How to sell next-gen consoles, Marketing, Positioning, and Pricing [2020]

[Deleted member 91734]

And this is really fucking infuriating because Xbox Series X is clearly an amazing piece of hardware.

I don't think so far it's proved that it is clearly an amazing piece of hardware. It has great specs but the games so far shown have not been impressive. It's not surprising that MS is talking up game pass and backward compatibility because the new games to showcase the system are badly lacking.

 

[BRiT]

Xbox One S: 1080p resolution, lower settings
Xbox One X: 4k resolution, lower settings
Xbox Series S: 1080/1440p, higher settings
Xbox Series X: 4k resolution, higher settings

When the new Halo arrives for all of these, is it better to get the Xbox One X or the Xbox Series S version?

My take -- it will always be better to get a 2020 model console (Series S or Series X) because of vast improvements in CPU, NVME, and Memory as well as the ability to get future next-gen titles for longer than last-gen.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I don't think so far it's proved that it is clearly an amazing piece of hardware. It has great specs but the games so far shown have not been impressive. It's not surprising that MS is talking up game pass and backward compatibility because the new games to showcase the system are badly lacking.

I think based on the specifications alone, we know Series X is solid tech. It's not like it's performance is predicated on some weird/questionable esoteric tech like embedded RAM on the GPU or Cell SPUs.

I'm not judging Series X based one what Microsoft have shown any more than I'm judging PS4 Pro based on Life of Black Tiger!

edit: and just to be clear, I'm not suggesting what Microsoft showed is anywhere near as bad as Life of Black Tiger, just that it would be foolish to judge the console's capabilities before we've even seen games running on it.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

When the new Halo arrives for all of these, is it better to get the Xbox One X or the Xbox Series S version? I'm not sure which one is better in this context, or are they broadly similar? One resolution and one higher settings. I guess its down to preference, or maybe the Series S can have resolution over high settings...

I agree with BRiT, it's difficult to imagine Series S not outperforming One X is almost all scenarios despite having a theoretically lowered-powered GPU. I'm sure there will be a few edge cases but for the most part, Series S should eclipse One X.

I am really looking forward to comparisons between these two consoles going forward.

 

[London Geezer]

So. With my general understanding.
Studios have several target dates.
One of them is called content lock. This milestone means after this point nothing is added to the game. Nothing is optimized either.
Content lock will happen anywhere between 7-9 months prior to release approximately.
If you are doing an E3 type event where you show a slice of your content, that is usually done 2-3 months before the event. So not necessarily at content lock depending on when you need to show it.
The game demo is not necessarily part of the real game. But usually it is to save effort.
The game is usually completely unoptimized. Optimization, bug fixes, finalization all happen after content lock.

Once finalization is done you are in gold.

So the game demo slice is usually a ton of effort to get it to even a playable state. If you are well into content lock when you need the demo this process is less painful. If you are required to demo before content lock you’re in for a lot of effort. It takes over 1-2 months to ready a demo of this size.

so if you’re 1-2 months happens during COVID and you’re not deep in content lock, the effort is monumental to get it done.

There is a lot of stuff 343i needs to do. Namely 4 platforms, new tools, new engine, development he’ll, COVID, and then make release.

Hope that helps. That’s not an excuse for people looking for more, but it’s just an understanding that Halo was not the only game that failed. I know another title that after making the demo (1-2) effort to be shown, was canned. And CGI was sent in replacement. Then still have to make content lock by end of month. And the optimization for release in 2021.

if you’re wondering why so little may be shown, it’s quite simply, they are too far from goal. And they would rather just let you know it’s coming than invest the effort to create a vertical slice during COVID

This is all understandable. There are always reasons. And yet, MS has had a loooooong time to prepare. How can it be acceptable that they are “not ready” while their competition seems to be? Coming out with “oh but we’re not really competing with our competition” is the lamest excuse for dropping the ball again and again.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Jason Schreier said before than Halo Infinite development was troubled and answering someone on twitter he will write an article about it or more probably keep the story for his next book.

