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Microsoft Says No New Xbox 360s In 2009
OrochimaruVoldemort writes "Microsoft has said to Engadget that they do not plan on making new consoles available in 2009. This comes from the same company that said it wasn't producing a Blu-ray drive for that Xbox, so it is pure speculation. Expect to see a new console within that year. Engadget also hints: 'Microsoft representative let us know today that "While we don't normally comment on rumors like this, we can tell you that we have no plans to release a new console in 2009."' The rest of us will wait and see. For now, focus on what is available."
I just wanted to get this out of the way now before rumors start flying.
If they said they did it would hurt sales of the current revision. Now if Nintendo or Sony were going to release a Wii2 or PS4 in the next year you'd have the standard MS vaporware announcement while they scramble to actually put a product together.
I read the title to mean that MS would stop making 360s.
What the article said is that there isn't going to be a slim version of the 360 or a 360 with a Blu-Ray drive.
Quite a big difference, I think.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Microsoft not having any plans on May 14th 2008 to release a new X360 model before December 31, 2009 is front page news worthy?
No sig for you!!
Orly?
Ya rly!
Sneeky msft iz beeng sneeky
With out free on line play, being able to host your own games, LAN only play, free mods, user mod and maps, able to play 100% free games, and other stuff pc gameing will be the KING!!!!!!!!!!!
The latest comments from Microsoft in the most recent conference call confirmed that they still were losing money on the 360 hardware and that there was no ETA on when they would finally cross the break even point. The huge amount of money they charge for online and other services are what is keeping the division out of the red.
Console hardware has been to straight disasters in a row for Microsoft with the entire endeavor racking up over 7 billion in losses. Over the past year Microsoft has been slowly migrating Xbox services on to Vista. The most likely scenario for Microsoft is they let the 360 run its corse with its only real viable market being the US over the next year or two and then move on to focusing on Vista exclusive gaming and forget about console hardware. The vast majority of Microsoft 360 developers are US PC x86 directx focused and most of them would rather have Microsoft resuscitate the dying PC gaming market than being forced to work on console hardware.
Microsoft is almost certainly done wasting time and effort on console hardware that they don't have the means to compete effectively with other companies. Continued efforts to try to get the fundamental design defects in the 360 is all Microsoft will spend resources on before the leave the console market.
Of course, I don't really care. Already have a 360 and if [when] it goes up in flames [literally] I'm unlikely to buy a replacement. Personally my biggest issue with it is the noise. The fans are loud enough to genuinely detract from the game playing experience while I'm trying to listen to in-game voices.
Gary (-;
They are too busy fixing the ones they already built.......
I'll believe it when i see it....oh wait..i mean don't see it
What about the Xbox 720?
So my opinion is that those rumors sound quite plausible but if you decide to hold off on a console purchase in May 2008 because there might be a revision in mid to late 2009 you were just looking for excuses not to buy it anyway =)
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Sounds like Microsoft will release a new xbox 360 in 2008 then. That way their statment holds true...
Peter.
A great big THANKYOU!
From all the "Red Circle Of Death"-experienced gamers everywhere!
I keed, I keed!
Cheers!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
See, the sad thing is PC gaming isn't King, even if its better. Consoles make 2-3x as much as PC gaming does at least. There's no contest anymore. The King was crowed long ago.
I'd guess that the recent games like Asassin's Creed and other console-first, PC later games are starting to show up the consoles and while it's not having a lot of effect yet, it's starting to, and people are waiting for the PC release before buying, because they know that unless the conversion is a dud, the PC version is always going to be better and higher resolution...
But as I said, it's only a small number of people looking that way at present, because the difference is slight at the moment.
I'd guess they're looking ahead to late 2009 where the next gen of PC video cards will make things possible in games that simply can't be repeated on consoles, and at higher resolutions too.
Then the X360 and PS3 and both going to start looking like an oversized DS..
I'd be suprised if some in Microsoft aren't wondering what they're going to do as that starts to happen... Create a new higher level X360 maybe or maybe even some are suggesting they build a whole new console that's X360 compatible.
But that's just conjecture based on them saying they're not making a new one... Because if they did, everyone would be waiting to buy it instead and the existing stocks would go the way of the Osborne PC.
GrpA.
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
I hate to say this, but MMO games and the continuing subscription model limited only by server and bandwidth costs make PCs king of the profit field.
I hate to say it because I think all of the MMO games currently available are roughly comparable to being consumed by and subsequently shit out of a bear.
