The Industry's Opinion: The 360 Launch

Gamasutra's ever-interesting question of the week queried individuals in the games industry for their opinions on the launch of the Xbox 360. There were opinions from both sides of the issue, with folks in between as well. From the article: "In my opinion, Microsoft did a superb job of establishing Xbox 360 as the premier next-gen gaming platform. However, it suffered a huge setback when it failed to get enough machines to the market for the Christmas holiday. While coordinating a console launch across multiple continents is truly a massive undertaking, a company as massive as Microsoft has no excuse for being so grossly unprepared. -Coray Seifert, Large Animal Games"

Comments

Re:This of it as this...

[heinousjay]

Yeah, they're dying all right. They're barely making more money than most people can comprehend.

Totally Botched

[MBCook]

I see the launch as totally botched.

First there are no great games? Where is the Halo? Where is the Mario? Where is the must have? It is sports and FPSes, and that's about it. I want to play PGR3, and Kameo looks interesting (although opinions on it vary wildly). But past that is is all sports and FPSes (Call of Duty 2 is nice, but it isn't original, it was on PC first). Even a copy of Burnout Revenge or SSX: Tricky or something like that with updated graphics would be nice (Sorry, not an Amped fan). There is no game worth the $470 it would cost me to play it right now (game + system). When I bought an X-Box (a few months after the launch) there was Halo, Jet Set Radio Future (AMAZING game), and a few others.

Second is launch problems. Like people in the article said, a world-wide launch is nice, but only if it works. They only had 400k systems for the US and that is a joke. This part was a DISASTER. Why not launch in the US and Japan only (Europe and other countries later)? Why not launch in the US only and then other countries? You don't want to be over stocked, but you don't want this problem of no-one able to buy your system for the next 2 months. Add in the crashing issues (very small, but got tons of press and thus bad) and things are not good.

Core System is by far the biggest mistake of the launch. "Our console is $300!" is not a good message when the $300 version is crippled. The built-in HDD was easily one of the best things of the original XBox. It could be used for caching and such (helps kill load times). It made saving fast (as opposed to the sometimes glacial pace of memory cards). Dropping it was a HUGE mistake. And in the future you will either put games on the HDD or on many DVDs (see next point). So selling without it is a mistake. I think the whole "Core System" thing was just terribly confusing to the public (when something like 20% of people see "In HD where available" at the bottom of a TV show and think they are watching HD on their old 10 year old TV, you can't expect them to get "Core" vs "Full"). And why does a 20 gig HDD cost $100? That's insane. Make the drive a 3.5" instead of 2.5" and sell us 60 gigs for that $100 and still make a nice profit.

HD? Buy our system and you can play games in HD. All you need is a $1500 TV. Yeah, RIGHT. Most games that are out now are not that much better looking than a XBox or 'Cube when you are on an SDTV. The storage issues worries me (I think they will need to move to multi-disk games VERY soon because of all the high-rez content. And anyways, can you really tell me that Resident Evil 4 on the 'Cube doesn't look good enough? What about Gran Turismo 4? Every previous console generation has brought massively improved graphics. 2600->NES was a huge jump. NES->SNES was too. SNES->PS bought us into 3D. PS->PS2 brought higher poly counts so people weren't blocks anymore. PS2->360 brings us... slightly less jaggies. This jump is the first time the graphics are not obviously improved by a large amount. Maybe things will look better in later titles (they always do) but it's not there now (maybe on HDTV, but that is not many people).

I'll probably buy one later, but I don't think they did a very good job with the launch. The massive shortages were easily the biggest problem. Why didn't they wait until December 14th or something like that so they'd have an extra 2 weeks of production to sell? I know they talked about almost holding the launch, and I think they would have been better off if they did (especially in the games arena when they could have had DOA 4 and other big titles).

Now they did some things right, don't get me wrong. The aesthetics of the unit are better, the controller is better, the XBox Live Arcade is ingenious (I can't wait to play Smash TV and such, but I'm not pay $410 for Smash TV). I wish they would open it up (sell a little dev-kit for $50 or $100 that you do on your PC and upload things to your 360 and you can enter competitions and such. Program it in some managed language l