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Salon Goes Inside the X-Box
Romancer writes "According to this
article, Recent X-box "Sales have been disappointing, and the co-creator of Microsoft's game console just quit his job -- a day before a book portraying him as a hero hit the bookstores." "
The article itself is allright, but it has a lot of good links.
Microsoft needs to help the developers. Give them free dev kits. Give them free support. If you built it, they will come.
Without massive developer interest like there was with the Sony PS1, you end up with a flop like the Dreamcast. Good games are the only thing that will keep the customers interested.
No amount of advertising can compensate for mediocrity...
Wait a minute. Did I just say that about MS?
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
I, personally, dontt like Xbox. Its just a computer inside a pretty box that connects to your TV so you can play games. And why is it dying? Well, Microsoft has a pretty weak business planing for Xbox. It has no support from many of world largest game houses, it was born too damn expensive, it has two or three good games (out of 10 games ever launched)... what, in my opinion, made Playstation One so famous was one possibility to choose beetwen hundreds of diferent games.
Hope Micros~1 does a better job next time!
Fabio - Sumare/Sao Paulo/Brazil/South America/Earth/Solar System/Milky Way/Universe
http://www.morroida.com.br
It gives me the hope that maybe a company software based or not will come along and make some business decisions that are not bone-headed and knock the Borg off their perch
And then we can start bitching about THEM!
Seriously - we don't want any ONE company to knock them off the perch. We want the hordes to eat the perch! making sure no one else gets up there to crap on us again!
"Opening the Xbox" is published by Prima Publishing. Among gamers, the Prima name is best known for publishing strategy guidebooks for a wide variety of console and computer titles. Prima guides are currently available for more than a dozen Xbox games, including Microsoft's popular shooter Halo and gridiron simulation NFL Fever 2002. Strategy guide publishers like Prima often depend heavily on the cooperation of game companies -- like Microsoft -- to release hint books that are information packed, timely and useful to gamers.
They also depend on mushbrained "journalists" giving them free advertising. That paragraph is worded like a prima press release, no one uses "information packed" in any other context.
Question - is Mr McCauley (who wrote the Salon article) a complete tool, or did he agree to include that exact phrasing in exchange for getting some sort of access? Have things gotten to the point where companies like Prima can dictate terms to the press? (He actually works for the Philadelphia Inquirer, not Salon.)
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Reading one of the side articles that the topic article linked to, it seemed that Gates was more interested in attacking Sony than he was in putting out a product that people would actually enjoy.
My brother has one of these things, and I hate the controller (even the smaller Japanese version that he picked up on a visit overseas). The games are nothing new (older PS2 re-releases for the most part, and don't even talk to me about Halo - if I want a FPS I've got my PC).
So am I surprised that it's not doing all that well? No. I think this one should have spent a little more time on the drawing board, and not come out just to take sales away from Sony.
I have all the current consoles, in fact, I have almost every console that has been made.
Of the current three the best hardware is the XBox. You get the HD for saving games and adding levels/characters/etc. You get true high definition support. True wide screen support. And very good Dolby Digital 5.1 sound. The GC game selection isn't very good, but it's cheaper. It has no DD and not all games support 480p resolution. The PS2 can only do DD in cut scenes. Not many games at all do wide screen. Both the GC and the PS2 still use memory cards. The XBox also has the shortest load times for games by far. The XBox also has built-in Ethernet.
As for game selection the PS2 wins, mainly because it's been out so long that the good games have appeared. Nintendo needs to get their Mario/Zelda/Metroid games out NOW. Microsoft is steadily releasing good games. Also, go hit IGN sometime when a game comes out on all three consoles. They have started doing very good side-by-side-by-side comparisons, and the XBox always wins. Better graphics, better sound, and sometimes extra levels/characters/etc.
Microsoft won't lose this. They have far more plans for this system than a simple game console. Give them another year to get even more good games out and we'll see what happens.
This is the famous Microsoft sensitivity and respect to the rights and cultures of others coming to the fore.
Seriously, this sort of thing is a part of the corporate culture. _Somebody_ had to approve the code name.
