There’s a lot about gaming I could talk about. Both retro, last gen, and next gen. I could tackle PC gaming, portable gaming, indie gaming, smartphones, tablets, etc. But this could make the series go on for way too much time, and the articles would end up way too big and tedious to read. On this last post of the series, I will give my personal opinion about next gen of gaming.

Let’s start off with the first console that was release for this generation.
The Wii U took everything good that the Wii did, and did the exact opposite.
With the Wii, Nintendo sought out to target a market that has not been targeted already, effectively making the system the best seller, and being released a year after its competition, it was clear that it was a next gen console, even if the hardware didn’t make it look like it much.
With the Wii U, Nintendo released the console way too early, they did not take into consideration what third party publishers thought about it, the gaming community wasn’t really expecting the console, and both the hardware and software titles made it look like it was trying to compete with the PS3 and 360, both of which have about the same power and same titles available, so the console ultimately didn’t feel like a nextgen console, so gamer’s attention was focusing on what Sony and Microsoft was about to come up with, both of which had a bit more time to finish up their product and seek third party support for a grander reveal. And when it comes to target audience, while casual gaming wasn’t really dug too much into back when the Wii was release, nowadays it is fully tackled by smartphones and tablets, both of which are devices that people already own and need to own, so with the Wii U there’s no reason why casual gamers would buy the system as it offers more or less the same for them as what their already bought devices do.
Nintendo should have known this, and they should have stopped with the casual gimmicky *** and go back to focusing on its core audience. This meant that the system is the lowest selling of this generation, on par with the Vita. Although Nintendo does have the means to boost up sales and it seems they are trying to get back on track with some success by releasing games from their franchises (even from franchises that were left out on the Wii like Pikmin) and giving less support for that gimmicky controller, which imo will eventually have to die. Personally, I think if Nintendo continues to trying to bring back their core audience and forget about casual gaming, they will end up not doing that bad, and the console might become an actual nice investment, but I doubt they will ever catch up to the PS4, they might catch up to the Xbox One, but not the PS4. The Wii U to me seems like it’ll end up like the GameCube, it’ll have nice first party gems and interesting titles, but it’s not at all a replacement to the PS4 like the GameCube wasn’t a replacement for the PS2, it’ll end up as a console that you can optionally buy to have the best of both worlds, but not a necessary buy for most people that already have a PS4 or are on the verge of buying one.

When Microsoft revealed their next-gen console last year everyone got shocked at what MS was trying to sell as the “future of gaming”: highly restrictive DRM policies, focus on multimedia rather than games, forced peripherals that have already been proven to not work well for games, high launch price, lack of exclusive games, TV, sports, TV, sports, TV, TV, TV, sports. While most people were shocked by this, a little bit of research on the past consoles from Microsoft reveals that this was indeed forthcoming, and that it shouldn’t really surprise anyone.
The first thing we can notice when taking a closer look at the original xbox and xbox 360 is that they were consoles created for the American market. The original xbox controller was huge, because in the eyes of Microsoft all American gamers are fat and have big hands. On the Xbox 360 we see a trend on the games and services, it’s all about online first person shooters and the brodude culture that Microsoft thinks is what America is all about. So it’s no wonder they wanted to bring so much TV and sports to the Xbone, considering it’s two things that Americans like a lot (and the rest of the world really).
What Microsoft failed to see is that people who wanna watch TV already have a TV, and most even have a cable box, they don’t expect to buy an expensive console to do something they can already do, they expect games. As for the sports side, people who really are big into sports don’t usually use their consoles for it, they normally hang out with friends either on a bar, or even in the living room, but we’re still with the same problem that these people already have a method to watch their sports, they don’t expect a gaming console to do it, they expect the console to play games.
On the other hand, as I mentioned in the previous article, the online brodude craze of the 360 was the entry point for a lot of corporations to do unfair deals, such as microtransactions on fully priced retail games, day one DLC that should have been included in the disc to begin with, or in the case of Capcom, it is included in the disc but locked behind a paywall. The online infrastructure of the 360 not only allowed this, but Microsoft is a company that I’m sure didn’t mind, or even embraced, this kind of behavior. We’re also talking about a company that has a complete monopoly over the PC OS market and known to do a lot of shady business practices to get away with what they want to achieve. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that they wanted to implement all this DRM nonsense to maximize their profit without having to improve their services for it.
The Xbox One made the same mistakes as Sony did with the PS3: it centered on multimedia rather than gaming and was highly priced compared to the competition. But not only did they do the same thing Sony did without learning anything from what happened to Sony last gen, they went even further, creating a machine that was too expensive as a multimedia box, but at the same time it wasn’t good enough for gaming, so just like they did with Windows Phone, Windows 8 and the Surface, Microsoft was unable to investigate what their target audience was, and instead decided to go the easy way and tried to make a device that would try to appeal to everyone but fails to appeal to anyone.
Microsoft has since then done everything on their side to make the console appeal more to gamers, which is what they should have done in the first place: they got rid of the DRM ***, they got rid of the Kinect (which shouldn’t have been there in the first place, Nintendo got rid of motion controls for God’s sake, and they were the ones who made them popular in the first place), they lowered the price of the console down, and it seems they are trying to get some games out, although on that aspect the games still follow the brodude online ***. Personally I believe Microsoft can make the Xbox One get on track again, but much like with the Wii U, I very much doubt they will ever catch up with the PS4. While Microsoft is entirely responsible for the disastrous launch of the Xbox One, the last nail in their coffin was the way Sony handled next gen.

