News & Rumors: Xbox One (codename Durango)

[(((interference)))]

Nevertheless, somehow we now have enough information to conclude that MS will simply employ cheap tech using a high price and a subscription model to basically ripped consumers off.

.

Umm, yes? At least they're nowhere near as bad as Nintendo

And let's not forget that a substantial portion of their BOM will go into Kinect.

In any case bkilian himself has stated that one of the reasons he quit was that he could not agree with the direction management was taking the console, he also said Xbox division is now run by 'MBAs with $ signs in their eyes' rather than the core gamers who worked on Xbox & 360.

 

[Tap In]

Umm, yes? At least they're nowhere near as bad as Nintendo

And let's not forget that a substantial portion of their BOM will go into Kinect.

In any case bkilian himself has stated that one of the reasons he quit was that he could not agree with the direction management was taking the console, he also said Xbox division is now run by 'MBAs with $ signs in their eyes' rather than the core gamers who worked on Xbox & 360.

lather, rinse, repeat.

that is your basis for assuming it's a rip off?

guess what, the world economy does not exist in a vacuum and people are not fools. MS knows this regardless how many times you remind us what bkilian reported about his experience. MS execs would have to be mighty stupid to squander a large leg of their current and planned, future ecosystem to fraud.

 

[(((interference)))]

No, i'm saying their value proposition is not the same as Sony's.

They're going after the Wii/Kinect/casual and Apple TV market as well as the core gamers this time around.

So obviously their value proposition for core gamers (ie us) is not going to be as good as the PS4s. At least not from a pure hardware perspective.

And how the hell does using demand based pricing like Apple, Samsung & co constitute fraud?
Plenty of people buy iPhones and iPads that cost far in excess of what they cost to make, so it would seem they're a lot of 'fools' out there...

 

[COPS N RAPPERS]

you know it was Microsoft who came up with unified system memory and developer friendly hardware and tools. what makes people think that Microsoft is just going to abandon that?

 

[Tap In]

No, i'm saying their value proposition is not the same as Sony's.

They're going after the Wii/Kinect/casual and Apple TV market as well as the core gamers this time around.

So obviously their value proposition for core gamers (ie us) is not going to be as good as the PS4s. At least not from a pure hardware perspective.

And how the hell does using demand based pricing like Apple, Samsung & co constitute fraud?
Plenty of people buy iPhones and iPads that cost far in excess of what they cost to make, so it would seem they're a lot of 'fools' out there...

exactly, just as "rip off" does not fit that description of a business model either yet you choose to endorse that phrase...

the core gamer market could be well served as well as expanding the ecosystem to offer even greater value and you do not know that yet. Let's save the sweeping generalizations of the business model until they actually tell us what they are doing and how much they are charging, no?

 

[(((interference)))]

you know it was Microsoft who came up with unified system memory and developer friendly hardware and tools. what makes people think that Microsoft is just going to abandon that?

Who said they're not going to abandon unified system memory and dev friendly hardware and tools?

I certainly didn't.

They are going to abandon a pissing contest with Sony for bragging rights to 'most powerful console' though. But then again, they only really cared about this with the original Xbox anyway.

 

[(((interference)))]

exactly, just as "rip off" does not fit that description of a business model either yet you choose to endorse that phrase...

I was disagreeing with the suggestion that MS would not 'rip off' gamers by charging $500 for modestly specced hardware and using that as an indication that the vgleaks specs are wrong (and the final console is more powerful than we are expecting)

the core gamer market could be well served as well as expanding the ecosystem to offer even greater value and you do not know that yet. Let's save the sweeping generalizations of the business model until they actually tell us what they are doing and how much they are charging, no?

I'm not saying the core gamer market won't be served well, just that PS4 would likely be the better proposition to core gamers - being more powerful and Sony having stronger 1P studios

 

[dagamer]

According to Forbes, paraphrasing some words from the everlasting predictor, the *much loved* Michael Patcher, Skype could be the true killer app for the nextXbox.

