Slashdot Mirror
Why The X-Box Network Will Fail
angkor wrote to us an article from The Register that looks at what Microsoft is planning for the X-Box Network. The factual information is educating on it's own - and the analysis of why they think it will fail is interesting as well.
We just want the X-box to fail soooo bad, don't we?
yay slashdot
The factual information is educating on it's own.
Sheesh. Would you dorks learn the difference between the contraction it's and the possessive its? "The factual information is educating on it is own" ? Thppft.
There are just 3 factors that will decide whether the XBOX Live Network will fail or not:
1) The amount of playable games.
2) The quality of the service (reliability, speed, etc).
3) The price.
XBOX does indeed have a very good amount of games coming, theres no denial for that. Unreal Championship is one, MechWarrior is another and more and more are being announced. However, the 2nd factor is what I think will decide the fate of this Network. If it's avaible to a lot of people, is relatively fast and is reliable, then you can count on a lot of people shelling out quite a lot for it.
Yet somehow, I wouldn't count on the service actually being as reliable as they claim it to be.
Big surpise this article comes from Register who has made it its sole purpose to badmouth MS.
Anyhow, it's unfortunate that the Register is so shortsighted. People love to say how the XBox is losing money, or can't possibly ever make a profit, or how Live will fail, etc.
They don't realize that gaming isn't the only thing MS has planned for the XBox. MS, and many other companies, have always wanted an integrated home media box that does everything from check your email, to help you plan a grocery list, to play video games.
The XBox is just the first part of the plan. Live is the second. Next, media boxes with interactive television.
It's unfortunate that the Register is on such a crusade that they can't see the forest from the trees.
The only way M$ will dominate the market is by a pyric victory, they will have to spend so much money it just isnt worth it in the end.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
The problem with the piece is that John Lettice approaches the subject from an axe grinding position that blinds him to judging anything on its own merits. Microsoft? Ooh, it's just gotta be bad. The Xbox Live approach is thus far the only fully formed end-to-end solution for adding online to the console world in a way that delivers a consistent consumer service, minimizes the infrastructure requirements to developers, and insures a revenue stream to make this a worthwhile thing to do for both the platform company (Microsoft) and small developers who don't want to run a back end operation and the related hassles for billing and customer support. If it doesn't grow the market in a big way online is simply betterleft to the PC realm which is better suited to small but profitable niche markets. The companies like EA that claim MS want to control everything are blowing smoke up the public's collective hinder. What they're really saying is "WE want to control everything and most importantly not share so much as a penny of the revenue with anyone else." Considering that EA has managed to dump over $100 million down their online sinkhole I'm more than a little interested in seeing someone else take on the task. THe Xbox setup doesn't prevent a developer from going their own way on online activity. It would just be very stupid on their part to waste resources duplicating the work and facilities already built by someone who can afford to shoulder the long term risk in pursuit of developing a new market. At the other end of the spectrum it's easy to see why Nintendo is taking the approach of, "Here's the modem and Ethernet if you want to try something but don't expect any deeper involvement from us." Nintendo has been beating their head against the wall of online ventures for consoles since the mid-80's. Although I'm sure their management appreciates that it is an extremely different environment for such things today, especially the broadband aspect, it will be up to others to prove this is a worthwhile business. Even if they have to scramble to catch up later giving it a pass is a better thing to do right now while they have no shortage of opportunities to make massive sales intheir proven markets.
While El Reg does love to bash Microsoft (one of the reasons I read it!) they also have a point here about the various companies different strategies for online gaming.
MS is building a theme park, and will charge a toll for players and (probably) for game companies too. Sony is staying out of the expensive business of physically connecting game players to game servers, and instead letting the game developers provide the servers. If the history of the Internet so far is any guide, Sony's approach is more likely to succeed.
--
E_NOSIG
Yes, it's true.
Just because they developed a kinda unfriendly OS there is no reason to hate the whole company and predict failings and spread bad mood.
