The biggest reason for console wars is usually directly related to high costs of current consoles, combined with the fact that people don't always have the money to buy several consoles.
As a result, people tend to try to justify their hard-earned money spent by siding with that console. It's a bad thing in itself, it makes them blind to the qualities of the other consoles.
Not to say that I didn't do this before myself. When it was Nintendo vs Sega, NES vs Master System, SNES vs Genesis, I kept thinking that my console was the best, the SNES at the time. I still liked to play on my friend's Genesis though, but only because I love games in general. It helped me realize things later. But my tale of fanboyism happened when the PlayStation came about.
Nintendo was priming over for the N64, which was supposed to literally jump a whole console generation, going from 16 to 64 bits, jumping over the 32 bit consoles that Sega and Playstation developed. I didn't buy the N64 right off, but I will admit that I felt a pang of betrayal when I heard that Final Fantasy was moving to the PlayStation, when it was supposed to be Nintendo's property.
Of course, I was blind to the facts that Square owned Final Fantasy, not Nintendo. It just happened that Nintendo was the best platform for them to develop on at the time, and when Nintendo stubbornly clinged to cartridges instead of optical media, it was their undoing on the development of those titles. Square wanted to use the full size of discs, making the PlayStation a better platform for that purpose.
I bought a PlayStation, later a N64, but for different reasons. The PlayStation was to follow the Final Fantasy series, and at the same time game me the chance to play other quality games like Legend of Legaia, Xenogears and Suikoden. The N64 was for Zelda mostly, but I had fun with Paper Mario as well.
That ends my little backstory, so back on subject. It's when I was using my own money to buy games and consoles that I realized that the console wars and fanboy attitude was useless. And today it's even more pronounced. The consoles offer different games. The few multi-platform games are pretty much the same on each, so there's no reason to fight over it.
Basically, someone should buy a console because it has the games they want to play, not because it contains the higher polygon rate. Nowadays I'll admit that you can also buy consoles because of their multi-purpose abilities, like web browsing, BluRay reading, Virtual Console classic gaming-style, etc.
Buying a console because you think it's the end all be all is bad in that aspect. You close your eyes on the actual potential on the competing consoles.
Let's try to think objectively, looking at the previous generation of consoles, as an example :
Dreamcast - Playstation 2 - Xbox - Gamecube
These 4 were technically on this generation. I can't talk about the Dreamcast knowingly, so I'll avoid it. But the other 3 consoles were well known. Xbox arguably had the highest processing power. Yet it attracted mostly action games, first person shooters. Being american made it didn't get most of the Japanese made games, except for multi-platforms like Soul Calibur.
The PlayStation 2 continued in the steps of it's predecessor, and was helped by the fact it was a relatively cheap DVD player at the time. While not as powerful as the Xbox, japanese based and already well-known architecture made it keep most of the RPG series and games. It is the ultimate RPG console in my opinion.
Nintendo had some catching up to do with the GameCube, needing to be forgiven the N64 lack of 3rd party titles. Having the lowest processing power of the 3 consoles, it still had some good potential. It still didn't get alot of third party titles, but it showcased an extremely solid first-party line up, and pushed the 4-player aspect. Not much about action games per say, but alot of party games and pick'me'up games that were perfect for gatherings of all kinds.
So 3 consoles, very different definitions of gaming. Standing by a single console basically meant you closed your eyes to the other kind of games. This generation has a similar pattern showing up, the Wii keeping it's multi-player party games and adding a whole new row of games for more casual people. The Playstation 3 boasts the highest power (arguably) and the storage capacity of the BluRay. The Xbox360 started getting more attention from japanese developers due to being roughly the same as PC titles, and started to attract more varied genres of games.
Yet you still see people siding with their consoles and being enraged at news like Final Fantasy XIII going multi-platform. Can't you be glad that a game will be played by more people thanks to it? Sad that your console is losing an exclusive title?
It's a fact that people waiting passionately on a specific game probably own the console months before the release, the sales of a console are not affected solely by a single title of a single genre. People that are 'meh, maybe' are probably waiting until the last minute, and some of them will simply be glad they don't have to buy a new console for a single game.
But before you buy a new console, you should be thinking of a single thing : will it be worth the money I put on it, will it run the games I really want to play, right now? We can't say what the future will hold, FFXIII proves that things can change, a game can hop console or go multi-platform suddenly.
If you don't buy a console to play games right away, are you looking to only decorate your living room?
Enjoy your games, enjoy your console, but for the right reasons, not blindly like a merchandising sheep.
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