The Today Show and Video Games

The Today Show might very well be a great way to get the most moderate perspective on anything the show covers. You know, it’s probably the way your mom might see the world. So it’s interesting to see how the outside world looks in at the gaming industry.

Subtly, it seems they pitted the industry as a console war, ranking the consoles, apparently by sale. Wired does a good job of summing it up, hitting the general points brought up in each “box” by the Today Show. And thankfully, the show did a fair job of straying away from just looking at the numbers when talking about each of the consoles.

A huge problem when talking about the “console wars” is that often it’s all about sales, as if it’s a race. If we’re talking about sales, the Xbox 360 has been out since November 2005, the Wii since September 2006 and the PlayStation 3 since November 2006. The only real fair comparison would be between the PS3 and the Wii, given their release dates. If we are talking about quality of systems, the 360, which is apparently the #1 system, might fall considerably given the failure rates of the console.

I can only hope that the media keeps focusing on the quality of the systems rather than the number of systems sold.