Want To Playtest An Xbox?

drix writes: "Microsoft is recruiting people to playtest the Xbox!" Someone over there has got to be reading! Let me have a crack at one guys! (Course, if they don't the conspiracy theorists will know why: and don't say, "Rob Doesn't Live in Seattle" cuz that's too easy. Course who am I kidding: The Microsoft conspirators are too busy saying the xbox will the crappiest system ever without ever touching one. I just see it as Microsoft's way of saying, "We're not a monopoly. Promise!" as they attempt to swallow another industry. The system may very well rock).

Comments

and this is a suprise?!?

[deander2]

come on folks. microsoft is the king of user-acceptance testing. if anyone had any doubt they'd do this, they aught to check their head.

and it's a dang good business decision too. any product should go through this procedure.

Wild guess: X-box will be an open platform

[Morgaine]

Everything we've heard so far about the X-box seems to indicate that it's going to be an ordinary console with everything that that entails in terms of tight control over software, severe manufacturer-imposed constraints on products, and ridiculously high licensing costs.

I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark on the basis of Microsoft's acknowledged ability to create markets for its products, and suggest that in practice the X-box will become the exact opposite of a conventional console as described in the paragraph above. Instead, it will become an entirely open platform, in practice.

Why do I think that this may be so? For a number of reasons:-

First, the console market is already fairly highly subscribed if not totally saturated, so the X-box will have to be pretty special to make a large proportion of gamers reach into their pockets again. All the other popular consoles are closed platforms. A way of becoming "pretty special" is ready and waiting. [The still-to-be-launched Indrema is doing something similar, albeit with a certification hurdle imposed, but hopefully this will not be a substantive barrier.]

Second, it just so happens that virtually all the big players in the console arena either have or will be bringing out new mega-powerful systems within the same time frame, so high technology alone may not be enough, especially since Microsoft is a latecomer to this market. A novel angle may be required to make headway.

Third, Microsoft knows full well that the popularity of Windows stems very largely from the massive buzz that was created by several years worth of unimpeded free-for-all copying of both the O/S and its applications. The official face of Microsoft may protest about "piracy", but unofficially they must know that in reality unconstrained access is an extremely powerful popularizing mechanism, vastly cheaper yet more effective than advertising.

These three things all point in the same direction: Microsoft will either make the platform fully open, or it will create an easy and inexpensive method for all and sundry to write and install games on the X-box, or it will turn a very blind eye to the cracking systems which will appear 2 microseconds after the machine hits the streets. Nothing is gained by restricting what can run on a platform (all the talk of controlling for "quality" is unadulterated rubbish --- people like to decide for themselves, thank you very much), but everything is gained by having thousands of products run on a console rather than merely hundreds.

We'll see. :-)