When did console gaming jump the shark?

[ptdebate]

People love their Dreamcast, SNES, Genesis, NES, and Atari 2600 systems. How many gamers can say the same of their PS2, GameCubes, Xbox 360s, Wiis, or PS4s?

I don't care much for hardware, but the PS2's software library just kills it for me. The Dreamcast had very consistent quality, but in my opinion the PS2 pushes far beyond it with quality and volume.

The Dreamcast ushered in online console gaming, not the PS2. The PS2 didn't ship with a network adapter--the DC did. The PS2 mostly focused on engrossing single-player experiences, not online multiplayer. To me that's what the Xbox represented.

[Paul Campbell]

I'm talking about when console gaming reached its pinnacle and began its decline, for any number of reasons.
If you think console gaming has never been better, you'd say it never jumped the shark.

Sounds like you need to change to a different term instead of "jumped the shark".

[MoarRipter]

I suppose for me, console gaming jumped the shark when 3D style games, particularly FPS, became the hot thing. Because I am, and have always been, so terrible at FPS that I just end up with a backlog of games that I bought for multiplayer with friends that I don't have any fun with because I get my ass kicked in MP and I can only beat the single player campaigns on easiest difficulty so that's not really fun either. At normal difficulty I end up rage quitting, and maybe weeks or months (or years) later I might get around to getting lucky and finishing the campaign, after much swearing. And forget about the hardest difficulty, I may as well throw the Xbox through a window. Additionally, games are just too damned long these days. It's not like a quick arcade game or a game that you can finish in a few hours, most of them now have these single player stories that take 40 hours or more to finish. That's a big investment of my time as I've become older and there's more important things that need doing, such as yard work.

I think also, the terrible 3D graphics of the 5th generation didn't help me with the transition to 3D, it took years to get my head around the 3D environments and really adapt to them, early 3D games used to give me such a headache and I would frequently get lost and lose interest. It wasn't until the 360 pretty much that I felt 3D environment games were actually playable without giving me a headache. Zelda OoT was such a letdown compared to ALttP. I just couldn't get into that 3D style Zelda. Even now, I could go back and play through ALttP or Super Metroid in a single setting right now and love every minute of it, but the thought of going back and playing OoT or Metroid Prime feels like a burden in so many ways and I'd just as soon leave it in its box to keep collecting dust. I literally have no interest in playing those games and getting frustrated by the 3D environment and controls. I grew up on 2D platformers and I still prefer those. I suppose my best days of gaming died with the SNES and Genesis, to be marginally resurrected by a few platformers on the Wii U that play much like those old 2D platformers, just with better graphics. Which is really what I wanted all along when the 5th gen released, but every developer jumped on the 3D bandwagon and left 2D in the dust as if it was for the kiddos. Now today there are a lot of gamers that were raised on 3D games so it's second nature to them and they view 2D platformers as just as frustrating and un-fun as I view 3D games. So maybe it's a generational thing. I do still like racing games, but for the most part those play the same as racing games from 30 years ago, Rad Racer and Out Run as examples. It's all the same viewing perspective, racing games really haven't changed, just clearer graphics, and maybe that's why I still enjoy them.

[scotland]

when console gaming Jumped the Shark

How about the Playstation?

Before that gaming was certainly big business, but never seemed so corporate. Nintendo and Sega lived by video gaming. With Sony came a giant conglomerate, with diversified businesses that could swallow losses. Nintendo and Sega helped transition the view of video gaming from an emerging market for entrepreneurs, to a far less risky established market. Yet the world of video gaming was chock full of excitement, really bringing the arcade feel home, and fueling possibly the greatest of the console wars. Those magazines of the early 90s still give evidence of the brashness of these rival houses advertising and psyching up their demographic.

Nintendo first inviting Sony in, then backing out at the last moment led to Sony turning a back slap into an opportunity. Sony came out of nowhere, with no arcade experience, to own the 5th generation heavily outselling Nintendo and putting Sega on the ropes. It was probably during the dominance of the Playstation that Microsoft decided to enter the established market as a second deep pocket diversified company.

Technology would have moved on regardless of who was making video game hardware. The internet was coming. Sega loved being on the bleeding edge, and would have gone from blast processing to pushing online gaming, textures, frame rates, HD resolution too. Yet would First Person Shooters be this dominant? Would single player campaigns be optional in some games, or not there at all?

Jumping the Shark gave Happy Days fans what they thought they wanted - more cool guy Fonzi, the breakout star of the show. The cost of focusing on Fonzi was losing what they liked about Happy Days to begin with - an ensemble cast dealing with pedestrian problems in a charming fantasy world of make believe 1950s.

Look at the NES library - and I am not the greatest champion of this console but holy Mario - sure it was a platformer centric machine, but there are so many other genres there too. 3rd and 4th generation consoles have libraries are chock full of exclusives, with multiplatform games being less of a feature. In fact, multiplatform games were a critique of the 2nd generation, where a game like Frogger could be played on just about any system. If the marketplace were still dominated by smaller video game focused companies, would we see so many multiplatform games? Beyond just being on consoles, would console games also regularly be PC games too? If I can play Fallout 4 on either a Sony or a Microsoft console, or on a Windows PC, isn't that diminishing consoles to some extent?

So, I am thinking the entrance of Sony (either when Nintendo reneges on their agreement, or with the launch of the PlayStation itself) as the moment when things changed beyond a technological change.

