Gadgetory

- A question I get asked a lot is should I get a PS4 or a Switch? And this is a really intriguing question to me because when you think back to the more kind of traditional, older question of PlayStation versus Xbox, we're talking about two things that offer roughly the same experience. Yes, there's arguments about which one has better exclusives or better graphics or better special services, but ultimately, they offer very similar libraries of games with a very similar overall experience. But when it comes to The Switch versus the PS4 or even The Switch versus the Xbox One, these are two very different things. When I think about Sony's approach to their system, I view them as being the very hardcore traditionalists out of the three major companies right now. They make a gaming system that has a good amount of power behind it. It will play games, you plug in controllers, and the focus is just making fun, cool games for that system that are gonna look really pretty. This isn't to say they don't take any risks or don't experiment at all. There's been plenty of other hardware that they've worked on aside from their main system. They've done their handhelds with the PSP and the PS Vita. They've messed with motion controls on PS3 and now PS VR on PlayStation 4 and they've done different side services like being able to stream play PS3 games so there's those other things out there, I just think they always take a backseat to the main focus of having strong first party games and what the hardware of the main system is. And if any of these ideas don't work out, well they get dropped or moved pass pretty quickly. When I think about Nintendo on the other hand though, despite them being the older company of the two, at least when it comes to being in the gaming industry, I think of them being the more risk-taking innovators. 'Cause again, while Sony has messed with some ideas, it's always kind of a side project, whereas Nintendo, if they're going to do something different that's the main focus. If they make a new handheld, hey, let's give it two screens or the Wii with having motion controls, the Wii U with the tablet and now The Switch with its ability to switch between the two different modes. And this is a tactic that has both worked out really great for Nintendo and not so much. I mean, the DS was a big success but the 3DS had a really rough lunch until the right games came out 'cause surprise, no one was really that excited about the 3D visuals. The Wii sold really well, but it also pushed away a lot of the different third parties' support because it didn't have the graphical power of its competitors. And the Wii U did not sell well at all because a lot of people weren't really sure what exactly was the difference between getting a Wii or Wii U. And now with The Switch, well, that's definitely the idea that's worked out the best in quite some time. When it comes to games, I think PlayStation also has this very singular focus in what exactly they're looking for in their first party titles. Obviously if you look at the whole library of what's in the PlayStation, there's a wide variety of different things but when it comes to first party stuff that's been emphasized over the last few years from Sony directly, they're all these very, single player, cinematic, adventure style stories. That isn't to say that there's no variety amongst their style of games, it's just that those are the major check boxes they all wanna hit at all times. Whether it's an open world game like Spider-Man or Horizon Zero Dawn or a more traditionally, linear adventure like from Uncharted. Even with concepts like horror or survival games, you end up with stuff like The Last of Us, which again, is very focused on this cinematic single-player story to tell. There's different game playing candidates between all of these, but they're all tied together by this focus that something's very much a move-like experience when it comes to the cut scenes and what kind of story is being told. On the other hand with Nintendo, I think it again comes back to this idea of what can be fun, innovative and different. Even when relying on big name franchises they've had forever which certainly doesn't hurt like Mario, Legend of Zelda, Pokemon. Even with those, the way they approach them on The Switch and on other systems, is how can we do things a little bit differently this time? Whether that's taking Legend of Zelda and making it a free roam game that relies less on traditional dungeon-delving like the last so many games had done. A Mario game that revisits the idea of Mario 64 or a Pokemon game that does the first game all over again but completely changes the gameplay style. There's also this heavy emphasis on the idea of fun for the whole family though. Multi-player games that aren't focused on competitive online but instead something that you can do in-house together as a group. There might be that competitive online option for things like Smash Brothers or Mario Kart, but there's also games that just focus on being able to do stupid stuff with your friends in person like Mario Party or Mario Tennis. I think this all plays into a heavy, underlying theme about how Nintendo approaches the gaming industry which is how can we make this fun? It's not just a matter of what's worked in the past and what can we keep doing to keep making money although there is some layer of that still 'cause they rely on all other big name franchises, but there's always this level of how can we do things differently? What can we change about the way this game works or how people even control the game in the first place? I mean, only with that kind of logic could you end up having a new game on their current successful system where you build a cardboard robot suit to wear in order to control a robot in game. And then there's how well these companies play with each other, which in Sony's case, they don't. At least, not entirely. Look, the PS4 has been very successful for Sony. It was a huge upgrade over the kind of middling experience of the PS3 and they had a very large opening momentum against both Nintendo and Xbox, at least until Nintendo released The Switch and Xbox off the One X model. And because of that huge opening momentum, they don't really care as hard for playing nice with some of them. One of the most noticeable ways this has happened is the idea of cross platform play where very few games allow you to play with other consoles and even then, we weren't allowed to do that for a while until late last year where they finally relented on very specific games like Rocket League and Fortnite. The idea of cross platform play is not something that is considered an automatic anymore. It's just more of a well, if the game gets large enough and enough people complain about it, yes, we'll try to make that happen. But otherwise, no. Of course when it comes to the idea of third party companies that are not in direct competition, there's a lot of playing nice. There's some awesome exclusives that come to the PlayStation that are from third party companies, there are games that are only available on PlayStation or PC and it's become the console home for them because again, it has been the most successful platform so of course people are excited to work with them on it. Cooperation on Nintendo's side though is something that's honestly really interesting to talk