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J Allard Interviewed
malchus6 writes "J Allard, one of the Xbox honchos over at Microsoft, spent an hour in an online chat answering questions regarding the upcoming release of the 360 including some pointed questions having to do with the two different price points, no wi-fi inclusion, his opinion on HD-DVD and more..."
If you are interested in the XBox 360, the information in this interview could be extremely useful to you. However, whether you're interested or not, make absolutely certain not to forget this crucial fact while reading this article:
You are reading an advertisement.
Either way, I think tha core package is a good move on their part. Whoever buys it will still have to buy accessories for it if they want to use it (controllers, games, etc). In the end, they might end up making more off those people that buy the core packet than the premium.
This interview took an hour to complete?
Some marketing mumbo-jumbo bs, and then a summary that says absolutely nothing other than "We want to make the best console ever for everyone." Which was probably written prior to the interview, then cut-and-pasted into the chat session. br>
If I am going to spend time viewing an online interview with an "expert," I expect to gain some insight, maybe, possibly, learn some new things. The MS press releases on the XBox 360 would have been a more informative read... and would, in essence, say exactly the same thing.
I know I'm getting modded down for this, but really now...
One valid item-of-note:
FTA: "Q: Why even offer the core package, its seems quite useless[sic] A: the significance of this message can not be understated. many of the publishing and retail partners want our commitment to grow the market. and as you have heard from us in our press conferences and such we are very committed to growing the market."
Translation: We have to convince developers and retailers that consumers will purchase the product, which they assuredly will not do at the price point for the complete system.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
My friends aren't hard core gamers. They don't look up specs or read online chats. They'll probably buy the cheaper xbox only to find out later it's missing functionality (no backwards compatability, as well as other features). This is just a muck on MS's part. And a 2.5" drive? Why the hell would they go and do that? Just to make it more expensive? I'm waiting for the PS3. Hopefully it takes a normal 3.5" IDE drive just like the PS2 does.
For $100 more, you get:
-remote control (for playing movies)
-wireless version of controller
-Xbox Live headset and 'silver' membership
-20GB hard drive (needed to play some Xbox1 games)
-High definition AV cables
If you don't get that more expensive package, you *have* to spend at least another $25 for a memory card to save games. For the Xbox1, you absolutely needed the $25-$30 remote to play DVD movies. I suspect that the Xbox360 will require this.
If you didn't care about high def cables, Xbox Live, or features that need a hard drive, then you have saved $50 at this point. This seems more like a scam to rip people off than really offer them a cheaper package.
Advice for my fellow geeks: before seeking out that threesome you dream of, you might see what a TWOsome is like first.
J Allard (Expert):
Q: Can a USB Memory been used by the xbox 360??(I'm asking this because the 360 has USB ports)
A: at present our design for xbox 360 uses the usb ports in a read-only capacity for playing music and viewing photos. if there are other applications that you guys think are interesting then please give us your feedback.
This is such a weak answer.
Here's an interesting application, Mr. Allard: How about not screwing customers by forcing them to buy some undersized, overpriced "XBox360 Memory Unit", instead of allowing the use of USB flash drives for game saves?
The thing to remember is that while we designed a no compromises game system, we made some compromises.
I just find it funny that they keep talking about "growing the market" when they $300 verison comes up. Um... I thought that was what the original XBox did, by trying to into new areas for the video game market, what with the hard drive and built-in ethernet and other features traditionally associated with PC gaming. Making those things into peripherals now with the XBox 360 seems to be acknowleging that growing the market wasn't actually a good idea to begin with, and they should retreat from that and just stick to the things the un-growed, traditional console market does.
How do you "grow the market" by releasing something totally indifferentiable from the PS3? Or does "grow the market" mean "try to steal Sony's market"?
Bashing on MS is fun, but come on.
You're obviously not in marketing. Consoles have traditionally hit the market in a bare-bones configuration designed for minimum price point (usually sold at a loss). Vendors can then make up for the loss on the base unit by selling accessories and games licenses. This is really no different than what Sony does with the PS. Yes, I personally wouldn't buy one without hard drive and WiFi either, but you and I aren't representative of the customer base as a whole. Face it, most consoles are bought by clueless parents to satisfy whining kids, in which case price is by far the most important factor. Little do the clueless parents know that they'll soon be spending several times the cost of the base unit in accessories and games... you'd think they would have figured that out by now.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I still haven't seen a reason to buy this thing. Where are the games??? Who cares about streaming video, mp3's and cameras? That's what PC's are for. Hell they even say you need a media PC to even use the feature. If you got that already, what's the point? I still haven't seen any games and it's like 2 months from launch. -Kevin
"What is your opinion on HD-DVD?