I'd forgotten the leadership shakeup of a year ago. I wonder if this resulted in the new people changing things at the eleventh hour.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1162457832580669441

 

[Scott_Arm]

On the point of them hyping the hardware but not actually showing it's capabilities:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1287070105302495233

This is what the DF guys are complaining about. I don't see how anyone could see it any other way.

 

[iroboto]

This is all understandable. There are always reasons. And yet, MS has had a loooooong time to prepare. How can it be acceptable that they are “not ready” while their competition seems to be? Coming out with “oh but we’re not really competing with our competition” is the lamest excuse for dropping the ball again and again.

Yea.. and I think troubled development should have been the topic of conversation a long time ago.
To put into perspective here (now that we know 343i failed), here are the approximate timeline differences.

a) PSX, a small cutscene in game, first official showing of TLOU2 Dec 2016
b) E3, a small engine demo, June 2017 + Paris games week when Abby is revealed
c) E3, gameplay demo, June 2018

So by E3 2018, look how _far_ they've already come. They would not release the product for another 2 years until June of 2020.
By comparison 343 released Halo 5, Oct 2015
They had to support Halo 5 for the next 3-4 years in content releases, FORGE, warzone, firefights etc, new arenas new modes etc,
And to help fix MCC.
And do Halo Infinite.

By the time we see the first glimpse of an engine demo, that doesn't happen until 2018.
2019 we get the small cutscene
2020 we finally get a gameplay demo.

To be on track with TLOU2, they would still should have 2 more years on top of what they've shown.
But they don't, they don't because the consoles are launching this year.

There's a lot to be said on whether or not 343i dropped the ball. Or whether 343i was asked to do too much.
I really don't know. Halo is not like what _any_ Sony 1P ever have to deal with. They don't have to deal with legacy players complaining about how the game should play. Halo does, they're in constant battle with players who want Halo to go in this direction or the next because its multiplayer component is cemented legacy with the Xbox community. Every adventure game they produce they can just sort of just move on. Because there is no MP aspect to it.

Is there TLOU2 MP yet? And yet, because of Halo's roots, it _must_ ship with multiplayer. No one will buy halo if they don't. They must ship with couch co-op. These are all things TLOU2 didn't have to tackle. They only had to tackle single player gameplay, and graphics and cutscenes.

343i has to do the same and then there's a whole side to Halo that has still yet to be shown: you haven't seen their Warzone, you haven't seen their big team battles, you haven't seen their arena play, you haven't seen their forge builder and their support for couch co-op.

I know that gameplay is 343i's their biggest concern. If they get that right, they can go back and fix up graphics over time. But bad gameplay and especially bad MP in Halo means death. The story was never good enough to carry players through. Bad graphics they can live with and resolve over time, and I think MS is hedging on that as well.

I'm not happy with the graphics showcase, but I know graphics can be resolved for release.
I would be upset at shitty gameplay.
People won't stop playing Halo just because it's got bad graphics. People won't play Halo if the gameplay outright sucks.

 

[Scott_Arm]

@iroboto There's a larger point that they just had an event which was supposed to showcase Microsoft game studios, and it failed to do so. They literally did not show gameplay from their own games. They showed gameplay from Halo Infinite, which they've been touting as built from the ground up to take advantage of Series X and it felt WAY short of their earlier hype videos. So now they have a probably $600 console coming out and no one understands why they're supposed to buy it. Why not just keep xbox one, or one x and get game pass and be done with it? They've had two gaming events that were outright panned from a games, game play perspective, and also failed to outline the point of their new "most powerful console ever."

