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J. Allard Responds to Hard Drive Criticism
Edge Online is reporting on responses Xbox 360 platform chief J. Allard gave in response to questions regarding the hard drive on the Xbox 360. From the article: "I don't know who we've let down. There isn't a game on 360 that you can't play without a hard drive, so I think that's a good thing for consumers. We've made a commitment to broadening the audience, and while I think most of our energy here at X05 is about the hardcore, over time we're really setting the stage for making this a bigger category for everybody. So from the developer point of view you have the best tools and the commitment of the most well-resourced company in the world going worldwide with this product and saying that we want to grow the audience. So that seems like a win for developers - I'm not sure who's supposed to be disappointed."
Heh. He lies in that statement. Flat out.
/will/ require a harddrive to play.
Quote: "I don't know who we've let down. There isn't a game on 360 that you can't play without a hard drive, so I think that's a good thing for consumers."
I can name it right now: FFXI. It
Matthew Walker
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yes...RIGHT NOW there aren't any because they haven't had all that much time to figure out everything they can do with the system.....but now developers have to make sure that their games can be played without a harddrive, so, if every one CAN be played without a harddrive...why do the other people have the harddrive (besides listening to music)??!?
it seems to me that everyone who buys the one with the harddrive will be getting screwed since the harddrive won't really add to the gaming experience....it's like getting a really fast car, but then realizing that since everyone else is going 5mph, you have to go that speed
Without a harddrive how am I supposed to install linux on it and turn it into a cheap media center that runs mame ?
Search your logs like the web: splunk!
I think he missed the real point of the criticism with his defense. I think the idea of different tiers of packaging and possible upgrades is a good idea. But I think many people believe that internal storage is no longer one of the "optional" features that can be removed to cut the cost of the machine.
...the game could be crippled without one. Imagine when all the new maps come out for Halo3 and you're the one that can't play with your friends on Live because you don't have the HD to download the map-pack.
They really need to give up the act about 'broadening our audience' for a while. Until this system costs less than I pay for my car each month, I don't think they'll be reaching for anybody but hardcore gamers.
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
Uh, that'd be your consumers J.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
And again Microsoft is going to find a way to fall flat on it's face and land in a pile of money.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
There is no way Final Fantasy XI can play WITHOUT a hard drive. It's really simple, MMORPG will always have patches and update contents. So unless M$ is dropping FFXI, or J. Allard isn't aware that FFXI will be ported to Xbox360, his statement is simply not true.
The problem with making it optional is that developers will never make any cool features for the HDD unless it's ubiquitous. I think that's the main reason Sony just did away with the HDD when releasing the PSTwo. Why would developers make games that even made use of it at all, much less required it, if it just alienated the people that did not have one.
We may not see quite the same problem here, since at least it will exist as an option from the start, but no major developer is going to release a game that has any features supporting the HD without serious consideration of how it will effect the customers that don't have one.
I also agree with the first reply, FFXI will NEED the HDD, but maybe he's just using Microsoft speak (poster #2) and saying that there are no games on the system NOW that require the HDD because there's technically no system available and no games available. Wouldn't be the first time MS abused "language loopholes" to pacify the audience...
And one of the requirements is that you make a game that can be played without a hard drive and without a memory card. You should be able to go through the game from beginning to end without saving.
I'll leave it up to you to decide how much extra work that is for developers.
Sure, all games can run without the hard drive...
BUT, if ALL systems DID have the hard drive... that allows the game developers to utilize it to it's max potential.
Imagine if the Revolution's controller was optional. An add-on of sorts. That kind of cripples the system. But since ALL the systems will have this extra ability, it means the developers can utilize it. Only having a fraction owning a particular accessory could scare developers away from actually using it.
This, IMO, is why it's too bad that all the systems don't have the hard drive.
J. Allard's "extreme" makeover from (balding gray-haired corpodrone to earring clad, doofus, sweatshirt under the jacket, teenage-style hipster) is one of the saddest and most embarrassing things to come out of corporate America in a long, long time.
From the article:
"I'm not sure who's supposed to be disappointed." -- The unknowing customers you're screwing over by forcing developers to not take advantage of the hardrive for fear of screwing their customers over and the developers who can no longer use the HDD for caching, etc. etc. (listed later)
"Are there developers who are disappointed? Yeah, sure." -- Did he not just say he wasn't sure who was supposed to be disappointed?