It comes down to how much respect does MS have for others, inside the company?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
As it turns out, the X-Box contains a couple layers of hardware based encryption. For instance, I'm pretty sure that you can't run any code from CD unless it's been signed with a key that MS possesses - development is done on the disk. None of the software that supports this is accessible from the game, and the hardware is likely prtected too, so you'll have a bitch of a time loading linux on it.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
They have no Mario, they have no Metroid. They have no Zelda! They dont have Gran Turismo! They dont have ANYTHING that can directly compete with these killer first party games. They have already lost. Good hardware? Not really, it's just a PC, and looks and plays like one. It certainly doesn't play like a console in the slightest. I can give them props for trying to be innovative, but they just released a PC in a small form factor. That was a terrible move, and because of it all their "good" games are your typical PC ports of games we already own. They just dont have a "Mario" to get their foot in the door. They've already lost Japan by a longshot. Even some pocket neo-geo system is outselling it. If you lost Japan you lost the race.
I mean, if that were the case, nobody would be using AOL (or outlook express, for that matter).
sure this version isn't doing that well, but when the Borg sets it targets on an area of the market, you can be fairly certain that it will eventually be assimilated.
I can't believe it's not lard!
The graphics as sound are better than anything else, aside from a full on PC. The HD is convienent.
As as for games: Project Gotham is better than GT, even some PS2 owners agree. Halo is a decent FPS. Jet Set Radio is sweet, vastly superior to the DC version. Spider-man is pretty decent too, even if you have to fight the camera a little bit.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
I agree, MS could cut prices to such a level that they could flood the market with cheap units. However, unlike the old Vetrex system which had an asteroids-like game burned into the console ROM itself, the X-Box requires software - and there lies the deficiency.
Microsoft made all the same mistakes that Neo Geo did in releasing a console - all the same mistakes that 3DO did. (Please tell me I'm not the only gamer old enough to remember.) Impressive hardware, nice design specs, even a cool niche idea - but not enough support. The Neo Geo was only for NG games and didn't have third party support that I'm aware of. The 3DO had so few games that I hesitate to think of more than one offhand.
The X-Box has fallen into the same perilous pitfall. MS built a system that's a bear to develop for and they didn't secure enough games on release day. Hell - in their release year.
The Gamecube sells because Nintendo has the almighty power of branding in the console market, and because they've got games by legendary designer Shigeru Miyamoto; that makes a lot of difference. Nintendo isn't about games, it's practically about franchises, esp when Miyamoto gets involved.
The Playstation 2 sells because, even though it's beastly hard to develop for, it was backward compatible with the libraries of PS1 games already out there. ("Look, Mom! You don't *need* to buy me all new games!") On top of that, they've got heavy duty third-party support: Konami's Metal Gear Solid series, and Squaresoft's Final Fantasy, to name two offhand.
MS didn't pay attention and has wound up in a bad way. On top of not paying attention to the console market, which they really didn't know, MS didn't even pay attention to the *PC* market, which is their bread and butter. They should know how tight the hardware markets are and how difficult it is to sell a third-party system; they've spent years ensuring this is how it would be. Yet, even so, they distribute the X-Box -- a scaled down PC, with the ability to port your PC games to it -- which places it directly in contention for a part of the PC Gamer market.
Alas, PC gamers have already bought their hardware and aren't bloody well likely to jump ship for Halo's sake.
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I just don't know. MS has made every mistake they possibly can make with the X-Box. I don't see that unit climbing out of obscurity. They should lick their wounds and prepare for round two, because this one is lost; maybe they should go read about Sega's console history, and see how Sega made the leap from the Master System to the Genesis. (and then *not* follow them down the same paths as the Saturn or the Dreamcast..)
Incomplete
Confusing
Badly designed
Overly difficult
I have said before that well designed games don't need manuals, and yet here's a whole subindustry devoted to selling you an additional manual! I suggest to all of you that if you play a game and have so much trouble figuring it out to the point where you think a "strategy guide" would be useful, you write to the company that made the game and tell them what's wrong with it. Because if you need a strategy guide, there is something wrong with the game. Most game developers love to hear suggestions on what they could have done better, and if enough people tell them, their next game will be better.
Furthermore, if you get stuck anywhere in any game, it's almost certain that someone will have posted a walkthrough, or even just a usenet post (which Deja/Google will do a wonderful job of finding for you) with the solution. Meaning you spent $10 up front for a guide you might or might not need (if you're buying it in case you get stuck) when you could have found the information for free from your fellow gamers.
Oftentimes strategy guides aren't even that good. I've worked on and seen enough games in development to know that some of the authors don't even spend much time at all with the game, and essentially just push rewritten versions of the manual or design document out the door as quickly as possible. To be fair, that isn't true for all of them, some guide book authors really do try to provide a valuable service. The main point of this rant is that it's only even a potentially valuable service as long as game companies are writing bad games. And if the games are bad, you shouldn't buy them.
