PS4 and Xbox One fall short

For gamers everywhere, Christmas has come early — the long-awaited next generation of gaming units has finally hit store shelves. Within 10 days of each other, both Sony’s Playstation 4 and Microsoft’s XBox One hit the market this past month and together opened up the console gaming world to a new echelon of button-mashing entertainment. While Playstation and XBox loyalists spend the coming weeks embroiled in heated arguments over whose platform is superior, let me save you from becoming collateral damage. Neither the Playstation 4 nor the XBox One is worthy of your time or money.

There’s no denying the unbelievable player experience, realistic graphics, processing power, back catalogue of games or gamer mindshare that Sony and Microsoft have to work with. The trouble lies in the world these two platforms find themselves in — the mobile gaming and wireless world.

The rising tide of mobile gaming is undeniable. More than one billion smartphones are in use today, and nearly two-thirds of their users have downloaded a game. As an industry, mobile gaming will produce more than $8 billion in revenue this year and is projected to reach $15 billion in annual returns by 2015. Where mobile truly starts to set itself apart is its demographics; traditional television console-gaming has always been a male-dominated endeavor, but mobile gaming is entirely different. Women comprise 54 percent of mobile gamers, supplying a huge influx of fresh consumers.

Now you might be saying that the market can sustain both console gaming and mobile gaming, but I see them colliding due to the disruption of mobile wireless. Smartphones are more than just a platform for gaming. They are remotes, storage for mobile gaming profiles and a conduit to project to larger screens. As wireless screen-sharing technologies, such as Google’s Chromecast, rise in popularity, gamers will want to take their console games with them. Consoles may be shrinking, but they are practically obsolete when you consider smartphones’ ability to replicate nearly all their features.

Today Sony and Microsoft proudly boast of selling one million gaming stations within the first 24 hours of release, but they should savor the moment, because it’s unlikely to happen again. CV                

Patrick Boberg is a central Iowa creative media specialist. For more tech insights, follow him on Twitter @PatBoBomb.