Eventually some visionary developer is going to get it right, though... and they're going to end up richer than God.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
'We don't want to say, "We're releasing a better version next year." and then have people refuse to buy the old units like they did with the HDMI thing. Especially as it would be for a full twelve months this time. That would really kill our lead against the other consoles in North America. So, uh, "We've got no plans!"'
It's almost certainly a lie. But they would be crazy to tell the truth and destroy their market until the new models did finally ship.
It's pretty much guaranteed Sony will ship new models too. Bigger hard drives, cooler processors, smaller cases, new skus with games bundled. There are always new stimuli to keep the market active. But no one in their right mind acknowledges their roadmap for the next 20 months (to the end of '09), screwing their current market with all the people who figure they'll just wait.
It's not just consoles. Canon releases a new xxxD camera every year or so, a new xxD camera every 18 months, pretty much like clockwork. And yet they refuse to announce the new model until the last possible moment, denying everything they can, so as not to trash the current prices. Look at what happened to the $3,000 Canon 5D that everyone assumed would have got a new revision in February. Even without a new rev turning up, discounting got so competetive on the assumption the old model was about to become obsolete that it now goes for a hair over $2,000. Even then, people like myself who'd still get a lot from the 5D are putting off their purchase, waiting for whatever its successor turns out to be or much lower 5D prices, rather than letting Canon shift stock now.
I wonder what the next name will be. I doubt they'll just double 360, that's kind of lame. No doubt, in the great tradition of Microsoft products, they will choose a succession of names where you could absolutely, positively not tell the order of release of the products from the name. Without knowing computer history, please put the following products in order of release:
/. would know the correct order, but the point is, Microsoft is legendary for using inconsistent, meaningless names.)
Windows Vista, Windows ME, Windows XP, Windows 98, Windows 3.1;
Visual Studio 2003, Visual Studio 6, Visual Studio.Net
(Of course, I expect most people on
So, in that spirit, we could have names like XBox Pro, XBox Gold, XBox Platinum, XBox Horizon, XBox 400, XBox 4000, Super XBox, XBox Supra, YBox, XBox 128 (I think that would be particularly unlikely, though, because it would appear to be a 'downgrade' from XBox 360). The possibilities for stupid names are endless.
Consoles, in aggregate, generate more game software sales revenue from traditional brick and mortar retail outlets than the PC. Its a bit more difficult to sort out the hardware side. NVIDIA posted a record quarter for its first quarter this year (at $1.15 billion) but that's from a variety of sources and only one of the big two name sin gaming. There is no good way to filter out PC gaming hardware vs non-gaming hardware outside of video cards so we won't try and split up the more than $100 billion a year PC system sales to compare it to the $8 billion or so in console hardware sales.
Sticking with software for a moment; if you compare US PC retail software sales vs US console software sales the PC came in third behind the PS2 and XBOX 360 last year with $900 million from brick and mortar stores (ignoring that NPD collects data from only 60-80% of the market and extrapolates the remainder). If you add back in subscription sales the PC was actually the top (non-portable) platform last year with over $2 billion in software and subscription sales. And if you accept recent evidence that digital sales have reached parity/exceeded brick and mortar sales then the PC is in the neighborhood of $3 billion in software derived revenue per year, or in the same ballpark as the top three console platforms combined.
Of course, all of that is a lot of silly wang measuring using NPD numbers. Which really amounts to comparing one wildly inaccurate (or at the very least, incomplete) set of numbers to another. The frustrating thing is that while NPD uses a lot of hand waving when describing their data collection methods and releases very selective sub-sets of data to the public (remember, their business model revolves around selling the detailed stuff); our illustrious media accepts these numbers as immutable, indisputable, fact. They then turn around and ignore that the $18.5 billion figure includes hardware, software, and accessories sales for nine platforms (PS2, XBOX, XBOX 360, PS3, DS, Game Boy Advanced, and PSP) plus partial software sales from a tenth (the PC) and proclaim that video games outsell theatrical movies tickets by almost two to one. The general public in turn parrots this line ('cause the news is always right) and console fans trumpet the 17 to 1 ratio vs retail PC software sales as proof that the PC industry is essentially dead.
Once more unto the breach dear friends...
Erm...the missing platforms from the list of nine would be the Wii and the GameCube.
Once more unto the breach dear friends...
I admired Microsoft's architecture of the Xbox 360. With the 3 processors, one for the main game thread, the other for rendering and stuff and the third one for L2 processor compression/decompression. The use of SMT to alleviate the cheap, high latency memory, the 10 MB of edram for cheap 2x, possibly even 4x MSAA or alternatively use for GPGPU tasks. With two core chips, commodity parts and third world factories, the 360 was designed for high power at low price.
