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Ballmer Justifies 360's Costs

Posted by Zonk on from the best-things-in-life-aren't-free dept.

Next Generation follows up on news last week of the enormous financial burden the 360's launch has placed on Microsoft. CEO Steve Ballmer sent around an email discussing the company's bright outlook with the new console. From the article: "While Xbox 360 hardware itself is the most prominent area of videogame-related investment, Ballmer indicated that further development of Xbox Live is also integral to the success of the platform and its respective division, saying, "We must execute our Live strategy with speed and precision." Relatedly, Live's downtime yesterday has resulted in an underwhelming feature addition: messaging.

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  1. DX10 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Well.. MS Vista doesn't really contain any benefits for gamers, in any way.

    However, MS Vista does contain DirectX 10-- and as far as has been announced so far, DirectX 10 will only be available for MS Vista. Before long, DirectX 10 is going to be required to play any new video games. So if you want to keep playing video games and get all the features and whatnot, you are going to have to upgrade to Vista. So you just have to learn to think like Microsoft. The way you probably think, "focused on gamers" means "designed to appeal to gamers and make gamers want to buy it". The way Microsoft thinks, "focused on gamers" means "we will be forcing gamers to buy it".

    In other words, Vista is "focused at gamers" the same way a sniper rifle might be "focused at" someone unexpectedly running across the White House lawn.