The 1,000 Console Future

Already having announced a new gaming handheld and a smart phone, it now looks like Sony is preparing to release an Android tablet, as well. These three new devices, combined with Nintendo's 3DS, Apple's three mobile game-playing devices, the wide array of Android devices, Windows Phone 7, OnLive, the three current-gen home consoles, and Steam serving both PC and Mac, make the "one console future" that Denis Dyack was evangelizing four years ago look pretty silly.

Of course the current proliferation of platforms won't be able to continue indefinitely, but its existence is still a good thing for now. If any one of Sony's experiments pays off, it will be because stiff competition from Apple, Nintendo and Microsoft drove them to make a device that did things that others didn't. The same can be said of Apple, Nintendo, HTC, and so on. Things may be starting to stagnate a little, with everyone focusing a little too much on keeping up with Apple rather than surpassing them, but for now it's good enough that a thousand flowers are blooming.

That's why I disagree, at least in part, with Chris Kohler's opinion piece on the subject at Wired. He compares the current situation to the mid '90s, when Sega, Philips and 3DO were flooding the market with hardware, creating confusion among consumers that would eventually lead to all three getting out of hardware development entirely. That analogy is good, but not perfect.

For one thing, devices like the 3DO, CD-i, 32X and SegaCD were, themselves, confusing. The former two wanted to be more than just video game consoles, but they failed completely at creating an identity beyond the nebulous concept of "multimedia" devices. Nobody, even the people creating content, knew what the hell multimedia was, which meant they couldn't make a compelling case for why the general public should care about it. The SegaCD and 32X might have made sense on their own, but they didn't as add-ons for the Genesis released in such close proximity to each other.

Sony doesn't have the same problem. People will know at a glance what the NGP, the Xperia Play, and the tablet (if it exists) are, because they've seen them before. Consumers have the concept of "handheld game system," "smartphone" and "tablet". There's no confusion with the hardware. There's a temptation to say that the Android marketplace is where the real confusion will come in, but let's not forget that Android phones are outselling all other smartphones as of 2010.

All this is not to say that Sony is in the clear--R&D costs on these devices must be astronomical, and none of them are going to be cheap (except maybe the Play). But I'm not ready to say just yet that they're a bad thing, or that the general proliferation of devices is a bad thing. I like choice, and like the innovation that comes from competition. There are smart and dumb ways to compete, but it's way too soon to make judgments about which strategy is which at this point.