Microsoft press conference

[Tap In]

MS E3 Live blow out:
available on mktplace right now

This is good stuff to have available for an E3

Demos:
Lost Planet
Test Drive Unlimited

Trailers:
Bullet Witch
Dead rising
LotR Battle for ME
BiA Hells HW
Jon Woo presents Stranglehold
Sonic hedgehog
Rain
Dance Dance Rev
NCAA 07 FB
NCAA 07 Hoops
GoW
Coldcept
Rockstar Table Tennis
Hitman Blood Money
Tony Hawk Proj 8
NBA 2k7
Marvel Ultimate aliiance
Call of Duty 3
Lost Planet new trailer
Halo 3 teaser
Too Human
Viva Pinata
alan wake
Shadowrun


more demos coming this week I hope

 

[onanie]

Please let me know when Sony says anything definitive about their own on-line service, thanks.

Are you talking about a free "online game directory/lobby/login and content distribution"?

 

[Tap In]

do we really need to get this thread locked?

this is a Microsoft conference thread please

make your own thread about comparable online solutions

thanks

 

[DemoCoder]

Please let me know when Sony says anything definitive about their own on-line service, thanks.

Game lobbies are trivial to write. Everyone has done them. GameSpy, EA, BattleNet, Steam, Yahoo, etc. If Sony has a hard time writing this, I'll offer my services to code it up in less than 6 months.

We don't need mindless speculation that Sony is incapable of delivering online shopping, authentication, billing, stat tracking, and game lobby. They can either do it themselves, or they can buy off the shelf. Even VoIP is a no brainer, voice codecs and SIP servers are market commodities.

There is nothing difficult or amazing about XBOX Live Marketplace. If it was HTML, instead of a fancy hardcoded GUI interface, you'd be asking why all the hype. Sony could stick a Macromedia flash player on the PS3, contract a bunch of Flex guys, and deliver a flashy interface that is dynamically updatable and even allow outside content developers, all very cheap.

Those people who think XBL represents some kind of trade secret competitive advantage and that it will take ages for anyone to implement anything similar are wistfully ignorant of the complexity of such services.

The only real investment is deploying enough servers to scale, and by starting later than Microsoft, Sony has a competitive advantage in that they can buy more CPU power per server per $$$ than when Microsoft built XBL. Just like free email providers who arrived later on the market were able to offer substantially more storage than those who started early, due to the fact that those with datacenter buildouts had to rent more rack space and buy more storage, while phasing out the old, less dense HDDs.

MS's advantage on XBL has nothing to due with technology, and more to do with community size. Sony will have to play catchup, and will have to make sure the PS3 OS provides a client library for all games to manage client data (credentials, wallet, etc) in a unified way. It's not a matter of a difficulty, but timing. They have to provide it early enough for launch titles to integrate it.

 

[expletive]

Those people who think XBL represents some kind of trade secret competitive advantage and that it will take ages for anyone to implement anything similar are wistfully ignorant of the complexity of such services.

MS's advantage on XBL has nothing to due with technology, and more to do with community size. Sony will have to play catchup, and will have to make sure the PS3 OS provides a client library for all games to manage client data (credentials, wallet, etc) in a unified way. It's not a matter of a difficulty, but timing. They have to provide it early enough for launch titles to integrate it.

Yet everyday companies make shitty software based on what should be simple technology and go out of business, go figure.

 

[scooby_dooby]

Demo, I've just watched teh conference and your missing some major points here:
1. A single username/gamercard/friendslist across all platforms, 360, windows & mobile phones

2. A single marketplace , buy content 1 time, play it on multiple platforms i.e. live arcade titles, play them on your phone, and your 360 when you get home, pay once

3. Completely integrated gamercard/game invites/xbox guide integrated into windows vista, single button to accept game invites or to compare gamercards/friendslist and view achievements, no networking setup required whatsoever.

The key here is seamless integration & consistancy across platforms. It simply doesn't work if you have to have a unique friendslist for every game, not to mention every platform. You can log into a 360, and see friends who are using their mobile phones, or gaming on a windows PC, invite them to a game and be up and running in seconds. All with supported voice chat. Obviously the potential here is huge.

 

[Graham]

I don't see what's so unified about it tho. Games will still need to be ported...

hence XNA framework / XNA studio.

Hypothetically:

Write your game in C#, using the XNA framework (modified .net framework tailored to games).
Use the xna studio tools to manage your assets, etc.
Publish game on Live arcade.
Users from all three platforms can download and play your game.

