Question about Microsoft's PC Xbox 360 strategy

[Sis]

It's not an "accident" at all IMO.

The XNA tools are in response to multiplatform development. It is not an attempt at driving a new market...

 

[Rolf N]

This is a good point. Oblivion has also been used to argue against PC / Xbox 360 cross platform development and yet it is currently the highest rated 360 game (94 on metacritic on 360) and in the top 10 highest rated PC games (another 94 on metacritic on the PC). It's already being talked about as game of the year for the PC.

Do these ratings tell you something about the competitive market place that is current PC gaming, or are they just skewed? It makes it seem as if Oblivion came out for the PS2 and looked and played exactly the same, it would score 94 again. It just can't work that way IMO.
Graphics aren't everything, but there should be a few points of wiggle room for technical achievement ("smoothness") in a game ranking, and for that you really have to take into account what you expect the system to be capable of.

So for perspective, how would some of the stuff rate that Bethesda showed at E3 2005, before they went into "launch window" crunch? 112? Or would it have made the same 94 score?

Have game reviewers already come to accept as normality that every major PC title has some "issues", "understandably because it is a port" and don't let things like that reflect on the ratings?
IOW how many issues (tech, controls) must a game have to be reliably rated below 94 points on metacritics?

It's topping sales charts on both platforms and is an unqualified commercial success already. There have been a few criticisms regarding the 'consoleified' interface on the PC but in the light of the overall almost universal acclaim for the game that seems like a fairly minor issue.

And it perhaps also seems like a fairly minor issue that virtually anyone who plays it on the PC has spent at least 2 hours for finding and applying ini tweaks. We're used to that already, "because it's a port", right?
Call me pedantic but I don't think a game with obvious issues like that should be rated >=90 percentage points ever, no matter how great it is otherwise.

On the flipside, it seems likely that the game may well be better as a result of more resources being committed to it on the expectation of higher returns due to a larger market across two platforms.

Two words: horse armor.

 

[see colon]

It's a game concept that doesn't work on a console. It works on a PC because it was designed for the PC and it somewhat worked on the XBox because it was very similar to the PC in so many ways (basically: drop mouse, take gamepad).

So perhaps you're trying to tell me that people who badly wanted a western RPG bought the XBox to play Morrowind on it? Sorry, these people should have chosen the PC version because it offered a so vastly improved experience, it's not even funny.

Oblivion is a whole new story though ... worse.

all i said was that if there was no Xbox*, a good portion of the people who played Morrowind wouldn't have. the Elder Scrolls series would have been an obscure PC series, with maybe the mobile phone ports at best. Oblivion wouldn't have been the raging success it had been because console gamers wouldn't have cared about it. the console gaming press wouldn't have run stories about it. if anything, the Xbox gave Bethesda the exposure they needed to make a best selling game. if you want to argue that that's not a good thing, go right ahead.

out of curiosity, why do you think Morrowind only "somewhat worked on the XBox because it was very similar to the PC in so many ways (basically: drop mouse, take gamepad)." the game is played with a controller on Xbox, so i can see that difference, but what would have really stopped a game like Morrowind (a western style RPG) from ending up on the PS2?


*this relates to your argument that both microsoft and the consumer would be better off had the Xbox and Xbox 360 never existed

 

[Rolf N]

This is such a myopic view, I'm not even sure where to start.

Many people buy consoles to play video games so it should come as no surprise that many of these same people, if given a choice, will choose a game even though there's a PC counterpart. Many people don't like playing games on a PC, don't want to spend the effort in configuring it, installing it, troubleshooting it, etc. As well, the PC to console price difference is such that suggesting "these people should have choosen the PC version" is mildly laughable, if you didn't seem so emotionally tied to it.

The point was that people who played Morrowind on the XBox have been screwed. They didn't get the full package. Morrowind was highly moddable and some seriously great stuff has come out that you'll just never see on the XBox version.

Morrowind is also trivial to install onto a PC.
If you don't like applying patches, you can just ignore them. Morrowind on XBox didn't have patches, even though it had the same issues, so if you've been playing it on the PC and didn't patch, you were still better off than on the XBox.

Similarly I find it odd, to say the least, that you picked one of the better selling games on both the PC and the Xbox as an example of something being bad. Apparently many people found it "good", including the publisher and developer.

I've seen what they would have made, and that was significantly higher quality than what they ended up putting on the shelves. It also performed better, for crying out loud.

Should I just ignore that perspective and adopt the "good enough=94 points" mantra?

 

[Sis]

Should I just ignore that perspective and adopt the "good enough=94 points" mantra?

No, but I think you might be barking up the wrong tree. Morrowind isn't less than it could have been because it's a port, but because it's Morrowind; it is what it is. Oblivion on the PC isn't less than what it could have been, either--god knows what kind of PC requirements it would have needed in that case.