[ptdebate]

I don't understand all the weirdness about 3D. Maybe it's an age thing.

I love great 2D games and I love great 3D games. Great games are great games.

Scotland's post doesn't make much sense to me, but perhaps that's because I never liked arcades to begin with. I prefer a long-form, single-player experience to a repetitive and iterative one. I like games to tell good stories that exist apart and independent from my participation in them. When I play a game, I like to be immersed in something beautiful and out-of-the-ordinary (Final Fantasy X, Ico), or even something that challenges my perception of reality (Rez, Metal Gear Solid 2).

Games can do a lot more than we thought they could 20 years ago. It's a tired notion indeed that there is some point at which they became greater than they ever would. Games are great. Games were great. Games are getting better. We would all do well to stop judging the present and future by their adherence to arbitrary expectations.

[scotland]

Scotland's post doesn't make much sense to me, but perhaps that's because I never liked arcades to begin with. I prefer a long-form, single-player experience to a repetitive and iterative one.

My post was about seeing the earlier 3rd and 4th generation as a frontier of experimenting more with different genres and a 'This town ain't big enough for the two of us' aggressive competition style where console libraries were mostly exclusives. The 4th generation console war stands out because the two rivals acted like rivals. By the 7th and 8th generation the big rivals seem agreeable to sharing the town with multiplats and similar controllers and technology and focusing on a few genres like shooters. When did that change happen - I will say with Sony riding into town with a car instead of a pony.

[jon]

I couldn't agree more with the last several posts. I think Sony's entrance in 1995 is what changed everything for the worse.

[ptdebate]

Scotland's post doesn't make much sense to me, but perhaps that's because I never liked arcades to begin with. I prefer a long-form, single-player experience to a repetitive and iterative one.

My post was about seeing the earlier 3rd and 4th generation as a frontier of experimenting more with different genres and a 'This town ain't big enough for the two of us' aggressive competition style where console libraries were mostly exclusives. The 4th generation console war stands out because the two rivals acted like rivals. By the 7th and 8th generation the big rivals seem agreeable to sharing the town with multiplats and similar controllers and technology and focusing on a few genres like shooters. When did that change happen - I will say with Sony riding into town with a car instead of a pony.

Doesn't that rely on the assumption that innovation in software is tied to competition among hardware manufacturers? If so, I can't agree with it. It's clever the way earlier gaming software worked around the limitations of the hardware, but fewer limitations and less exclusivity is only a good thing in my book. There's still competition among game console manufacturers, but I'm thankful that that hardware competition is almost meaningless these days. Therefore, I don't really have to own more than one box to play most current games.

[scotland]

Doesn't that rely on the assumption that innovation in software is tied to competition among hardware manufacturers? If so, I can't agree with it. ... less exclusivity is only a good thing in my book...I'm thankful that that hardware competition is almost meaningless these days.

Nice thoughtful post.

Its clear innovation in software is not tied to competition among hardware. New ideas like Skylanders did not come about from console competition. I am not asserting it does. I am putting out there the idea that competition and exclusivity among consoles bred an attitude to cater to smaller groups with more diverse tastes.

When I think about the consoles and family computers of the 1980s and 1990s, they are chiefly defined by their games. These companies fought to have the rights to hot arcade ports, or to have exclusive games that really outshined their competition. Multiplatform games were good for the 3rd party developer, but not good for the console manufacturer. Situations like Frogger below are sometimes cited as a reason for the 83 Crash.

frogger2.jpg (11.1 KiB) Viewed 1893 times

I think Nintendo has always been cognizant that their IPs define their console, and when they lose sight of that and promote features of their console such as a novel controller, they do less well. Wouldn't gaming be more interesting if we had 3 or 4 exclusive environments with multiplats being rare?

There is clear distinctions in their games between the Intellivision and the 2600, or the NES and the SMS, or the Genny and the SNES. Sure there are multiplats (although we may not have used that term back then), but there actually served to further distinguish consoles. Shinobi on the SMS versus the NES, or Uridium on the C64 versus the Spectrum. Now when you buy either an Xbox or a Playstation, how much difference is there when you play Fallout 4? Choosing between these two systems is not so much choosing a games library you are choosing between so much as a bundle of services and a community to belong to.

Your assertion is less exclusivity is a good thing. I understand, and you have a point. Buy any Android device, and you don't have to worry about what games are available for it. However, I think that a new game in this universal gaming environment has the opportunity to sell millions of units, but is also in heavy competition. This means that genres with smaller fanbases may not get the attention of the top line developers on consoles, since that will absolutely cap their sales relative to a first person shooter.

[Shapur]

I'm going for the seventh generation(Xbox 360) as the point where things started to get worse. It didn't bring any huge upgrades in any way over the sixth gen consoles. Graphics were already "good enough" to do almost any game we wanted back in 2002. Now we just get them in HD with better shaders. Before that every generational change brought with it just tons and tons of game that couldn't have been done on the old machine but in this case not so much. We got DLC instead of complete games and online multiplayer instead of local. The original Xbox and Dreamcast had modems but were always perfectly usable offline.

The biggest problem was the huge budgets that these new graphics bought. Small developers couldn't compete, big developers can't take risks. This is the generation where a 6.5 hour game would have a 30 minute tutorial because games needed to be playable by the broadest audience possible. Everything is a trend so you can see some of this starting back on the PS2 and Xbox just not as bad.