The latest run in the format wars has been declared over, the winner: Blu-ray. It’s easy to understand why this war has ended so soon. Sony has been pushing Blu-ray to the ends of the earth in advertising. Sony’s Playstation 3 has a built in Blu-ray player, and its not exclusive to the higher priced SKUs. For the longest time, it was the cheapest Blu-ray player around, but that didnt help sales of the, what many (including myself) have called, over-priced console. And I mean that in not that you’re not getting your moneys worth, but that it is just to expensive for an average Joe.
Every opportunity Sony had, they boasted Blu-ray, and through all the advertisements I saw, and there weren’t many, I noticed more for Blu-ray, than HD. Microsoft failed again in their marketing skills. It seemed like they didn’t really care. And why would they bank so much? I don’t think they invested much in it because they know a new horizon is approaching, and they may be getting ready to cash in. Also, older format wars last years and years, ultimately decided by the consumer as to which is worth it. It was the big companies that decided the outcome this time.
Despite all this, I don’t feel Blu-ray is going to be the big winner. It has won the battle, but will lose the war. The fact of the matter is, neither HD nor Blu-ray would ever be widely accepted. We have seen it all before, and yes, the consumers will decide. It takes a major leap in technology for a new media to be used. Audio cassettes to CDs to mp3s, VHS to DVDs to… HDDVD??? When Mini-discs came out (Sony backed of course), they were the rave of the audio community. The ability to have near lossless audio on a disc that held more than a CD was said to be the next big thing. Not only that, they were much smaller, and it fixed the scratched CD issue. It was great for its time, but it fell wayward to mp3s and the iPod.
This is what we are seeing with DVDs. High-def video is the next big thing, but the media it will be delivered on is only barely starting to emerge. As digital storage capacity becomes larger and cheaper, we will soon be downloading High def movies onto multi-terabyte hard drives. There are only a few major problems with this. We have an internet that heading into a a bandwidth crunch, and we don’t have a company that is giving us a definitive home theater solution. There just isn’t a standard.
What does this have to do with gaming? Well, its led me to a very big question… With the future of DC thrusting towards us, what’s going to happen to the content that we only own in name. Video games are going to have to write this standard, because simply put, this is where the most DC is provided (at least thats where I feel it is most talked about). When the next generations of consoles come out, are we going to be able to access these games that we have spent our hard earned cash to have on our systems, or will we be forced to download (and pay) for them again just because we decided to get the latest upgrade? Sounds backwards, huh? We upgrade, and are penalized for it.
Its becoming more and more apparent that we are paying for the same content more than just a few times. If you’ve purchased a CD player with MP3 playing capabilities, an iPod, or even Windows (that includes if you bought a computer from a company with Windows on it, yes you paid for it… surprise!), that means you have purchased along with it a license to play mp3s on that electronic. Oddly, we may have bought many things that give us that license over and over again. I bet you had no idea you were even paying for it.
My point is, is this what is going to happen to video games? Are we going to be buying the same license over and over again, just to play our good old classic games? One day, owning a physical copy of a game is going to be the rarity. But as the big gaming companies are heading into this, we as gamers need to make it clear that this is something that we purchased directly from the company, and we’re not going to keep paying for the damn thing. I had Super Mario bros. when it came out, and when the SNES hit, and they packaged it for the SNES with 2,3 and lost worlds, I was okay with that. It was justified for many reasons, but mainly because the hardware wouldn’t let me put NES cartridges into the SNES. Fast-forward, I buy it for the Wii, mainly because I want it on my console. Forever there for me. No more roms, no more hardware constraints, wireless controller. This is what I wanted. And I had it. It just didn’t occur to me what the next-gen would mean for this “micro-transaction”.
What I’m asking for is the type of service that our grandparents would be demanding if this was the sort of issue in their generation. And guess what, they’d get it. Many may argue that its a different world today, but that doesn’t matter at all. The point is that if we don’t demand it, or even ask for it, we most likely won’t get it.
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