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."

Comments

Re:Of course they don't have plans.

[KingArthur10]

Yes, what they will do is wait for the market to become saturated with Wiis. Then they will start selling different colors. Colors will correspond to different bundled games. After a while, they'll release a Wii.1 version with expanded internal Solid State memory, possibly more RAM (to enable larger texture files), and the elimination of the Gamecube slots to make it slimmer. It's possible you'll be able to purchase a USB accessory to connect Gamecube devices to.

Xbox 360 Hardware Still Isn't Profitable

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Xbox 360 Hardware Still Isn't Profitable

[TeraCo]

Are you retarded? Why would they dump the 'difficult and risky to chip' xbox360 market for the 'I can pirate games with 30 seconds on a search engine' vista market?

If they abandon the console market, it will be because they're leaving the games industry all together.

Re:No new *kinds* of 360s in 2009

[Chris Burke]

We're not being pedantic, thats a straight forward interpretation of what is written.

Yes, that's a straightforward interpretation. Another straightforward interpretation is that there'd be no new types of 360s (360s could possibly refer to either individual machines, or classes of machines, much like "I didn't see any new birds" could refer to individuals, or species). And since a sentence having multiple straight forward interpretations is completely bog-standard in English -- it can take a great deal of effort to write in such a way that there isn't multiple possible meanings -- most people are very used to holding these multiple definitions in their head, and selecting the most likely one based on context and experience. Or all of them, which is how puns work.

So of the two meanings, which is more likely? MS isn't going to manufacture any xbox hardware of any kind in 2009? Or they are not going to release a new design for their hardware in 2009?

Maybe pedantry isn't the right word. What is the right word for assuming there to be only one possible correct interpretation of a sentence?

Though to be fair, adding the word "types" or "kinds" would have certainly made the meaning more clear. I'm all for that.

Re:What PC can't play a video game?

[Dutch Gun]

So if a game engine can scale down to the Wii, why can't it scale down to low-end PCs? It most certainly can. I've heard so many people say things like "Oh, the xxx engine can't do this or that fast, etc..." More often than not, it's the content, not the engine, that kills performance. At my last company, our in-house engine (which was then making Xbox, PS2, and GameCube titles) was ported to the PSP. It did a fine job, too. That same engine is being used now for all current-gen platforms (360, PS3), and they're still making PSP games with it. There's a limit though - it wouldn't be efficient to scale it down to the Nintendo DS - they have an engine for that which is optimized specifically for low-memory platforms.

It's not always an issue of just the engine, though. There are lots of issues with scaling a game. If you have an extremely CPU-intensive AI system that runs fine on the Xbox or PS3's multiple cores, how do you affect this without substantially impacting gameplay? If all your art is shader-based, and relying on shaders that simply don't exist on the Wii, then what? There's not always a practical way to scale down the number of bones a character has - that's another scaling problem for you.

At some point, it becomes easier to simply rework the game for the lower-end platform than to port the game. Likewise, the gap between the highest end PC and lowest end of the current market seems to be substantially larger than it used to be.

The game my company is currently developing requires hardware with shader 2.0 support at a minimum. All of our assets are being developed with this hardware in mind. Should we create two sets of assets, one for shader 2.0 hardware and one using simple blended textures? Lighting, another shader-dependent beast, would end up looking completely different for the two systems. While this is possible, you end up making significant compromises in the look of the game.

It's all great to say "scale it down to low-end PCs", but we're making version two of a successful online PC game. Our players will be expecting a game that looks and plays significantly better than the first version. So while we're not going to require ridiculous specs, we still have to compete with the screenshots and videos of other PC games. There's a pretty significant difference between a Tetris game and what we're producing.

Re:Make way for the console that will kill PC gami

[drinkypoo]

See, the sad thing is PC gaming isn't King, even if its better.

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.