From a developer point of view, that is absolute gold. Sure you won't be creating gears of war like this, but it could open up the market enormously.

 

[DemoCoder]

Yet everyday companies make shitty software based on what should be simple technology

No truer description of Microsoft has ever been written.

 

[DemoCoder]

Demo, I've just watched teh conference and your missing some major points here:
1. A single username/gamercard/friendslist across all platforms, 360, windows & mobile phones

Trivial, and there is even a standard for it already. Liberty. MS is most likely reusing Passport.

2. A single marketplace , buy content 1 time, play it on multiple platforms i.e. live arcade titles, play them on your phone, and your 360 when you get home, pay once

Wow, an extra database column.

The key here is seamless integration & consistancy across platforms. It simply doesn't work if you have to have a unique friendslist for every game, not to mention every platform. You can log into a 360, and see friends who are using their mobile phones, or gaming on a windows PC, invite them to a game and be up and running in seconds. All with supported voice chat. Obviously the potential here is huge.

Everyone is doing Present and Voice Chat services now. The only different is, Microsoft "presence" is dependent upon buying shitty Microsoft smartphones, whereas if Sony is smart, they'd use the existing *international standard* OMA/3GPP/3GPP2 Presense specs.

 

[DemoCoder]

hence XNA framework / XNA studio.

Hypothetically:

Write your game in C#, using the XNA framework (modified .net framework tailored to games).
Use the xna studio tools to manage your assets, etc.
Publish game on Live arcade.
Users from all three platforms can download and play your game.

From a developer point of view, that is absolute gold. Sure you won't be creating gears of war like this, but it could open up the market enormously.

Ahaha, hahahah, ahahaahahhaha! You have no clue how difficult this is to do today, even if you just limit yourself to writing games for mobile phones. Please, we've heard this pitch before. Even two different mobile phones have vastly different platforms, simply things like keycodes, soft buttons, screen aspect ratio.

The only way Microsoft can make this work is if your phone is a PocketPC/Smartphone, and I can tell you now, ASP.NET Compact Framework doesn't even port nicely across PPC vs SmartPhone. Get real!

 

[patsu]

hence XNA framework / XNA studio.

Hypothetically:

Write your game in C#, using the XNA framework (modified .net framework tailored to games).
Use the xna studio tools to manage your assets, etc.
Publish game on Live arcade.
Users from all three platforms can download and play your game.

From a developer point of view, that is absolute gold. Sure you won't be creating gears of war like this, but it could open up the market enormously.

Ok, while I like the vision this is where I cry foul. I think MS is only providing support for cellphone running Windows OS (Smart phone) ? For the majority of them running Symbian, Java OS and what not. It'd be hands off for them right ? Or am I mistaken ?

To my knowledge, the variety and inconsistency of cellphone hardware/OS/library/config requires dedication attention to each model. That's why there are 300 men shop in China doing cellphone software porting acros different platforms to make your software work well.

It's a good start (in mobile area) but not quite enough yet for "Play" Anywhere.

EDIT: Oh ok, I see that DemoCoder has already replied. It's true guys. He's not trying to nit-pick.

 

[Asher]

DemoCoder, since when have you so rabidly been pro-Sony? It seems like you're going out of your way to negate positive things about the Xbox.

 

[Powderkeg]

Well, Sony already integrated PC and Console worlds with FF online. Do they get credit for being the first from you? I guess not.

And why should they get credit for doing it first when Quake could be played on the PC or Dreamcast against each other years before FF online?

 

[scooby_dooby]

Trivial, and there is even a standard for it already. Liberty. MS is most likely reusing Passport.

Wow, an extra database column.

Everyone is doing Present and Voice Chat services now. The only different is, Microsoft "presence" is dependent upon buying shitty Microsoft smartphones, whereas if Sony is smart, they'd use the existing *international standard* OMA/3GPP/3GPP2 Presense specs.

The point isn't "IN THEORY how hard is it to do" the point is that they are planning on making it happen. Please tell me, what other company has tha capabilities to extend this sort of feature across mobile phones, all PC machines sold in 2007 and beyond, and one of the leading video game consoles in the world?

Fact is there is no-one in the position to bring gamers together across all these platforms, and be user friendly enough to hit a mainstream critical mass other than MS.

Have you even watched the conference? You can't deny what they are doing is cool,innovative and great for consumers. For you to compare it to SINGLE games, and other SINGLE services is nothing short of ridiculous.

This isn't about allowing cross-platform games, this is about maintaining an identity throughout all your gaming platforms, pc, mobile phones, and xbox 360. It's about it being integrated well enough, that your average consumer can pick it up and play and not have to think twice.