Patcher said that Skype brings grandma into the mix.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidth...e-be-the-killer-app-for-microsofts-next-xbox/

I dunno, I think it's a battle of two different philosophies. On the one hand, gamers want Sony and Microsoft to build a box just for them and to leave stuff like Skype and Netflix out of it because they don't care about that stuff. I personally would tell them that ship sailed with the PS2 being an extremely popular DVD player.

On the other hand, both Sony and Microsoft see how well Apple sells $500 iPads every 2-3 years and wonders how on earth someone wouldn't be able to buy one of their gee whiz boxes ONCE and use it for 7+ years. Considering the sheer number of iPads being sold every quarter (30+ million), it's clear that the problem isn't primarily about funds but value. There's clearly a reason why iPads sell so well, and it's the same vein the Wii previously tapped into.

From what we've seen so far, Sony is taking the "safe" approach (I put that in quotes because look at early PS3 sales), but Microsoft may want to go for gold and attempt to catch lightning in a bottle. Clearly Kinect struck something special, otherwise 33% of all Xbox 360 consoles wouldn't have one (and before we all go claiming it's a pure gimmick, Move was similar but clearly sold far less units - I've never seen one in real life).

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I'm not saying the core gamer market won't be served well, just that PS4 would likely be the better proposition to core gamers - being more powerful and Sony having stronger 1P studios

That's certainly a very arguable point. For someone like me, Grand Turismo 5 is the only Sony first party exclusive that I would potentially buy a platform for. Except I don't do racing anymore, and Forza is right up there with it.

I've tried some of the other stuff at friends. And the majority of them I certainly wouldn't buy a console in order to play. Not going into details so as not to derail this thread into an, "OMG, I can't believe you don't like X game that is the BESTEST in the world" derailment.

For me, this generation the X360 had by far the stronger and more compelling exclusives (peoples individual tastes may disagree, but sales numbers don't), even though many of those have gone away as time went by (Mass Effect and Bioshock for example, and only Bioshock is still good). But their remaining exlcusives are still slightly more compelling.

Next generation I'm expecting more new exclusives from both Sony and Microsoft. Except MS, hasn't said one peep about what exclusives may potentially be coming to their console. Although already knowing that there's a Crytek exclusive and a Respawn exclusive certainly has me intrigued to say the least.

Unless Sony have some secret exclusives hidden away for launch, I can already say that none of the so far announced titles for PS4 would make me want to buy one. Then again, I'm also not expecting any Microsoft exclusives to make me want to buy one either.

But I could be surprised. I had absolutely ZERO plans to buy an X360 until I found out that Gears of Wars was going to be an exclusive.

At this point about the only game I could think of that might get me to buy a console is if Blizzard suddenly said they are actually close to finishing StarCraft Ghost (the only reason I bought a first gen Xbox) and it is going to be exclusive to one of the consoles. Probably not going to happen, even if there are rumors that Blizzard have possibly started work on it again.

Hmm, although I suppose if Irrational games somehow got the rights to the System Shock IP and announced they were developing SS3 and it was going to be exclusive, that might get me to buy as well. But since everything Irrational makes goes to PC, I doubt that would happen even in the unlikely event they got the SS IP.

So, at the end of the day, it's still going to depend on the next Playstation or Xbox offering more full featured living room functionality than I can get with my HTPC to tempt me into buying one. but if games were the only deciding factor? I have a feeling Microsoft is going to announce more interesting exclusives than what has been announced for the PS4 thus far.

Regards,
SB

 

[(((interference)))]

MS buying exclusivity for Bioshock, ME etc is not what i'm talking about, their actual 1P studios are not as talented or as diverse as Sony's. Especially as Rare is working pretty much exclusively on Kinect stuff and Bungie has gone multiplat.

Plus Sony's exclusives (whether developed in house or externally) this gen have been more diverse than MS, I'm thinking Journey, LittleBigPlanet, Heavy Rain etc. Sony seems to take more risks with their exclusive titles.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Nevertheless, somehow we now have enough information to conclude that MS will simply employ cheap tech using a high price and a subscription model to basically ripped consumers off.

