So, as we all know, the consoles of the gaming community aren't friends. They never have been, right? Why, I remember when Nintendo and Sega were duking it out...although it was a mascot sort of fight more than a console in a lot of ways. It was an 'exclusive' console fight, where it was about which system had the better games, the better style.
I think something shifted when the Dreamcast died. Suddenly, you could 'win' the console war. It wasn't a rivalry, it was something you could do to take another company's system and outperform it so bad it would fail and crash. Nintendo and the Playstation got locked into constant debates over system performance, game style. The original Xbox was thrown into the mix soon after, and it was confusing for many, as the company didn't have a gaming legacy to stand on - just nothing but strong system specs and the ability to hire gaming developers. It looked bleak for them until Halo: Combat Evolved grabbed the title of 'best shooter' from Goldeneye with its polished graphics, multiplayer and next-gen controller scheme.
So now what? A decade later, and we've seen the next wave of consoles fight it out to a standstill - Xbox 360 and PS3 haven't ever been friends, and the PS3 having terrible coverage during their announcement at E3 sounds so...familiar for some reason while we look at the Xbox One coverage today. Meanwhile, Nintendo's doing something different, being able to compete in the console war by saying "we'll do our own thing" and leaving the tech fight to the others.
Open topic time, because there's just so many places to go with this one - what does the console war even mean anymore? Do any of the gaming companies think they can actually drive the other out of business? What does it mean that the fight isn't so much about exclusive games and mascots anymore, and is instead about tech power and new-fangled concepts like DRM and downloadable content? Please, share your thoughts, we would love to hear them.
