Microsoft Xbox Reveal Event - May 21, 2013

[Nisaaru]

Ummm.. What? First, as was said earlier, it serves the Japanese media right. MS went out of their way to court them and the Japanese market with the 360 and MS was told essentially to F Off. Not just through their media outlets, but also by the market itself. Getting a foothold in Japan was huge part of their strategy for the 360 and it failed. It was also proven not to matter. I'm glad MS isn't dedicating resources to courting a market that clearly isn't interested, those resources can be better spent in NA and the EU.

Even if they were snubbed for xenophobe reasons in Japan it's stupid to snub them back. The invitation would have cost them nothing. Now they antagonized them. It's bad PR, period.

Second, bad PR everywhere? Have you been reading this thread? It's what we've been talking about for the last X amount of pages. The PR is all overwhelming positive. Fanboy rants on message boards is NOT PR.

http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/game...entiert-wohnzimmer-ueberwachung-a-901413.html

The Nr1 web news and political webpage in germany. The comments about it in the reviews were >80% negative because of the privacy invasion and Big Brother aspects. The audience are "educated" mainstream family customers.

 

[GrimThorne]

That's when you slip something in her drink..

But seriously, there's not much MS could've done. Still, it looks bad though. I happen to think JPN games will see a bit of a resurgence next gen, so I think it'd be a shame if MS lost out on some support there.

They never had any support there, and it wasn't because Microsoft didn't try. The 360 case was designed by a Japanese firm to expressly appeal to their aesthetics. They came out with the wackiest commercials made by Japanese directors to ensure that they would appeal to the consumers in that market.

When it launched there they gave Japanese gamers one SKU with a standard HDD at a LOWER price than the North American and European markets. MS lost hundreds of millions marketing the 360 over there.

As my father would say to me, "You can put as much bait in that water as you want son, but if the fish aren't interested you won't catch a thing"

 

[James Car]

If their competitor chooses to do it.
FWIW UX is hard to get right, and software is very far from free.
I would expect that MS has invested a lot of man hours in that interface, and copying it would be an expensive proposition, I'd expect Sony to retain there focus on what they think is important in the space rather than trying to me too a UX.

I called MS's focus on the user experience before the reveal. I'm a little surprised we didn't see more on social integration, and I was expecting to see more game footage. But this presentation was pretty much what I expected and the specialist press and forum goer reaction to it is inline with what I'd expect too. What I'm most interested in is if it has any impact at all at launch, my guess is no.

With this being the case, it is still something which they have the flexibility to do. They have the basic platform to mimic (nearly) everything that was shown on xbone. If at any point they feel they need to up their efforts in replicating non-gaming functions to gain marketshare, they can choose to invest more heavily in that arena to strengthen their proposition.

With them being in the position they are in, I see no reason they would not be marching toward that direction anyway (with varying degrees of investment) while at the same time not hampered by an inferior hardware proposition.

That is the crux of the issue ... policies can change, software can change, peripheries unrelated to games can change, but the core games hardware can't.

MS is stuck with what they have (unless they act on the backlash and source off the shelf x86 cpu+gpu). It's a sad proposition really.

 

[Scott_Arm]

I can understand if someone says they want to buy the best console gaming hardware, and the Xbox One is not good enough. That's fine. I get it. I might go that route too. The idea that Microsoft has given up on gaming because they presented a tv feature, before presenting a bunch of pre-rendered game trailers, does not appear to be based in reality. They're investing a lot in games, we just haven't seen them yet. Maybe they'll all be terrible. Who knows. I'd at least like to see them before I pass judgement.

 

[Tap In]

Ok, but I don't really see how that invalidates his point. 15 exclusives targeted for the first year (rather optimistically, I'd say) is still a large commitment.

Microsoft making $1B bet on Xbox One games, says bigwig Phil Harrison

Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/23/p...s-for-xbox-one-interview/#sIm14fd1cL0fHryh.99

 

[Nisaaru]

What does the UK have to do with Europe?

