It’s probably safe to say that in most cases the more options you have with anything in life, the better a given situation is. Among many of the obvious positive additions we’ve seen with the advent of the current console generation, we’ve also seen quite a few questionable trends.
Moments after the multi-SKU strategy for the Xbox 360 was announced, gamers and technophiles alike quickly jumped on the negative bandwagon, giving the Xbox 360 Core model the misfortune of being forever known as the “Tard Pack.” Sony’s Phil Harrison was quick (maybe too quick?) to voice his opinion on the matter, stating:
“This is my personal view, not my corporate view, but when I look at those formats, I think it just confuses the audience. They don’t know which one to buy, developers don’t know which one to create for, and retailers don’t know which one to stock.”
Calendars have changed, and with it the sensationalist attitude has dissipated as well. We’ve seen more iterations on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 than we have enough fingers to count on, yet the videogame industry is seeing record numbers in sales, even surpassing that of the film industry.
We’re knee deep in what is looking to be quite an era in the world of videogames, but is having multiple console versions a brilliant marketing strategy, or nothing more than a fall back plan destined for failure?
Sony, ironically can claim their stake in a large portion of our counting fingers, yet given recent rumors of yet another version of the PS3, it’s easy to assume they’ve done everything in their power short of hitting the “abort button” to move units. We’ve gone just about everywhere from 20-80GB in hard drive size, spawning a ridiculous amount of iterations, with differences ranging from hard drive size to USB ports, WiFi, Memory Card Readers, and backwards compatibility support.
It’s times like these that I’m glad I don’t work in retail. Imagine giving the same lecture every time you’re trying to sell a PS3 or an Xbox 360 to an unknowing customer. You need to take into consideration what options they want or need to get the best experience suiting to their personal needs. If you’re not into gaming or following gaming news it’s a complete headache. While hard drive space should be simple to discern, how many people outside of the gaming world would know that their library of PS2 titles no longer work on 40GB versions of the PS3, yet some titles work on the 80GB version, and the majority work on the 20 and 60 GB versions? It’s too much information, and that’s not even taking into account the smaller irregularities.
Don’t think we’re picking on Sony here, Microsoft is plenty guilty, spawning consoles with hard drives, without hard drives, with larger hard drives, and non/HDMI versions of all of the preceding. While you could argue that they’ve been the trend-setters, for the most part they’ve been more successful. Giving each product a memorable name might just be the best decision out of all of this. We see numbers all the time, and frankly they’re just not pleasant aesthetically or for the sake of memory. Recalling the Xbox 360 Elite or Arcade product name is simply more intuitive and consumer friendly than declaring differing console versions with a hard drive space number, when differences are far greater and impactful than just that number.
The impact of multiple versions of consoles on the future of gaming can be disputed until we’re all blue in the face (and probably will) — it’s a trend we’re not likely to see go away anytime soon. Our attention turns to you, dear reader. How do you feel about this? Is choice more important than ease of access?