I'm not defending that multiplatform titles give us waterer-down versions of games, because I think there is some truth to that. I just completely disagree with the idea that A) Microsoft is somehow driving this and B) People who bought the Xbox version should have bought the PC version. I would have had I wanted to spend a few hundred bucks upgrading my PC. I didn't so I settled with the Xbox version--and I'm thankful it was available, otherwise I would have missed out entirely.

EDIT: Also, what do you mean you saw "what they would have made"?

 

[fearsomepirate]

Morrowind on the Xbox was one of the most miserable experiences of my gaming existence. I would rather have just played a real console RPG than wander around Superman 64-like fog with PSx-like load times. Also, it doesn't seem like reviewers dock points for massive menus, annoying consolized interfaces, or keeping the data console-managable. I'm sure Oblivion is a great game, but a lot of the PC hardcore are saying "what could have been," and I don't want to ignore those voices.

However, IIRC, the original mind behind Xbox designed it as basically a stripped down PC with a hot graphics chip because he genuinely thought that would be a much better design philosophy than what was currently on the market. I recall an interview where he said something about being struck by how awesome PC graphics chips were, how cheap PC parts were, and how he clearly could build a better console that could easily get PC ports by using pretty much off-the-shelf PC parts. Of course, that philosophy ended up having some severe cost and performance issues.

 

[Geo]

Morrowind on the Xbox was one of the most miserable experiences of my gaming existence.

Errm, does it ever occur to anyone besides me when playing a game you decide early on is just not your cup of tea to. . .well. .. .quit? Rather than subject yourself to an emotionally scarring experience?

 

[heliosphere]

I'm sure Oblivion is a great game, but a lot of the PC hardcore are saying "what could have been," and I don't want to ignore those voices.

The problem is, the vocal PC hardcore isn't a big enough market to justify the development budget for a game like Oblivion. Some of the things the hardcore are bitching about are things that make the game more appealing to the wider market and what enable the game to sell 1.7 million copies in it's first few weeks. Without targeting a wider audience through design choices and target platform choices they could never have justified the resources they put into developing the game. You can't make money on a game with the scope of Oblivion selling to a few thousand ultra hardcore PC RPG enthusiasts. If that's your target market you can't afford to make a game as pretty or expansive as Oblivion.

 

[scooby_dooby]

I've seen what they would have made, and that was significantly higher quality than what they ended up putting on the shelves. It also performed better, for crying out loud.

Are you talking about the E3 demo? They've stated, without question, that the shadowing they used in the E3 demo was simply TOO SLOW on any platform, it too costly for ANY platform.

You need to quit blaming Oblivion's shortcomings on xbox 360. Any graphical shortcomings are most likely due to the fact it's a early 2006 release that has been in development for over 3 years. Not the fact it was developed concurrently on a console.

We have no reason to believe that Oblivion would have been any better had it been developed solely for the PC. In fact, the extra sales they could expect from releasing it on console, may have very well allowed them to spend more money on development and make a better overall product.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

And I thought it had virtual memory?

Games have to work without HDD, so reliance on VM isn't possible on XB360.

Manufacturing costs.

Manufacturing costs are offset by licensing deals, not developing new processors. I doubt AMD would have turned their nose up at having MS pay them for no work on AMDs part to fab processors. The cost of licensing versus paying IBM to create a custom processor is debateable, but if MS were really serious about having a PC friendly platform, Athlon presents some compelling possibilities lost by a quirky custom CPU.

Of course Microsoft knows that this makes porting harder, and they did something to offset this "alien" hardware environment because they want to have a platform that is friendly to ports.

Use of XNA can't be taken solely as evidence as a desire for cross platform compatibility. MS would have been stupid beyond belief to not support the same libraries and instead created totally new ones, when the existing MS tools (which is mostly what XNA is) are well known. If XNA were a one button fix for PC<>XB360 conversions, you'd have a point, but you have to do serious work to get your PC game to run on XB360 at a useable speed. It'd make a lot more sense for MS to have gone with OOO x86. The only reason not to do this is to offset licensing costs of licensing a CPU with a flat fee to comissions a new, alien, complex processor architecture.

It's not an "accident" at all IMO.

MS are sure to promote their development tools. This is a marketting strength they have. They suggested Sony and Nintendo use XNA too. Development on these machines is complex and expensive, so anything you can do to mitigate costs is good. Promoting XB360's development environment as compatible with the massive installed base is going to be a good marketting ploy. But the rest of the system doesn't fit with the idea of MS wanting XB360 to be 'compatible' with PC.

