Power On: The Story of Xbox [Documentary 6 Parts]

Speaking of hardware
I see your Vita and raise you a Microsoft Kin

1 billion dollars to bring to market, $250 million spent on marketing
and sold a grand total of ....... drum roll

Spoiler

8810

Actually with so few out there, maybe they are worth some money today?

 

But it is Playstation's biggest failure. So everyone claiming the PS3 is the worst selling Playstation... Well, it isn't.

Kiin isn't an Xbox.

 

Sorry, yeah - I got the years mixed up, it certainly felt a lot longer at the time! lol

It sold well for the first year. Japan alone can't keep a console sucessful. The fuck ups came in North America the largest market at the time (and I think it might still be)

as i've said many times in this thread including the dates the consoles launched

All are true.

Ah so your ass hurt that I think the xbox 360 is the benchmark of all the current consoles ? Guess what I think the console market was shaped more by sega and then microsoft vs Sony. Dreamcast did online better than the playstation 2 and xbox did it better than the dreamcast. The xbox 360 really perfected it and even launching a year later the ps3 couldn't copy what Microsoft had done and spent the rest of the generation trying to copy MS. The ps4's success was by building another xbox 360 .

What positives should I be talking about ?

Except it launched after other 3d consoles including by your own admission the sega saturn..... Seems odd for you to give that system credit for something that even the super nintendo was doing.

It's lower price point and less complex hardware are the good things it did. But that isn't the whole story.

Again you just seem butt hurt .

Oh honey aren't you cute. I will go get my magnifying glass.

Yea I can picture it now , you come back and claim how dare I say sony didn't do everything right with the playstation 5 and how bias I am and blah blah blah.

I am just going to quote the original post I originally responded too

You seem really hurt that I imply that sony is only around because other companies fucked up. All of this is because some sony drama queens can't stand someone critizing their console of choice.

 

I don't know if anybody has claimed this. I called the PS3 Sony's "PlayStation's biggest commercial failure", which is a tactic acknowledgement to what Sony invested in the PS3 versus what Sony got from the PS3, including profits tails like Blu-ray. I was focussed on home consoles at the time but I doubt many would argue that Sony invested a tiny fraction into PS Vita compared to PS3, but if anybody has numbers it would be interesting to see them.

The profits/losses from PS Vita did not notably impact Sony financial reports unlike PS3, so which was demonstrably the bigger commercial failure?

 

Just wanted to point out that the box for SNES boasts about it's "dazzling 3D graphics", in case anyone wants to claim that the system wasn't marketed as having them.

I think we would need to know more about Sony's financials to really sort that out, but PS3 was definitely a deciding factor for Bluray winning the HD format wars, so if we are going big picture I have a hard time believing that PS3 failed as hard as Vita, which failed as both a handheld and a streaming set top box. It couldn't beat 3DS and it couldn't beat Roku. Vita lost to 3DS worldwide something like 5 or 6 to 1, and North America was more like 12:1. Hell, in North America, WiiU outsold Vita 2:1, and WiiU was absolutely a failure in every region.

 

Just finished watching this, amazing series. Puts into perspective how they managed to turn it around from the terrible Xbox One launch

 

Its funny that they dont mention some other disastrous facts about the XBOX though

 

Microsoft commissioned this documentary as part of the celebration of their 20 year anniversary for the Xbox brand.
It was never supposed to be an investigative journalism exposé.

 

I know. Thats why I d say its well...biased

 

Why give it such a knock then? C"Mon it's Christmas. You can't be nice 1 day a year?

Tommy McClain

 

I already noted the game controllers, keyboards and mice.

Neither AMD, Intel, nor NV had any experience with consumer electronics for the living room or pretty much anything that didn't involve a business office, data center, or PC room. The big OEM PC makers all laughed at MS and declined to take part in attempting to fit a PC into something as small as a living room console. Not a bad thing either as none of them had much experience with non-PC hardware, almost all of which were some shade of large beige, grey, or black boxes at the time.

