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Microsoft's Tokyo Game Show Showing
Microsoft's Tokyo Game Show press conference had quite a few choice revelations, above and beyond 1080p for the 360. Several 360 titles are now platinum with games like Kameo, Project Gotham Racing, and Perfect Dark Zero becoming available for about $30 in October. For those with Xbox Live, the first bring it home content is now available from TGS. Demos are expected later this week, but so far all we have to show for the event are some picture packs. The hopeful Xbox presentation, located as it is in Tokyo, has prompted some consideration of the 360's future in Japan. Despite the upbeat tone, the general consensus seems to be Microsoft has already lost the Japanese market, before the other systems are even on the market.
The last thing 360 developers need right now is Microsoft running their mouths off about 1080p support for games. The 360 graphics hardware simply is not powerful enough to handle games at that resolution. The 360 really isn't even able to handle 720p very well with huge numbers of 360 games plagued by screen tearing, jaggies, lack of affine filtering, and poor framerates.
The 360 is essentially at 480p console. A 4xAA 480p framebuffer fits perfectly in the 10megs of EDRAM. Anything larger than 480p on the 360 requires a tedious to write and performance draining tile renderer to be able to fit into the too small EDRAM. That is the main reason so many 360 games a filled with jaggies as developers don't or can't write tile renderers as their games are already running in the just playable 20-30fps range already.
And now Microsoft has stood up in front of the gaming world and bragged about 1080p gaming support? Right as we are learning that the PS3 already has two to three confirmed 1080p launch titles. Now every 360 developer is going to have to listen to gamers ask why there are no 1080p games on the 360 if Microsoft claimed the system is supposed to support it.
What a bunch of boneheads running the 360 project. No wonder the system is selling worse than the first Xbox.
They almost did have a PS1 emu. Connectix, the company that MS bought VirtualPC from, used to make a PS1 emulator for Mac and Windows. However, Sony bought it from Connectix after failing to win a lawsuit over it.
This guy's the limit!
I don't know what Microsoft is thinking with this 1080p announcement. The best analogy for it would be a manager deciding on their own to enter their middleweight boxer in a heavyweight fight. In this case the manager is Microsoft and the boxer is the 360 developers out there.
Turning on the ability to output a 1080p signal doesn't change the underlying 360 hardware in any way. Reminiscent of the way the bungled backwards compatibly where if they had just stuck to their guns and just kept repeating that they didn't think BC was important. Instead the came out with a half-assed solution so they could claim a bullet point on a feature list and it has been nothing but a PR nightmare for them ever since.
1080p support is very similar. If they had just stuck to their guns and continued to downplay 1080p it would have been somewhat negative, but now they are making things worse by bringing the issue right to the foreground and their hardware simply can't handle the task.
This has to be a marketing driven decision, like backwards compatibility, and not a sound technical one.
Microsoft needs to take 100,000 Premium Xbox 360 systems and lend each of them out for a week in Japan free of charge. Repeat 12 times. They could make a deal with the Japanese video stores to lend them out and after the 12 weeks they could take ownership of them. I know that there isn't video game rental in Japan, but it could be to Microsoft's advantage if they tried it. If each of the consoles had 8 games with it, it should give a diversity of play. It would be a test drive. The Japanese are very familiar with Nintendo and Sony consoles, but are not familiar at all with Microsoft consoles. People could borrow it and play around with, try Xbox Live Gold online play. It would create product awareness. Most people are reluctant to shell out a few hundred dollars before they try something. Total cost for Microsoft, about a hundred million dollars. But, it would almost certainly be worth more than that in free press coverage.
In the event that no one wants to even try out the Xbox 360, Microsoft has to abandon Japan as a console market. If you can't give away your product, how can you sell it?