I order all my games through UK

 

[Dave Baumann]

I called MS's focus on the user experience before the reveal. I'm a little surprised we didn't see more on social integration, and I was expecting to see more game footage. But this presentation was pretty much what I expected and the specialist press and forum goer reaction to it is inline with what I'd expect too. What I'm most interested in is if it has any impact at all at launch, my guess is no.

Somewhat of a smart move to clearly get the look of the actual product out there. Alongside the tech/gamer press the pictures of the product has been/will be published across all kinds of mainstream media and will build a better familiarity with a wider audience pre-release and also enables retailers to clearly show a "product" ahead of its availablability, as they have already started to.

That reveal was designed to be as widespread as possible and tap in to the mainstream. There are other avenues for catering for the gamer crowd.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Microsoft making $1B bet on Xbox One games, says bigwig Phil Harrison

Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/23/p...s-for-xbox-one-interview/#sIm14fd1cL0fHryh.99

So 15 exclusives in the first year and 8 are new IPs, if I'm reading that right? Means there are 7 returning IPs. Fable, Gears, Crackdown, Halo, Forza, Kinect Sports ... the last one is tougher. Lips?

 

[James Car]

No, you missed the point. PS4 is 911, XB1 is Cayenne. As a sports car Cayennes are inferior to 911s, they are still vastly more popular.

No.
xbone is a ford explorer (all in one sport utility vehicle that can also go on the highway)

ps4 is Cayenne (an all in one sport utility vehicle that can also go on the highway and hit 160mph and 0-60 in 5.6)

Silicon isn't scaling down as fast as it used to. From 2005 until now we've gone from 90nm to 32/28, that's a factor of three, - area a factor of nine. This gen we're going to see a drop from 28nm to 20nm and perhaps 14nm in the lifetime of the products, that's less than half the drop in raw area. And each smaller node is more expensive per area, so cost reductions will be even less.

And the lower nodes won't be much higher performance/lower power per transistor (other than the one time shift to FinFet) so MS and Sony are basically stuck in the same power envelope for the duration.

That's great but another thing that has slowed is price drops ... how much is xb360 selling for again 8 years after launching at $300?

And BTW, who here honestly things either box will be selling at a loss?

Another point, MS is also (currently) making over $1B annually in xbl fees. That tends to help smooth over any BOM costs.

Again, I expected at least 200mm2 GPU budget. 1.2TF is a joke.

Sure, they can replicate it by adding mandatory PSEyes to every console sold, add HDMI-in, reserve 3GB and 2 cores for running the software that they will develop.

Easy and cheap.

Cheers

No more expensive than MS is putting in the box.

 

[Gubbi]

That reveal was designed to be as widespread as possible and tap in to the mainstream. There are other avenues for catering for the gamer crowd.

I must say you're an island of reality in an ocean of diarrhea.

Cheers

 

[Tap In]

So 15 exclusives in the first year and 8 are new IPs, if I'm reading that right? Means there are 7 returning IPs. Fable, Gears, Crackdown, Halo, Forza, Kinect Sports ... the last one is tougher. Lips?

Minecraft.


or Viva Pinata or Banjo?

really curious to see the 8 rew Ips

 

[James Car]

Minecraft.


or Viva Pinata or Banjo?

really curious to see the 8 rew Ips

Before the mediocre hardware announcement, I was hoping to see a new KI.

 

[blakjedi]

While that may be true, there is nothing this box is doing in that realm which isn't easily replicated by their competition.

Not to mention the majority of people already have their gadgets for apps etc, as you said.

It's a solution looking for a problem. And in the meantime, it weakened the one portion of their business that was performing and growing rather well:

gaming

this was true of phones, cameras, and laptops once upon a time too... Now you can do it all from a tablet or phablet... its called convergence.

The consumer entertainment market is larger than the gaming market. They want that consumer entertainment market which is worth 68 billion annually of which gaming is only a part.

Ultimately you can buy one, the other, both or none and be very happy. But the only device which seems to provides you everything in a home electronics device "all in one" is the ONE. Im sure the games wont to be too shabby either.