I also imagine 343 has multiple teams to work on all of these projects. If they don't, that's their own fault. If they're supporting Halo 5, they have one team to do that. If they're supporting MCC (I thought that was a different studio) then they have another team to do that. If they're making Halo Infinite then they have another team to do that. Anything less than that is the fault of their own management. It's not an unfair situation they were burdened with. It's the products they decided to make. If they don't have enough people to make Halo Infinite at the scale they want to make, then get more people or reduce the scale. If you're just some low level grunt and the executives are making bad decisions, then you have a right to complain. But the company as a whole is accountable for its own commitments. Sure, the Last of Us 2 has a limited scope, though their attention to detail is insane. We know they crunched and that's caused some internal conflict. Ultimately they picked a scope that was achievable.

 

[BRiT]

It likely wont be $600.

 

[iroboto]

@iroboto There's a larger point that they just had an event which was supposed to showcase Microsoft game studios, and it failed to do so. They literally did not show gameplay from their own games. They showed gameplay from Halo Infinite, which they've been touting as built from the ground up to take advantage of Series X and it felt WAY short of their earlier hype videos. So now they have a probably $600 console coming out and no one understands why they're supposed to buy it. Why not just keep xbox one, or one x and get game pass and be done with it? They've had two gaming events that were outright panned from a games, game play perspective, and also failed to outline the point of their new "most powerful console ever."

I also imagine 343 has multiple teams to work on all of these projects. If they don't, that's their own fault. If they're supporting Halo 5, they have one team to do that. If they're supporting MCC (I thought that was a different studio) then they have another team to do that. If they're making Halo Infinite then they have another team to do that. Anything less than that is the fault of their own management. It's not an unfair situation they were burdened with. It's the products they decided to make. If they don't have enough people to make Halo Infinite at the scale they want to make, then get more people or reduce the scale. If you're just some low level grunt and the executives are making bad decisions, then you have a right to complain. But the company as a whole is accountable for its own commitments. Sure, the Last of Us 2 has a limited scope, though their attention to detail is insane. We know they crunched and that's caused some internal conflict. Ultimately they picked a scope that was achievable.

That's fine, but everyone is basing what Halo will ultimately end up looking like on XSX based upon a vertical slice demo that was made during COVID. If they had completed RT lighting it's entirely possible all this hate would have been reversed. It's not yet a released product, they may not be that far from goal, though I largely suspect the XBO and X1X will look like what we saw. You have yet to see what the XSX will really look like once the RT patch goes in. The right thing to do is to delay to ensure it ships with RT.

If everything here is dynamic lighting as per @Dictator shows in his recent video, it's already taking steps in the right direction as far as I'm concerned. Baked lighting going into next gen is largely going to be a thing of the past.

You are right that the rest of MS showing was not there. I'm not here to defend that. They are just not nearly as far along as Sony studios. That may be because for them, the original plan for Sony was to launch PS5 in 2019 if we recall all the rumours there and there was never a plan for cross gen for them.

MS made some bad calls here I think. But it's not irrecoverable. They will need 3P to push them through until the other titles show up.

 

[Scott_Arm]

That's fine, but everyone is basing what Halo will ultimately end up looking like on XSX based upon a vertical slice demo that was made during COVID. If they had completed RT lighting it's entirely possible all this hate would have been reversed. ...

This is their fault. That's the point. If they couldn't have RT ready for the game because of Covid then don't show the game on Series X, or show it and give a disclaimer saying RT will be added later, or show it on the One X ... Something other than what they did which is entirely within their control.

Also, what does studio head Chris Lee say?

The gameplay demo is a great example of how we're running on Xbox Series X, you'll be able to run at a solid 60 frames per second at up to 4K resolution. We're bringing the highest fidelity experience that we've ever created. We're able to do more than 10 times the processing power per pixel that we were able to do in Halo 5, which just allows us to create this experience that's unlike anything that we've had in Halo before. In Halo Infinite we've really harnessed a lot of advanced rendering techniques, but also the immense power of the Xbox Series X.

https://wccftech.com/halo-infinite-...eatures-a-new-acoustic-engine-leveraging-xsx/

I don't get it. It's a great example but you're adding RT later which is totally missing in this build? We don't even know what their RT is going to do. Maybe it'll just be reflections and won't be AO or indirect light. We have no idea. That's the problem. RT could make the game look amazing. It could also just look like a minor improvement. You don't know and I don't know. That's what this showcase was supposed to be for.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

You are right that the rest of MS showing was not there. I'm not here to defend that. They are just not nearly as far along as Sony studios. That may be because for them, the original plan for Sony was to launch PS5 in 2019 if we recall all the rumours there and there was never a plan for cross gen for them.