When talking about the big success the PS4 is having compared to the competition, some people will tell you they were just lucky that the competition failed to deliver to the gaming industry, others will tell you that, unlike MS and Nintendo, Sony did create a true next generation console. While this is not far from the truth, there’s much more to it than that. The entire reveal and launch of the PS4 was a masterfully crafted plan by Sony that worked out really well and set the path for the PS4 to become the dominant next gen console, but we have to dig a bit deeper into what happened.
We start off with the reveal of the console, except the console wasn’t revealed.
Sony only showcased all the games being developed at the time by various third party developers, they also showed a list of all third party devs that were working on the system or had intentions to do so, and the only hardware they showed was the controller. One might think they were just holding on to showing the console for E3 so they actually had something to show then. While this is true, the ultimate goal was far more than that. By not revealing the actual hardware, and only showing the controller and games, Sony was clearly telling everyone that the important aspect of the system was gaming, not the system itself. The controller and catalog of games were symbolic for the clear message they were trying to send: it’s all about gaming. Not only did they use this as a way to hype up the actual console reveal, as everyone was eager to find out what the console looked like, but it also gave potential buyers a clear idea of what the console was offering: games, and believe it or not, that’s mostly what console buyers actually want. The E3 event was where Sony finally smashed it. They learned about Microsoft’s reveal and all their mistakes, and made sure to shout out that they weren’t gonna do the same thing, their console was just that: a typical home console, but upgraded for the next generation. And boy did they upgraded it.
With the PS4 Sony knows perfectly what to do and what not to do: they are bringing far new and potentially great ideas to the table, but without forcing it on to anyone. The biggest of them is the famous share button. Sony knows the potential let’s players have to influence their viewers into buying a game. It’s simple, if I see a let’s player having fun with a certain game, I will want to buy it. It’s free advertisement and Sony, unlike Nintendo (who is known to flag and take down youtube accounts that have videos of their games), not only understands this, but it’s supporting it by giving players a fast an easy way to record and upload their gaming sessions for all the world to see. But the share button is not something forced upon you, it’s a really nice and great idea, but only for those interested in it, but those who don’t care about it and will never use it, it’s a feature that will not intrusively get in the way between you and gaming. This is what Sony learned from past generation and something Microsoft failed to see. The best way you can bring new features onto a console is by greatly advertising it but making it clear that it will not be mandatory or that it will not bother those who don’t use the feature.
With the PS4 Sony is doing everything that should be done in the correct way, it’s listening to the customers and core audience instead of casting them aside or forcing them to like or do what the company wants, and it’s a console that knows pretty well who to target.
History has shown us that not only can Sony turn a failing console into a huge success (PSP and PS3), but when they have the upper hand (PS1 and PS2) they are unstoppable, and with the PS4, they have the same initial boost they had with the PS1 and PS2, now it’s time for them TO NOT *** IT UP.

That is it folks, the final chapter on this journey of console gaming. Some of you might be wondering what the heck happened to the 10 Days of Hacking, after all there’s two more days left that I haven’t done.
Well the problem is that I can’t find a decent hack I want to talk about, and don’t get me wrong, there’s lots of hacks out there, we have the PS3 hack, the Wii U hack, the 3DS hack, etc, but most of these are already very well explained by either their authors or other hackers out there, so I would only be doing a summary and I want to avoid that. There’s other hacks I want to talk about, but they are undisclosed, and I have no idea when they will be made public.
But, fear not, I have one more series coming up. In the “Other Platforms” section of /talk you can find a handful of tutorials for learning C, Python and Perl, but these tutorials are mostly meant for people who already have programming (in the case of Python and Perl), or (in the case of C) it really only teaches you how to program in C from scratch, but doesn’t really teach you programming in general.
So I decided to make 20 Days of Programming, where I will teach you the inner workings of writing code, starting from the bare base and general (language independent) concepts, then moving on to low-level and high-level programming, as well as Object Oriented Programming, Concurrent Programming and Distributive Programming. Keep in mind all of this is huge, so I’m not entirely sure if it will be 20 Days, 25 Days or even 30 Days of Programming. For now it’s 20, but don’t be surprised if it suddenly becomes 30 or something else.

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