By Jess Conditt

Few things are a given to the hardcore gaming community today: there is such a thing as too many exclusives, if they build it we can hack it, the cake is a lie, and we don’t want to play all of our games through motion control consoles. Strangely, the main corporations providing us with the tools for gaming–Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo–don’t fully agree with our standards, and there is little we can do about it. We can not trump supply and demand, stock exchanges and Capitalism. Kinect and Move, for example, have people who don’t care about gaming buzzing across the business boards, meaning Microsoft and Sony are doing something right for someone else in a world where video games are more profit than they are art. The hype in these sectors for the new generation of motion controlled gaming only highlights that which we should have predicted, and our own sad naivety. Basically:

We shouldn’t be surprised by this.

We allowed a few years of competition between Sony and Microsoft for the hardcore gaming market to earn our trust, and most of us thought we had friends in the corporate world. That was our mistake. Our money has friends, and we have whatever brainchild is spawned through their gluttonous union. For the past four years, our money has been friends with serious benefits with Nintendo’s Wii, and we should have known Sony and Microsoft would want a piece of that action. Both companies publicly delivered what we wanted while creating grotesque Frankenstein Wii monsters in the mountaintop castle laboratories we bought for them. And now the monsters are all but loose and there isn’t much we can do about them besides cower in our basements with our precious controllers, pressing buttons in the dark while trying to banish the shrieks of laughter from our six-year-old sisters as they play Kinectimalsin the family room upstairs.

Again, we really shouldn’t be surprised by this.

The Wii has topped console sales nearly every month since its release in 2006 while the 360 and PS3 have trailed below PSP sales some of those years, and damn that must suck for the PS3 developers when they run into the PSP crew at company parties. Sony and Microsoft were competing with each other for a limited hardcore audience, while Wii had free reign over the broad casual sector. We could even call it a sector monopoly, but Microsoft has a monopoly on having monopolies, so we won’t. Point is, Sony just bought Park Place, Microsoft put a hotel on Boardwalk, and a casual game for mass consumer cash is now officially on.

In this sense, the motion control shift is beneficial for us hardcore gamers though. With more companies competing for the same consumer base, prices should drop across the technologically-relevant board. Already we have the PS3 Slim and the new 4GB 360 (Kinect ready!) at drastically reduced prices, and even the Wii is cheaper now than ever before. The Kinect alone costs $150 and the Move is $100 for the basic package, but if we’re pissed because the technology is intended for a casual audience and we would never use it, the prices shouldn’t matter to us at all because we won’t be buying it. However, if we think the technology is innovative enough to warrant purchasing, we can’t bitch about it being for a casual consumer because we want it anyway. With a lightgun to our head, it’s officially time to make up our minds.

Sony and Microsoft’s main problem, besides some deep-seated mommy issues, lies in the advertising arena. Both companies are selling their new motion sensing technologies as “peripherals” or “controllers,” when they would be better served, and closer to truth, selling them as consoles. This translates easier for Kinect, but even Move could advertise its camera add-on as creating an entirely new console. Most of us view them as completely unique systems anyway, hence our frustration at not getting any real new consoles for at least another generation. Think of the new products as real-life DLC, like a zombie pack for Call of Duty—it uses the original game but creates an entirely new, not as intense, and slightly shittier game all on its own, just as Kinect and Move are less hardcore, relatively worse versions of the 360 and PS3.

As for the price, spending $150 on a controller is hard to justify, while spending $150 on a new console is a smokin’ deal. Never mind Forbes estimated the Kinect to cost around $40 to make – Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer does have last year’s personal compensation of $1,276,627 to match ya know, the poor guy.

Questionable advertising practices aside, the suits at Microsoft and Sony are looking at the numbers, and sadly for the traditional gaming audience, Kinect and Move are adding up. Sales ending July 31 showed Xbox 360 and PS3 both sold more consoles than the Wii worldwide, a phenomenon rarer than a good Julia Roberts movie (seriously, what is Eat Pray Love even about?). A recent survey from Ispos OTX published by IndustryGamers suggests Kinect is appealing most to non-360 owners, just as Microsoft wanted. Now they can sell even more newly-cheapened 4GB 360s, be even more content with their broader audience business strategy and focus on producing for the casual market in the coming years.

Shit.

But perhaps this isn’t the end of traditional games for 360 or PS3, as titles like Call of Duty: Black Ops and the freshly-announced BioShock Infinite can attest, so lets crawl out from under our desks and wipe the tears from our faces, kiddos. The Motion Sensing Shitstorm of 2010 is the latest balance shift in the gaming industry and, in the best/worst case, it will force more emphasis on something the consoles can’t deliver and won’t create—hardcore PC games. I would expect companies like Blizzard and Valve to take full advantage of a waning hardcore console sect by shelling out some impressive new games and updates. Without making any excuses for Microsoft or Sony as they’ve excluded some of the most loyal people in their fan bases, this is another classic case of Don’t Hate The Player, Hate
The Game, and for better or for worse, Gaming Inc. is something we’ll all be playing until we unplug our consoles for good.

So, what about you? How do you feel about the direction Sony and Microsoft are heading in? Should hardcore gamers be concerned? Are traditional games going the way of the dodo? Should we all just take a deep breath and trust the industry’s great game makers to further pursue innovation instead of riches? Will the casual controls converge with hardcore games in any sort of meaningful way? There are a lot of questions, but we wanna hear from you on this all-important topic, so be sure to sound off with your thoughts in the comments section below and check back soon on EpicBattleAxe.com for the latest installment of GAMING INC.