Sorry but I have to wade in here. Any market requires competition the second you remove the competition and reduce it to a single manufacturer you have a monoploy and at this point the consumer is the biggest loser in that.
A market that has several competitors is a market that is always going to have a company trying something to get the interest of the consumer. Now to be honest in the current climate the consoles are all pretty much the same, at least 360 and PS3 wise with a few difference being the key reasons why someone buys a 360 and some buy a PS3. The only games that prove the breed are generally the first party exclusives of which there are only a few of any note on both consoles.
Now you have people saying why not combine the consoles and get the best of both worlds, well in cloud cuckoo land that may work but the reality is that the second you have a market that is controlled by one company they have no motive to make the best console / product because people don't have any alternative. MS is a grand example of this with Windows. they are on to the 6th iteration of the OS and they still haven't got it right and the OS itself has some fundimentals security flaws that would require the complete trashing of the very basic OS code to get it sorted. Something that would render old files useless. Now if MS had had competition from Linux at the start then who knows what the OS market would be like now.
Now lets take a look at what would happen with a current gen monopoly.
- Well first of all the consoles would not be as powerful as they are, primarily because IBM created the tech for the PS3 and along came MS and asked to buy a part of that tech, already competition has played a key role in this current gen console war.
- Games would not shockingly enough cost less and nor would they be of any better or for that matter worse quality. Since developers have to pay a fee to produce a game on a console as well as pay for the SDK to actually develop games a monopoly could charge the developers whatever the hell they wanted and that cost would be passed straight on to the consumer. fter all what's the developer gonna do, go develop for a rival conso... oh their aren;t any. A good example of this is the CPU and GPU wars the only reason we are getting powerful cheap CPUs and GPUs at the moment is because the companies are trying to out do each other any bet that if AMD, for example, went under the price of the Intel and Nvidia hardware would go up overnight by a sizeable margin.
- Singular format games will not create inter developer competition. The market itself right now has a huge number of developers releasing a whole host of game types. The market as it is right now is ideal for developers to try and compete against each other. Reducing the console market to one console format will not in any way create new or better games. The only way this may work is the detrimental effect of having a long term monopoly on the console. The reduction in the complex tech within the console may well leave more room for developers to experiment but chances are developers will do what they always do latch on to a genre that sells well and milk the creamy warm goodness from it.
Let's look at it this way and using a current gen example.
Take the RROD for example. Now not withstanding that in the current climate this should have never even made it past the drawing the board can you imagine what would have happened if MS has a monopoly.
A lot of people are under the mistaken impression that MS are all warm and fuzzy and actually care about their 360 RROD problems. They gave me a 3 year warranty and they came and collected my 360 and it only took them two weeks to repair. They are the people that think this is great service yet fail to grasp that the console should never have ever been allowed to RROD in the first place. Anyway MS didn't do this because they cared they did this because
a). They screwed up in a major way
b). They have two competitors both of whom can provide consoles that won't break down at a whim. Screw your customer over with piss poor service on a product that was faulty before it even left the factory and you lose that customer pretty damn quick.
Had MS had a monopoly if your 360 had gone tits up after 6 months you would be buying another 360 the next day.
Actually my solution wouldn't just drive down the prices for consoles (by creating competition) but it would also ensure that they don't have these sorts of chronic hardware problems we often see.
No, some fundimentals
- MS and Sony make nothing on the consoles they sell. They make money from the developers paying them money for the rights to release games on their consoles. That means that if Panasonic for example where to make a 360 they would first if all have to pay MS for the rights to use their designs and they wouldn't see a penny of the software developers money because end of the day it's MS who controls the rights for developers to use their SDK. So
a). Panasonic would have to sell the console at a greater price than MS
b). Since Panasonic is using MS designs for the console and will see very little return it is highly unlikely you would see any weeding out of fundimental flaws such as the RROD, Panasonic wouldn't want to funnel money in to resolving design flaws with a piece of hardware they aren't gonna make money on.
The fact is the GPU market has shown already the worse aspects of this idea.
Third party GPU producers have to buy the rights to use Nvidia designs. Once they do this they can do several things
a). Look at the design and see what they strip off and sell the card cheaper
b). See what they can add to make the card better and sell it at a higher price
Now the market is different to the consoles in that they actually make money on the hardware so design changes at this stage do make a difference but the fact is these changes are very small and do not weed out funidmental flaws in pieice of tech. Look at the Nvidia laptop debacle where number of Nvidia based gpus began failing on mass. These GPUs were released by several hardware produces but because they all used the basic designs provided by Nvidia they all suffered the same issue.
