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State of the Xbox
An anonymous reader writes "Xbox head-honcho Robbie Bach has written up a State of the Xbox in which he gloats about the continuing success of the console but fails to say a word about its evolution." From the article: "You may have seen the October Game Developers Magazine, which announced its top 20 Publishers of the Year. Microsoft Game Studios was named the number two publisher, just behind EA, based on revenue as well as use of third-party developers, average critical response to titles, percentage of original intellectual properties (IPs), and developer opinion."
http://alexalbrecht.typepad.com/alex/2005/01/xbox_ ii.html
So in my travels this weekend I came across a Microsoft employee and talked him up about Xbox II... here are the facts I found out.
1) Hard Drive... Yes! There was some speculation that MS was going to take the HD out to make it more difficult to Mod.
2) Flash based HD... Yes!!! It was told to me that the HD was going to be flash based... small size fast access... BAM!
3) No Stupid Dongle DVD playback... Yes!!! The reason that the first Xbox didn't have built in DVD playback is a simple one, Sony owns the Intellectual Property rights for DVD playback. Nuf said...
4) Xbox II at E3... Hell Yes!!! There will be an Xbox II maybe more at E3 this year...
5) Xbox II release date announced at E3... another Hell Yes!!! MS will be announcing a release date for Xbox II...
Now this is not like the "rumors" about IBM before these are hard cold facts from the horses mouth...
but I stopped when he started bragging about the "awards" xbox games won at Spike TV's second annual Video Game Awards. The award show I saw I wouldn't brag about to anyone.
Touting their average critical response is a joke. The gaming press is not exactly a hive of quality journalism. Most gaming magazines and websites are simply deliverers of the gaming industry's press releases. They call it news and charge you extra for movies and such. Review scores are determined by how much hype has been generated and how well the the reviewer is treated by the company. The Driv3r scandal last summer is an example of this.
Don't forget to tell Microsoft to fuck off for having the foresight to include a harddrive and broadband at the release of the product, or having four controller ports built in so you don't have to buy an adapter for your two extra friends.
OOOOOHHH, and all those low priced memory cards we ne.... wait, the built-in harddrive means no more goddamned memory cards too!
The PlayStation 2 is older and less powerful that the Xbox. The PS2 is showing it's age and IMO it's already saturated the market.
My response to MS gloating about how many units they sell is "so what, all the gamers that already have a PS2 are now getting around to buying an Xbox also."
That said Xbox Live is a great thing that I didn't understand until I had used it for a while. Sony and Nintendo would be making a mistake if they don't build an equivalent in their next consoles.
Why shouldn't people take outside opinions of Microsoft into account when judging the Xbox? What evidence do you have that they won't do the same thing in the video game console market that they've done in every other market they've become the leaders in if they manage to crush the competition? Do you look forward to a world where the Xbox 4 is essentially the last console that exists, because the Xbox 5, 6, anc 7 will just be the same thing in fancier colors and there isn't anybody else out there pushing the state of the art? Microsoft's stuff is always groundbreaking and exciting when they're playing catch up. It's the aftermath you should fear.
approx. the same as the state of the pc 3 years ago.
free online diet tracking.
Take a $150 Xbox, solder in a mod chip, throw in a big HD and even a USB keyboard if you like. What do you get? A great little media center box and an awesome box for emulation, oh yeah and it runs Linux too.
I know it's all illegal but I swear one of the reasons for the Xbox's increase in popularity is the mod community.
Because it is x86 based it's been pretty easy to port existing emulators over to the Xbox. Currently you have arcade machine emus, NES, SNES, Gameboy (up to Advance), Genesis, Sega Master System, Game Gear, Atari 2600 & 5200, Atari 8 bit computers, Atari ST, Commodore Pet, Vic 20 and 64, Amiga, PC Engine (Turbographix), Apple II and IIGS, Sinclair Spectrum, Lynx, Wonderswan, MSX computers, Colecovision, MS DOS, Intellivision, Neo Geo, Odyssey, Amstrad CPC even Playstation and N64 to a degree. All easy to use and play from your TV set.
Plus XBMC for playing DIVX, XVID and other video files, viewing pictures and playing mp3s. Oh yeah it will show you a current weather report too.
Amazing stuff.
Let's see how hard MS works to kill off the mod community with XBox 2.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Here's my question: How does the XBox handle someone who wants to grab their saves and a game they own and head off to a friend's house (who already owns an XBox)? With the PS2 or Game Cube, you just grab the memory card and the game and head over.
I assume you can copy save games between XBoxs when they're connected to the LAN too. This doesn't come up too often, but still - it does come up occasionally.
I don't really want to get into a flame war, but I really don't see how using a hard drive to save games is any better than using a memory card - the flaws with the memory card (small storage space, slow write speed) don't seem to be large enough to really offset the flaws with using a hard drive (lack of portability, more fragile). They're just different. I'm just curious if the XBox has a solution to bringing save games over to your friend's.
Carrying the XBox over and being able to connect them without requiring a TV for both XBoxes is only worth half credit (since a memory card is much smaller and less prone to break if you drop it on the floor).
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
One thing they fail to note, among all those glowing numbers and SpikeTV accolades:
Have they actually made any money yet? Or are they still bleeding money like they had been the previous 2 years?
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
The XBox does support memory cards. You have to copy save games from a management screen (similar to the PS2 and Gamecube memory card management screens).