"I was the biggest fan of the hard drive and its potential, but the problem is that we sold 22million Xbox consoles and 5million, maybe 10million just don't care about it." -- Maybe they didn't even know it was being used in games they were playing, used for caching, storing huge save games that would require an entire memory card, used for map updates, used for patches to the game itself, etc.
"We can either ask the gamer to pay for it, pay for it ourselves, or prove that there's enough value in it and have the gamer say 'I want to pay for it' - I think that's the right model." -- again just completely missing the point, it creates a situation where developers have to make a choice to support it or not, piss off the customers that don't have one or not, etc.
"A lot of people have said: 'This is really confusing - you have different configurations and blah, blah, blah', and I'm like: what consumer electronics business in the world has three manufacturers, three brands that each make one thing that doesn't change for seven years?" -- that should be pretty damn obvious, it's the consumer electronics business that YOU are in...
The problem is that there is an implication that you're saving 100 dollars by getting the cheaper model when in fact you will need to purchase a 40-dollar memory card to save games (something that is a fundamental requirement of modern gaming). Thus you will only save 60 dollars and get a much worse deal. A lot of people will be disappointed when they opt for the cheaper model and find out a few hours later that they still need to spend another 40 bucks before they can save their game.
As it is I see this as a major mistake on Microsoft's part. They are making it more difficult for developers to take full advantage of their console just so some customers can save 60 dollars and still feel like they got ripped off.
The people who lose are the people who want to play old xbox games on their xbox 360. My understanding is that you need the hard drive (and an xbox live connection) to play older xbox games. Or has this fact changed in the past two weeks?
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
Source
Last but not least, after we were told that there was no ability to fly aircrafts in the game due to the DVD drive's inability to stream the environment fast enough in full 720p resolution. We asked Jacques Hennequet (Producer for Saint's Row), "If the Xbox 360 Hard Drive was standard across both SKU's, would flying aircrafts in the game have been a reality?", Jacques simply answered "Yes". While he completely understands why MS made the decision to not include a hard drive in the Core System, I think he felt somewhat disappointed, as it could have opened up much more possibilities within the gameplay for Volition's first Xbox 360 title.
Not making it standard is making features be cut from games. End of story. Why is this a big deal when the others don't have a HDD? The Xbox had one standard, so it's taking a step backwards. THAT is why people are complaining - you're removing a feature that was being used unconsciously, and causing developers to cut features that otherwise would have been included.
$10 says that they'll figure it out as the developers mature in their understanding of how to exploit the hardware. First gen games are almost always less polished than later games on a new system. Give it time. Saints Row II will probably be chock full of aviation.
On the bright side, has anyone noticed that since the hard drive is removable, when it does go out (and it will), all you need to do as Joe Blow average consumer is go buy a replacement drive for it? The hard drive and the dvd drive are the two most likely pieces to fail in the console. At least you won't be screwed when the hard drive craps out as in the original XBOX model. Notice that I'm talking about Joe Blow here - not you hot rod modders.
Sure that's what the words in the article can clearly mean, but J. Allard just doesn't have a clear understanding of English. What he said was:
"I don't know who we've let down."
He doesn't seem to realize that "let down" is a synonym for disappointed...
Ah wait, Firefox find stalled on the apostophe. He means the total package shoudn't be an overall disappointment, while not having a hard drive is a specific disappointment.
But he still doesn't realize the chicken or egg problem that the hard drive entails, kind of like the HD content or HD TV situation.
This is all about price points. Mom goes to Walmart around Christmas and sees "XBox 360 $299". She's much more likely to buy it than she is to buy it at $399. That's all that matters. Mom will buy it.
So now little Jimmy has it and he's slapping down $60/game every now and then, whenever he can afford one himself, or can nag his parents into buying one.
Jimmy eventually gets Halo 3, and yes there are map packs, and yes his friends are playing them and he can't because he can only download one map onto his memory card at a time and it's just a huge pain. So he whines and it's been a year and his mom is like "god he spends a lot of time on that x-box I wish I hadn't bought it" and she forks over $99 for the hard drive upgrade.
People are more willing to spend $800 over two years than they are to spend $600 all at once. It's just human consumer nature.
