Significances of Proliferation in hardware and content

What are some of the significances of proliferation in hardware?

From having multiple choice in hardware the audience are able to pick and choose to what suits their personal needs best. The ability to sift through the positives and negatives of such consoles as Playstation, Xbox and Nintendo the client can decide which is most suitable.
Again, the audience will take assurance from the fact that there are different consoles on the market, in the sense of competition. The more choice in the market, the less monopolisation a company holds over the consumer hence the price shall be driven lower and lower.
Finally, with so much competition of hardware companies will be forced to find new niche's in the market. This should lead to technological convergence. This can be shown with the latest generation of consoles: The Playstation 3 has the ability to play Blu-Ray as well as browse the internet and the Xbox 360 users being able to access Windows Live Messenger.

A negative of having lots of hardware on the market, for the company, will be that they are forced to spend more on development and marketing to get their product out there.
For the consumer, the downside will be the complications they may find when coming to purchase a certain product. If they are new to the market they may encounter problems when trying to decipher which console will suit them best, putting them of all together.

What are some of the significances of proliferation in content?

With having a variety of choice within in the specifics of the consoles is very similar to that of hardware. For example the competition with promoting games and content to the target audiences results in companies spending large sums of money to enhance their status in the market.
With there being too much content on offer to consumers, this would benefit them in limitless ways. I.e competition would be so high that each distributor would be forced to drop prices. Not only this, but designers would be fighting to be the best in their market leading to a better game for all. Unfortunately this would inevitably result in a crash altogether of the market. A great example of this was in the 1980's when there was so much variety in the market that the market deteriorated and critics labelled the gaming era as 'a phase'. Companies would be spending so much money designing content they would later be forced to lower prices lower than that spent on production.
A challenge for companies can be to get their content on the forefront of the market. They can attack this with 'synergy'. This is the marketing of a product along with another product of a different industry. In 1982 'E.T' was released. Companies thought they would attempt to increase their game sales by releasing the E.T game within the hype of the film.