Just watch the conference, if you still think it's so trivial then we'll have to agree to disagree.

 

[ERP]

Your kind of missing the point about Live, it's about consistency of experience.

I agree for the most part none of the parts are hard from a software standpoint, but it's hard to get right as a whole.

I remember seeing a first draft of the Xbox 1 live TRC's and telling MS they would never get a title compliant with them, in the end they loosened them up dramatically, and lost a lot of consistency because of it.

What they've done with 360 is taken the implementation out of the hands of the developers, so they can have consistency of feature set in all of the games.

I'm not sure any of this is particularly news worthy, but MS has done an excellent job with Live. Extending that consistent experience to other spaces seems like a good idea to me.

 

[DemoCoder]

The point isn't "IN THEORY how hard is it to do" the point is that they are planning on making it happen. Please tell me, what other company has tha capabilities to extend this sort of feature across mobile phones, all PC machines sold in 2007 and beyond, and one of the leading video game consoles in the world?

Microsoft does not have the capability to extend this across any but an insignificant fraction of mobile phones. Mobile phones are dominated by J2ME and Symbian. Windows CE has an insignificant fraction of the global mobile market.

Fact is there is no-one in the position to bring gamers together across all these platforms, and be user friendly enough to hit a mainstream critical mass other than MS.

Microsoft isn't in the position either. They can only deal with PC and XB. They are a complete bit player in the mobile market.

Have you even watched the conference? You can't deny what they are doing is cool,innovative and great for consumers. For you to compare it to SINGLE games, and other SINGLE services is nothing short of ridiculous.

It's a tech demo using an MS Smartphone. I went to the last 3 COMDEXes and CESes and watched MS do lots of "living room" demos. Have the stuff never pans out. Do you have your SPOT Watch yet?

This isn't about allowing cross-platform games, this is about maintaining an identity throughout all your gaming platforms, pc, mobile phones, and xbox 360. It's about it being integrated well enough, that your average consumer can pick it up and play and not have to think twice.

The identity is the easy part. As I said, both centralized and federated identity systems are widespread. Most online portals have them. Google is rolling out their own identity login service. Yahoo has one. And most of the industry has already settled on Liberty.

 

[DemoCoder]

DemoCoder, since when have you so rabidly been pro-Sony? It seems like you're going out of your way to negate positive things about the Xbox.

I'm not negating them, I am negating the idea that other people can't do them, and quite easily I might add.

 

[patsu]

I understood and like the Live vision and the potential consistency it brings (See my previous post).

I'm just saying that the mobile phone domain is more than just a "platform". It's not only a question of too many phone model (with new ones coming out every few month). It is also about how telcos negotiate, package and operate their networks. These phones are customized by the telcos for their purposes. They get end-of-lived quickly with no support. Configurations also get overwritten from time to time depending on what the users do.

Microsoft, while strong and healthy, will not have the resources to track down these problems worldwide. This is on top of their own problems running Windows on assorted PC hardware (but worse).

It's just a reality check. Other than that, go MS go !

 

[DemoCoder]

Your kind of missing the point about Live, it's about consistency of experience.

I agree. My point is, many of the components are already there. There has been alot of industry work done since Xbox1 was launched related to federated identity, presense, wallet, session initiation, etc.

It's up to Sony to collect the best of this work, select a core which is implementable on the PS3, and mandate it.


I guess I am biased, because my daily work brings me in contact with IETF, W3C, and OMA standards groups, and I have seen this all before, and I am aware of so many implementations that people are already using, alot of it in the mobile space. Technology wise, it's there.

The clever part is coming up with what data schemas you need, and standarding an API interface. But the fundamental pipeline is there. And in this regard, Sony has it alittle easier with respect to MS because the path has already been paved.

 

[scooby_dooby]

The identity is the easy part. As I said, both centralized and federated identity systems are widespread. Most online portals have them. Google is rolling out their own identity login service. Yahoo has one. And most of the industry has already settled on Liberty.

Bringing that identity across all platforms is the hard part. Will google have theirs integrated into the xbox 360, one of the largest game consoles in teh world? Will Yahoo have their services pre-installed on almost every PC sold after 2007? Will they be providing new operating systems for mobile phones???

Obviously MS needs to make huge strides in mobile phones to pull this off, but that's what they plan on doing, they've got 2 out of 3 of the keystones lined up, who knows if they can pull it off. But, I'm glad their trying. I can see the potential of what they are trying to do, and I don't see anyone else stepping up to the plate doing something like this.