Microsoft wants you to buy the stripped down version, then they will entice you to buy the upgrade. They get more users from the stripped down version, they get more money from the upgrades. It's win win for them.
It makes perfect business sense and I don't blame them for avoiding taking an extra $100 loss on every system they sell so it has a hard drive.
But does it suck for the developers? Of course. Does it mean games won't be *as good*, certainly. Is it better for Microsoft, probably yes. Personally I'm just going to suck it up and buy the premium system with the hard drive and the wireless dohicky etc. It's the price of early adoption, wait a year and premium will be $100 less, and regular will be $50 less, and more and more games will come out that just require the hard drive.
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I support spreading santorum
""Sometimes doing the right thing means doing the hard thing. Are there developers who are disappointed? Yeah, sure. I wish there was a hard drive and I wish there were four terabytes of memory; I wish it were free to consumers and I wish we could put one in every TV set - there are a lot of wishes that I have but at the end of the day we're trying to run a business, and you have to make those trade-offs. "
Why do people even print or read this bullshit. People don't get their wish for a standard hard drive, and he sympathises with them by saying he wishing for all this fanciful bullshit like being totally free to everyone and four terabtyes of memory. I know we all know this, but this is just obvious PR garbage that isn't even worth the time of day. I'm presuming Edge magazine now has a comedy section, although they didn't in last months mag, so maybe they hide bullshit like this on their website only where hopefully less people will waste their time reading it. They could include anything that Allard or Kutaragi says and put it next to their pretty bad comic strip.
There isn't a game on 360 that you can't play without a hard drive
I can't not misunderstand this sentence because it doesn't have not too many un-un-negatives...
3) Backward compat. Because the original Xbox has a HD and did not abstract it away, all Xbox 1 games will require a HD to run at all.
The HD was abstracted away to the same degree as storage in Windows. They could easily emulate the filesystem on solid state memory if it were fast enough; the problem is simply that so much storage was made available to the developers (something like a 700mb utility drive, not including save storage).
I find it ridiculous that you need an Xbox-specific hard drive. For $100, I can get at least a 150 or 200 gig IDE/SATA hard drive. (IDE/SATA because there's almost no price difference.) Knock it down to, say, 80 gigs (still four times the standard drive) and you should easily have enough money to buy a cheap IDE card, maybe even a SATA card.
I don't claim that I could build a gaming computer for less than $400, or $300 without a hard drive, though I might have fun trying. But I fail to see why we need a $100 drive that's only 20 gigs. In fact, considering the cheapest gaming computer Dell sells is over $1000, why not apply the same price scaling they do to the RAM, CPU, and video card to the hard drive? It'd end up costing less than $350 for the Deluxe, and instead of 20 gigs, you'd get over 200.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
First gen games are almost always less polished than later games on a new system.
Yes, with enough polishing even the foulest turd can become a shining diamond.
Common knowledge.
And that's why people are disappointed. One of the great things about a console is that you can assume people will have the same hardware, so you don't have to scale down to the lowest common denominator. If it works on the development machine, it'll work on everyone's machine, otherwise theirs is officially broken.
And if a hard drive, broadband connection, high-end nVidia card, quad-core processor (do I have that right?), and all of these are things you can count on most people having, you'll use all of them. Meaning we'd see a lot of very cool games using all of them. As it is now, this is worse than the original xbox -- it's just a high-end PS2. The only reason I'll ever buy one is if I can't borrow someone's for long enough to play through the Halo 3 campaign.
It looks like PC gaming wins here, with things like Half-Life 2 -- you pretty much need an Internet connection, and probably broadband, in order to play the game and keep up with all the patches, meaning all that, plus some decent minimum requirements, can be assumed by any modders. Which is why we see such awesome mods. Natural Selection, anyone?
So, PC gaming wins... maybe that's what they wanted?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
"So that seems like a win for developers - I'm not sure who's supposed to be disappointed."
Ah! But you do know:
"Are there developers who are disappointed? Yeah, sure."
And then this:
"You bought a Mini Cooper and you want the Turbo, you're screwed. You buy the Xbox 360 Core system, you can build up to the premium system and you won't be left out of anything along the way."
Horrible analogy. People will not "upgrade" their Xbox because no games will require it. Developers will not create games that require the hard disk because most people will not have it. Recurse. How many times have we seen this?
Btw, is being an arrogant fuckwit a prerequisite for working at MS?
