Xbox 360 Launch to Face Several Hurdles

JamesO writes "Microsoft's J Allard has said that the Xbox 360 will be released in differing versions over the next five years. "It's something we're not ready to announce yet," he said. "I don't think it's a one-size-fits-all [approach] over the next five-year horizon." Relatedly JamesO writes "Microsoft is saying that anywhere up to 40 games could be released for the Xbox 360 during its launch period, but which of those will make or break the console's launch? Pro-G choose their ten most important Xbox 360 launch games. Not the ten best launch games, but the most important for the success of the Xbox 360."

Comments

Skip TFA

[kirkb]

10: Kameo: Elements of Power
9: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
8: Ridge Racer 6
7: N3: Ninety-Nine Nights
6: Dead or Alive 4
5: Call of Duty 2
4: Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter
3: Project Gotham Racing 3
2: Madden NFL 06
1: Perfect Dark Zero

Re:Skip TFA

[Bobartig]

Super Mario Brothers 2 wasn't really a sequel to SMB. Nintendo took a game called Doki Doki Panic, which had a completely separate cast of characters, and its own story, redrew all the characters to be from the mario world, and released it in the US as Super Mario Brothers 2. I mean, can we really call this a sequel when its just a completely different game with a Super Mario name tag slapped on it?

Then in a bizarre twist, they released the american version of the japanese game as Super Mario USA (since the japanese already had a Super Mario Brothers 2, in a game that was very similar to the first title, and has been released several times in various forms on US carts as "Lost Levels")

Despite the wierdities of its sordid past, SMB 2 is still a great game!

Re:Skip TFA

[syates21]

Well, according to this Wikipedia article Madden 2005 was one of only 9 games to sell more than 1 million copies on the Xbox, so yeah I guess it's pretty important to them. It's even more important now that it's the only NFL game in town, and there won't be a competitive (better?) ESPN NFL game to compete with it.

Also, even in the PS2 world, the Madden has the next 3 top sellers after the GTA series and GT3. So, yes I would say they are quite justified ranking it highly in the article.

How many multi-million selling launch titles do you really think they're going to have for this thing?

Re:Skip TFA

[ThePepe]

Heres a quality example of how they changed the artwork.

Wikipedia - Doki Doki article

Let's read it again

[lastberserker]

Right here :-)

On Xbox 360

the Xbox 360 has an architecture where you essentially have got three processors and they're all running the same memory pool and they're all synchronized, and cache coherent, and you can spawn off another thread in your program and make it go do some work. That's kind of the best case and it's still really difficult to turn into faster performance or getting it to get more stuff done in a game title.

On PS3:

Is the performance benefit that you get out of this worth the extra development time? There's sort of an inclination to believe that, and there's some truth to it, that Sony sort of takes this position where, 'okay it's going to be difficult, maybe its going to suck to do this, but the good game developers are going to suck it up and make it work.' There's some truth to that. There will be the developers that go ahead and have a miserable time and do get good performance out of some of these multi-core approaches. And Cell is worse than others in some respects, here.

Re:Over a PC, not the PS3

[Breakfast Pants]

He actually didn't berate them, he acknowledged that it is where the industry is going and they probably don't have much choice. He simply warned that the performance leap of this generation over the last won't be that great because it will take developers a long while to adjust.

Re:Nailing your own coffin

[FidelCatsro]

What MS says and what MS does are rarely related ;) , plus its the public perception that matters not the reality .An improved feature set , be it for games or for movies will cause a problem
People will hear that "New 360" will contain feature X and Y above their model ,and then later on another version with features N and Z will come out , in essence competing with your own product.

So they will perhaps wait and in the mean time get a PS3 or Revolution and perhaps intend on getting an Xbox 360 when its actually released with all its features or (if all the things are released at once) when the market has settled and see which is the dominant type of Xbox.

Now they may intend on getting one later , but very few people actually do.

The only two choices people really want to make when getting a console are "Which games shall i buy" and " which type of console will I get" if you start to offer variations on the console beyond the superficial you rob the console market of one if its primary advantages

Re:Relax, 360 will most likely include hard drive

[Babbster]

The 360 will almost certainly include the hard drive at launch.

You ALMOST have it right in that the 360 will CERTAINLY include the hard drive at launch. It's been confirmed. I'm wondering how many times Allard and company have to confirm it before people accept it.

People seem to have been so brainwashed by the speculation (not hype by MS, but wild-ass guesses by "industry analysts) over the last two years that nothing can get through the mental blocks anymore.

Allard's comments about potentially shipping an Xbox 360 sans HD are for the future, going after people who wait for price breaks and a more full game catalog before buying (like me, as a matter of fact). Hence, he wants developers to code for the possibility that a hard drive won't be on the system. That means that they have to optimize save files so that memory cards can be used (none of that "take a snapshot of memory" nonsense as Bioware did with Knights of the Old Republic). It means that they may have to include an if/then statement regarding hard drive caching and make sure that their game runs acceptably with nothing but the optical drive. What it DOESN'T mean is that the Xbox 360 is coming out with no hard drive, nor does it mean that developers have to release multiple versions of their games for compatibility purposes.

The worst-case scenario is that a few early games may absolutely require the hard drive to run. Of course, early adopters will [interestingly] not have any worries about this since they will already have the hard drive, and the hard drives will be available to anyone who wants one. This isn't an N64 situation where extra memory was required for some games and it wasn't included with the console - that's at least certain at the beginning, and possibly (Allard was trying not to rule anything out) for the life of the device.

Most of the above, by the way, wasn't aimed at the parent but to the doomsayers elsewhere in this discussion.

Re:Backflip

[enc0der]

Regardless, it's not a PC, I can attest as I helped work on it. Everything is custom silicon as far as the processors go. Not to say the SDK hasn't been unified as stated for both PC and Xbox, from a development standpoint, I can see why they'd do that, but hardware wise, I am actually really interested in getting my hands on one. I worked on the graphics chip.