Look at XNA from the overall history of the system...
MS already have a series of tools, compiler, graphics libraries, IDE etc., post XBox. They used these tools when they created a PC-based console in the XBox to contest Sony in the living room. These tools have a massive developer base supporting them. Microsoft then plan on creating another console to compete with PS3.

They have two options :
1) Develop a totally new set of tools and libraries, expending goodness knows how much internal resources reinventing the wheel, which no developers knows and which will provide a difficult interface adapting to the new system
2) Adapt the existing tools to run on the very un-PC-like new console system, giving developers an easy, well understood interface.

Which of those should they do? Number 2, obviously. And if are adapting your PC tools to work with XB360, the marketting department are obviously going to crow about how the provides a convenient cross-platform development as they try to attract devs to their platform.

As I say, if MS were serious about providing the easiest task possible for devs to develop for XB360 and PC, they should have used a PC like system architecture. the cost to develop the system would likely have been cheaper than XB360, they could have had it out quicker, they could have produced systems more rapdily to quickly saturate the market, and the losses in licensing would likely be minimal - plenty of hardware devices license tech. As it is, the XB360 seems targetted at being a console, providing a more console like architecture with different targets (massive FP throughput, IO program design) despite the difficulties that offers to cross-platform developers. Your argument seems to rest on XNA being announced as a cross-platform aid, but every point taken together, I see very little reason to believe MS were building the XB360 with a view to make it a PC cross-platform friendly device.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

You need to quit blaming Oblivion's shortcomings on xbox 360. Any graphical shortcomings are most likely due to the fact it's a early 2006 release that has been in development for over 3 years.

Or even that Bethesda aren't the world's greatest graphics gurus, and their forte is elsewhere? We can't seriously expect every developer to create graphically stunning games. Bethesda aren't known for graphically efficient games, but are known for the expansive gameplay experience, which Oblivion has.

 

[scooby_dooby]

Or even that Bethesda aren't the world's greatest graphics gurus, and their forte is elsewhere? We can't seriously expect every developer to create graphically stunning games. Bethesda aren't known for graphically efficient games, but are known for the expansive gameplay experience, which Oblivion has.

Ya..I nearly edited my post to include that point as well. Bethesda has never been known for their graphics.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Errm, does it ever occur to anyone besides me when playing a game you decide early on is just not your cup of tea to. . .well. .. .quit?

I did. But I wanted to give it a chance. After all, just getting to meet that old bald guy Crappicus or whatever his name was took a good several hours of "Loading..." and see a few levels and bad guys. I played enough to hate it as an Xbox game...I think it was probably great on PC, though.

Also, wasn't the original argument that the Xbox has made the PC into a small market?

 

[heliosphere]

Or even that Bethesda aren't the world's greatest graphics gurus, and their forte is elsewhere? We can't seriously expect every developer to create graphically stunning games. Bethesda aren't known for graphically efficient games, but are known for the expansive gameplay experience, which Oblivion has.

Plus it's a hell of a lot more difficult to have cutting edge graphics in an expansive open world with a vast amount of content than it is for a level-based FPS or 3rd person game with a much more restricted environment. Things like dynamic day / night cycles, streaming worlds, large amounts of procedurally generated content, customizable characters (armour, facial characteristics, etc.), large numbers of NPCs, etc. all present considerable obstacles to achieving the same level of graphical quality as a traditional FPS or 3rd person action game.

 

[one]

How much did Oblivion sell in the PC and console version respectively? If it sells better on 360 then it makes sense they tailor the experience to cater to 360 users, or else to PC users.

I expect FPS franchises will stay PC-oriented for some time, except for Doom about which Carmack said Xbox 360 will be the main dev platform.

 

[Rolf N]

Games have to work without HDD, so reliance on VM isn't possible on XB360.

Ah, I misunderstood you. I thought you were still talking about XBox 1 at that point.

Manufacturing costs are offset by licensing deals, not developing new processors. I doubt AMD would have turned their nose up at having MS pay them for no work on AMDs part to fab processors. The cost of licensing versus paying IBM to create a custom processor is debateable, but if MS were really serious about having a PC friendly platform, Athlon presents some compelling possibilities lost by a quirky custom CPU.

I think they wanted the recipe, not the chips, and that didn't fly with anyone else.

Apparently they had ... difficulties in getting the costs down with XBox 1 because NVIDIA and Intel, delivering the finished chips, didn't agree with Microsoft on how much of the cost reduction enabled by better manufacturing processes should be passed on. They wanted to break that dependency and have full control over the costs. I remember that the NVIDIA vs Microsoft story was subject of various Inq news tidbits a few years ago. I think it makes sense to assume that after their experience with the XBox 1, it was never an option to buy finished chips for the XBox360.

IBM is pretty much the only company that you can go to if you want an IP deal for a high performance CPU. AMD will never license out their CPU designs and neither will Intel. Besides, there just aren't that many third-party fabs in the world that could make the chips, even if they were licensed out.

