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Ballmer Reflects on Xbox Launch Errors
Steve Ballmer, cheerleader for all things Microsoft, was candid and reflective during the first official day of the expo. Gamespot has coverage of the one hour rap session he held with journalists, discussing game demos, the positioning of the 360, and their rivalry with Sony. From the article: "He voluntarily reflected on the poor pre-release showing the company gave the first-gen Xbox, calling those early demos 'a disaster.' Threaded through his comments in the freeform discussion were constant references to what the company must do to better its performance in the console wars with the Xbox 360." Update: 05/18 21:31 GMT by Z : Helps if I actually link to the article, huh? Interview with Ballmer up on Engadget, as well.
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000597043723/
* Snippet *
Bach: Just to give you a specific example, wouldn't it be cool to have the game that has the person on the PC being the general who is driving the strategy and the person on the console on Xbox Live executing the strategy. That is a completely new genre, not sure what you would call it, but that's a completely different experience, and it leverages everything that steve talked about that we're putting in place. That's the kind of thinking that we're going to get people to, whether it's first party or third party.
Look past the gaming aspects of the console, how does the Xbox 360 serve as Microsoft's beachhead into the living room. A 20GB hard drive isn't a lot of space for storage, but since it does have this broadband connection, how is it going to integrated with IPTV, streaming video, and streaming audio?
Three things: Number one, who knows what configurations will be there by the time we're done. I think that's important to say. Number two, because you do have the network connectivity, whether you have a Media Center PC or not. You can put an awfully big hard disk on a regular PC and plug into this ecosystem, we have plenty of extensibility in terms of storage. And then number three, you take the IP TV work we're doing, and that technology can run on a PC, on a set top box, it can run on an Xbox. So there will be, in conjunction with the work we do with the video delivery companies, particularly the telcos, who have tended to be our strongest customers for our IPTV stuff, there will be yet another way to acquire and use video content. So you have set tops, you have the set top experience, you have the Xbox, you've got a big hard disk, you've got networked to the PC in the home, so I think there will be a lot of ways to get that media onto the Xbox.
Why were they a disaster? That's what I want to know. It's not in the article at all. Is it because there were no gameplay movies?
He was talking about the original Xbox demos. Which yes, were a disaster.
GameSpot assumes a certain familiarity with the material in the articles they write, which is probably the correct way to go. You don't go to Gamespot looking for a primer in every single article; they sort of expect you've been keeping up for a while. That's why the backstory is not in there.
In 2000 (or was it 2001?), MS unveiled the Xbox and then went to E3. Prior to E3, they showed a bunch of tech demos that looked technically amazing, then their E3 showing was awful. I was there; it was pretty bad, and everybody knew it. Their biggest games at that E3 were Blood Wake and PGR, and while a lot of people were impressed with the water effects in Blood Wake, the game itself was dark and drab, as was pretty much every other game in their booth. Worse for them, hardly any of these games were in a state worthy of being on the E3 floor - they were almost all extremely choppy, for one thing (not unlike the Xbox 360 stuff released so far), and many of them crashed repeatedly.
They took a beating in the press, and it probably did hurt their initial launch numbers.
But, what it also showed is that E3 ultimately doesn't matter. Two years before, Sega had come in and supposedly blown the doors off everybody else showing 80 games for the Dreamcast in their booth alone, many of which looked really amazing and really fun and got them a ton of good press. Two years later, MS had as negative a showing as Sega had a positive one.
In the end, the fortunes of the two companies in the game industry turned out exactly the reverse of what you'd expected had you been reading the post-E3 coverage of those events. It's very easy to get sucked into thinking the majority of the public even knows what E3 is, much less cares about what goes on there. They really don't, and so much can happen between E3 and when the products you see there actually go on sale that you really can't make any judgements at all based on anything that happens there.
As for your second question:
We see all these cool demos that the PS2, PS3, X-Box, X-Box 360, GC and such can do, but why don't they put those on a disc and include it with the hardware just as a way of saying "see, this is what it can do" to the consumer, as a way of showing off.
Sometimes they do. All three current system at one point or another have included pack-in games that also have demos on them, or demo discs themselves. It's just not a standard thing, because the early demos often don't represent final product (and often won't even run on final hardware), so it's tough to include them in the first run of systems, and then there's always the question of when to update them. I think it's just a headache that the manufacturers don't really want to deal with, but you can still get demos if you wait a while for the right package.
Generally, at launch, most manufacturers assume you'll be buying a few games with your system, so demos aren't really necessary. MS does like to include demos on game discs, though, so it's pretty likely they'll keep doing that through the Xbox 360 release. (No idea of Sony or Nintendo will take up that same policy, but both of those companies have also released demo discs as pack-ins and also separately for the PS2 and GameCube.)
Yep, it's official. They only give mod points to those with an IQ less than 60.