SquareEnix certainly seems to believe that FFXI will be on the Xbox 360.
After all, there is always the remote possibility they may have someone "on the inside" feeding them information.
You ignorant cock, theseeria. "Uninformedseer" certainly seems apt right now.
Without a harddrive, there will be no backwards compatibility (=recompiled binaries) for current generation XBox games.
"There isn't a game on 360 that you can't play without a hard drive"
You can't play ANY XBox game on the 360 without a hard drive.
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I still remember a game for the Dreamcast, I think it was called Dragon's Blood. It might have had a different name in the USA.
What surprised me at the time was that I could hear the CD-ROM seeking all the time. As soon as I started moving around, the CD would seek like crazy. I can only guess it loaded data on the fly off the CD.
But here's the fun part: the game never missed a beat. It ran flawlessly at a clean 50 fps. (That's the TV refresh rate here in Europe.)
That's just the kind of thing that you can do with good hardware and software design.
On the hardware side, the whole system didn't crawl as soon as you access the CD, as is pretty much the norm on PCs. Loading and running the game just happened at the same time with no slowdown.
And on the software side, it tells me that they not only coded the game to be able to do that, but most likely also took the time to optimize the placement of the files in the resources, to minimize seek times. That's another thing that just doesn't seem to happen on the PC.
Giving the XBox a standard hard drive just allowed the exact same kind of crap. Throwing some files together haphazardly, and relying on the HDD to sort out the performance problem. I.e., what the HDD really brought you there probably isn't the faster load on 2nd try, but the dog slow load on the first try.
And how much can you cache anyway? You don't want a 5 GB game cached to a 10 GB HDD, because you only have enough place for two of them then, and that doesn't even leave any space for saved games. So sooner or later (e.g., when playing a bunch of maps online in random order), you'll have to reload one from DVD anyway. Welcome back to the slow moving blue bar.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
...both seem a bit overpriced.
$50 for a 64MB memory card? Amazon.com (just as an example) has generic 512MB memory cards at the same price.
$100 for a 20GB hard drive? I can easily find 120GB drives for that price elsewhere (assuming a 3 1/2" IDE drive is OK).
C - the footgun of programming languages
I seem to recall reading some M$ sales info on the XBoX a few years ago (I'm too lazt to find a link) that said if 10% of the user base gets a hardware add-on, that is consider a good margin for an add on. Unless your company also sells the addon then, it's not worth development cost to code for an addon. I thought these were the reasons they included a HD and Broadband in the XBoX, so they would be used by developers, and thus a reason XBoX was better than a PS2.
/. rss. If I can't do all that *and* have great games on 360, I'm happy where I'm at now.
I think they see XBoX as a failure, even though they said they expected a loss. They are now trying to not repeat themselves, but they don't know why XBoX failed. It failed because of the lack of games, not the platform. How sad is it when I mod my XBoX so I can BT any games I want and realize the 5 I bought are the only 5 I'm intereste in playing?
I love my XBoX, it runs mame, streams avi's, and mp3's, does karaoke, taps into my tivo, and lists the latest
If a few of you will recall there were several games for the Xbox that required patching. Where will you store the patches when you have no HDD?
We need to let game makers know we want games that require the harddrive and maybe MS will stop selling the core system
Here's a nice little article that came out on GAF today: http://www.gamesarefun.com/news.php?newsid=5630 Exerpts: "Microsoft seems to be wasting no time with their online program for Xbox 360 - the company has announced the first download-only game, the exclusive Xbox Live Arcade game Marble Blast Ultra....it's expected to be available as soon as the Xbox 360 is out, and requires the hard drive equipped Xbox to download." I wonder what he would say to that?
Huzzah! Microsoft has lost my sale.
This post made up my mind. /. actually did something good...
Out of all of the MS crap I don't like, I actually purchased and enjoyed the XBOX. After this news, I have decided that I am not going to bother with an XBOX 360. The Nintendo controller is a million times more interesting than purchasing another Jaguar. One word sums up that decsion (not including the HD): LAME.
The problem with optional console perhipherals
...my mistake for not researching the details.
But now, I wonder what Microsoft were thinking when they decided on an external hard drive. The case of the XBox 360 looks large enough to hold a 3 1/2" standard IDE drive. That would have been a far superior solution.
C - the footgun of programming languages
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.