Does MS need to support more new IPs this gen? *spawn

[Shifty Geezer]

You can can only play the cards your dealt as the saying goes. MS executed well, Sony didn't.

I don't equate good execution or poor execution to luck.

But what the opposition does (or what cards you are dealt) is luck. Taking 'luck' as being when factors outside of one's control go in one's favour.

This is something of a trivial discussion of semantics though - the real meat of the discussion is whether MS fumbled their way to success as some think, or whether they engineered and worked their success. The latter is definitely the case. MS didn't do too much wrong, gaining them a higher probability of success in a world of uncertainties.

 

[fearsomepirate]

So according to you a game that sells 5 milion copies is objectively better than a game that sells 1 million copies which in turn is better than a game that sells 500k copies. Is that correct?

No, what I'm saying is that there's no such thing as "objective quality." Quality judgments are 100% subjective, not objective. Each of us makes his own quality judgments for himself when making a purchase based on our own completely individual definition of what constitutes a "good" game. If you love Superman 64 more than any other game in the world and think Uncharted 2 is boring and stupid, then for you, Superman 64 is a high-quality game, and UC2 isn't. If you have ever disagreed with another person over whether a game was good or bad, you know what I'm talking about.

A game that sells 5 million units was judged by more people to be good enough to deserve their money than a game that sells 1 million units, which in turn received a positive judgment by more people than a game that sells 500K copies.

Also you don't have to personally play/experience a game to know whether it's good. Just look at the sales numbers. 20 million = awesome, 10 milion = good, 1 milion = waste of time. Right ?

I can look at the sales numbers and say, "Five million people thought this game was worth buying," or "Only fifty thousand people thought this game was worth buying." That doesn't tell me whether or not I personally will like it, because I have my own individual tastes as well.

I don't know why this is controversial; do you think that everyone likes the exact same things?

 

[mrcorbo]

But what the opposition does (or what cards you are dealt) is luck. Taking 'luck' as being when factors outside of one's control go in one's favour.

This is something of a trivial discussion of semantics though - the real meat of the discussion is whether MS fumbled their way to success as some think, or whether they engineered and worked their success. The latter is definitely the case. MS didn't do too much wrong, gaining them a higher probability of success in a world of uncertainties.

Given that their hardware design turned out to be faulty and that this wasn't addressed fully for a few years into its product life, that's quite a statement. They either did a lot of other things incredibly well, or their luck was even better than is being suggested.

 

[Scott_Arm]

...They either did a lot of other things incredibly well, or their luck was even better than is being suggested.

It's the former, not the latter.

 

[Tea2]

A game that sells 5 million units was judged by more people to be good enough to deserve their money than a game that sells 1 million units, which in turn received a positive judgment by more people than a game that sells 500K copies.

Are you familiar with the concept of advertising and/or marketing budgets?

Don't you agree that you can sell more copies of a game if you spend more money on advertising? Regardless of what that game actually is? What about the so called niche genres - are they all automatically worthless crap because they always sell to a very limited amount of people?

I'm sorry I just can wrap my head around this way of thinking.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Given that their hardware design turned out to be faulty and that this wasn't addressed fully for a few years into its product life, that's quite a statement.

They got one thing wrong, maybe two if you argue library distribution early on being too narrowly focussed on core gamers. I didn't say they got everything right.

 

[fearsomepirate]

The version of history you guys are telling doesn't match the sales data. The 360 has done fairly well, but it's taken six and a half years to reach 60 million units. The NES, Wii, PS2, and PS1 were significantly more successful than that. It's a successful product, and it has maintained a sales lead over the PS3 in the USA, but I'd stop well short of making it a textbook example of how to capitalize on a rival's mistake. The Microsoft of the 2010s is not the Sony of the 1990s.

I am not, by the way, disputing in the slightest how much better the Xbox's development tools were and are. But it doesn't seem to have a huge effect on what's actually on the shelf. I mean, I don't think the fact DMC4 had longer load times on the PS3 was driving all that many sales one way or another. IMO, the most important things were, in order:

1. FIVE HUNDRED NINETY-NINE US DOLLARS
2. Xbox Live
3. A couple big-hitting exclusives in the first two years.

#1 was 100% Sony's fault. #2 were genuine "MS capitalizing on Sony's failure," because PSN was kind of crap for the first year or two, and good PS3 exclusives didn't come for a long time.

1. Red Ring of Death
2. Didn't hit as big or as often with big-hitting exclusives as they needed to.
3. Subscription fees for online multiplayer

Are you familiar with the concept of advertising and/or marketing budgets?

That's a classic excuse for why other people don't like the same games as you, but it's not a good one.

 

[Scott_Arm]

No one is saying 360 dominated the way the PS2 did, and no one is saying the PS3 is a bad product. Microsoft had to be on the ball to make gains, and they did. Microsoft executed better than Sony did in the first half of this generation, and went from a 25 million unit console to a 60+ million console. I'm not sure how getting your console out a year earlier than the competition is luck. It's called designing and executing. It's what every single hardware company tries to do.

 

[Tea2]

That's a classic excuse for why other people don't like the same games as you, but it's not a good one.

