Functionality of a Game Console

Can you bring us back to the start of the console world and share a bit of the history around the console?

One of the important questions to ask, when you have a new business category is, what problem is it solving? What business problem is it solving? What problems is it solving for us, as consumers? It’s worth remembering that, back at that time – we’re talking more than 30 years ago – computers were fairly clunky and their distribution was not as widespread as it is now. They were all in different formats; they had different architectures and different configurations. If you were a game developer, it was a bit of a nightmare. You would not be able to develop the same game for everybody, so you’d have different versions of the game, for different graphics cards. If you were a consumer, it was even worse, because you didn’t really know what you were talking about when you were buying a game. You didn’t know how well it would work on your machine.

Consoles really solved that problem of accessibility, of simplicity. Why that was so important was that, in the early days, video gaming was in category of toys. The target market was a lot younger than it is now. If you’re thinking about your market, of Sega and Nintendo, it really was quite young people. There were economic issues around having access to computers but, also, technical issues around simplicity and robustness. That’s where the console really fitted in. It solved this problem of accessibility and simplicity and took the technical labor out of it.

In some ways, Steam, in the last few years has solved many of those problems of PC. It takes away those issues and works out, for the consumer, what’s going to work on their PC or their Mac. It’s addressed parts of that problem. But there are still affordability and access issues, beyond that, which the console solves. That’s why it existed in the first place, I think, as a reason to attract developers and consumers.

Once in there, the great thing for developers was that they had two types of certainty. One was they knew, to an extent, what the size of their target market was. In those days, that was defined by the installed base, the number of bits of hardware sold. Now we define it by monthly active use. In those days, you could say, we sold this many. The other very important factor for the developer was that they knew what each consumer had in their hand. They could optimize for that machine, which allowed you, effectively, to go further, with any given piece of hardware kit. You didn’t have to think, well, this guy might not have a graphics card like this. Life was better for developers, in that respect.

What it also did was that it added something into the value chain; it added a participant, which was the console platform. The console platform didn’t come for free. If we look at the business model that the console platform players were working on, they were not making money from selling consoles. Nothing much has changed there; in the 25 years that I’ve been in the business, that’s been fairly consistent, though it’s changed in the level of intensity of that factor. What they were doing was that they were making money from the developer and the customer. They were taking a chunk out of the developer’s revenue, which is the model that has continued, since then.

They eliminated a lot of friction in the route to market for games and created a customer base but, obviously, that came at a cost. That was the environment of the console industry, at least at the time when Sony got into the business.