You Can Build It… But Will They Buy It?
By Steve Smith -- TWICE, 5/21/2001
On the eve of last week's E3 show in Los Angeles, Sony and America Online announced an agreement to link the hardware maker's PlayStation 2 video game machine to the Internet. The move is seen as an attempt to keep up with Microsoft and its Xbox game machine, and Nintendo's introduction of Gamecube, which is scheduled for this fall.
PlayStation 2, which can already play DVD movies and games, has the computing power to do more than that. PS2, Xbox and Gamecube have all been described as computers disguised as video game machines. In its coverage of the Sony/AOL deal, The Wall Street Journal described today's game machines this way: "Trojan horses that take the [video game] battle into the living room."
For PS2 to take advantage of AOL's attributes and fight for attention in living rooms nationwide, consumers will have to buy the system more armaments to compete: a keyboard, mouse, phone line access, etc. So if Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo and AOL have their way, consumers will have a game playing computer/DVD player that can browse the web in living rooms nationwide.
Time out. Just because you can combine a variety of products/features into one box doesn't mean there is a market for it.
Does anyone with remember Odyssey by Magnavox? That was a game system which debuted around 1980 that featured an acetate keyboard which can "make this game system a home computer," as Magnavox described it. How about Coleco's Adam? Circa 1984, it was an add-on to the toy/electronics maker's successful ColecoVision game machine, making it a notoriously unreliable game-playing computer. Even Atari, which had the Atari 400, 600 and 800 computers, tried to revive its Atari 2600 video game machine, the Model T of the industry, by showing a keyboard attachment to make it a computer. That keyboard never shipped and the 2600 quietly passed on, along with Odyssey and the Adam.
Plenty of surveys during the past couple of years showed that while consumers know and like home networking and home theater, most don't want to go online through their home's main TV set or use that set to play video games.
When the subject of combos comes up, TWICE's editor-at-large Bob Gerson has always been fond of pointing out that TV/VCR combos are probably one of the most successful ever produced. But many typical TV/VCR combo owners use the unit as their main set. His point is this: If the combo breaks and you bring it to be serviced, you can catch up on your reading for a week or so.
And as Paul Liao, chief technology officer at Matsushita, put it when asked in a recent Wall Street Journal story on convergence, "There isn't a single engineer who wouldn't love to design a product that does everything. It's an engineer's dream but a consumer nightmare."
Best of luck to the video game industry with it's new "converged" strategy, but one can only hope that the fruit of it's labors will be a pleasant dream for consumers and not another nightmare.
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