Remember Neil Young? He said the NGP was “dead on arrival” ealier in the month? Good. Because he’s back, and he’s just as outspoken as ever.
Speaking to Industry Gamers, Mr Young, ngmoco founder, talked about the state of the current mainstream consoles with respect to digital distribution, cloud technology and networking capabilities.
“In the hardware world, I think Sony’s massively out of position,” he said. “I think they’re in trouble. I think Microsoft’s in much better shape.”
The mobile device champion stated that Microsoft understand cloud computing, said that the Xbox Live service is “world class” and have a “foothold” in mobile, even if it’s a “tenuous” one. “I think they’re in better shape,” he said, by way of clarification.
In a general sense, he’s partly right – the very definition of console gaming is changing right before our eyes, and to think that the next generation of consoles will run off disks again, with normal high-street shops playing a major role, seems archaic, at least one some level.
If it’s all about the ‘cloud’, and it’s a bit ‘if’ – the follow-ups to the PS3 and Xbox 360 could be very different indeed.
TJ
I definitely agree that MS understand ‘the cloud’ better than Sony. Even now as Sony unleash ‘cloud saves’ they’ve done it in an arse- about-face way, you still have to ‘copy’ the saves to the cloud area. That defeats the whole point – it should be a transparent process.
Much like MS treats Achievements, they ‘just sync’ no fiddling required. I can’t believe the Trophy sync is still a manual thing, its so archaic!
Come on Sony, you make great TVs and the PS2 was the best console of all time, but you’ve really got to up your software game to keep up.
As for the ‘Neo-Geo Pocket’ (NGP!), sounds great, but its clearly going to be another PSP, ie, massively hyped but hugely mis-targeted.