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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.
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Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
...we've done a much better job at leaking secrets and hints this time around!
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
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.)