Honestly it was the weirdest thing at PAX.

One of the public’s earliest chances to see and play the PS4 and they chose to show these. Along with Killzone: Shadow Fall, Knack, DriveClub, and a bunch of smaller indie games, Sony was proudly displaying games that would have the fremium model. Namely Blacklight: Retribution and WarFrame.

Both of these game have been on PC for a while now.

And this was front line and center next to the biggest games(and DiveKick). And it didn’t stop there. Wargaming was all out on World of Tanks on Xbox 360, a port of their free-to-play PC game now being ported to the 360 and just a stones throw away was Killer Instinct. Killer Instinct is a revival of an old fighting game franchise from the SNES era now exclusive to Xbox One. Once more, while a “retail” version can be bought with, you know, the game like you would expect, you can also have it free-to-play. You get one character Jago, sort of the Ryu of Killer Instinct, and the rest of the characters can be bought ala carte just like your favorite MOBA.

Does no one else think this is a little weird? Granted, these kinds of games have been on PC’s for awhile now, but I thought the common industry line regarding the PC was that it’s a “different user base looking for a different experience.” Personally that’s kind of where I am with this. When you are making a PS4, Xbox One, or Wii U game you know you are making a game for people who are willing to spend money on a video game. At the same time you are dealing with an audience with historically a low attach rate for paying for download only content. Looking at what became of the PSP Go or even the recent backpedaling from Microsoft regarding the always online business it seems like console players are still a little shy of going pure digital. Meanwhile on the PC people have been buying games digital only for awhile now. It’s something the user base is already okay with because it makes sense on that platform. The only source of income from the fremium model is purchasing content on an online store, a method of payment that this player base is not yet 100% on-board for.

I am curious to see how this all turns out. I want to look at World of Tanks 360 when it comes out. I wonder how the payment models will work there and what kind of player base it will get. It’s weird territory we are diving into and even if it doesn’t quite work out, I still think video games are fun.

With new consoles announced and on the horizon, journalists have rushed to interpret and explain how the next few years of video game consoles are going to pan out. If we believe Wikipedia the last generation started way back in 2005; an entire 8 years ago. If you can remember back then, journalists still made predictions. The Xbox 360 was going to do fine with the support of the hardcore base, the Wii would do amazingly because both casual and hardcore players would want new and innovative games with motion controls that they could not get anywhere else, and the PS3 was DOA with no games to play and too high of a price tag.

Oh and PC games were already dead and were not coming back.

And look how wrong all that was.

So now here we are again trying to make the same kind of calls. Xbox One will struggle because of a price tag but hook the causal market with motion controls, PS4 will keep the hardcore base, and the WiiU will fail forcing Nintendo to become a third party developer.

Maybe this is an exaggeration of what is being put out there, but the point is people are making statements like fortune-tellers. We don’t know any of this yet and we wont know until it happens. Until it actually happens, all the speculation in the world means nothing. All we know now is it has been a long time since new video game consoles have been made. And video games are fun, right?