Are You Aware of Your Console’s Potential?

There was a time when game consoles were nothing more than little plastic boxes that played our copies of Pilot Wings and Harvest Moon; but no longer. Today, our consoles are becoming so advanced they seem closer in design to our desktop PCs than our old school Neo Geos. But I can’t help but wonder: just how many of these features do consumers use regularly, or even know about?

With each new console, companies throw on more and more bells and whistles. It’s common knowledge that the Wii has motion sensitive controls, the Xbox has an online presence and that the PS3 is trying to combine the two. But that doesn’t mean that everyone gets the most out of their console’s potential.

All three consoles are equipped to take the gaming experience online with the Playstation Home, Xbox Live, and whatever you want to call Nintendo’s Wi-Fi offering. Since the consoles themselves are designed with large hard drives to handle downloading it is safe to say that the designers thought this was integral to providing a quality experience.

The online playability is only one–although probably the most crucial–of the non-gaming features these machines provide. The PS3 and Xbox 360 both have the ability to interface with multimedia tools such as iPods, laptops and even desktop PCs in order to play videos and music. Beyond that, the Xbox 360 even comes with a video distribution system over Xbox Live that hopes to make your local video store obsolete.

A study that came out prior to the format war showed that only half of the 6,260 surveyed next-gen console owners, only 30 percent knew the Xbox 360 had the ability to play HD DVDs, while only 50 percent knew about the PS3’s built in Blu-ray player. While these numbers have probably increased thanks to Sony’s marketing of the PS3 as an inexpensive Blu-ray player rather than a painfully priced game console, as well as the recent deluge of format war coverage, we can probably assume that the general trend of consumer ignorance has continued to some degree.

So if most gamers don’t even know about all of their console’s functions, why do people pay top dollar for all of them? The phenomenon is probably similar to what possesses people to buy V8, gas-guzzling SUVs when they live in the suburbs and have never hauled a payload heavier than two kids. It seems that the majority of game consumers just don’t care about these added perks though, because the Wii has proven that a low price is far more important than the ability to map out protein folds.

I can see both sides of the argument. If a consumer just wants to play a game, they shouldn’t have to pay the $500 for a console that’s capable of running NASA grade flight simulations. Of course, Microsoft did give consumers this option, but after seeing how the Xbox 360 Core System was received, it is rather bizarre that this lower-tech option seems appealing to so many consumers now.