Now that multi-platform releases span "generations"

[Bada Bing!]

I was thinking the other day, with games like NFS Most Wanted and Call of Duty 2 are available on latest gen Xbox 360, as well as the 'sooo 2001' PS2 etc. It reminded me of the good old days when I'd get something like Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge on the Spectrum, and look longingly at the screenshots of the Atari ST and Amiga versions.

It's not going to happen for long, as typically these days as soon as the next gen consoles arrive, the old ones are left for dead by the major publishers but it was an interesting though. No one has thought about maintaining a tiered gaming system, where there are different price ranges for consoles and their games, sort of like cars I suppose. Beginners start out in banged up 205's and the older peeps with a bit more cash and experience go for faster and more expensive machines. There's no hint of this in gaming bar the (IMO unsuccessful) rebranding excercise with PSOne.

How come then, that the old Master System stayed alive for quite a while alongside the Megadrive? I remember both going strong at one point (say '90/'91) with no sign of the Master System losing steam. Doesn't happen now, although I suppose you could argue that the DS is an obsolete platform (with its N64 roots) living alongside its current gen big brother.

[112]

Thats an interesting point as i, like your self, used to stare at the amiga images on the back of a box and hope that the C64 version was not that far off. Boy was i kidding my self big time. But the Game boy is doing that as we speak isnt it? With the GBC (i think), GBA, and DS still having games come out for them.

The thing about the xbox is that MS are eager for everyone to buy into there new platform that the there simply is no room for the xbox. Sony did what nintendo an sega have done before with a few of the previous consoles by making them backwards compatable. Do you remember when the PS2 came out? the userbase of the PSX was so big that at one point sales eclipsed the new machine in favour of the older one. Also bare in mind that todays throwaway society means older 'junk' is simply jus that 'old junk'. You only need to look at the state of the mobile phone market to understand. Phones have a shelf life of about 12 months tops! and thats only because people have contracts.

IF peeps made a stand for a older gen system the DC would be doing what its somewhat doing in Japan, well ish.

112

[Baseley09]

It's mad at the time, say 89 - 91 there were over 10 formats on the market with full support.

[rmoxon]

The thing is the majority of people just don't usualy have more than one or two consoles in their homes so why would they keep an older system when a newer one with much moreimpressive graphics and stuff is waiting to be played?.People will get rid of their Xbox's and buy 360's simply for that reason. And so if people are rid of the console then I'm not really sure why developers would want to carry on producing for it. I think this is also why the DC failed, it wasn't Segas lack of support, it was that without customers then they had no reason to support it.

Oh yeah and by the way, Call Of Duty 2 on PS2 is a completely different game to the 360 version so that probabaly dosen't count...

[vertigo]

When you talk about the Spectrum vs Amiga, I think you're a little misguided by saying that it's akin to PS2 vs XB360 games. Yes the Spectrum is 8-bit and the Amiga 16-bit, but they occupy the same era of gaming, that is the great home computer gaming period (roughly) from 1982 to 1993. This is actually the same thing as the PS2, GC and XBox being competing platforms even though their specs vary wildly, as they all occupy the same era/generation. You will get a slight cross-over of multi-platform games from this generation onto 360, but that can be fairly reliably attributed to the 360 launching so far ahead of any rival platform.

I think hardware companies don't really do a significant and extended period of dual-platform support any more because that means double the resources which reflects on the short-term bottom line, something which business is increasingly obsessed with. Also, marketing departments, which are full of condescending people who are paid far too much money to take far too long to tell you something you already knew, are obsessed with something called 'product differentiation' and have convinced heads of companies that consumers are thickies who can't tell the difference between a PlayStation and PS2, for example.

I think these days we also don't have multi-platform support from a single manufacturer because there was one period in time where the MS vs NES and MD vs SNES markets could happily coexist, with a quite obviously tiered pricing structure. We don't have that situation in the market any more outside of the 360 anomaly which I've tried to explain above. I could theorise all day about why without actually getting anywhere, so I won't, but I think the PS was able to co-exist with PS2 for as long as it did because it was such a huge cultural phenomenom and sea change in the way the industry did business. Read "Revolutionaries At Sony" if you want more details on that.

There's no hint of this in gaming bar the (IMO unsuccessful) rebranding excercise with PSOne.

Unsuccessful in your eyes maybe, but the constant refinements to the PCB during the PS's lifetime, eventually culminating in a one-chip solution and the release of the redesigned, much more aesthetically attractive, hardware was an engineering and business success as far as I'm concerned.