Andrew Park is GameSpot's senior editor in charge of PC games, and he's a hypocrite because he owns a Blackberry handheld. E-mail him on it at andrew@gamespot.com.

intendo may not conquer the market, and it may not even keep its current foothold. But it has the ability to capture imaginations like no other, and this should be admirable, even to its competitors. The combination of Mario, Luigi, the iPod, and imagination to create a combination of marketing, simplicity, and possibility has left many yearning for more answers...and quite possibly, for more innovation. Leave them wanting more, and they'll come back again and again. Now that's the key to great marketing.

Separated at birth?

Here's another key to great marketing in case the first one doesn't work: rip off the iPod. And the story behind that incredibly successful hardware is pretty hard to believe. Start with a pricey gadget, add pricey peripherals (such as "official" and third-party headphones, USB cables, carrying cases, and plenty of others), then add a proprietary music format for its songs--different from the common (and commonly pirated) MP3 format--and charge money for those, too. It's all ridiculously expensive, and to capitalize on what appears to have been and still is a craze, Apple has also ruthlessly pumped out new versions of the iPod over the last few years, from lower-end iPod Shuffles, which house anything from 512MB to a gigabyte of music or data, to 15GB models to 20GB models to 40GB models to 60GB models, to the recently announced Nano unit. And people keep buying them, presumably because the iPod is a sleek and, let's face it, fashionable little number, which, when everything is used correctly (with official peripherals and songs from Apple's iTunes online music store), works more or less flawlessly. It just costs you an arm and a leg. But those of us keeping up with the times, and the Joneses, won't let that stop us from buying one, apparently.

You'd have to be blind not to see the influence of the iPod's success in newer hardware designs, not just in the music hardware business, but also in terms of phones and game hardware as well. The hardware for both the Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Revolution consoles will apparently try to capitalize on the clean, platinum-white design of the iPod. You could even argue that the two companies are trying to follow Apple's improbably successful business model, right down to continuously charging small amounts for content after the hardware is bought, like iTunes. After all, the Revolution will apparently offer a for-pay downloadable back catalog of classic Nintendo games, going all the way back to the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. And the Xbox 360 will offer "microtransactions," available only on Xbox Live, which will bring additional revenue trickling back into Microsoft's pockets long after players have purchased and started playing games on their new system. (You'll even be able to buy one of two different versions of the 360.) Consider the pricey Game Boy Micro, which is fundamentally just another Game Boy Advance unit...but with a smaller, slimmer look apparently intended for the fashion conscious. And take the Sony PSP, which, for its sleek frame, high price tag, and proprietary media format, might have been mistaken for an iPod at a distance if it hadn't been released in white (and it has since, anyway). Was that intentional on Sony's part? You'd better believe that Sony intended the PSP to compete with the iPod and other media players.

This is the problem. Since the iPod came out years before the PSP, most fashion-conscious gadget lovers already have an iPod, and the best Sony could hope for was for people to pick up a PSP in addition to their iPods. But your PSP won't replace your iPod unless you have an AAC-to-MP3 converter to convert all the music you already bought from Apple, and if you don't mind letting your pricey iPod gather dust and you can live with the limited storage of a 512MB or 1GB stick of RAM (though there are apparently 4GB sticks available now...which also, shockingly enough, cost a lot of money). So you carry both, along with a mobile phone.

Buying a PSP? Can we interest you in some accessories?

My colleague Jason Ocampo, who is one of the most seasoned tech experts I know, made the joke that he'll be in serious trouble if he trips and falls, because he'll be out several hundred dollars from smashing all the expensive gadgets in his pockets. All this fancy technology is supposed to be an all-in-one solution that simplifies our lives, right? A handheld device that plays games, MP3s, and movies? This is our convergence? If anything, what we're seeing is divergence. Ironically, in an industry that's trying harder than ever to be more accessible to casual users, the barrier of entry is going up, and up, and up. The major players aren't just getting aggressive about carving out their piece of the pie; they're taking their slices and locking them away behind the counter for serious customers only, in the hopes that they'll have another iPod on their hands. Don't take my word for it...try preordering a "premium bundle" and see how lightly that one will weigh on your pocketbook. I don't even want to think about the price tags on the Revolution and the PlayStation 3...but they're going to cost us dearly, you can be sure of that.

Having a really divergent playing field is something you might expect from the PC game market, not from consoles. After all, PCs are much more common in homes than consoles are, since they're used both for work and for play. Plus, PCs have a much wider age range of users, and they also have a huge variety of different hardware configurations, which is why technical problems are so commonly attributed to playing PC games. But PCs potentially offer a huge spectrum of different game types, as well the most widely used operating system in history. The PC also has the longest, strongest history of online games--you know, online, the uncharted frontier that will save the game industry by cutting out those bloated game publishers and bringing fun and innovation back to games.

One day, will games and consoles be locked in one of these, next to purses and perfume?

Online distribution, some argue, could save games as we know it--except that the online-distribution scene looks a lot like the console scene, with each player trying to be the gold standard, the iPod of the field. You've probably only even heard of one of them, though there are certainly others, and not one of them is the fabled perfect solution for untold reasons, including, but not limited to, licensing and copy-protection issues, technical problems, and flat-out game selection, just to name a few. Online casual games are in the same boat. While the market has grown hugely and even attracted the previously untapped female audience, picking out the best ones is still really hard to do. Use a search engine to look for puzzle games, crosswords, or "free online games" and see how many results you return. Try picking out the best casual game service. Some are free, some cost money per game, and some require signing up for a subscription. Each has its own rules you have to play by and sign for.

Obviously, in a business with so many resources behind it and so much to gain, you'd expect there to be fierce competition. But is this just the cost of business? To those of us who work in the game industry, we understand that things came to be this way for a reason. But if things don't change, those coveted mainstream customers everyone is desperately trying to reach will look at the game industry and see nothing more than a huge wall of noise made of screaming voices...and each of those voices will be demanding that people commit to one, and only one of them, while making a vicious grab for their wallets. Just like there's no way most people could, or would, keep snapping up the latest iPod models (because of cost and redundancy, among other things), there's no way most people can keep up with all the increasingly costly hardware and games. Yes, the future holds the promise of a lot of exciting new developments, but will they be worth the cost?