Are gamers being used?

You've all heard for the battle for the living room. Sony, Microsoft and Cisco(bought out Scientific Atlanta, makers of a lot of the set-top boxes used for Digital TV) are all interested and getting a peice of the home entertainment pie.

The concept is that they want to sell you a peice of equipment that will connect to your TV and be used as a content distribution device.

While Cisco is aiming for the market through your local Service Providers, Microsoft and Sony decided to target another group altogether to get their services into people's homes. Gamers!

Let's look at the the apparent strategies of both the Sony and MS camps and see how they seem to be doing things:

Microsoft:

The strategy seems simple enough. Sell the machine, get people on XBox Live and sell the movie/TV shows and other game-related content. The service has ballooned into somewhat of a juggernaut in the industry. They've landed a ton of contracts with studios and TV networks to distribute content. It's working for them and they're making a ton of cash with it apparently.

The other side of the medal(and what sold me a 360 to begin with) was the Media Center Extender capabilities. If you have a XP Media Center PC or pre-loaded with Vista Home Premium/Ultimate, then you have the ability to stream your music, pictures and videos to the 360 with ease. Add a TV tuner to the PC and you have a full featured PVR that had recording options up the wazoo.

There are some serious limitations to the PVR and analog tuners however when you have satellite or digital cable service. To address this, MS is coming out with the IPTV service with a built-in PVR through the 360 coming next year and resold through the normal channels of Local Providers. We'll see if this initiative will sink or swim for them.

Sony:

The Sony strategy seems a bit multi-pronged. First and foremost, they're working on releasing the content downloads through the PSN. They've promised this and I expect it to be live within a year or so. The big kicker is that Sony runs their own movie and recording studios. A lot of that content will be easily accessible to the Sony Store and appeals to the gamer demographic.

There's news of a TIVO-like PVR recorder somone in the year as well. They're about to launch in South Korea and there's lining up Freeview service through the PS3 PVR in Australia. Latest rumors have Sony linked to TiVo for PVR services in the US but those are just rumors for the time being. We'll see what time brings.

The PS3 is able to stream data from a PC as well through Linux as well as the DLNA Standard support that was added in a recent patch.

Sony also quite possibly secured Blu-Ray's movie future with the PS3. The trojan horse will secure Sony a ton of money off tech licensing of it wins the format war. If it loses however, at least PS3 owners have oddles of storage space for games as such.

So...

At the end of the day, after watching gaming fans and owners of each platform jumping down each other's throat and blaming each other for the delay of GTA4 (PS3 too complicated vs DVD is a last gen format and R* can't make it work for the game), I'm starting to find MS and Sony's money making ambitions less and less appealing.

Microsoft and Sony have made gaming a subject that is as polarized as US politics and all this animosity at the end of the day isn't good for anyone.

Let me close by asking you this, whatever happened to the fun?

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*edit* I re-read this and I did what I always do when writing a long paragraph. Veered completely off course again and lost my original intent.  Here's the on-topic actual final paragraph...

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Personally I believe that gamers are being used. These MS is using the 360 as a trojan horse for it's movie service and to help secure and leverage Windows features, Sony is using the PS3 for movies/music and Blu-Ray.

Gamers are a crowd that usually aren't scared of new technologies. We embrace it and like to show off the shiniest, newest and coolest features to their friends and family, thus being the perfect mouth to mouth advertising these companies want so badly.

At the end of the day, I enjoy playing the games I get on the console. I realise I'm being used by MS every time I make a post with my gamertag attached as a signature in a forum(and Facebook, and MSN Messenger when it displays what game I'm playing since I use the same address as my gamertag and constantly am logged in to the system when I log in to the 360). However, I come to the realisation that I have absolutely no problems plugging a system who'se greatness I truly believe in. (I do warn people of the RRoD issues however).