The gaming sector of Microsoft has nothing in common with the part of the company that produces the OS, except the name.
Take a look at Microsoft hardware, the controllers, the joysticks, the mice. They deliver rock steady quality for a fair price.
And I think it's the same thing with gaming here. The guys responsible for that DO have the balls and the money to pull this thing off.
Why do we always have to bitch about EVERYTHING that MS does? Why can't we just be grateful that they give us more freedom in choosing our online/gaming console?
More drivers just improve the quality of the race.
So, let's see how they do, and hey, if it's cool don't be ashamed to use it.
I'm amazed that I have yet to read a single article that draws together the most obvious strands of Microsoft's Xbox strategy.
1. It has nothing to do with the old razors/blades chestnut, whereby companies exclusively focused on gaming subsidized the hardware in order to make money on the software. Most commentators are so dazzled at their own brilliance in understanding that rather simple business strategy that they've failed to notice that the market has moved on, increased it's complexity and now has substantially expanded ambitions.
2. MS might be saying that their only focus is gaming but you'd have to be retarded to believe it. Their major international investments in cable companies make it obvious that some sort of Personal Video Recorder and possibly also basic decoder capability will work it's way into the next Xbox.
3. The current iteration of the Xbox is all about establishing it's credibility as a consumer device. They will achieve this because they have to and that sort of acceptance absolutely CAN be bought. I'm not saying that MS would madly throw money at this regardless of eventual profit but you have to realize that the eventual market they're aiming for is FAR larger than gaming.
4. Apart from PVR, Gaming, DVD and cable TV decoding, there's also the fact that the Xbox will be the hardware incarnation of MSN Messenger and THAT'S the biggest game in town. An often overlooked part of their upcoming online gaming package is the headset communicator that they're bundling with it. Stated purpose of this device: to allow gamers to lambast eachother while playing. Actual purpose: to allow millions of people to chat. THAT's why they're building data-centres with such massive capability. Think about it, they become the world's defacto IM service with no Yahoo or AOL to compete with them.
Let me just make this clear: the Xbox is going to be the world's telephone/watercooler/flirtation device. Your sister will buy one.
The proof: MS aren't going to reduce the Xbox's retail price any further but, by Xmas, they WILL add the headset communicator and a years subscription to the bundle. Seriously, this will happen.
Next, expect to see the introduction of a non-gaming based chat service by next summer.
5. MS don't have to keep lowering the Xbox price. In fact, a major sales channel that Sony and Nintendo don't have is the cable companies. Expect to see the Xbox offered as a rental item, for about $15 per month along with Xbox Live subscription and stripped-down broadband Internet Connectivity (i.e. Xbox only).
I'm not for or against MS, I'm just calling it as I see it. Personally, I might buy a GameCube when Pikmin is released. I might also buy an Xbox when it's functionality stretches, as I've predicted, beyond just gaming.
Right, and thats when they TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!! MUHAHAHA!!!!
Sorry man, but I have to take a more positive "it could happen" approach. How 'bout this:
As soon as their network goes live the Xbox is hacked and is running apache on their OWN datacenters faster and more efficient then IIS. The MSFT lawers realizes the court battle is hopeless and quit and the court smacks down big daddy M$. It is ruled that proprietary protocols are a threat to national security and MSFT is outlawed from public sector use in the US. The PR is so bad for MSFT that there is a social stigma for even using it. The Tonight Show and others are constantly tossing out MSFT jokes (more then they do now) and Apple suddenly gains a significant market share. MSFT decides to totaly drop Apple. No more mac IE or mac Office. That is the final straw for the courts, and MSFT is de-regulated. They are split into a million pieces and FORCED to honor government regulated price caps, and to open up all their API's, document formats, and network protocols. Many of these become international standards, and Linux and Mac are now AMAZINGLY compatable. Meanwhile the Apple XServe has been gaining in popularity. Sun and Apple own the server market and practically drive intel out of business. Apple now totaly owns the market, and for fear of being a monopoly they decide to licence aqua for x86 and give intel and MSFT a subsity to keep them in business. *NIX is hands down the most common operating system in the world and the open source software community receives government funding in the interest of national security.
