Microsoft Aims to Boost the 360's Family Appeal

Bloomberg is reporting on Microsoft's efforts to be more inclusive to 'family' game players. Essentially, Micrsoft admits they're looking to Nintendo as the generation leader this time around, with low cost and family appeal driving their sales numbers ever higher. To that end, Microsoft is looking at a possible price cut and shift in strategies to appeal to a broader audience. This dovetails with comments made by Bill Gates at the AllThingsDigital event regarding motion controls in the future of the console. "Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer wants to avoid the fate of the first Xbox. The console appealed mainly to hard-core gamers, generally males between 15 and 29 years old, and trailed Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 2 in sales by a 5-to-1 margin ... Microsoft's initial attempts to target children didn't live up to the company's expectations. A November game called Viva Piñata, in which kids build a garden and raise animals that look like piñatas brought to life, didn't make it into the top 20, even with a Saturday morning cartoon created to promote the game." It might not have sold, but VP was an awesome game.

Comments

MS is still not getting it

[badasscat]

You can't on the one hand promote games like Halo 3 and Gears of War as your premiere games (and whoever actually publishes them, MS has gone out of their way to promote the system using them) and then on the other hand try to market your system as a "family system". It's one or the other.

I know everybody wants to live in a world where everything is all things to all people, but it doesn't work like that. The fact is there is competition out there doing the family thing better than MS ever will - namely Nintendo. So why would a parent buy an Xbox 360 to play games with their kids when the Wii exists?

I hate to tell MS, but the 360 is going to meet the exact same fate as the original Xbox - it's the system for hardcore gamers. If MS wants it to be anything else, then they need to focus like a laser beam on making it something else - they can't throw all their weight behind MA-rated violent shooters like they have been, then whine about how families aren't buying the system. That's a bit like a porn movie publisher wondering why people keep spending money going to Disneyland instead of buying porn movies.

MS can't be the "family game" company as long as they keep promoting themselves with MA-rated shooters any more than Nintendo can be the "hardcore gamer" company as long as they keep promoting themselves with Mario and Pokemon. Companies have to make choices, and these are the choices they've made. It just so happens that Nintendo's strategy is working and MS's isn't - but if MS wants to change their strategy, then they need to actually change their strategy. Just saying they want some of that audience isn't going to accomplish anything.

Game Suggestion

[rlp]

Microsoft should create a new line of games for kids. I suggest starting with Super Mario Monopoly. You play an Italian plumber who's running a very very large software company. Your opponent Bowser runs a search engine company. You play by taking money from consumers, collecting other small companies, and throwing chairs at your opponents. Fun for the whole family!

Not going to work.

[stonecypher]

The only way you can pick up the family safe demographic is by discarding all other demographics, and it takes years for parental trust to change for a given company. They couldn't take the family demographic without throwing away everything they already have, or coming up with some form of radical departure from current business models.

Whereas I applaud Microsoft for looking to learn from its competition, and for admitting that this generation belongs to Nintendo, this is not something they can adapt by graft without doing tremendous damage to themselves. It would, in my opinion as a professional game designer, be a fatal error.