I would love to hear a counter example from someone who buys strategy guides and finds they improve the experience (of an otherwise good game) somehow. Anyone out there?
The article is biased, and full of contradictions.
It tries to make the point that since the head of the development effort is quitting his position, he must know something we don't, and that the XBox must be doomed. It then follows with this:
--quote
"Absolutely! Xbox kicks ass."
But, hey, what else would you expect an ex-Xbox evangelist to say?
--endquote
So... he's not quitting because the Xbox is doomed? What's this article about again?
A lot of people have said similar things about Microsoft's initial failures, only to be proven very wrong after a year or two once Microsoft has won the war.
I think that more competition in the console market is better for everyone. Yes, Microsoft rarely gets a product right on the first try, but look at the difference between win 98 and win 2000. Two years can make a big difference.
All companies make mistakes. Not all companies learn from them.
Amazing magic tricks
Why is the Console "Network effect" never mentioned. Has anyone ever seen something on the local geographical distribution of console sales. Local, like by city or smaller geographical units.
Most gamers buy the same console as their friends so they can share games. This would make the incumbent almost impossible to dislodge and might be the "real" reason the market can't sustain 3 consoles. Dreamcast had lots of good games but I think the "Network effect" killed it, little else.
This would mean that Japan for sure is dead for Xbox (see sales data below), Europe will depend on the GC early succes. The GC addresses a slightly younger audience so they are to a lesser degree taking on PS2 head-on. Sales of Consoles in Japan early April. Third week sales is out but I couldn't find it)
Quote
Sales tracking firm Media Create reports that in the first week of April (4/1 - 4/7), Microsoft sold an abysmal 2,179 units, a number that in and of itself is astonishingly low for a newly-released console system. But when you examine sales of some of the other hardware on the market, the news gets even worse. In the same week in April, Sony's seven-year old PS one platform sold 3,959 units. And get this--Sega's discontinued Dreamcast console even managed to outsell the Xbox with 3,427 units purchased by Japanese gamers. As for the other next-generation platforms, the PS2 and the GameCube sold 80,734 units and 15,06
8 units respectively.
Help fight continental drift.
So are you.
First off, they don't have many good games in their lineup for the forseeable future.
That is *YOUR* Opinion. Personally, My opinion is that Halo, Project Gotham, Max Payne, Munch's Odysee, Simpsons Road Rage, Rallisport Challenge and DOA3 have all been EXCELLENT games.
They have completely failed in Japan, which is a real problem because many of the best games come from Japan.
How are they going to make money? They have put a PC in a box and are selling it at a loss, whereas Sony and Nintendo either make money or at least break even on their console sales. Microsoft took a shortcut and simply put a PC in a box, because their expertise is not in making hardware, that's simply not going to work from a business standpoint.
Where do you get this nonsense? Everything is a PC in a box. Why such a fuss over putting a hard drive and Linux on a PS2? Isnt that " Just a pc in a box".
I don't know what you guys are smoking, but the Xbox has only JUST began. The online lineup is amazing, the future titles coming through are amazing and the potential is amazing.
Just like others have said, we haven't even scratched the surface of the potential of the xbox. It is nice being able to play my own music, have basically infinate game saves and have an EXCELLENT LAUNCH Library.
You want a sh**y launch library look at the ps2. Took a year before things really got going!
And i'm sorry, a 300.00 xbox doesn't cost anymore then a 299.00 PS2. You DO get DD 5.1, HDTV 1080 support, DVD Playback, (yeah yeah, a remote is needed, spend the 20 freaking bucks!), Great game linup and a hard drive with infinate potential and savegames.
I'm sorry, but i'm looking foward to Unreal Championship with the voice commander. It will be nice to not need a keyboard and be able to yell at people.
Of course it's a capable gaming machine, it's a PC!
That's its strength, but it is also its weakness.
I'm not criticizing the hardware, I'm criticizing the company. They are trying to gain marketshare in the industry by selling a piece of equipment way below cost, and they are doing that because they aren't capable of developing a dedicated gaming system that can be sold cheaply, above cost.
Folks, they cannot take a loss forever. Something eventually has to give, either the hardware or the price.
Also, my criticism of their game lineup is an opinion, you may disagree. But many people are of the same opinion as myself, their lineup is not diverse enough to get the attention of a wide enough audience.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Since M$ has a history of just dropping things that don't work out right. Is the Xbox worth it to them to stick it out for the long haul? We all know that given enough time M$ can make any product acceptible to consumers.
http://Lenny.com