Ummm, no-one's concluded anything. The possibility of high profit margins has been presented in contrast to the possibility that the BOM means the price won't be so high or the high price means the hardware won't be the devkit leak hardware.

Everything we have seen with any credibility outside of Vgleaks has shown that MS was intent on decoupling its applications hardware from its system based hardware.

Everything we've seen prior to the devkit leaks was old.

There are enough unknowns to shoot holes in anyone’s argument.

With the discussion about profit margins existing to shoot holes in the belief that the high price meant better hardware. Conclusion - no-one knows anything yet, but as long as people are discussion rumours and ideas, they can all be floated and discussed, hopefully with enough sense and reason present to see what's plausible and what's highly implausible.

 

[PalmiNio]

MS buying exclusivity for Bioshock, ME etc is not what i'm talking about, their actual 1P studios are not as talented or as diverse as Sony's. Especially as Rare is working pretty much exclusively on Kinect stuff and Bungie has gone multiplat.

Plus Sony's exclusives (whether developed in house or externally) this gen have been more diverse than MS, I'm thinking Journey, LittleBigPlanet, Heavy Rain etc. Sony seems to take more risks with their exclusive titles.

Paying money straight up for titles or having your own studio does not make any difference for the end user, game is a game.

Taking into context that PS2 was vastly superior to Xbox 1 in many aspects, I would say Microsoft did the right thing to buy exclusivity in the first 1-3 years of Xbox 360 lifetime

The pros of buying titles is pretty clear - Cash in / Cash out in short term and you know what you get,.
Maybe more expensive but less risk

The pros of having your own studios - More controll of the IP and the production.
Maybe less expensive overall but higher risk since people have to get payed even if the games does not sell.

Yes I can agree Sony has more diverse IPs in their pocket but in terms of IPs that can sell consoles I would say the playing field is more even. Journey, LittleBigPlanet and Heavy Rain maybe good games but they are not selling any consoles. The sales of Halo on 360 could easy be compared to a handfull of 1p games on PS3 in terms of impact on consoles sold. So the impact of 1 big first party game can be heavier than many small.

The only IP on PS3 that I believe will help the Sony in the PS4 generation is Uncharted. The rest will be series from the PS1/PS2 era such as GT/GoW and so on. Sure there are others IPs from the PS3 era that can help Sony to spice things up like Motorstorm/Resistance/InFamous but based on their stand alone sales on PS3 I would say they wont move larger qty of units.

So doing good games and have large diversity is not always a strong proposition that you will sell more console.

 

[(((interference)))]

I agree that Halo is a system seller (really the only thing Sony has in the same sort of league is Gran Turismo), but in the hands of 343, I'm not so sure - if Halo 4 is anything to go by.

Who's to say people won't just get a PS4 and get Bungie's Destiny, especially if it plays more like Halo of old than 343s Halo games?

Plus, 1st party exclusives do have some differences to 3rd party ones - for one, they tend to utilise the hardware better, nor can they go multiplatform if their title is successful, like Bioshock and Mass Effect did.

And anyway, my original point was not that Sony exclusives can sell more consoles than MS exclusives, but that Sony's bevy of technically accomplished, first party devs are more appealing to core gamers, who care about titles like Journey, LittleBigPlanet etc, The Last Guardian etc.

 

[Prophecy2k]

From what we've seen so far, Sony is taking the "safe" approach (I put that in quotes because look at early PS3 sales), but Microsoft may want to go for gold and attempt to catch lightning in a bottle. Clearly Kinect struck something special, otherwise 33% of all Xbox 360 consoles wouldn't have one (and before we all go claiming it's a pure gimmick, Move was similar but clearly sold far less units - I've never seen one in real life).

This isn't strictly true to be honest. The last numbers released for kinect i believe were 30 million units sold worldwide, including bundles. Sony's Move sales were in excess of 17 million and we know for a fact that their device wasn't bundled to the extent Kinect was.

