Consoleation Observation: Future Past

It took about 4 months, but the honeymoon is over.

Don’t get me wrong… I still happily have my Xbox 360 and Wii sitting here in my office. I haven’t done any(thing else) rash, like selling off more hardware. What I am discovering about myself lately is that my gaming preferences are once again on the move… and I’ve prioritized my PlayStation 2 and Virtual Console games over this generation’s offerings. Instead of playing Ghostbusters on my 360, I’m firing up Donkey Kong Country via the Virtual Console. Rather than spending lots of time with Little League 2009 on the Wii, I’m playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 on my PS2. Heck, I even spent some time tonight playing State of Emergency on my Xbox just to blow off some steam.

Weird, huh? Not really.

With as many great gaming experiences as this console generation has offered– from Bioshock and Call of Duty 4 to Uncharted and Super Mario Galaxy– I’ve been finding reasons to strongly dislike what console gaming has become. Perhaps it’s nostalgia rearing its ugly head. Perhaps I’m getting to that point in my life when things were “better back then”. Maybe I’m struggling a bit with adapting to the changes that console gaming has undergone in the last few years. Hell… it’s likely a combination of a lot of things. I’ve opined on some of these things before, but let me list some of the reasoning behind my disdain for this generation:

For starters, an unavoidable fact that comes with getting older is that you have more bills to pay and less money to play with. When you add the fact that the economy is in the worst shape that it’s been since console gaming first got its start, that means that– for some– gaming is becoming the odd thing out. I can tell you from personal experience that game stores used to love me because I was the classic impulse buyer. I had money to throw around and consequently did just that. I preordered games constantly. I would commonly drop at least $50 each week on gaming-related purchases. Now, with the economy being what it is and with more personal responsibility to account for, I spend considerably less each month. New game purchases have been downgraded to used game purchases, and release-day buys don’t happen much.

This generation’s pricing expectations haven’t helped me much, either. My PS3 ran $500 when I bought it, and that didn’t happen until early 2008. My Xbox 360 Elite ran me $400, and that was decided upon because I knew that I wanted the extra hard drive space. The Wii, which was my “cheapest” system, still ran $250. Buying all three consoles ran $1150. Now, compare that to the last console generation: at launch time, the PS2 was $300 , the Xbox was also $300, and the Gamecube was $200. That’s $800… some $350 less than what I paid to keep up currently. In the last generation, $350 would have been enough to afford 7 new games. SEVEN.

Software pricing, especially for the 360 and PS3, has been another sore spot. I know that I’ve touched on this before, but it’s worth repeating here. For about a decade, which spanned two console generations, consumers were paying $50 a pop for disc-based games. Nintendo 64 games were more expensive because of the media choice (cartridges cost more to make than discs), but PlayStation, Saturn, Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, Xbox, and Gamecube games were generally $50 a pop– unless you were buying Collector’s Editions of games (which I honestly don’t have a problem with). In many cases, games came to retail crammed with lots of great stuff like bonus levels and costumes, hidden characters, additional quests, “The Making Of” featurettes, and so on. While there was a fair amount of shovelware out there, there were plenty of games that were worth every penny of your purchase.

Then came downloadable content, which I just recently discussed.

I’ve already said my fair share as a staunch critic of the way that publishers are fleecing their potential consumers. What I will say here is that playing “older” games reminds me when developers tried to give players everything they had before the title went gold. There wasn’t the excuse that a feature could be left out for possible addition later. Games were complete then, unlike now. If there was DLC during the 32-bit era, who’s to say that the optional quests to find the Weapons in Final Fantasy VII would have been included on the disc when Squaresoft and Sony could’ve sold those quests for, say, $3 each?

Perhaps the most interesting personal observation I can make is that I’m finding myself harboring doubt about the future of console gaming for the first time. In all of the generations that have come before, I’ve always found something to be excited about… such as new technology, new games, new experiences, and so on. Now, I find myself wanting to go back to the way things were. I don’t necessarily want the changes and advances that the industry is pushing forward. I don’t want to have to download all of my games instead of buying them on a disc. I don’t want to have co-op or multiplayer action forced upon me if I don’t want it. I don’t want to be paying over $400 for a console again, no matter what the bells and whistles are that I am promised.

I can only wonder if we’ll ever know just how good we once had it.