The future is what you make of it. I'm not going to give up yet!
Sigs are out of style, so I'm not going to use one...oh wait..
the question just remains that if sony can do it for free, how much better does M$'s have to be in order to convince people to pay for it
But Sony isn't going to do it for free. Sony is just not going to do it. That is, all Sony is going to sell you on your PS2 is a modem/network adapter to allow you to connect to your pre-existing ISP.
From then on, whether you play a game online or not is entirely dependent upon your relationship with the software publisher of the particular game. So in the case of playing Everquest, you will pay $10/month to Sony. If you want to play some other game from Sega, you will pay $10/month to Sega and so forth. Now some games may sell so well that the publisher includes online play in the price of the box, like Blizzard does with Diablo, but I suspect most won't be like that. There will either be a charge to get to the Sega network, or per individual title.
So the Sony model is actually going to be far more expensive per month in order to get access to the same number of games as the Microsoft model. I think this makes the Microsoft model far more compelling from a consumer aspect.
Gracious, you are right, I did just think it was an ugly game console. Well, not really.
You paint an interesting timeline of the future, one that I buy right up to the point where they invade corporate America with the Xbox(n). I rather suspect that M$ fears the content owners/creators ($ony, AOL/TW etc) as they are the companies rising like rancid cream to the top of the profit margin glass.
Software is becomming a commodity, not Office and Windows, not yet, but they will. There are only so many bells and whistles one can add to the OS and office suite to persuade people to buy it, and only so much money that the M$ tax will bring in on new machines. Sure, corporate america will eventually lease it's software, keeping the revenue flowing on that end, but corporate america is canny with its money and will only part with sufficient to get the job done.
Joe Q Public on the other hand is still a ripe and untapped market. He has lots of money (gaw bless America) and when he wants to be entertained, He Wants To Be Entertained!.
As it currently stands, he has paid his one-off M$ tax on his Dell, pirated his copy of office (and if he has to pay for it due to WPA or whatever, he'll use something else, he doesn't write that many essays and office software isn't fun) and now he isn't really paying MS for anything. The people still getting his dollar are $ony, AOL et al because they are providing him with his ongoing entertainment. Why do you think $ony decided to get into music and movies? Because there is a vast pool of money to be slurped from, and M$ wishes, I'm guessing, to insert it's proboscis by hook or by crook into this pool. The Xbox is just the start of this attack, and more power to them I say.
Don't get me wrong, M$ is somewhat evil, and a very evident evil in my life as a programmer who spends 8 hours a day in front of a Win2K box. They have a monopoly on desktop software and office software. However, the software I write never runs on MS operating systems, never hits MS databases and is interpreted by a non-MS runtime environment. I just use windows as my dev system because that is what my editor runs on, and for that purpose it does it's job.
However, when I go home and turn on the stereo or the TV, I'm giving vast amounts of money to a multopoly of the most appaling sort.
I regard $ony in much the same way I regard Exxon and DeBeers, truly evil multinationals who will do anything and everything they can to get to and stay on the top. MS bashing is very valid in the context of IT professionals, however, in the great big scheme of things, their evil mostly pales into insignificance when compared to what goes on elsewhere in the corporate world.