I understand how people like to pipe Kinect as this incredible success but in my eyes, after rapidly selling out its first twenty or so million, its sales tanked hard. Sony's Move has been selling alot more slowly and an yet still has managed to sell through a reasonable amount. Both devices would have been profitable for MS and Sony. Sure Move didn't get the mindshare and thus development support, but look at Kinect now? How many dedicated Kinect games are even still being made?

If MS thinks that a improved Kinect will be what is required to recapture the hearts and minds of both core and casual gamers alike next-gen then I wager they are cruising for a bruising. There's no way they'll be able to get all those 30 million existing Kinect owners to rebuy Kinect2 for Dunrango... and all the remaining 40 million 360 owners who never bought into kinect in the first place, what guarantee does MS think they have that these guys will buy into an improved version of essentially the same thing?

I see it as MS facing the exact same predicament selling Kinect2 as Sony faced selling Move in a post-wii world. For Durango to succeed MS needs far far more than Kinect. And entertainment services will exist on platforms, not just PS4 and Xbox Next, so it silly to think that would be enough of a draw.

Also, lol @ Michael Pachter thinking Durango will sell gangbusters because of Skype that is on every device under the sun...

 

[PalmiNio]

I agree that Halo is a system seller (really the only thing Sony has in the same sort of league is Gran Turismo), but in the hands of 343, I'm not so sure - if Halo 4 is anything to go by.

Who's to say people won't just get a PS4 and get Bungie's Destiny, especially if it plays more like Halo of old than 343s Halo games?

Plus, 1st party exclusives do have some differences to 3rd party ones - for one, they tend to utilise the hardware better, nor can they go multiplatform if their title is successful, like Bioshock and Mass Effect did.

And anyway, my original point was not that Sony exclusives can sell more consoles than MS exclusives, but that Sony's bevy of technically accomplished, first party devs are more appealing to core gamers, who care about titles like Journey, LittleBigPlanet etc, The Last Guardian etc.

Sure sure. But even without Bungie the brand is still the brand and that is the most important for the market when the brand is so well known. Halo sells, because it is Halo and not because it is Bungie. I would argue that the brand Halo is bigger then the brand of Bungie right now. I am pretty sure that Microsoft will control the Halo IP to make sure the value does not decline to much.

But the success of Halo will of course get people to try Destiny and maybe in time that will turn out to be a new big IP. But that means only that the people who know what Bungies is will try and that will not result in an automatically success.

I agree that 1 party games are better for tech demoing the hardware but that but still I would argue that they have very low value when actually shifting consoles. Bioshock and Mass Effect as third part time exclusive can still be considered much better IPs based on their first game compared to Heavy Rain, even if Heavy Rain can be argued to be a better technical achievement compared to Bioshock.

And even if the title gets over to other platform later this is not a problem since the gamer community always wants the first bite. So if we would say that Microsoft bought title A from EA for a time exclusivity of 1 year then EA will not tell the community that it will go multi later on and thus the effect of the game release will only affect Xbox and move consoles. When the title the arrives on the other plattforms the game will be bought mainly buy people that already owns the console and thus move so much new console on the other plattforms.

And I don’t agree with you definition of Core Gamer. If the Core Gamer is defined by wanting games like Journey and LittleBigPlanet then something is wrong. LP was not aimed at core gamers to begin with. I would say that those types of titles are aimed to a much smaller community than the broad gaming community. I consider them as spice.
I could argue that the core gamer is less interested in innovation and shift from one sequel to the other in the same big IP series. Thus my claim would be that the exclusivity of one Call of Duty game is worth more that 50 games based on new and innovative IPs (Like Journey and LBP) when looking at the broad Core Gamer spectrum. After all, appeal is what sells games and that is what sells consoles.

 

[PalmiNio]

This isn't strictly true to be honest. The last numbers released for kinect i believe were 30 million units sold worldwide, including bundles. Sony's Move sales were in excess of 17 million and we know for a fact that their device wasn't bundled to the extent Kinect was.

