Game console war shifts into high gear

Game console war shifts into high gear

Microsoft sought to shake up the video-game world last week with the big unveiling of its next Xbox game console. But now the competition begins.

The Redmond company's rivals, Sony and Nintendo, are expected to reveal new details of their own next-generation consoles at separate events in the Los Angeles area Monday and Tuesday. The result should be a much better sense for the direction of the worldwide console battle for the rest of this decade.

The attention garnered by last week's unveiling of the Xbox 360 could compel the competing console makers to try to outdo Microsoft as they preview their own plans.

"The pressure's on Sony and Nintendo to come up with something," said Matt Rosoff, an analyst at research firm Directions On Microsoft.

...Lowenstein said, "This is a pretty intensely competitive industry, and I don't think either Nintendo or Sony is going to willingly give up center stage to Microsoft."

At its briefing Tuesday morning, Nintendo is expected to show what its next-generation console, code-named Revolution, will look like.

The console will be released sometime in 2006, said Perrin Kaplan, Redmond-based Nintendo of America's vice president of marketing. It will come with wireless online capabilities built in. DVD game discs will load through a slot in the front, rather than a tray, and Revolution will play games made for the current console, the GameCube. It will be less than 2 inches thick, Nintendo's smallest home console ever.

Revolution also will let users watch DVD movies and listen to music from CDs, but the main focus of the machine is video games. That contrasts with Microsoft, which has designed the Xbox 360 with an array of multimedia capabilities. Sony has also been moving toward more multimedia functions in the PlayStation.

"Nintendo at the end of the day has by far the most experience building these machines, whether it's portable or console," Kaplan said. "We're using all that skill to make something that really sticks to the experience of gaming."