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Date Posted: 15:46:08 04/26/01 Thu
Author: Madcat
Author Host/IP: user-38lcirq.dialup.mindspring.com / 209.86.75.122
Subject: An Interesting Article....

I got this from the New York Times Online, btw. Very informative.....

Madcat

======================
Let the Game Wars Begin

By MICHEL MARRIOTT

Whether consumers like it or not, millions of them � perhaps even you � will soon find themselves in the middle of a full-fledged war. It will be a battle for the hearts and minds and pocketbooks of all those interested, even mildly so, in playing video games on high-tech consoles plugged into their television sets.

The first real salvo was fired by Sony about six months ago when it released Play Station 2, at the time the most advanced game console on the planet. Early this year, Microsoft offered a preview of its entry, Xbox, which promises to be even more powerful.

And when video game makers and retailers meet next month in Los Angeles for the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo, Nintendo is scheduled to unveil its latest and most powerful game machine, GameCube. It is being primed to challenge PlayStation 2 and Xbox when all three consoles, each with unique features and capabilities, fight it out this fall during the holiday buying season.

The three companies are preparing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to promote their game machines, with Microsoft alone declaring that it will spend $500 million over an 18-month period to market Xbox.

"Ultimately, this is going to be a very competitive environment," said Robert Kotick, co-chairman and chief executive of Activision Inc., a major maker of video game software. "And I think the amounts of money that will be spent among all three companies on marketing and advertising is going to create awareness and interests and have a lot of new consumers coming into the marketplace."

The struggle has already claimed a high- profile casualty. Sega Enterprises, a pioneer in the $7.4-billion-a-year video game industry, announced earlier this year that it would stop making its Dreamcast game console. But even with Sega out of the picture, the battle among Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft is looming as the biggest ever in the industry.

So what's in it for consumers?

PlayStation 2, a $299 black box with a heavily machined look, is a known quantity. By the fall it will have been on the market for about a year and will have, by far, the deepest inventory of games. Sony executives note that game developers, many with a loyal following, are designing second-generation games that take significantly more advantage of Play Station 2's capabilities. Some game industry analysts say that could provide an important advantage over competitors that will reach the market with only their own first- generation games.

Sony, which has sold about 2.7 million PlayStation 2 consoles in North America and another 7 million overseas, seems committed to relatively older players. Play Station 2 is the only game console that can play DVD movies right out of the box, for example. And both the console's styling and the types of games offered � action-adventure, role-playing, sports � seem geared to teenagers and young adults.

Xbox, which is bulkier than PlayStation 2, exudes a sort of
no-nonsense quality, which generally appeals to teenage boys and young adults, video game experts say. And Microsoft executives acknowledge that Xbox, which is expected to cost about $300, is aimed at players 16 to 25 � the same demographic group that has been playing the company's games on PC's.

Xbox's internal architecture makes it the most powerful game console coming to market this year. It can play DVD movies, too, but only with the help of a low-cost add-on package. Microsoft also announced recently that Xbox would be able to play its games in Digital Dolby 5.1, a feature designed to impress older players, who are most likely to have the audio hardware to take full advantage of it. And Xbox has advanced features for online game play.

On the other hand, Nintendo, which has had much of its success with younger players � pre-teenagers and teenagers who gravitate to its Pok�mon games rather than the harder-core games available on its competitors' machines � appears to be positioning GameCube for a similar market.

For one thing, the console's boxy look somewhat resembles a
child's lunchbox with its strap handle, and prototypes have been shown in bright colors. (In fact, the design has been criticized. Frank O'Connor, executive producer of DailyRadar.com, an influential online gaming news site, said it looked childish, like "Barney's handbag.")

The console is expected to cost $150 to $200. It will not play DVD movies or audio CD's, as the other game consoles will.

While executives for all three console makers said they recognized that their machines would have core audiences, all said that their companies wanted to expand those audiences. The industry's holy grail is to make video games mainstream entertainment; they want the game console to become as ubiquitous an add-on for television sets as the videocassette recorder.

