The HD/SD Situation

My friend has been a gamer his entire life, but in the last several years it has been hard to keep up with his hobby. He's been working until he has enough to pay for a semester of school, signing up for classes, and heading back to work when he needs money for the next semester. It's safe to say that this lifestyle doesn't exactly result in much of an expendable income, but awhile back he managed to buy an Xbox 360.

Still, getting himself an HDTV to play it on is kind of out of the question at this point, so he's left to play it on their old SD set. I never really thought much of this until I recently got a PS3. I have an HDTV that came as a bonus from the used car dealer when I bought a car back in November, but I never got around to setting it up. So I just popped the PS3 onto the SDTV where I do all of my gaming and set to work on The Saboteur. I quickly realized that the text was going to be an issue as I couldn't really make out most of the main menu, but it got even worse.

Whenever I spoke to someone, I took to spinning the camera around in circles, looking for a solid wall to set the subtitles against so that I might be able to make out what they said. Once, I accidentally put on a Nazi soldiers uniform instead of picking up his gun. I didn't want to be disguised for the mission I was about to do, so I began hitting buttons, trying to figure out how to take it off. Something popped up that I said, "Want to take off disguise? Press..." and had two button icons. I could not for the life of me make out what those button icons were, so I went back to pressing random buttons that looked similar until I figured it out, all the while spinning the camera around in an attempt to find a solid background that might help me actually be able to read the text.

This whole situation seems absolutely ridiculous to me. Game developers have been designing games for SDTVs for more than two decades, yet all of a sudden they can't be bothered to put text or icons in their games that are big enough to make out on an SD set? I sent a text message to my friend, remembering that he was also HD-less. "Yeah, man. It's pretty bad. I have to get right up to the screen sometimes." was the response I got. Clearly, this is an issue for more than just one person, and one game.

As near as I can tell, HDTV adoption is somewhere near 50% in the US, meaning 150 million people have upgraded. With US 360 sales at around 20 million, and US Playstation 3 sales around 12 million, I can definitely see how game companies have assumed that every one in their customer base would have an HDTV, but it all still strikes me as a little bit lazy.

When SD people struck up some outrage at the unreadable text in Dead Rising, the game industry as a whole should have clued into the fact that those people did exist. To me, it seems so easy for them to just make the text and icons as big as they always have in previous generations. It's not like you'd need to make it look like the large print books section of Barnes & Noble, it would just have to be the same size that it has always been in previous generations.

Yet, the game industry hasn't figured out this seemingly obvious fact, and now parts of it are throwing themselves head-first into 3D TV support. Hey, guys, you still don't have half of the entire country on the HD bandwagon and you're moving into the 3D space? What sort of hiccups are going to occur there? As 3D TV support rises, will the games industry forget about all of their non-3D customers? A lot has been said about this generation pushing past the normal five year timespan because of the slumping economy, but apparently the industry thinks that doesn't count when it comes to all technology besides actual consoles, even if that technology is integral to the experience.

Do you think the game industry is adapting to new tech too fast for their customers to keep up?