Use of XNA can't be taken solely as evidence as a desire for cross platform compatibility. MS would have been stupid beyond belief to not support the same libraries and instead created totally new ones, when the existing MS tools (which is mostly what XNA is) are well known. If XNA were a one button fix for PC<>XB360 conversions, you'd have a point, but you have to do serious work to get your PC game to run on XB360 at a useable speed. It'd make a lot more sense for MS to have gone with OOO x86. The only reason not to do this is to offset licensing costs of licensing a CPU with a flat fee to comissions a new, alien, complex processor architecture.

<shortened>

As I say, if MS were serious about providing the easiest task possible for devs to develop for XB360 and PC, they should have used a PC like system architecture. the cost to develop the system would likely have been cheaper than XB360, they could have had it out quicker, they could have produced systems more rapdily to quickly saturate the market, and the losses in licensing would likely be minimal - plenty of hardware devices license tech.

That is exactly what they had done with the XBox 1, and that's what I'm basing this on for a large part. The XBox 1 was totally and IMO also deliberately friendly to ports from/towards the PC.

For the XBox360 software stuff, I agree that it makes sense to reuse tech that still works. Of course you don't throw everything away.

At this point we can't really argue well whether or not the XBox360's software environment tries to mimick the XBox 1 software environment or the PC software environment. The results would be equal in both cases, so ...
Even if the XBox360 was Microsoft's first, they would probably have ended up with similar cross-development tools. I reckon Microsoft is very proud of that and sees it as a good thing, and to some degree it's also exactly what you'd expect from Microsoft. They already have a 3D API on the PC, so when they make a console they're going to equip it with some variant of that. It's just natural.

On the hardware front I firmly believe that Microsoft would have liked to continue with x86 and a standard hard drive but the costs turned out to be the bigger issue and prevented that from happening. Now they are simply doing their best to make it as painless as possible. They don't want to alienate former XBox 1 developers.

As it is, the XB360 seems targetted at being a console, providing a more console like architecture with different targets (massive FP throughput, IO program design) despite the difficulties that offers to cross-platform developers. Your argument seems to rest on XNA being announced as a cross-platform aid, but every point taken together, I see very little reason to believe MS were building the XB360 with a view to make it a PC cross-platform friendly device.

Again, we have partly misunderstood each other. The definite attempt has been the XBox 1 IMO. For the 360 they really had to do something about the manufacturing costs and now have to rely on their software and documentation efforts to make it a reasonably smooth ride for developers who "upgraded".

I agree that the XBox360 hardware is pretty much a true console design (already made the GameCube comparison). And XNA might well be just a suggestion, not a push

If you take all the debatable stuff away from me there'll be one thing that remains though: the ATI graphics chip. I'm pretty certain that shader programs are trivial to port between XBox360 and DirectX on the PC.

 

[Scuzzlebutt]

$45? Release day it was $37 for the PC version at Fry's and $60 for the 360 version everywhere. I bought the 360 version to give me a reason to own my 360, but I'd love to try the PC version later.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Group 4: People who simply can't stand extended gaming session on their PC sitting in an uncomfortable chair hunched over a keyboard, and vastly prefer the experience on a couch, with a big screen TV and using their pre-existing sourround sound set-up.

AKA: The majority of people.

My desk chair is not uncomfortable and I do not hunch over the keyboard (not unless im so ingrossed in the game that I naturally want too).

Im sure most people in here spend more time in their desk chair on the net anyway than they do playing games from the couch and I doubt there are many serious PC gamers out there that can't afford to spend $100 ona good chair.

Im sorry but it just really annoys me when people try to make out that PC gaming = uncomfortable. If that were the case it simply wouldn't exist. If you have an uncomfortable desk chair, its your fault, not the fault of PC gaming!

Besides, the majority of consoles are probably in teenagers bedrooms without a couch.

 

[Johnny Awesome]

Someone doesn't understand the market very well.

 

[ERP]

$45? Release day it was $37 for the PC version at Fry's and $60 for the 360 version everywhere. I bought the 360 version to give me a reason to own my 360, but I'd love to try the PC version later.

I bought the PC version, because I have yet to find a 360 for sale, and my PC struggles surprisingly hard to run it at any reasonable framerate especially if there is more than 1 enemy on screen and close.

My PC isn't state of the art any more but it's certianly above average A64 3400+ 1GB RAM and a 6800GT. I have a lot of features turned off at the moment and I'm running in 1024x768 to get what I consider a playable framerate. I'd hope the X360 version has somewhat more consistent framerate.

I've never really considered the elder scrolls games particularly technically great, but the shear amount and quality of content is just unparalelled in my opinion.