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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!!
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
Are you trying to make it sound like MS hemoraging money is a bad thing?
If they keep trying to break in to the Japanese dominated console market and keep failing, losing tons of money, all I can say is "Good for them".
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
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 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
I think you guessed poorly. As someone in retail electronics, the vast majority of people have no idea what resolution means. Couple that with the higher and higher demands on performance PC hardware, and its an expensive proposition. Joe Majority is not going back to PC gaming, ever. And the majority is all that really matters here.
'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.
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...
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.
Not Meta-modding due to apathy.
I think you've got this entirely backwards. It's PC gaming that's in trouble, not the consoles. Average people have little to no interest in constantly upgrading their PCs just so the newest game will run, worrying about driver problems, patches, the current rash of DRM on PC games, etc. With an Xbox360 or PS3, they just come home with the game, put the disc in, and it starts. They didn't even have to look on the back of the box before they bought it to see if they needed to spend $200 on a new video card first. The reason it takes games like Assassin's Creed so long to come out for PC is because the PC version is almost an afterthought now, it's hardly even considered a major platform. Grand Theft Auto IV is probably the "biggest" game of the year, and last I saw it didn't even have a PC version planned. If you're a PC-exclusive gamer now, you're going to get left behind on a lot of the big games, and I only see this trend continuing in the future.
Sturgeon was an optimist.
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
They:
1. Release XBox360 slim (or with blu-ray...) then
2. Release XBox 4 and 'legitimately' call it '4'
The whole 360 thing was to have a number starting with 3 to compete with Sony.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
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?
The fact that yourself, as well as all your kids all have high-end gaming PCs suggests you're far richer than most gamers, and your opinions are probably completely out of touch with reality.
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.'"
Don't forget how you don't have to worry about little shits running around with wall hacks, transparency exploits and other things that tend to happen in the PC gaming world within a few months of a game's release.
:)
Oh and don't get me started on how so many PC releases are bugfests for their first few weeks or months. Nothing sucks more than downloading a demo, seeing it run so-so with promises of fixes before it goes gold, then buy the game and it not work at all without either a lot of dicking around with the drivers or waiting for a patch that fixes a compatibility issue with your particular hardware. God help you if the game vendor and the hardware folks start pointing fingers at each other instead of patching.
There's also the issue of PC games being stuck on the PC you installed it on. Your mention of DRM covers that, but you know, it's great to be able to pop out the DVD of any game I own and toss it into any friend's 360 and not have to worry about installing or affecting the 'security measures' of the product.
The list, with me, goes on to the social side of console gaming. Even with WoW being the dominant gaming force, I can't stand playing it. It's not fun to lose in PVP because someone else downloaded a script/mod that makes their character quicker at certain tasks than someone with the normal interface. I hate playing games where people are sitting around typing instead of actually playing. On the modern console, or 360 at least, every controller comes with a headset so if people are going to be talking, they'll likely be productive because they aren't keying away-- but speaking with their actual voice. They don't have to go download teamspeak, or whatever today's voice conference application is and switch back and forth between the game and the software when wanting to talk to someone else, and so on.
All this and if you go ahead and plunk down $200 for the new graphics card, there you are, sitting at the desk, using the same interface you use to browse the web, do your taxes, work, etc. It's just nice to sit on the sofa with a beer and relax to the hdtv and surround system instead of being hunched over a desk like folks already spend eight hours a day working at.
To me, technological bliss is where all computing is done on the laptop and all gaming is done on the console. Not very geek, but it interfaces with a real life a bit more than the old computer desk with a bunch of gear that heats up the room by 15 degrees and is loud enough to drown out a window fan.