sticks are just as effective and can be larger since physical size isn't the biggest deal, but the SD card's compact nature and the ability to fit into smaller devices makes it perfect for integrating into an entertainment setup. Once again pointing the finger at Sony, I wonder what lack of brilliance it was to decide that the Memory Stick Duo was going to be the trademark of the PSP, yet completely void in the post-slot PS3's. I also have to remind readers that I understand the reasoning behind removing the SD slot and I also understand that nobody really buys a PS3 expecting one, but it's 2010, SD slots are cheap, and why Microsoft and Sony don't have them is beyond me.
There's so many more options I would like to see included in hardware from the get go, and even some software ones, but I'm not entirely convinced that they are as "duh" as these three basic functions are. Sure, it would be nice to have a record button in every console so that no one has to go out and buy a capture device just to get their gameplay on file. It would also be be nice if consoles returned to having headphone jacks be a common thing. Many more options are available for me to list, but none really come across as being necessary.
I've had this conversation before, and for some reason, the livid reaction was that the costs would be passed on to the consumer or that the console makers would be losing money in some way, and I'm just not buying it. Say that 20% of Playstation owners bought an Eye, and that's a hugely generous number. I did the math, and all that Sony would have to do to make up the cost of their $1 camera in the console vs. selling the Eye at $33 would be to sell a couple of million mini-games for $5 over the PSN. That sounds like an insane number, but it's not. All it means is that instead of convincing a very tiny group of people to shell out insane amounts of money for some gimmick game that you need the game AND the Eye for, you get about 30% of the people who own PS3's to try one little $5 download since they already have the hardware sitting in the box. Same goes for the 360.
It's simple stuff, really, and the Big 3 don't seem to realize how much money they are flushing down the toilet just for not spending the extra $5 it would take to incorporate all of this technology. Everybody has voice chat. Everybody has access to a webcam, and if what Sony has been bragging about all along is true, then everyone has access to motion recognition (it's half true). People who don't know how to use their computer would easily be able to get on their consoles and do video chat and photo sharing right out of the box since the complexity would pretty much be limited to a couple of button presses. Remember, there are people out there that buy $400-1000 computers for three reasons: e-mail, internet, and pulling photos off their camera. Wouldn't you want to be the company that says "Hey, save a few bucks. Buy us, do all the stuff you were gonna do anyway, and make your kids happy at the same time." Not one company has really mastered this potential ease of use for the computer illiterate.
Finally, let's get back to the Natal thing really quick. I talk up Natal a lot, and that's because I'm excited about what it's going to offer for gamers. What I'm not excited about it the price tag and the knowledge that this is stuff we should have been doing 5 years ago. I mention voice and video chat and the ability to turn a gaming console into a hub of communication, as well as enhancing the way a gamer uses their system of choice.
If every console had a camera, then those bubble popping games wouldn't be a gimmick at all. They would be the cheap, downloadable application we buy for $5 off of the Marketplace, PSN, or Nintendo Store. Pictures would be implemented into every game that could feasibly use it. Yes, for the past 5 years, you could have been using your own face to make your create-a-player in Madden, because it would have been standard. Instead, it was a gimmick that no one wanted to support except a couple of companies who soon ditched the idea because no one used it.
If every console had a microphone built in, then games wouldn't be so reliant on controllers in the first place. Think of all the buttons you used press in Madden, which I will bring up one more time, just to pull off an audible. Think of how many times you wish you could have just said "retreat!" in an RTS battle. Think of how many times you wish that you could be screaming to a player on your Phantasy Star Online game to come heal you because you're about to die. This all could have been fixed years ago to the benefit of game design across the board.
These things could be changing games right now, but instead we're being given the marked up price of novelty that never seems to get the support it needs. It's 2010. We're spending hundreds of dollars on this hardware. We've made it to the point where we are manipulating movies in real time. There are microphones on the Famicom, and that was about 25 years ago. Get a clue, guys.
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