I’ve made a number of confident predictions in my life.
Here are some randomly selected highlights:
“That Eric Djemba-Djemba will turn out to be a terrific player”
He wasn’t.
“I bet you Portugal’s lone striker Pauleta will be the top goalscorer at the 2004 European Championships”
Played every single game. Didn’t score a single goal.
“I think Watford will win the 2013/14 Championship and get promoted to the Premier League”
We are currently 13th and, as of today, managerless.
“I'm certain England will win the 2006 World Cup”
We didn’t.
You get the idea.
Well the time has come for me to make another one.
“I'm not convinced the Xbox One and PS4 will really catch on”.
There I said it.
We are currently experiencing a massive price crash on Xbox 360 and Playstation3 games due to those heartless bastards with jobs and those fucking awful rich children whose parents buy them entire houses trading in their consoles for the latest fancy technology.
You’d think I’d be bitter and you’d be right. But mainly because that’s just my default setting. Generally this is good news for me.
I bought ten games today for less than 50 quid. A couple of months ago the same ten games would have probably cost me closer to £250.
When the Xbox 360 and Playstation3 came out the Xbox and Playstation2 didn’t stand much hope of surviving.
This was down to a number of factors.
First of all HD technology was clearly about to revolutionise our television screens, and nowhere was this to have such a big impact as with gaming. The 360 and PS3 came with built-in HDMI capability whereas the Xbox and PS2 still ran off of SCART. The PS3 also included a Blu-Ray player, before HDTV or Blu-Rays had really even been invented.
Secondly Wi-Fi was about to completely alter the way we used the internet. It went on to make online gaming and indie gaming a mainstream activity. Sure you could play online games on the original Xbox and PS2 but it was about as popular as cooking baked beans in a toaster.
Fast forward 8 years and the situation is completely different.
Most major titles are currently scheduled for release on both the Xbox 360/PS3 and Xbox One/PS4 generation of consoles. DragonAge 3 for example is currently scheduled for a late 2014 / early 2015 release on both Xbox One and Xbox 360.
This didn’t happen back in 2005 when production of Xbox and many PS2 games all but stopped in favour of the new generation.
Undoubtedly the Xbox One and PS4 are more powerful machines than their current generation counterparts. And in two or three years time game developers will no doubt be producing games purely with their specifications in mind.
But it’s difficult to feel the same inexorable wave of revolution as back in 2005.
The only exception to this is in the case of motion tracking technology and voice activation.
Call me old fashioned but personally I’m still happy to turn my console on by pressing a button. Likewise the idea of having to stand up or move to play a video game is still about as appealing as it was in 2006 when Nintendo released their fun with a very small F Wii.
So there you go.
I’ll leave that there.
I was only writing this while Battlefield 3 installed itself on my Xbox 360 which it just has.
That took over half an hour.
But then again that’s current generation loading times for you...
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