I think it's clear at this point, given Ratchet & Clank and Spider-Man are launch games and Horizon 2 will follow soon after, that Sony began preparing for PS5's launch some years back.

Microsoft clearly had some issues, which is similar to PS4's launch this gen with Infamous Second Son (which should have been a launch game) not releasing until February 2014 and DriveClub being delayed several times.

It's worth taking a step back though and reminding ourselves that both Microsoft and Sony's first party titles are only part of the equation, third parties will continue to provide the majority of the content for both platforms. Even if folks feel a little disappointed with either console's exclusive content, Ubisoft, Activision, EA, CD Projekt Red and others will probably have you covered.

 

[eastmen]

I think it's clear at this point, given Ratchet & Clank and Spider-Man are launch games and Horizon 2 will follow soon after, that Sony began preparing for PS5's launch some years back.

Microsoft clearly had some issues, which is similar to PS4's launch this gen with Infamous Second Son (which should have been a launch game) not releasing until February 2014 and DriveClub being delayed several times.

It's worth taking a step back though and reminding ourselves that both Microsoft and Sony's first party titles are only part of the equation, third parties will continue to provide the majority of the content for both platforms. Even if folks feel a little disappointed with either console's exclusive content, Ubisoft, Activision, EA, CD Projekt Red and others will probably have you covered.

and for a lot of people the purchase will be judged on the 3rd party content. If your a huge cyberpunk fan then the console that runs that the best will most likely be what you buy and the same goes for other 3rd party games people are interested in.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

and for a lot of people the purchase will be judged on the 3rd party content. If your a huge cyberpunk fan then the console that runs that the best will most likely be what you buy and the same goes for other 3rd party games people are interested in.

I think that there is a legitimate question about which console will run it better at launch.

We've had many developers state PS5 being really easy to develop for and at Microsoft's most recent event, just days ago, Microsoft's first party studios showed nothing running on Series X, only PC. Regardless of what the hardware may be capable of, the SDK and tool functionality is critical to delivering performant software.

 

[eastmen]

Not for Xbox it doesn't, same with gears tactics.

Was gears tactics ever announced for xbox ?

Also i did not know that about Flight simulator. My guess is it wont be on the xbox one but will be an xbox series x exclusive and they will announce it next year.

 

[eastmen]

I think that there is a legitimate question about which console will run it better at launch.

We've had many developers state PS5 being really easy to develop for and at Microsoft's most recent event, just days ago, Microsoft's first party studios showed nothing running on Series X, only PC. Regardless of what the hardware may be capable of, the SDK and tool functionality is critical to delivering performant software.

Its hard to tell anything at all really. The only game I recall seeing played on the ps5 is ratchet the majority of their stuff was captured on the ps5 but who knows what that means. None of it looked like game play. Its disapointing from both sides imo.

Also its hard to narrow down the problem for this demo. I would wager at this point the team is working to get it done from launch and building a demo for the press and this event may have been done months before if this was supposed to be an E3 demo. It could be pre covid or even 2019 code running here.

Maybe it be best if MS didn't show anything at all and just put out another trailer and said the team is hard at work but due to covid we are delaying showing game play. But then i think they would have gotten blasted for having nothing but Ori game play ? Maybe the figured Sony had one game so they had to have one big game too?

My through process with Halo is simply this. Release the xbox one / x edition this fall and let xsx players play that edition with the XSX optimized one coming out in quarter 1 of 2021 and take the extra 3-4 months to work on it.

