Right Idea, Wrong Time
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"Broadband access is more of a fantasy than a reality." - Business 2.0

I find it remarkable that Sony is promising that their next generation system will be "the one" to deliver broadband entertainment to our livingrooms, that we'll be playing most of our games online against visible minorities, and downloading complete games, movies and music from Sony's vast entertainment content empire. What is even more remarkable is that Sony intends to accomplish this revolution with a device that won't ship with a modem, an ethernet adapter, or a hard drive, or from a company without an Internet strategy. What I don't think is remarkable is that Square would bet a large piece of their farm on such a promise, I think that's just plain stupid.

Microsoft is also making a similar promise with their X-Box. However, they're going to launch with the hardware to back it up, will most likely have an Internet strategy and the required systems in place, and will be offering fee-based Replay TV and Digital VCR services among it's rumored list of evils.

Unfortunately, what neither of these "broadband" consoles will have is an audience.

As it stands, broadband access is for the most part a North American thing. Canada leads the world with 17% of it's ONLINE population connecting to the internet at broadband speeds*, with the U.S. a distant second at 8.6% (due to the U.S. having 9x the population, it obviously leads in the number of broadband users which is around 5.5 million people). Most of the world, and particularly Japan, aren't anywhere near the numbers of either Canada or the United States in this area. When you consider that only about 10-15% of those few broadband users could possibly be interested in console gaming (probably an optimistic amount for sure), the numbers look even less promising. By 2003, they won't get much better.

(*) Although I could be wrong, I would believe that a "broadband connection" would be defined as any Internet connection capable of download speeds in excess of 200Kb/s (ISDN, Cable Modems, DSL...).

Forecasts for the number of broadband users by the year 2003 don't show much improvement. The percentage of online households with broadband access will rise to about 27% in Canada, 21% in the United States and only Australia, the Netherlands, Singapore, and Sweden are predicted to be over the 10% mark at that time. Of those countries, the United States is the only one that's considered a "key" marketplace in the videogaming industry, and they will lead the world with 25 million broadband users.

Disturbingly, a full year after the likely release of FFXI, the total number of Japanese broadband users will only be 2.5 million, a full 1.1 million less than Canada(at 3.6 million) despite having 3 times the population (120 to 40 million). Which brings us to FFXI.

Playing Online with Fire
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Square has admitted that they will need at least 3.5 million subscribers per month to PlayOnline or they will lose money. The fact that they would even publicly announce such a detail should signal to everyone that aren't expecting to get 3.5 million monthly subscribers and are going to lose money. A ton of money. If 3.5 million people need to pay $5-10(US) a month for membership that means their expenditures for PlayOnline will be in the neighborhood of $17,500,000 - $35,000,000... or about 4x - 10x the development cost of FF8, per MONTH.

Between North America and Japan, Square will have a maximum market of around 25 million people capable of playing FFXI when it comes out late 2001/early 2002 (face it, 56K is barely fast enough to handle PlayOnline.com, let alone an online experience worthy of the Final Fantasy namesake). Then reduce that number to the amount of people who are into videogaming, have a PS2, and bothered to buy the PS2's optional ethernet adapter thing.

It's quite possible that by 2002 there could be fewer PlayOnline-ready PS2 units worldwide than the 3.5 million Square requires. As many recently failed "dot-com"s can attest to, market share means nothing when the market is too small.

For PlayOnline.com to succeed it will need to incorporate more titles from some of Square's other major franchises, it will have to run nearly flawlessly from day 1, and they will need to get on Sony's ass to ensure that millions of PS2 ethernet adapters find their way onto people's home consoles. Anything less could result in the failure of PlayOnline and possibly the sale of Square to a larger developer.

The more I watch Sony's fumbling of the Playstation 2, the more I believe that their broadband strategy is the Playstation 3.

