Suttree.com: Casual Games, Social Software by Duncan Gough

When it comes to online, on-demand game services, the Xbox360 leads the way, with the Wii and PS3 following on shortly after their respective launch periods.

Now that all three services are pretty well defined, it’s interesting to see what technologies they’ve embraced and how those technologies reflect a pretty decent roundup of the key ideas about the web over the last few years.

First of all, is broadband. Broadband penetration must have reached a point amongst typical gamers that each company (MS, Nintendo and Sony) felt it unlikely to hinder adoption rates if their consoles relied on broadband-only content. Multiplayer online gaming requires a low ping and a speedy connection and almost all next-gen consoles consider ‘online’ a requirement.

Secondly, is media downloading. At a time when DRM is the reason for delays in the PS3 and interoperability between Zune and iPod, Zune and PlaysForSure devices, many consoles use the internet to download updates, films and games. Downloading ’stuff’ has been second nature to many, many people on the internet and it fits in with their on-demand experience. Adding this to consoles made perfect sense, but I’d imagine that plenty of people behind the scenes are worried that their online capabilities could lead to virii and other unauthorised downloads. This is, after all, the same kind of media delivery used by Napster, Kazaa, BitTorrent and, my personal, long-gone, favourite, Audiogalaxy.

Thirdly, there are portal and home pages. I’ve not seen what the PS3 offers in this respect but the Xbox360 and Wii both offer customisable home pages and, in the case of Wii weather and news, portal pages too. Whilst this isn’t the most revolutionary of things to include, it does lead the way for some other, more interesting choices. On the web, personal home pages aren’t very successful. Portal pages are very Web 1.0 and seen as one of the ills of the time. However, personal customisation is huge - look at the whole Item Model where people pay for virtual hats, stickers and extras for their virtual avatars. Look at mobile phone covers and ringtones, any typical MySpace page. Given the option to customise, most people do, so console support for this opens up a number of possibilities.

Of course, the portal pages in consoles are more targeted at in-game friends, and the rise of social networking outside of games has served to highlight the fundamental social nature of multiplayer gaming. Having an interactive list of friends inside your console makes perfect sense.

And, finally, from Casual Games comes the idea of ‘try before you buy’. The entire Casual Games industry is pretty much based on this tenet and consoles have jumped on board wholeheartedly. The Wii has the Virtual Console to download classic games from and the Xbox360 has LiveArcade.

Whilst, on the one hand, it’s 2007 and the world is only just about ready for touchscreen internet devices in your pocket (i.e., the iPhone), next-gen consoles do seem to be ahead of the pack when it comes to convergence, social networking, customisation and revenue streams.

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