It's Not a Game Console, It's a Community

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/21/its-not-a-game-console-its-a-community/

 

July 21, 2008,  12:49 pm

By Eric A. Taub

 

Cammie Dunaway, right, executive vice president of sales and marketing, Nintendo of America, duels Reggie Fils-Aime, the company’s president and chief operating officer, in a game of the forthcoming release of “Wii Sports Resort.” (Credit: Ric Francis/Associated Press)As a technology product matures, it’s common that the companies pushing it rally around a theme that they believe will move its acceptance to the next level. And at last week’s E3 video game conference in Los Angeles, the word was “community,” the ability to connect to and interact with other players around the world.

While the console makers Microsoft and Sony have offered community game-playing for several years, those two companies and to a lesser extent Nintendo are making a more aggressive push to position their machines as the one place to go to play, communicate, and socialize with all your buddies, melding the virtual world with the real one.

 

Why? Because the platform that succeeds in being all things to many people could wind up “owning” the living room space, becoming the one place that consumers think of when they want to be entertained. With a cable or satellite box, audio receiver, DVD player and PVR, there are only so many boxes that people will tolerate. And nobody wants to be on the losing end of that equation.

Which is why Microsoft is pushing its “new Xbox experience,” a combination of services, available this fall, that allows gamers to enter virtual worlds and meet their friends’ avatars, watch movies simultaneously with up to seven remote individuals, chat, exchange photographs, and buy and play games, among other features.

 

The company has taken a page from Apple’s design playbook, and created an interface in which game titles are lined up like dominoes — clicking one causes it to zoom up in line with the others tailing behind. Xbox Live Gold subscribers who also get Netflix can arrange their queue on their computers, see the actual box art on their TVs, and then download and watch those titles relatively quickly (10,000 Netflix titles are available for this service).

 

You can invite your friends to view the same film (if they also are Netflix subscribers) and then annoy all of them by taking control of the playback while everyone chats about the movie.

According to Steve Willett, chief of staff for Xbox Live, this service gives customers “a reason to turn the box on every day and see what’s happening.” And if Microsoft can get customers to do that, it will have gone a long way to making the Xbox a central part of their recreational life.

 

Meanwhile, Sony said that this fall, it will move its PlayStation Home service into an open beta test. With PlayStation Home, users can create their own personal environments, dressing both the rooms and their avatars with a variety of looks; invite others into their rooms; and meet other players in public spaces, some of which are designed to look like the environments of hot games, such as Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and Warhawk.

 

For its part, Nintendo announced that this Christmas, it will be selling the new WiiSpeak microphone, a $30 USB add-on that initially will work with the new Wii version of Animal Crossing: City Folk, and let players carry on Internet chats with friends.

 

Wii Music, another new title shipping this holiday period, lets players create their own versions of a wide variety of songs, using different instruments to create melodies and rhythms. Those mixes can then be sent to friends who also own the game, via the WiiConnect24 Internet service. Then your friends can take your mix, remake them to their own liking and send them back to you.

Unlike its competitors, Nintendo says it is not looking to combine a lot of other capabilities into its box. “If we could truly wow the consumer, I could see it happening,” said Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo North America president, implying that, so far, he hasn’t figured out how to do that.