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SCANDINAVIAN TRAVELER | TESTS | CONSOLE GAMES
A
s we enter the holiday
season, the peak season
for gaming consoles and
games, three new consoles
are competing for
gamers’ attention. The
Wii U has been out since
2012, the Playstation 4
(PS4) since 2013 and now
– a year after it hit the
stores in Germany, America, Britain, and elsewhere,
the Xbox One is available in Scandinavia.
It’s time for an all-out console war – again.
Although one of the competitors may already be
down and out: the Wii U has lost ground partly due
to poor sales figures and partly because it is just
for Nintendo games. Technically, it’s not really a
next-generation console either as it is closer to the
PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 than the PlayStation 4
and Xbox One.
The battle has been a long time coming. The
latest generation of Microsoft’s Xbox, the Xbox 360,
46
History today
The battle of the
consoles has been the
subject of several books.
David Sheff’s Game
Over (Vintage, 1993) is
an entertaining look at
the 1980s. Its original
subtitle, How Nintendo
Zapped an American
Industry, Captured Your
Dollars, and Enslaved
Your Children, captures
the essence of the age.
The 1990s battle
between Nintendo and
Sega is chronicled in
Console Wars: Sega,
Nintendo, and the Battle
that Defined a Generation
by Blake J. Harris
(It Books, 2014).
premiered in 2005; Sony’s PS3 came out in 2006,
and in the gaming world that’s eons. Just to put that
into perspective, in 2007 Apple released the iPhone,
a product that totally changed our concept of a cell
phone and is today the world’s most used gaming
device. The iPhone 6 is the eighth version of the
phone. In 2010, Apple released the iPad.
While the console companies were tinkering
away, the world got turned onto games, largely
thanks to the iPhone and other smartphones that
have brought us the likes of Angry Birds and Candy
Crush Saga. Today, 25 percent of Europeans play
games at least once a week. Swedes top the list with
34 percent.
And if you think that gamers are only teenage
boys, you’re mistaken – 45 percent of gamers in
Europe are female, and that’s across all age groups.
T
he challenge facing the PS4 and Xbox
One is to address a market that is far
more diversified than it was in 2005. Not
only has mobile gaming gained market
share, but there has also been an explosion
in the number of independent game studios.
Thanks to faster internet connections and off-theshelf
payment solutions for even small operators,
developers don’t need big game publishers or
console manufacturers to get their games into
the hands of players. All they have to do is set up
a website or sell their game through Apple’s App
DECEMBER 2014 | SCANDINAVIAN TRAVELER