Maybe if they weren't such cheap bastards and did not skimp on proper cooling, the 360 would have a much lower failure rate.
what about the wonder swan sure it never made it anywhere but japan...
and one thing i hate, is the way 'Blu-ray' adoption rates "Don't Count PS3s, because they're console sales" even though every website I googled said 'PS3 is the best Blu-ray movie player, PS3 is the Only Blu-Ray Player to support BDJava, yada yada yada..'
Why would anyone pay $400 for a Blu-ray stand alone when the PS3 is $400? and furthermore, $200 'BD-rom drives' aren't Blu-ray players even though you can buy plenty of HD movie playback software for M$ windows. $250 in 'upgrade' costs is a lot less than $400, especially if your PC is already hooked to you HDTV because you didn't want to pay $1400 for a crappy 30" PC monitor display when a 42" HDTV with PC in was $1000
anyways, consoles aren't all used to play games, and not all PCs come with a graphic card capable of playing a video game. http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/card-wars/intel-graphics-business-still-champ-but-nvidia-is-showing-rockys-pluck-257035.php at least 37% of the market have intel graphics and intel graphics don't even run 'aero' much less video games, and nvidia and AMD sell tons of graphic cards that don't play video games (any nvidia card below 'X,500' won't play modern games at any frame rate and ATI doesn't have a convenient scheme to determine which cards play games, but as intel has shown the lions share of the market is in cheap chipsets. but that's because something like 60% of the PC market is aimed at businesses most of which (graphic artists aside) want the cheapest chip available...
and then about 20% of the market are people who want 'internet capable' machines, with maybe 20% who want a multi use game capable machine, of those only 25% are serious gamers who will spend more than $200 on a graphic solution just to be able to play modern games at full frame rates (in less than HD resolution) and an even smaller set of those will buy $400+ for full HD capable graphic solutions rather than running on a PC monitor at a 'lower resolution' to get acceptable framerates...
personally, I've decided to go SLI/crossfire, and all told will spent almost 4 grand on my next gaming PC plus the TV set, and i should be able to run games for many years to come, without needing new graphic cards or a new PC... but I'm a serious gamer, and i spend thousands of hours playing games. and I expect my gaming rig to handle any game i throw at it for 4 years... if Full HD isn't the end of graphic card evolution...
(of course physics engines etc might some day go beyond a quad core CPU, and newer computer setups might save significant electric consumption)
but for at least the next 4 years I plan on being able to play anything i buy at the stores, when i build my next gaming rig.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
The subscription sales include console revenue... did you RYOFA?
For the casual to hardcore gamer though, console gaming usually is better. With a console you usually have around 5-8 years of which the platform will have new games released for it unless that platform is a total failure (Such as the Virtual Boy). With a PC you have to keep upgrading. A game released 3 years from now won't run as well as a game made today on today's hardware, however with a console usually a game released at the end of life will run just as well or even better then a game made on the console's launch date. Also, with PC gaming you have the problem of Windows (unless you feel like hacking WINE to make the newest games work, there isn't many native Linux games, though gaming is improving on Linux) which, Vista uses up much, much, much, much, much more resources then XP to run at the same level. So your XP system which ran 1 Gig of RAM, decent video card, high-end P4 could run many games decently, an "upgrade" to Vista would most likely require an extra 2 gigs of RAM, twice the CPU power and most likely a new video card to get the exact same level of performance. Console gaming usually doesn't have that problem, though some hardware gets redesigned (Game Boy to Game Boy Pocket, the fat PS1 to the slim PS1, PSP to PSP Slim and Lite, GBA to GBA SP) games will run at the same level on both of them. PC gaming is great if you have $1000 to waste on upgrades and a new computer, console gaming is great if you have say $500 to buy a bunch of games and a system. For most people console gaming wins.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Tetris, developed by Alexey Pajitnov and originally published by samizdat, is a video game. All PCs with a CGA, EGA, VGA, or more powerful VGA-compatible video card have been able to run Vadim Gerasimov's port of Tetris to the PC, even if inside an old-PC emulator such as DOSBox.
My point is that sure, low-end PCs with an Intel GPU won't run Xbox 360- or PS3-level graphics, but they'll definitely run DS- or PSP-level graphics, and probably even Wii-level graphics. So if a game engine can scale down to the Wii, why can't it scale down to low-end PCs?
Is that each console or all consoles in total? Because there are 3 consoles...