Bigg difference.

1 Kinect sold 1 new user

1 Move sold does not equal 1 new user.

So when it comes to installation based you have to break the numbers down on Move to products with the start package sold.

So technically 4 sold Move units can still count as 1 user. But on the matter of Kinect it is very unlikely that a household has more than 1 Kinect camera.

When Sony last year in March said 10 million units has been shipped out to retailers that included extra move controllers and navigation controllers

"But at the beginning of the panel, Sony's Gabe Ahn revealed new PlayStation Move sales data. 10.5 million units have been shipped to retailers so far. With Sony's insistence on using shipped numbers in lieu of sold-to-consumer numbers, we did verify with Mr. Ahn after the panel to verify that his numbers were shipped and not sold. We also verified that the numbers include both PlayStation Move controllers and Navigation Controllers combined."

I would guess the installation base of Move is around 10 million or less with 1 or more move controllers in the household. BUT, that is just a guess.

 

[PalmiNio]

I understand how people like to pipe Kinect as this incredible success but in my eyes, after rapidly selling out its first twenty or so million, its sales tanked hard. Sony's Move has been selling alot more slowly and an yet still has managed to sell through a reasonable amount. Both devices would have been profitable for MS and Sony. Sure Move didn't get the mindshare and thus development support, but look at Kinect now? How many dedicated Kinect games are even still being made?

Well that seems very inaccurate with official report. It reached 19 millions in May 2012, that's over 1 year since launch so the 20 million was not rapid:
http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/kinect-sells-20-million-units/

10 month later additional 5 million has been reported sold adding up to 24 million:
http://www.computerandvideogames.co...d-worldwide/?cid=OTC-RSS&attr=CVG-General-RSS
That is some mayor legs compared to games.

So yes I would say it is a success based that it came so late and based that many games for Kinect have shifted large numbers compared to the low level of effort getting into them.
But we can also draw very clear conclusion with the data behind Wii and Kinect - they appeal to a different audience than the Core Gamer and that audience have different characteristics:

- They play less
- Thy buy less games

But on the other hand they can be counted as an addition and the games that they buy are crazy cheap to produce since they don’t demand the same production quality compared to Core Gamers.

I would argue that Kinect is the reason why Xbox 360 didnät fall more behind PS3 in terms of sales the last 2 years.

Will Kinect 2.0 have an impact for Durango? Sure - Microsoft has a clear aim 1. Keep the core gamer base from 360 2. Try to add the consumers that bought Wii.

Will they succed? That I am not sure of since I know nothing about their console.

 

[GrimThorne]

http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/121...tent-pictures-confirm-hardware-to-be-at-event

 

[Prophecy2k]

I think that additional 5 million sold was only in the US and worlwide the total sales figure was quoted by a tweet from one of the MS guys as being close to 30 million if my memory serves me correctly.

Cheers for the quotes re the Move sales data though. I wasn't aware they totalled Move wands as well as Nav controllers.

On the onther hand however i still debate whether Kinect 2 will at all have any impact on Durango sales. The main thrust of my argument being that casual sales are driven by fads, and given we've already had the "Kinect-hands-free-you-are-the-controller-all-new-innovative-hand-waving-simulator fad", there is absolutely no guarantee that MS will be able to get people to buy into what is essentially exactly the same thing re-hashed a second time... It would be an extremely silly premise imho to stake the majority of the Next Xbox's platform and features on a device that the core gamer outright rejected, and the casuals already own. It would be akin to Nintendo releasing the WiiU built around Wii Motion plus and expecting the same accelerated sales. Foolishness in my opinion...

MS will have to have much more up their sleeve to try to draw in the casual market as well as the core from day one. Kinect 2.0 is simply not good enough

 

[Bagel seed]

http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/121...tent-pictures-confirm-hardware-to-be-at-event

A tent..? Seems a little underwhelming for MS standards tbh. Are they going to have a bbq and prize drawing afterwards?