In that context, if MS want to go out and build the best gaming system they possibly can, from the console to the network, to eventual PVR and other functionality, then go right ahead I say. They have plenty of competition, and frankly I like the competition a lot less. (It is worth noting that when MS actually has some competition, they can produce very good products, subjectively at least. You can have my iPaq when you pry it from my cold dead fingers, ditto my Xbox and my licence for Win2K)
With that in mind, when they dropped the price on the Xbox, Beloved (who does indeed love me) went straight out and bought me one. It is my considered opinion that I have never had a more pleasurable extended gaming experience than I have over the last couple of days with RalliSport Challenge and Halo. (This is coming from someone who has the stereotypical fire breathing thunderbird/GF3/1GB-RAM box at home (It's like a tiny god) plugged into a cable modem just waiting to play what have you, if you can get the damn thing to run stably and free up enough drive space and sort out that weird conflict with the latest detonator driver and work out why the hell the latest 4in1 doesn't work as well as the last three etc etc ad nauseum). No muss, no fuss, no setup, no wondering how it will play on your machine. No hunting for memory cards. Listen to your own music. Nice big adult controller. Fantabulous graphics and sound (I'd rather TV resolution and predicatbly adequate frame rate, though I suppose I'm in the minority there, and all from a device whose total cost is significantly under half of what I paid for my last god damned video card. Shit, where is that receipt?)
When the $50 online kit comes out, I'll be happily queueing with the spotty teenagers and early adopters. Frankly, I'm going to enjoy being able to let my 10 year old play online in a 'safe' sandbox appropriate to his age, and I'm going to get a hell of a kick out of UT against matched opponents (so I don't continuously get the crap kicked out of me by people who still have reflexes like I used to) and I'm going to enjoy the heck out of the headset too. I think it is a fabulous idea and I truly hope it all comes together, despite the fact that it will continue to line Bill's pockets. I don't mind lining them when he provides me with what I want. In terms of the future, if and when the product offends my ethics or morals, I'll stop giving him my money, as is my right.
Damn it all, that was a long rant. I like my xbox a great deal. I dislike MS monopolistic practices. The latter only impacts the former for me in as much as I'm going to encourage MS to engage in business practices that are not monopolistic by supporting those products that are competing. Sony has done little to deserve my money with their current console on a technical level, and frankly I dislike the company enough to boycott it on a moral level.
So Apple can produce both it's own Hardware and Software/OS.
SUN can do the same.
IBM can do the same.
But if MS does it, it's Dr. Evil and the fate of the free world is at stake.
Come on. Give it up.
Think down the road, in 500 years do you think anyone will even care? This will all pass, and people 500 years from now will not likely know the name of the manufactuer of their central house OS anymore than they know the brand of toliet bowl they use.
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
Keep in mind that my assumtions are pretty optimistic. There are how many PCs? 1 billion? 600 million? How many are primarily game systems? 200 million, maybe 300?
Considering that some of the best PC games (The Sims excepted) only sell a few hundred-thousand copies, I think the idea that there are 300 million game PCs out there is amazingly optomistic.
Halo has sold more than 1.5 million copies with an installed base of less than 4 million Xboxes. How many copies of Quake 3 were sold?
My point is: console games regularly out-sell PC games, so I would say there are not very many PCs out there that are primarily game machines (i.e. kept up to date enough to play the latest games).
You've got it backwards. If i'm trying to play HALO over the Xbox network, and it's dog slow, who am I mad at (think console gamer mentality)? I'm mad at MS, because this is their console/system. Bungie is nothing more than some label on my DVD case.
Also, what MS is fixing to do here is coup EA. By offering to essentially run an ASP model with developers, they are allowing the little 20 person shops that sprouted up all over Austin and other places, to compete with the big boys. "Hey guys, give us your servers and we'll handle the hosting for, just write your game to use this common user-tracking API and we'll pay you based on how much your service is used".
What Sony is going to have, is a fractured network, where only the big boys can afford the have their systems spread out enough to prevent brutal latency issues and bottlenecks.
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
Food for thought:
1) Which is the strongest driving force for Console/Console-Accessories/Console-Games:
a) Whinning kids.
b) Grownups buying presents.
Wrong. The real answer is c) Twenty-somethings who have grown up with atari -> NES -> SNES/genesis.
Ten years ago a) and b) would have been true. The videogame target market was much younger. These days, videogame developers and publishers target the twenty-something, because they have their own income and thus can purchase more games/systems/peripherals.
Even nintendo finally understands this. Witness Resident Evil for gamecube. This, from the company that forced midway to alter the mortal kombat fatalities to be less gory.