I'm not talking about specific MS franchises, or the games I like and don't like, I'm making a general observation about the video game market as a whole.
Personally, I think there are plenty of things that might contribute to a game's success. So not only advertising budget and the way it's being spent, but also release date; developer's pedigree; belonging to a franchise/ being a new ip; genre and mainstream appeal, other games releasing within the same time frame "stealing the thunder", etc.

If you think those things don't matter and good games simply sell, bad games simply don't... Okay.

 

[mrcorbo]

They got one thing wrong, maybe two if you argue library distribution early on being too narrowly focussed on core gamers. I didn't say they got everything right.

I didn't say you said that. I'm just pointing out that that one thing was kind of a big thing to get wrong.

 

[RobertR1]

2. Didn't hit as big or as often with big-hitting exclusives as they needed to.

huh?

Gears and Halo have sold tons. The Fable franchise has sold multi millions with both versions.

XBLA has been a huge success. Kinect Sports sold millions. As has Dance Central and Forza.

I'm failing to see these huge Sony franchises doing record number routinely.

 

[fearsomepirate]

No one is saying 360 dominated the way the PS2 did, and no one is saying the PS3 is a bad product. Microsoft had to be on the ball to make gains, and they did. Microsoft executed better than Sony did in the first half of this generation,

And I don't disagree with any of that. I'm just saying it's more because Sony executed so colossally badly than because MS executed particularly well. I think MS's execution was mediocre--some good, some bad. Nintendo's was obviously much better (in the first half!). Sony's was a flusterkuck of epic proportions. I don't think MS had the people or the vision necessary to do what Nintendo did. But I think Sony's screw-ups were so bad that it left MS an opportunity to hit a critical mass in those first two years where third parties would look at the costs of cross-platform development and say, "Well, the Xbox is 85% of the market we're trying to hit, so we're not going to bother with PS3 development" and let things snowball from there (cf. PS2 vs Xbox and Cube last gen). That didn't happen because of a few ways MS failed to execute, the most notable being the machine's reliability. I'm not saying they did awful. I'm saying they did fairly well, but not nearly as well as people in this thread are portraying them as doing, and not half as well as they could have done.

I'm not sure how getting your console out a year earlier than the competition is luck.

I'm not. I'm just saying it's not a strategy you can reliably execute, because it requires having competition that's currently so dominant that they're in no hurry to destroy their current market.

If you think those things don't matter and good games simply sell, bad games simply don't... Okay.

Do you believe that people don't actually like the games they play?

 

[fearsomepirate]

huh?

Gears and Halo have sold tons. The Fable franchise has sold multi millions with both versions.

Yes, they did well. But none of them crossed the 10m threshold. Combined, they don't even add up to Mario Kart Wii. For a fun comparison, here is the total of the top 5 exclusives* on each platform in the 3D era.

PS1 = 45.24m
N64 = 41m
DC = 7m**
PS2 = 50m
GC = 27m
OXbox = 20m
360 = 25m
Wii = 140m***
PS3 = 25m

Neither MS nor Sony have done exceptionally well with big-hitting exclusives this gen, in large part because they don't have exceptionally strong first-party publishing. They've done okay, but cross-platform titles are far more important to gamers this gen. A histogram would be more informative, but I only do so much work for free.

* I'm counting exclusives with a significant time lead because coming out a year later in video game world is like showing up to a party four days late. I'm not counting Wii Sports or Kinect Adventures.

** LOL

*** Holy crap

 

[Scott_Arm]

Ummm, Halo 3/ODST/Reach on 360 have sold over 25 million alone, and Gears 1, 2, 3 have passed 15 million. Forza is probably around 10 million on 360, and Fable 2/3 are around 7 or 8 million. That's not counting Kinect titles. I have no idea where you got your numbers from, or what they're supposed to mean. Sony's only title to break 10 million is GT5, I believe, so I don't know what significance that benchmark is supposed to hold. Halo 3 broke 10 million, I think. Most of Sony's exclusives never broke 5 million. This gen has belonged to multiplatform.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Ummm, Halo 3/ODST/Reach on 360 have sold over 25 million alone, and Gears 1, 2, 3 have passed 15 million. Forza is probably around 10 million on 360, and Fable 2/3 are around 7 or 8 million.

You just listed nine games. I just added up the top five. Much more detailed analysis could be done, and if you want a more informative comparison, I strongly encourage you to do one.

I used Wikipedia, because it's the only source that has a lot of numbers easily reachable in one place. They're not up to date, but it's not unreasonable to assume the out-of-dateness isn't biased toward any one particular console. Better data is out there, of course, and if you would like a similar analysis using data that's more up-to-date, but more time-consuming to do, I enthusiastically support any efforts on your part to do so.

As for what it shows, you can reach rather large numbers by adding up the very large quantities of middling-to-decent selling games. But in my opinion, a dozen games that each sell 750K-1.5 million units aren't hardware-sellers. Oh sure, fleshing out the library is always nice, but in terms of really raising the public image of the machine and getting units out the door, you need those big, hard-hitting 5+m titles. So I looked at just the five biggest titles as sort of a first-order (or maybe even 0th ) approximation of the information you'd get out of a histogram, which I didn't do because

A histogram would be more informative, but I only do so much work for free.