A: it's going to be interesting to see how and if a high def format for movies plays out. when we designed the the initial xbox many people asked if sacd or dvd audio would be the successor to the cd format for music. as everyone knows the real successor was mp3 and digital distribution with things like napster ipod and msn music. while there is a lot of talk about this in the industry it will be interesting to see what the exact future of this is for movies. of course i think there will be a need for higher capacity optical media for storage applications. we prefer hd-dvd to blu-ray in terms of the flexibility it offers to different applications as well as the infrastructure costs to the market."
The real answer...
Well we hate Blue-Ray because it is what Sony picked and we are going to do everything we can to piss all over it. We realize that by not providing HD-DVD by default it will give the Playstation 3 a significant advantage in game content and as such we need to tell all the Xbox faithfull that it really isn't that important.
The real question that should have been asked.
How few XBOX 360's need to be sold this year (shipped to customers not stores), before you consider it to be a failure?
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
Q: will the loss of HDD mean that all games will be made without the HDD in mind, therefore effecting users of the premium pack?
A: absolute not. consider this last generation where somewhere in the neighborhood of 20% of game consoles had hard drives attached. this did not deter game developers from utilizing the hard drive both for exclusive games and cross platform games on xbox. this generation our first party team and our exclusive content developers are just as committed to using the hard drive and like we they demonstrated with this generation our third party cross platform developers are committed as well. games like splinter cell, madden, and tony hawk all demonstrated unique capabilities in hard drive configured systems.
What an idiot... "20% of systems had hard drives" -- yeah, but 100% of XBOXES had hard drives, and 100% -- count them! 100% of the XBox games are able to use it for something, if only storing saved games.
Compare this to the number of PS2 games that even have the OPTION to use a hard drive. He's trying to make it sound like the sometimes-absent HDD will be no problem. But it's a HUGE problem. There is yet to be ANY console with an optional hard drive that had more than one or two games support it.
Actually, its quite smart. If you look at the suggested pricing for the components to upgrade the core system to the premium, the price goes way above the premium package pricing. Since most consoles are purchased by parents for their whining kids, they will get the cheaper version to make the holiday nice, and then their kids start whining about how useless the box is without the add-ons (backwards compatibility requires HDD, for example), suddenly MS has the revenue from buying all the addons separately. Its sort of a delayed "bait and switch". Come in and buy the core, but six months later, you have purchased the premium for a lot more money...
What?
I think the point here was that we see many great games these days which are cross platform. Cross platform games (with PS2 and Xbox, eg.) necessarily are treating the HD as optional, so it stands to reason that great games can be made to leverage it when it's present and function when it's not.
The xbox360 will sell with or without wifi. Would you rather
(a) include wifi, take a extra $10-20 hit for each console sold
(b) sell wifi seperately for $50, profit
No. Modern games are too complex. Too many variables going on, why do you think save files are so big? They save entire data structures into files, you sure as hell wouldn't want to type them out. Save passwords are only good for arcade type simple games
How are they going to do savefiles? A $40 64mb memory card. That's right. Since you need the memory card, the budget system is actually only 60$ cheaper, and you loose the 20GB harddrive (100$ for a 20gb 2.5 inch harddrive isn't so horrible, $40 for a 64mb flash card that they will be mass producing is)
Isn't this true of PSX, PS2 and GC?
Not one of these could save games out of the box, so people bought memory cards. I don't remember an overwhelming amount of complaining except in comparision to cartridge games.
I too, was very surprised and slightly annoyed with the $300 model because I didn't know who they were trying to appeal to. Working in EB Games I rarely see a casual gamer talk about the 360, but I now understand what J was saying by making it easier for a new adopter to get into video games by purchasing the Core SKU. The early adopter isn't going to need everything if they are just curious about the system. If they do a little research they will find out the bundle is a better value but it might not fit their needs
Look at it this way: no matter which console you buy, you're getting a great deal - a lot of expensive hardware at well under cost. Yes, the add-ons are too expensive, but it's still an excellent deal compared to buying a PC to play games of that level, or even just an equivalent graphics card.
Try to take a more balanced view of things. Oh wait, slashdot, right...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?