about and look at these days 'cause it's a bit of a change in tune. For a while, a lot of third parties started leaving Nintendo either because of the very controlling sense of wanting control for their systems or because their systems just stopped being as graphically powerful as the competition. And this was a very big problem during the Wii and Wii U days of not really having big name third party support. The Switch however, was able to close that performance gap just enough and introduce this really fun idea of taking games on the go but still play them at home, that a lot of third party companies started going back. We're seeing a lot of multi-platform releases that never would have made sense years ago during the Wii or Wii U years. I mean, if you told me that a Doom game was gonna be on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Wii U, I'd call you crazy but here we are now with it on The Switch. And this inclusion goes beyond just major third party companies. There's also the early seeds of something right now that might be really an interesting future, Xbox and Nintendo working together. We're already seeing a major originally Xbox inclusive title Cuphead make its way to The Switch and there are a lot of rumors, that it's not gonna be the last game to do that. With other games like Ori or maybe even a Forza game making their way. Even crazier dreams to come out of these theories include the idea that Microsoft's xCloud could make its way to The Switch in the future. A service that would allow you to stream play major Xbox One titles but in this case, on your Switch on the go. I mean imagine that. A situation where you can play Sea of Thieves, or the new Gears game or the new Halo game all in handheld. It's a level of cooperation that was born out of the initial competitiveness between these three companies but now, it's kind of like they're working together to really overcome the current lead that Sony has. Something that makes this modern competition between Sony and Nintendo really interesting as well is the fact that they have shared history. Specifically, that Sony created the original PlayStation basically out of spite after Nintendo more or less betrayed them. Back in the late 80's when Nintendo was working on the Super Nintendo, one of the deals they had was with Sony to develop a CD attachment for the system called the Super CD. This was based on some of the same concepts Nintendo would use for the original Famicom system, like the Famicom disk attachment. As part of this deal, Sony would get certain licensing rights to the games available on the systems and would also release their own hardware called the PlayStation, which was the system that would play both super Famicom games and the CD games all in one instead of being two separate components. Again, tracing a very similar lineage from what happened with the Famicom, where they was the Twin Fami. Well, Nintendo ended up deciding that they didn't really like the terms of this deal with Sony, so instead on the side, they sought out a better deal in their favor with Philips. Fast forward to E3 1991 where Sony unveiled and showed off their Nintendo PlayStation and the very next day Nintendo announced their deal with Philips surprising everyone, Sony included. Now this right here wasn't the absolute end of the possible deal between these two companies. Nintendo and Sony did try working things out over time but it never really healed up. So instead, Sony began taking the technology they had worked on for the Super CD and started working on their own dedicated system named after the hardware they were going to release, the PlayStation. Now as a reminder, this was happening at a time when Nintendo was the big system to be. Sure, they had some good competition for a little bit from SEGA with the Genesis, (SEGA commercial playing) but that didn't end up working out in the long run and so Sony had a lot of stuff to go up against but it ended working out in their favor thanks to one very big factor, the move and focus to a CD focused system instead of using cartridges. See, at the time, cartridges still had some advantages against CDs, namely the fact that they had much faster loading times, but at the same time, they were a lot more expensive to produce. Something that wouldn't bother the owner of the console, like Nintendo, but was really annoying for any third party companies that wanted to work with them. CDs on the other hand allowed for a lot more data to be stored on a given game and was a lot cheaper to produce. This, combined with the Nintendo's very micro-managy approach to quality control caused a lot of third party companies to make the move from Nintendo to PlayStation taking a lot of big named games that were usually associated with the Nintendo or Super Nintendo to now find a new home on Sony's platform. One of the most historically significant examples of this is the Final Fantasy series from Square where the first six games and a number of spinoffs, at least in title, were all on Nintendo systems. The original Nintendo, the Super Nintendo and Game Boy. But, with the PlayStation, they released what is probably one of the most important works in the series and was a massive game changer, Final Fantasy VII. And this isn't the only major franchise to make that move. Series like Street Fighter, Mega Man, Catlevania all started making the move to PlayStation forcing Nintendo to lose one of their big edges and instead have to focus on the strength of their first party titles. While a lot of these bridges had now been mended, it's very clear to see how these major events from the 90's really impacted the current landscape of the gaming market. Also, by the way, that deal that Nintendo had with Philips, yeah they never actually got a CD attachment for the Super Nintendo, but Philips still got their end of the bargain by getting them to release some really nightmarish Zelda and Mario games on their own system, the CD-i. (Zelda game playing) The past is important but it's also the future of these systems that I really care about and I think something that is very interesting about this current landscape is that all three major companies are kind of going in different directions. Just looking at all these rumors and concepts and theories that have been going around lately, it seems like this next generation of gaming is gonna be one of the ones to find the most by having each of the three companies cling to their own unique philosophies. I mean, we've had that a little bit in the past with the Nintendo splintering off with the Wii, focusing less on graphics and more on how you actually interact with the game, but now even PlayStation and Xbox are going their separate ways with different emphases on hardware versus software. With the way technology's been progressing, these companies are now focusing a lot more on actual concepts and not just redoing what has been happening over and over again each cycle and there's no better set-up for that than what we're seeing right now with the question of should you get a Switch or should you get a PS4 or which one is better, because it's not a simple answer. It's not just a, oh well this one's got the better graphics and this one's at the better price. No, they're different things, entirely different things and whether you want one more than the other comes down to well, you.