This is the era, said Billy Pidgeon, an analyst for Jupiter Media Metrix, an Internet research company, in which the gaming industry is "bringing video gaming to the mainstream rather than the niche gamer."

But many consumers, and even the most dedicated video game
players, say that all the frantic positioning, claims and
counterclaims about what the consoles can actually do are making them uncomfortably anxious.

"It kind of makes you crazy," said Rodney Smith, a 27-year-old video game player who was one of the first people to buy last holiday season's hard-to-find PlayStation 2. Mr. Smith, who lives in the Bronx and works at a Starbucks coffee shop in Manhattan, said he was taking a hard look at whether to buy an Xbox when it was released in the fall. "It comes down to one thing," he said. "You want to have the best machine that can play the best games."

Ah, yes, the games. Even executives within the three companies acknowledge that the differences among the consoles � expressed in terms like processor speed and polygon rates � may mean less than the quality of the games they play.

Jim Merrick, the technology director at Nintendo, said the
individual machine's specifications "mean nothing to the end user." Game consoles that are promoted as having very powerful components can turn out to be "somewhat less than the sum of their parts," he added.

Perrin Kaplan, vice president for corporate affairs for Nintendo in the United States, said the relationship between the console hardware and the games it plays was much like the relationship between a movie theater and the films it shows.

"People go to a theater because they want to see a certain movie," Ms. Kaplan said. That, she added, bodes well for Nintendo because the company has made many of its most successful games itself.

Ms. Kaplan said the GameCube would be a "mass consumer product" that was expected to take advantage of Nintendo's well-known knack for producing games, like the Mario and Pok�mon series, that feature memorable (and marketable) characters.

Nintendo also appears committed to departing from its practice of packaging its games in cartridges for the new machine. Instead, GameCube will use a proprietary DVD system developed by Matsushita, the parent company of Panasonic. The optical disc system uses a three-inch disc, much smaller in size and storage capacity than a standard DVD optical disc, which is used for both PlayStation 2 and Xbox.

While using the Matsushita optical disc system is expected to lower the overall production cost of the GameCube significantly, it also prevents the machine from doubling as a player of DVD movies and audio CD's.

But the GameCube is expected to pack a number of tricks that its competitors will not have. One of the most compelling, company officials said, will use Nintendo's vastly improved GameBoy, called GameBoy Advance and scheduled for release in the United States on June 11. GameCube has been designed to permit GameBoy Advance players to plug directly into GameCube. Once the stand-alone, hand-held GameBoy Advance is linked, it can function like a super game controller, Mr. Merrick said.

Joe Fielder, the Internet site director for Gamespot.com, an online game magzine, said the game console maker that can either produce or line up highly successful game designers to produce hits, preferably exclusive ones, was most likely to triumph. In that respect, Mr. Fielder said, Nintendo has some advantages as the maker of iconic games like the Mario and Zelda titles.

But good games with popular characters are not everything. Sonic the Hedgehog, for example, could not save Sega. In recent months, Nintendo has also been courting older players with more risqu� games like Conker's Bad Fur Day.

Other game analysts and makers say that Microsoft's Xbox has built-in advantages for game designers, especially those who have successfully designed games for the large personal computer market. According to some PC game developers who have used DirectX, a graphics standard that Microsoft developed for PC games, it is relatively simple to design games for Xbox, which uses a variation of DirectX.

Some game developers say that it is difficult to design games for PlayStation 2. Jack Tretton, senior vice president of Sony Computer Entertainment America, recently conceded that it might be difficult to write game code for PlayStation 2. "Anything very good is difficult," he said.

But whether or not they were difficult to design, a slew of
PlayStation 2 games that industry watchers say may be some of the best ever made for any console are scheduled for release late this year, just when the game console war is expected to be at its most combative. They include Solid Gear Metal 2: Sons of Liberty, by Konami, and DOA 3: Hardcore, by Tecmo.

When Mr. Pidgeon, the analyst, was asked if he could pick a
probable winner, all he could say was, "Right now, it's up in the air."

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