That claim, to summarize, is that

a) Microsoft has done better on big-hitting exclusives than Sony.
b) But MS didn't do as well on the big-hitters as the top-selling consoles of the past or present.
c) That has in part prevented the Xbox 360 from being the NES/PS1/PS2/Wii of this gen.
d) Thus MS needs to get better at figuring out and funding the kind of IP that will draw in the big sales.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Sorry, I misinterpreted top 5 games for top 5 IPs (exclusive), because that's what this thread is about. I'm not sure what top 5 individual selling exclusives tells us.

 

[RobertR1]

Sorry, I misinterpreted top 5 games for top 5 IPs (exclusive), because that's what this thread is about. I'm not sure what top 5 individual selling exclusives tells us.

Even then top 5 would surpass 25mil as the Halo games have hit that alone. The two Gears game would push it past 35.

Seriously though, consider paying him. I don't want this entertainment to end. Don't ruin his for me, Scott.

 

[swym]

God of War didn't spend 30 years in development hell.

And this matters how exactly? The whole discussion was about how late into the console lifecycle new IPs are introduced, and in that regard the X360 currently seems to be on-par with the PS2, with Alan Wake being introduced at about the same time into the lifecycle as God of War. The PS3 is actually behind in that area, with the last new (retail) IP introduced about 4 years into the console lifecycle. This might change soon, unless of course the announced IPs also spend 30 years in development hell (and at least for The Last Guardian this seems to be the case).

Quantity is fine. Problem is quality. MS is much worse at cultivating new, successful IP than Sony. Stuff they finance, if it stays exclusive, tends to have a rather short half-life, often not meriting a sequel.

I don't really know about that... it seems that both have their ups and downs. This generation Microsoft piggybacked some very successful IPs from the last gen: Fable, Forze and Halo all sold amazingly well and saw a few iteration this gen. Even PGR which you considered "dead" saw two retail releases this gen (which is actually more than we can say about Sony's Gran Turismo).
All at the same time three of the best selling exclusive this gen for the PS3 are also from last gen: God of War, Metal Gear Solid and Gran Turismo - so it's pretty much the same deal. And even the success of Killzone this gen was founded on an IP from last gen.
Yes, Sony also cultivated some successful new IPs this gen: LittleBigPlanet, Uncharted, Resistance, Infamous, Motorstorm and perhaps a few others. But at the same time Microsoft also cultivated some of their own IPs this gen to different levels of success: Alan Wake, Crackdown, Gears of War (which was far more successful than any new IP introduced by Sony this gen) and a few others - including supporting original IPs which later went multiplatform and also became best hits (Mass Effect for example - which is an approach I actually consider better for both developers who retain their IP and for the gamers themselves).
Both had some decent one-offs that didn't actually evolve into a series (Kameo, Heavenly Sword etc) and both had their flops (Lair, Too Human etc). Claiming that one company is good at raising successful IPs this gen while the other does not is just blindly ignoring the facts. To create a smashing hit you always have to throw all kinds of shit at the wall, and see what sticks.

This is not to say that I agree with either MS or Sony's philosophy: I've had for example my share of complaints about MS driving their own IP to the ground and not understanding what actually made their games good (Crackdown VS crackdown 2 is a prime example I think).

A game that sells 5 million units was judged by more people to be good enough to deserve their money than a game that sells 1 million units, which in turn received a positive judgment by more people than a game that sells 500K copies.

This point of view is a bit flawed considering the fact that the people who bought the 5 million units didn't actually play the game before purchasing it. Some might have had some experience with a demo (which isn't always a good representative of the actual game), other played it at their friends, but the majority didn't really play it before buying it so you can't conclude from that how many people actually liked the game. It is entirely possible that 4 of those 5 millions actually didn't think the game is any good and were disappointed by it.
And this is especially true for big blockbusters that sell millions of copies at launch: for most people there's still no word of mouth going, or way to experience the game before making their purchase. There is usually a strong correlation between good games and sales because good games will have a strong word of mouth and sell over time, but there are many exceptions to that rule.

How is your rival making a huge mistake not lucky?

Ok, so now luck is a quantifiable feat? I'll go inform Cortana
But in that regard, isn't Microsoft just extremely unlucky? If a rival making a huge mistake is considered being lucky, having a rival pulling an ace out of their sleeve should be considered unlucky, correct?
Nintendo pretty much pulled an ace at the beginning of the generation, with a product that offered very high differentiation. Microsoft was trying to 1-up Sony who was the market leader last gen and they were pretty much successful at that, but then all of a sudden Nintendo came out with their Wii and catapulted themselves to first place.

Yes, they did well. But none of them crossed the 10m threshold. Combined, they don't even add up to Mario Kart Wii. For a fun comparison, here is the total of the top 5 exclusives* on each platform in the 3D era.

I'm sorry, but this comparison and the numbers you came up with are pretty flawed.