 

[bkilian]

The problem is not the NFL agreement. It's spending a rather large chunk of a worldwide reveal talking about how great is this feature that matters exclusively to north americans and no one else.

They didn't spend a similar chunk of the hour-long presentation talking about football (or soccer to some?) so if you didn't understand my explanation above, then fortunately you'll never understand at all.

Um, maybe you missed the FIFA 14 stuff then? Exclusive content? But don't let me get in the way of your righteous indignation, carry on.

 

[blakjedi]

Um, maybe you missed the FIFA 14 stuff then? Exclusive content? But don't let me get in the way of your righteous indignation, carry on.

i pointed out the same thing. They also demoed Forza...

I think the 18 versus 12 CUs power argument is going to be THE angle moving forward.. Nothing else matters.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Um, maybe you missed the FIFA 14 stuff then? Exclusive content? But don't let me get in the way of your righteous indignation, carry on.

FIFA is football, which is an American sport. No one in the UK or Europe cares about it ... Wait, that doesn't sound right.

 

[Jwm]

Don't know how people are making the assumption that Microsoft has totally abandoned their focus on gaming, or even significantly diminished it. If that were true, they wouldn't be going to E3 and they wouldn't have people working on exclusive games. On top of that, they wouldn't have released a box with vastly improved specs over the 360. There is far too much hardware in the box to come to that conclusion. This isn't the Wii, where they just did a slight bump to the previous gen. This isn't 360 and a half. It would have been easy to put out a tablet spec in a box and just sold games through the Windows 8 metro store, or whatever it's called.

Not to mention that they were showing that gaming was larger in revenue than the movies, so they do know well that gaming is a larger revenue stream for them over Kinect only products, or TV only, etc.

I wanted better specs from all three companies, so I remain upset with them all! But I realize the reality of the console market, lower heat, lower noise, etc. If I were to build a console it would be massively water cooled, and cost us all $1k while still taking a loss on the hardware! Maybe I should do a kick starter?

 

[James Car]

this was true of phones, cameras, and laptops once upon a time too... Now you can do it all from a tablet or phablet... its called convergence.

The consumer entertainment market is larger than the gaming market. They want that consumer entertainment market which is worth 68 billion annually of which gaming is only a part.

Ultimately you can buy one, the other, both or none and be very happy. But the only device which seems to provides you everything in a home electronics device "all in one" is the ONE. Im sure the games wont to be too shabby either.

Yes it does seem to have "convergence" well covered. But again, nothing which seems to be difficult to replicate.

I'd rather have an all in one device which does it's primary function great, and periphery decent rather than everything "well enough".

 

[RancidLunchmeat]

For starters, if there's any "gamer" out there that feels betrayed on MS's increased emphasis on things other than gaming, they're either flat out stupid or just blind to the realities of why MS entered the console arena in the first place. They haven't exactly ever hidden the fact that they created the Xbox, and then the 360 to do exactly what they've announced the One will do.

It's not turning their backs or reimagining their product focus, it's the culmination of their focus.

Second, wow, you people should really go back through the last three or so pages of this thread and read how that car analogy kept changing goal posts. Truly hysterical stuff. I realize emotional people get caught up in the moment and don't accurately remember who said what, but that was great stuff. I'm pretty sure in two more pages the One will be a bicycle and PS4 a Gulfstream V.

Finally, if the main thing that is so disappointing to these "gamers" is that it is obvious from the architecture that the One was designed and built from the ground up to provide and support features other than gaming and has dedicated resources for such, why do these same "gamers" believe that Sony can just toss the same features into the PS4 and copy them whenever they choose?

 

[BoardBonobo]

You just made my point for me, thanks.

The point being that at a 'console' reveal, MS revealed an expensive remote control for the mainstream. If the mainstream is a very small sliver of the entire market, who apparently need 'help' changing channels on a TV.

Not to mention the fact that the hour was spent conjoining the xbone with a format that is in a steady decline as streaming media takes over. Something that all the platforms have equal access to.