As the series noted, because of that MS basically went it alone in trying to get a PC into something as small as a gaming console that wouldn't look completely out of place in the living room. Remember, this was also before SFF PCs were even a thing. Gaming laptops didn't even exist really. Alienware didn't introduce one capable of gaming until 2002-2003 (but a gaming , after the Xbox was already on the market.

Basically non of MS's partners at the time had any expertise with getting something as powerful as a PC with a HDD into a living room friendly console form factor. The aforementioned Alienware PC builders were still making some shade of large grey, beige or black gaming PCs that were still in the standard boxy PC cases. Their experimentation with the look of the casing didn't even start until sometime around 2002. There were some small business oriented PCs at the time, but due to the size, they were all pretty anemic (usually low speed Celerons or the like because of issues with cooling a more powerful CPU in those cases) and none were capable of gaming, because, how do you fit a graphics card that was basically the size of the business PC into that case?

If MS wanted to have a large boxy PC in the livingroom, then yes, they had plenty of partners they could lean on. If they wanted something that a large number of consumers would actually want in the living room? Well, that was ground they would have to break themselves.

Sony? They had decades (about half a century) of consumer experience in the living room and making products that would fit in a living room by the time they made their first gaming console. They had years of experience working with companies whose expertise was gaming consoles in the living room.

The electronics experience that Sony had (especially in the living room or any other room which wasn't a business office, data center or PC room) was leagues above what MS or their partners had.

Regards,
SB

 

Sony's financials are all published. Everything between 2005 and 2012 makes pretty grim reading. PS Vita failed hard out of the gate but if you read the 2011 to 2013 reports, very few of Sony's losses wee attributed to Vita.

I think you are over-estimating the complexity of putting some electronics onto a plastic box and selling it. Prior to China, Taiwan and Singapore were where most consumer electronics devices were mass produced during the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. Putting electronics into a box is not complicated and hundreds of millions of HiFis, VHS recorders, DVD players, TVs, DVRs, cable/satellite boxes were manufactured without issue. Something like RRoD can catch anybody out but it's slapping some hardware into a box isn't at all complicated and plenty of no-name manufacturing factories around the world did this en masse before the likes of Foxconn dominated. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If Intel, AMD, Nvidia and Microsoft were challenged by putting their own silicon in a custom box reliably, I don't know what to say.

 

Oh, sure. I don't dispute this at all. Sony took big losses on PS3, but it was also the trojan horse product for Bluray. Do we think Sony would have preferred to sell PS3's at a profit and lose the HD format wars? And in that perspective, was PS3 a bigger failure than Vita?

 

PS3 almost killed Sony. Xbox One almost torpedoed the Xbox initiative. Both companies learned a lot from these failures.

 

The OG XBOX also generated billions of losses.
I

 

This is a frequently floated statement that is not actually true. Whilst PS3 ate billions of dollars to bring to market (a fair for Blu-ray), it was profitable overall by the time PS4 launched - and by profitable I don't mean Sony made a profit on each machine, but they recouped what they invested.

What almost killed Sony - which you can read yourself in their financials reports - was facing multiple changing markets in the space of a decade. In the 2000-2009 period, Sony Bravia LCD TVs never enjoyed the same success to Sony Trinitron CRTs, Sony Ericsson was not equipment to deal with the transition to smart phones, Sony Vaio had been running at a loss, Sony Music had not adjusted to shift from selling CDs to digital-only purchases and Sony's movie studios had a string of losses. Like many consumer electronic companies at the time - Sony, Samsung, JVC, Hitachi, Mitsubishi - their business was predicated on making hundreds of slightly different TVs for different markets, the same with radios, a/v equipment, cameras. As these devices became 'smarter', the many differences made production of many different models unprofitable. Sony were also still operating some their own fabrication facilities for ICs that were not competitive with what TSMC could provide.

Sony investing heavily in Blu-ray domination to replace DVD when streaming was emerging as viable for the future as the icing on the cake. Using PS3 as a Blu-ray Greek horse, delaying the console whilst making it way more expensive really wasn't that a deal at that point. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

Seems to have run its course where none of the discussion is actually about the 6 part documentary series called "Power On: The Story of Xbox".