But if this is a game that will continue on for years like they said i expect the graphics to continue to be reworked over the years. So perhaps MS is going for the sea of theives model

 

[function]

Presenting Halo Infinite as being "for the ground up" for XSX was a big mistake, especially at this point. It's not, and it doesn't look it. It has pop-in, pop out, and the lighting is flat. It does nothing to demonstrate the XSX as anything other than a hi res Xbox One.

Also a mistake was the time of day they used in the demo. Thanks to it, as DF says, it frequently destroyed the detail and materials they were going to such lengths to render at 4K. And even when in the sunlight, the time of day they chose fucked with the colours and the contrast.

And they didn't even demonstrate the real time clock aspect, so that's yet more cost and compromise on something that's lost on people.

Saying Halo Infinite was built for the ground up for XSX, and choosing the demo they did in the state it's in, just makes the XSX look weak and 343i look untalented. They should have been honest and just say "it's a 60 fps cross gen game with free 4k60 enhancements at launch, here it is on PC to give you an idea. We'll be excited to show you the next major evolution on XSX just as soon as it's ready - it'll be sick". They worst thing is people actually believe them when they say it's a ground up XSX game, and this was a highly polished demo.

[Still looking forward to the game, and when all the pieces come together Slipspace will be a fantastic engine I'm sure, but using this to start the XSX recovery after the last shitshow CGI e-advert shows poor judgement or desperation]

So I was expecting cross gen, that's fine, but I was not expecting (and still can't quite believe) that MS hadn't made the effort to turn a single cross-gen game or even a recent X1 game into a mini showcase of what the system can do. Not one. Nothing. They turned up with nothing to show off XVA or ray tracing on XSX in an actual game.

Anyway ... so the Forza 8 reveal sequence was captured in engine. But at what frame rate, and on which hardware?

 

[Deleted member 11852]

The only game I recall seeing played on the ps5 is ratchet the majority of their stuff was captured on the ps5 but who knows what that means. None of it looked like game play. Its disapointing from both sides imo.

You probably want to revisit the Sony presentation if you only recall one game running on PS5. We've seen a lot of games, not to mention Epic's Unreal Engine 5 engine, running on PS5. Thus far, we've seen nothing running on Series X and both consoles launch in a few months.

 

[iroboto]

This is their fault. That's the point. If they couldn't have RT ready for the game because of Covid then don't show the game on Series X, or show it and give a disclaimer saying RT will be added later, or show it on the One X ... Something other than what they did which is entirely within their control.

Also, what does studio head Chris Lee say?



https://wccftech.com/halo-infinite-...eatures-a-new-acoustic-engine-leveraging-xsx/

I don't get it. It's a great example but you're adding RT later which is totally missing in this build? We don't even know what their RT is going to do. Maybe it'll just be reflections and won't be AO or indirect light. We have no idea. That's the problem. RT could make the game look amazing. It could also just look like a minor improvement. You don't know and I don't know. That's what this showcase was supposed to be for.

I’m not disagreeing that MS dropped the ball. On the contrary they totally botched it.
But as a user, I only care if Halo becomes a fun title for me, at a low low cost of game pass. Whether I play it on PC with a $2000 video card or on XSX for $600. Or on neither and just on my existing X1X. Those options are available to me.

MS screwing up is something for Phil and team to reflect how they are getting their ass kicked. And I’ll be honest in saying that this generation was exactly more of the same. And it didn’t bother me as long as I got to play the titles I wanted to play.

yes they dropped the ball on marketing.
Yes that means we don’t need XSX but that was always going to be the case for us here with it going to Steam anyway.

But dropping the ball on marketing doesnt make it a bad game. Sea of Thieves currently enjoys more players now than ever. 3 years after launch.

those are the metrics that will be important for halo. Since it’s not meant to be a one and done game. There will be no sequels. It is very much targeted to be like Sea if Thieves or the next Forza Motorsport. Front loading sales doesn’t mean anything if you are designing the game with a long tail.

They have a lot they need to show to convince people to buy. But it’s the announcements aren’t done yet. And this failure doesn’t spell the end for Halo.