The problem: Most save games are too big for 8MB cards. You would need 32MB for KOTOR I or II. You can only fit one Halo 2 "profile" on an 8MB card.
Benefits:
The big potential benefit for the HD, is for downloadable content. That is the primary driver for the Sony PS2 HDD upgrade: Large storage for dynamicly updateable content and updates in FFIX.
I can do everything you listed above, with more ease, on my computer, which can also be hooked up to my TV. Which I would rather do than have my Live account cancelled because I modded my xbox.
Seriously, I don't find that very amazing. I doubt enough people in the world do either to make any type of signifigant increase in xbox sales.
They weren't trying to get a stranglehold on the market. They were doing something that's called "entering a market." I will give you one million dollars (if I had that much anyway), and let you pick any existing industry. You then have five years to produce a return on my investment by doing business in that industry. Very unlikely in ANY industry. Getting recognized as a legitamate name costs a lot of money and a lot of advertising. Microsoft needed to get contracts and partnerships that it didn't have before and start doing things and hiring people that it hadn't done before.
It's pretty equatable to a store (just with a few extra 0's on the bankroll). The initial investment is huge. You need to purchase property, and either build a suitable structure or remodel the existing one to fit (or pay a likely higher price on an already fitting location), you need to invest in initial inventory, hardware and electronics, pay the connection or transfer fees on all the services, and then you need to hire a workstaff. At this point you have still not made a dime, but boy are you spending it.
Once you open for business, you have a mountain of debts, which turns off investors (this is one of the few areas where a pre-existing corporation entering a new market has an advantage. it can offest these costs with profits from other divisions. However, many major investors will see this new division as a big gaping black hole and will be more hesitant to invest), meaning odds are those debts aren't going anywhere just yet.
Most importantly, you're new. Few people know about you, and even those that do don't know wether it's worth doing business with you. You need to spend money to get people to do this by advertising, and it's usually neccessary to cut prices to razor-thing profit margins (or even temporary losses) so that people are more likely to gamble on a "test" purchase from you. Microsoft did this by selling the Xbox at a loss initially. Nintendo has done this, Sega did this, I'm pretty sure Sony does this, although I've never cared enough to look up the particulars, and Microsoft had to do it to keep up. I don't know if Atari ever did this, but if they did, then it would have hurt them far worse. Nintedo was an old and successful card and board game producer, Sony had a long line of successful electronics, and Microsoft has operating systems. They all had to take the initial entry pains to get into the video game market. The fact that Microsoft is dealing with those pains the same way Nintendo and Sony did should not be suprising. In fact, it should be [reassuring or troubling, depending on wether you want to be reasonable and open or simply want Microsoft to fail for failure's sake]. It worked for the the other consoles. That's not to say it'll work for the next one, but it does strongly suggest that it's a pretty good way to go.
About the only company that didn't take initial losses on entering the gaming system market is Nokia. They went and tried to sell their handheld system at $400 out of the gate (I can only hope they were trying to profit off of system sales without having to rely on game sales or gamble on continued future success, anyway. If they were selling below cost, then they have worse problems than I ever thought). Had they started out with the sort of prices they cut it down to, I still don't think they would have succeeded, but they would have had a decent shot at getting some impulse buyers on the hook.
Microsoft is the only company who can lose a billion dollars on a product and consider it a success.
Saying that hackability is driving the XBox sales is just ignoring the facts. Having the highest attach rate for any console ever (7.6 games per console) means that there are a lot of quality games people are willing to pay for on that console. That's what drives the sales, not the ability to hack.
Well, that may be true for you - but I heard and saw about it from numerous friends. Most who are not techies at all. They play video games and don't read Slashdot.
I also can do everything I listed with ease on my computer. However I wanted a media center pc for my living room and I didn't want to spend a lot of money.
As for emulation on a pc vs. the xbox - all the Xbox emulation software benefits from the standardized controllers. On the pc it's a crapshoot as to whether a particular emulator will support say the dual analog sticks on your pc controller.
The other nice thing is the Xbox software is easy to use with a remote or controller sitting on the couch. Just simple menu driven screens.
If you don't think there is a market for this I suggest you take a look at how large the mod scene is. And yes the primary driving motivation for the mod may not be what I think is cool and what I use it for (video and emulation). It's more likely piracy seeing as a modded xbox can suck a game off a dvd in 15 minutes or so and can also play downloaded isos.
Do you honestly think the only people who modded Playstation's were techs who post on Slashdot???
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Any "Top 20 Publishers of the Year" list that puts EA at number 1 will get no respect from me.
"Fable" was awarded "Best Role-Playing Game" at last month's Spike TV's second annual Video Game Awards.
Do you REALLY want to mention that the Spike TV Winners Bought and Paid For By Advertisers Video Game Awards are really the way to say how good a crap ass RPG like Fable is?
There are 8 MB memory cards available... alas, as others have pointed out, some games have save files too large to fit on them. KotOR and KotOR II saves are around 25 MB each.
assume you can copy save games between XBoxs when they're connected to the LAN too. This doesn't come up too often, but still - it does come up occasionally.
Actually, you can't. Ironic being as network gaming was what they pushed before Live, and yet you can't transfer settings or saves over the network. Oddly enough, transferring over a LAN is something so simple, even crap OSes Windows 95 can do it, but the Xbox with it's modified Win 2K kernel can't.