The Weekly Question...
- Inna Kryvoruchko
- Apr 29, 2016
- 6 min read
There is so much going on in the video game industry on a daily basis. Consoles, gaming technologies, online platforms, and thousands of products are replacing one another in a fight for their place in the sun. Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and other big brands flooded the market with quite a few hardware pieces in the recent decade. In order not to lose ourselves in this sea of consoles, and to remember the best releases that occurred in the recent 10 years, we asked our colleagues the following question this week:
What gaming hardware release do you consider to be the most significant in the recent decade and why?
Robert Hill, JP-EN Localization Specialist
Although it may not be the most obvious answer, for me the most important hardware release of the past ten years would have to be Sony’s PlayStation Vita, but perhaps not for the reasons you expect.
First let me say, I love my Vita. I spend more time on my Vita than I do on any other gaming platform, and have possibly clocked up as many hours on it in the past 18 months than I did over the entire course of the PlayStation 3’s life cycle. It is packed full of awesome indie games and is probably the go to platform to play modern classics such as Spelunky and The Binding of Isaac.
But the honest truth is that, in terms of financial success, the Vita can only be considered a failure. Sony invested heavily in it at launch, hoping to continue on where the PSP left off, and for a handheld it was, and to some extent still is, a high end piece of kit (with production costs to match). But in a landscape in which many smartphones and devices are more than capable of matching the grunt of the Vita, its impact has been diminished greatly. If your phone can do most things a Vita can while also doing everything expected of a modern phone, then why would you invest the £200 needed to get one? Well the answer is dedicated push buttons and awesome and unusual games, but for a modern and broader gaming audience that is no longer such a fundamental requirement.
So you may ask then, why do I consider the Vita to be such an important release. And the answer would be that it is because it has almost certainly signalled, in a last great hurrah, the death knells of the dedicated handheld gaming device. There probably will never be another handheld device as successful and popular as the Nintendo GameBoy, or the GameBoy Advance, or the Sony PSP. In fact it is unlikely that any of the major console manufacturers will even release a new handheld device ever again. Phones and other mobile devices are now king, and it would be folly to try and compete in that field.
It is such a pity because I love my Vita just like I loved my GameBoy Advance, and both of them were genuinely fantastic pieces of hardware. But alas, times change and so do the requirements of the people.
Thibault Carpentier, Project Manager
Hardware releases are the true milestones in gaming history. From the earliest leaked pictures/info to the official announcement and eventually the launch, hardware is what fuels the gamers’ dreams, whether it is new consoles, technology, or peripherals. Every gamer will tell you that it’s the games that matter, but new hardware always brings new possibilities, new promises, new visions of what the next big game could be like.
During the last decade we got 2 generations of consoles, the birth of mobile gaming, the rise and fall of motion gaming and 3D technology tried to make a comeback. Plenty to talk about, but what I find most significant is not in that list. To me, the most interesting gaming platform of the last 10 years… is not a real gaming platform.
Nobody expected Steam to become what it is today. I remember having to install it in order to play Half-Life 2, complaining like everyone at the time about DRMs. Steam was just a Valve platform to handle their multiplayer game Counter-Strike and acted as a DRM for their productions. Then it became an online store… You know the rest. Steam sales are now a significant time of the gaming year, but moreover, Steam triggered a real paradigm shift in such a way that nobody really took the measure of it. I bought around 40 PC games in 2015. I do not own a physical copy of any of them. Not a single DVD, not even a paper with a code to redeem the game online… nothing. My gaming PC doesn’t even have a physical optical drive. However, I legally purchased all of them (the gamers’ attitude towards piracy in general can definitely be seen as a paradigm shift as well). I cannot sell them back, trade them in or let my friends borrow them. This became the norm of PC gaming, in less than 10 years and it’s quite unbelievable. It’s even stranger that when Microsoft planned to use a similar concept for their Xbox One, the gamer community did not react positively to say the least. Are console gamers not quite ready yet? Or don’t they just see that this paradigm shift has already occurred?
Shane Hulgraine, Project Manager
While I really want to say the Nintendo ‘Power Glove’, purely from a nostalgia perspective (and a love of all things Fred Savage circa the 1980’s), I instead am going to veer further forwards and focus on the evolution of the home video game console – primarily in the form of the Sony PlayStation.
Strictly speaking it was not released in the past decade but by all accounts the PlayStation 1 (or simply PlayStation for those of us that were around for its release) was a game changer by way of what one could expect and take away from the home gaming experience and, I feel, it shaped the landscape for modern day consoles.
The PS1 offered something unrecognisable to gamers at the time and blew flailing cartridge reliant consoles out of the water. With the PS (and its ancestors) there existed a deeper, more immersive gameplay that became the benchmark, there were slicker, sophisticated three-dimensional graphics that could put it up any coin-op of the time, and before long gamers were spoiled with an expansive array of engaging games in multiple genres.
It served as a blueprint for things to come. Without getting too bogged down in the specs, the disc reader later produced DVD and Blu-ray compatibility in later incarnations of the PS, Dualshock and, eventually, wireless controllers, and beyond that the PS brand diverged from being solely gaming-based to offering an all media-encompassing entertainment experience.
It could be said that its major achievement was dethroning gaming giants Sega and Nintendo – companies that largely dominated the gaming industry for a large part of the 80’s and early 90’s. With the standard set, I do not believe that the Nintendo 64 or Sega Saturn ever really mounted a significant enough challenge to dent its progress and the PS legacy continued through many evolutions. PS2, PS3, slim versions for all, and of course, the PS4 today. I have no doubt that the brand’s innovation and ability to stay ahead of the pack will continue its success for a long time to come; not least when PSVR changes everything yet again.
Irene Doval Marcos, Spanish Localisation Specialist
It is very hard to analyse the console industry and choose just one console as a “game changer”. The consoles we have today would not exist without their predecessors in the 80s, the videogame industry itself could have sunk after the Commodore and the Atari and only started to see the light again when the “new” old generation of consoles was launched. Some people would say it was the NES that brought videogames back into the scene and into our homes, while others argue that was the PlayStation. And in some ways both of them are right. Without those two consoles, none of us would be where we are today.
And if it is so hard to choose from the original consoles, is there really a way to choose from the recent ones?
Hard to tell. All the different consoles have their pros and cons.
From a gaming point of view, probably the PS4 is the one with a better graphic system and with more playability. The way they are introducing the cross-platform gaming again will probably have interesting consequences in the near future.
The Xbox is including new interaction features trying to create an integrated system for all the entertainment and working needs in a way that creates a lot of debate by itself.
And even the most forgotten one was relevant. Despite its low sales, it was Wii that rolled out a more significant technologic change in the recent times:
Wii introduced the kinesis into the game and changed not only the game industry, but a big part the scientific industry in general. The basis of the Wii had been adapted then into the famous Kinect of Xbox, yes that it is now used to create the interactive cinema experiences and will lead to virtual reality in the future. Moreover, the same mechanism is actually used in medical fields, including some long distance operations.
Does this mean it is the most significant console of the decade? As a gamer, I wouldn’t agree with that. It had the advantage of bringing games to the casual public. It didn’t really improve that much the hard-core user experience, but its invention will probably change our lives in ways we can only now start to imagine.
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