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E3 MMO movement

July 15th, 2008 (Visited 2859 times) Tags: club penguin, disney, game business, game industry, microsoft, mii, nintendo, sony, XBLA

XBox Live avatars and new dashboard

From here, it sure like the virtual world-ish convergence that has long been predicted is hitting the consoles in earnest.

XBox Live is adding avatars, akin to the Nintendo Miis, but it looks like they’ll have a bit more spatiality and multiplayer interaction to them — and will be the basic interface for XBL from now on. Oh, and remember when I commented that consoles were turning into PCs? They announced the ability to install games to the hard drive as a major advance. Heh.
Nintendo’s next Animal Crossing game is also drifting towards online-world land, though still not truly massive in scale.
Club Penguin is jumping to the Nintendo DS, and don’t underestimate Disney’s new DGamer service, which is intended to network all the Disney online properties.
Sony has a 256-player action game coming, which qualifies as “massive,” certainly, though perhaps not as presistent. They’re also adding more real-world integration, with stuff like movie and TV downloads, weather service, news, etc.

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tallimar said on July 15th, 2008 at 3:31 pm:

in other words, they’re looking at nintendo’s success with the miis and the various channels (weather, news, etc.) and decided they want in on it too? when you mentioned about xb allowing game installations, i had to chuckle too.

Eolirin said on July 15th, 2008 at 3:43 pm:

As someone not following E3 too closely at the moment, what was this Sony game about?

Raph said on July 15th, 2008 at 5:29 pm:

“Massive Combat.” Squads of eight, with notable players auto-nominated to lead the squads. But I didn’t read much about it.

Derek Licciardi said on July 15th, 2008 at 9:39 pm:

Couple of notes on all this E3 stuff. With 20, 60 and 120GB HD options for the 360, there’s not enough space for Netflix movies, regular downloaded HD movies, XBLA games and retail game installation caches. You can kiss a 20GB hard drive gone in seconds. The 120 GB Elite seems to be the only model even remotely capable of handling all the cool stuff in the 360.

The Avatars are interesting. Everyone else has been copying XBL as the best online console service out there so it’s was only a matter of time before someone innovated enough for Microsoft to like the idea enough to add it to their already outstanding online service.

I thought the PS3 movie stuff was a big deal because the PS3 can leverage the entire Sony lineup, but I have to give props to Netflix for aggressively pioneering the download/instant watch market. The settop box announced by them a few weeks ago was cool enough but the deal with Xbox put 17+ million settops in houses in one fell swoop. The rest is just signups. Netflix wins and Microsoft wins. Sony’s movie download announcement looks much smaller now.

The good news is that with the Wii generally not even considered for its online capabilities and Sony putting pressure on Microsoft to continue to innovate, the future of console gaming online looks bright and in HD.

Stacey Roach said on July 16th, 2008 at 12:59 pm:

No mention of the 1 vs 100 “Primetime” game?

Looks like that’s going to be an interesting ‘massive’ game of sorts with real life prizes.

I think we’re really hitting the first console that is starting to touch the innovation possibilities that were talked about barely a decade ago. You have to wonder how much Microsoft can keep a stranglehold on this … they’ve long been after the set top box market and internet speeds are really making a lot of this reality.

Gonna be an interesting next 5 to 10 years for watching the markets converge.

Eolirin said on July 16th, 2008 at 11:00 pm:

It’s kind of interesting really. For all this focus on online aspects, the consoles really don’t seem to be attracting all that much of an audience, at least for online stuff.

All of the really big killer multiplayer apps are either Halo (or a knock off thereof) or on the PC. Honestly, the biggest benefit to all this stuff is that they’ve got a venue for microtransactions and secondary media, like streaming video. Take away DLC and I’m not sure there’d be much point to it, at least in terms of the games. I suppose it replaces the need for a media pc though, but only barely.

rodrigot said on July 17th, 2008 at 8:57 am:

not to mention “PS Home”
http://www.gametrailers.com/game/4865.html
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/23210.html

E3 MMO movement

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