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Also what about Europe? Stores here have roughly the same amount of space for PC games as they do for all consoles combined (unless you love the pain of shopping at Gamestop).
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Indeed, though console online revenue is a tiny fraction of the total subscription based revenue in the US. Basically you have Xbox Live Gold subscribers (~1 million @ $40 a year) and a small population of Final Fantasy XI (most FFXI subscribers in the US play on their PCs) and Phantasy Star Online players. On the PC, World of Warcraft alone accounts for nearly $450 million a year in subscription revenue.
Once more unto the breach dear friends...
personaly seeing how much micro payments have managed to leach off of me in the past 2 years.. subscription based games are not the big money maker..
while subscriptions helps a company understand the market and have a realive budget, they turn away gamers.
one game i play http://www.airrivals.net/ the idea is simple.. free to play.. and you can access all content without paying a cent.. but there is an item shop that is a cash shop.. and it is done as micro payments.. they do quite well and it isn't uncommon to see the servers so full at times that you can't even login.
when wow and city of hero's came out and other mmo's (eve).. charge me for the game and let me play for free or give me the game and make me pay to play it.. not both.. but from what i know i have and others have sinked into certian games.. the give free play free pay for little things over time.. makes them a but load more money off the people who have any money.. and the rest that don't have money wouldn't have paid to begin with BUT add a very large userbase for the paying customers to interact with.. large scale PvP is better than small.. so get the other people in there for free to make it more enjoyable for the paying customers..
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
No == Yes Yes == Maybe
PC gaming seems to be a lot more popular in mainland europe than in the UK and US, I know a lot more PC gamers than console gamers and dutch gaming sites also give PC gaming a lot of coverage... So yeah I agree there.
The way to corrupt a youth is to teach him to hold in higher value them who think alike than those who think differently
It's not better, it's different. PC gaming offers the widest range of titles and peripherals and, for people for whom gaming is the focus of their life and thus they can afford such things, the most detailed gaming experience (best graphics, best sound, blah blah blah.) Console gaming offers a relatively hassle-free experience. Each has its own appeal.
I do both, and I feel I say from experience that each has its place. Don't forget handheld gaming (arguably, the oldest kind of self-entertainment) :) e.g. playing tetris on the GB SP while taking a dump, or playing solitaire on the cellphone while waiting for your number to be called, etc. There's tons of gaming to be done out there. It's an exciting time to be a nerd.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm working on the cure for the MMO. It is simply this -- make everything emergent. A big problem with MMOs are that they end up fighting evolutionary forces and market forces. Instead, co-opt them!
I'm working on a space game where everything is playable by the users, or designable by the users, scriptable by the users, or it evolves on it's own in the background using genetic algorithms. There is no dev-generated "content." There is "mining" and "farming" but this will be done by people who choose to do so, and they will be using official APIs provided them in the game. If they want not to do so, then they are welcome to use other scripting mechanisms as well. "Mining" and "farming" will just be a part of RTS-style resource management play.
There will be no spawn-camping, and no gate-camping. The only kind of time-consuming play will be exploration, which will be interesting, as there will be 400 billion star systems procedurally generated using cryptographically secure PRNGs running only on the servers.
Externalities are a fact of life -- we will co-opt them. Market forces are a fact of life -- we will make them part of the game. Emergence is not only a fact of life, but a source of everything truly fascinating in MMOs. Our game will be based on this.
You must be new here -
"Eventually some visionary developer is going to get it right, though... and they're going to end up richer than God."
Have you heard of the game World of Warcraft?
They didn't say there wouldn't be a 361 or a 720, right??? Blueray, here it comes.
Every time you call tech support, a little kitten dies.
I really wish more Americans had a mentality like they have in Japan. In Japan they're actually proud of their native companies doing well, and the populace is loyal to them. Here in the U.S., we have absolutely no loyalty to our own companies, and are more likely to bash the hell out of them than acknowledge the good they do for our economy or our role in the world marketplace. If Sony and Nintendo went under tomorrow, Japanese citizens would be committing suicide. If Microsoft went under tomorrow, most U.S. citizens would be cheering about it like it were really a great thing.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Consoles never took off in EU because of the import duties/taxes made them more expensive than those Sinclair Spectrum's you all used. It's why most of the Amiga games late in it's life were from Europe, because you all were still using them rather than switching to SNES's and Genesis machines.
I hate to say it because I think all of the MMO games currently available are roughly comparable to being consumed by and subsequently shit out of a bear.
You're one of the few. I'm pretty sure Blizzards' 100 billion subscribers think that at least 1 company got it right...
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.