The timing of the PS3 should be just about perfect. Around 2004- 2005, it will come out at a time where both Internet backbone and server technologies will be better equipped to deliver broadband entertainment. 56K modems will be woefully inadequate for even the simplest Internet tasks and will be replaced by broadband connections at a faster pace then ever before. Any faults present in the PS2 will be corrected and Sony's research into semi-conductors and broadband technologies will help produce a system that's not only difficult to beat, but can be applied a wide variety of configurations outside of just being a set-top box. Most importantly, Sony will have a solid business strategy and will be in a great position to make use of their massive libraries of movie, music and videogame entertainment.

We can only hope that Square will wait for the PS3 as well.

Spear.

Sources of broadband statistics: -------------------------------- Business 2.0, August 2000 (business2.com) Cyberatlas (cyberatlas.internet.com) eMarketing

p.s. Again, sorry for the length :(

At least you didn't have to research and write this sucker.

Mike Mitchell
Creative Director | Digital Spear Communications
Website "http://www.digitalspear.com"

Actually, if you could put a good, coherent story onto Marvel VS Capcom or King Of Fighters, you could have a good Beat-em-up RPG. Consider that these games are team battles with 2/3/4 characters in your "party" at a time, and that they have dozens of fairly interesting and well-known characters. What's the real differnce between pressing HP and HK to swap between Ryu and Ken, and pressing Right to swap between Serge and Kid? Just taht it's real-time really. All you need to add is a exploration mode between fights.

Of course, the main problem is making a Good, Coherent story out of the mess that is the Streetfighter and King Of Fighters "continuities". I doubt we'll see that in our lifetime.

Mr Freeman may want to check out Treasure's "Guardian Heroes" for the Saturn too if he can. It's a side scroller, not a one on one, but it does have some nice RPG trappings; such as level ups, extensive dialogue cutscenes, a good story, and many branches in the plot. (5 final levels and bosses!) Shame the game is actually real short though.

Kett Shee

AK-

There is a dos-based RPG creation engine available at www.HamsterRepublic.com/html/ohrrpgce.html. It's called the Official Hamster Republic RPG Creation Engine (OHRRPGCE), and I think it's ideal for a fanatical RPG fan. It has conversion tools available if you want to use .bmp and .midi files for your graphics and background music, too.

At any rate, if you're running a dos- or windows-box and you don't want to wait for RPGM to come over, this is a good substitute for the nonce.

I'm not mailing this to Chris because he doesn't like REM enough.

del

HELL YEAH! At last, someone at the GIA who actually realizes VS's crappiness. I'm sure there's a good story hidden somewhere in there, but since the battle system is so incredibly crappy, plus the huge amount of dungeon crawling, means I'll never reach that story. Good to see that you don't fit into the "VS is GOD" mode that seems prevalent in most videogame sites/magazines.

Cham
Not a big fan of VS and proud of it!

Hey hey

I'm guessing that Zohar Gilboa doesn't like any rpgs, or perhaps any games at all. To be so adamantly opposed to FF4 and CT, you really can't be much of an rpg fan. I don't go into a game expecting a 1984 caliber story. I go into wanting to be the hero and defeat an evil force, and I want there to be clear cut lines, and know that kicking his ass is the right thing to do. And you can't really have the classic hero and villain if you plan on devoting it to Citizen Kane style character development. For example I'm playing Spiderman on my PSX, and anyone who's ever seen a comic book, cartoon, comic strip etc.. can see every plot twist from a hundred miles away, but the game's still fun. I don't let a simplistic plot make me hate a game.

Gilbert

P.S. If CT is his most hated game, where would LoD and Beyond the Beyond rate on his list.

Here's a conversation between Marle and Kino from Chrono Trigger.
"Now, you two better have strong kids, or else I'll be in big trouble!"
"Don't worry! Ayla very strong!"
"Hey, what exactly do you mean by that?"
This was from the ending you get when you beat the game all the way through. Is it just me, or is this some sort of sexual referrence?

-SC4000

AK

After 10s of minutes of careless deliberation, looking at blurry screenshots, and reading baseless opinions, I have figured out something:

Dragon Quest VII is a good game...

-Agent X "FOR ME TO POOP ON!!"

Dude, Shakespeare misspelled Shakespeare. Honestly on some of the manuscripts it is spelled five different ways. Spelling wasn't standardized until the late 19th century.

BeerGoggles_FromMARS