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New Consoles, New Consequences



I seem to remember the Xbox 360, the Nintendo Wii and the PS3 as if they just came out yesterday. They all launched fairly close together in the mid-2000's around the year 2005. And the XBox One, PS4 and Nintendo Wii-U would be tossed in our laps only a little over a decade later around the year 2014. (For the Wii-U it was 2012) In the Wii-U's case, the console was so short-lived that a new Nintendo Console was on the market five years later.

And that quick of a turnaround towards the release date of a new console brings me to the point of this particular piece. It seems that with every new console that is released to the public it brings with it new consequences as a result.

It makes it more difficult for the consumer and the gamer to savor and enjoy their consoles during their shelf life because it takes at least a couple years or more for the consoles to finally get enough good quality games to make the purchase worth it and then by that point, half the shelf life of the console is already spent. And in the day and age where the latest console is always the rage, the older consoles and their wide catalog of games end up being lost in the sands of time.

And it is not just the lack of being able to really savor and appreciate the games and the older consoles before the new ones are shipped out that is an issue. Its the fact that now these older consoles and games are becoming either inoperable due to lack of multiplayer servers for multi-player online games but the lack of backward compatibility as well. Some of the older games can play on newer consoles. But a lot of them cannot. This was a problem even with the XBox 360 and games for the original XBox.

I thought that when I finally got around to getting a 360, I would be able to use it to play my original XBox games as well. But I quickly found out that since there is no longer the same support for the 360 that the updates I need to play some of the older games I own are no longer available. So I am stuck having to play some of my favorite XBox games on the original console. And yes, this was something that consumers and gamers had to deal with ever since the days of Nintendo and Genesis, but that made sense that the games weren't backward compatible. And that was before the arrival of the PlayStation. Sony has the right idea. The PS2 and the some earlier models of the PS3 can play games from older systems without a problem. And despite the issues, the 360 has at the moment, The new XBox One has the ability to play a lot of games from the 360 and even the original XBox. Some games are still not available. But its a start and a definite step in the right direction. And a big selling point for me personally to actually buy one of these consoles sometime in the future.

What is very curious about this though, is that Sony and Nintendo are slow to get into the backward compatibility game. And it is shocking to see Sony on that list. You could play PS2 games with no issues whatsoever on the PS3. And the PS4 has plenty of memory and the capability to process and play PS2 games as well but Sony has no desire at the moment to allow it to do so. And Nintendo has always been stubborn about backward compatibility so hearing that they have next to no plans to change that is no shocker.

I don't know about you, but if I spent a decent amount of money on a library of games for the previous system, I should be able to still play those games on the new system. If you buy a new blu-ray player, you can still play all of your old blu-rays and DVDs. You don't have to go back to an older model player to play them. And another reason why this is an issue, is what if the older console ends up having no support at all for any of the technical glitches or patches that are necessary for certain games to work and keep working? And in some instances the console itself? This is a giant issue that I don't think is getting nearly enough attention.

Backwards compatibility is a big consequence of new consoles, but it is only one of many. I have one more I would like to discuss before I go. And that is things like digital downloads. The best example of this is all of the digital ROMs of classic NES and SNES games that the consumer purchased through Nintendo's store and stored on their consoles like the Wii and the Wii-U. Since Nintendo has decided to shift their focus to a new subscription service for these kind of games for their latest console. Which has now made all of the games that consumers and gamers paid money for completely useless. Nintendo has effectively taken the consumers money, shut down the store and then moved all of the inventory to another store and is now going to ask the consumer to pay for the same items they already bought, all over again. Which is an absolutely terrible business model and Nintendo wonders why people pirate their games?

Every new console and the new bit of technology that comes with it also comes with new consequences. And it would be nice to see every console developer and studio understand that issue and do whatever they can to fix it so when the consumer pays hundreds of dollars for a new console, they don't have to buy the games all over again or be stuck with using their old console to play games from the previous console that may or may not work the way it used to anymore.



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