Slashdot Mirror
New Xbox 360 Dev Kits Shipped Out
GamesIndustry.biz is reporting that Microsoft has sent out new versions of the beta development kit for the Xbox 360, replacing the Apple platforms used up to this point. From the article: "Prior to E3, developers reported that a very small number of these more advanced kits had been manufactured, but it's only in recent weeks that they have begun shipping to Microsoft's development partners on a wide scale."
all Microsoft can say that they did was to virtually tie a company that has a fraction of the financial assets (Nintendo) while bleeding out money.
Yes, because a $2 billion loss (for a $8 billion profit on $36 billion revenue) last year is "bleeding out the company". Nevermind that the $2 billion loss of their Xbox division would have made a nice tax writeoff.
And let's pretend that Sony didn't only make $0.8 billion profit last year on $71 billion revenue! What are they doing wrong over at Sony?
I would be surprised if there is a third XBox if the 360 is nearly as unprofitable.
Come to think of it, Sony's not been particularly profitable recently, especially given the failure of the PSP - maybe they should give up too?
Does anyone know what happens to the old dev kits from the old consoles?
I mean the snes and megadrive kits and others from time past.
I mean I know you needed certin hardware to run your games on when you made them but can they not be emulated?
Any information on what happens to the old kits would be appreciated.
-Jason
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/30/ 1346221&tid=212&tid=98&tid=187&tid=233
Sony isn't an angel either.
Sort of off topic...
I haven't yet worked on any next-gen titles, but I have experience on current-gen Xbox, PS2, and PC games. Our game logic has a lot of branchy code, really branchy, spaghetti code, with lots of indirect branches, etc. This code represents the majority of the actual volume of our source, but in practice only takes something like 3-10% of CPU time. Everything else in the game is suited to parallelisation.
So we have this 10/90 split (at worst) of time spent excecuting the wacky code vs. the pure number crunching. Why on earth would I want a processor that is better at doing the 10, when I could have one that is better at the rest?
Just because they make a profit now, does not guarantee profit in the future, let alone breaking even. I could be wrong, but in the last quarter, the X-Box division make something like $175 million. Comparing that with the $2 billion loss they've incurred so far, that means they would have to maintain their current profitability for nearly 3 years to break even. They can't do this, especially with losing money on a new console.
20 games is a NOT a conservative estimate. Most people I know do NOT buy 20 new games off the shelf for $50 (I'am also in the male 18-24 demographic that MS is targetting). The people I know do not have $1000 of disposable income just lying around to spend on games.
Your figures for installed userbase is also incredibly off. Maybe in the US that might be true, but worldwide, Sony has close to 2/3 (if not more) of the installed userbase, and MS is barely ahead of Nintendo. Nintendo is by no means out of the running yet, since they have almost always managed to turn a profit, unlike MS's entertainment division.