What Happened To Durango?

[Inuhanyou]

I think what people are really fearful about is potentially waiting another 8 more years until 2021 to get new hardware again. Super long generations make people stir crazy because they see what PC hardware can provide.

Well yeah, but people have to keep in mind that we don't have any answers to what their strategy is going forward. We have more than 1 dev saying that super long gens have an adverse effect on the industry. So who knows, maybe they've taken it to heart. We just don't have enough information yet to say either way. We should wait for their plans.

 

[dagamer]

Well yeah, but people have to keep in mind that we don't have any answers to what their strategy is going forward. We have more than 1 dev saying that super long gens have an adverse effect on the industry. So who knows, maybe they've taken it to heart. We just don't have enough information yet to say either way. We should wait for their plans.

One good sign is buy going with console that have less exotic designs, it should be easier to make them cheaper, so they get their ROI sooner and are less adverse to launching another round. Plus with the media functionality, they should continue to be useful around the home in say a bedroom or kids living room (though current consoles are vampires with even the power they suck at idle).

 

[Inuhanyou]

Well yeah, what they are packing isn't exactly super expensive or super complicated. That should bode well for shrinkage going forward allowing them to lower prices much faster and recoup losses much easier.

 

[XpiderMX]

I don't know what's happening at Microsoft. Sony is getting all the attention, and Durango (now) is known as a bad option for gamers.

Why Microsoft is not doing any move?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

They don't need to. No-one's buying these boxes tomorrow, so current opinion is immaterial. MS only needs to make a move when they are ready with enough time to inform and educate.

Edit: especially when at the moment it's just rumour vs. rumour. On Thursday, MS execs can have a meeting about what Sony shows tomorrow, where they stand, and how they'll compete. Which might involve waiting a few months letting Sony get all the early, virtually worthless limelight. As a loose comparison, Sony had all the attention prior to PS3's unveil, with years of Cell talk. Then BAM, $600 plus Wii, and PS3 became yesterday's cold chips wrapped in the day before's soggy newspaper. Nintendo didn't need any long term market battling when they were able to spring something of massive interest when it was needed.

 

[Bagel seed]

By going first and trying to make a big splash (obvious at this point) it definitely makes it harder on MS having to follow up. And the longer they wait to 'answer back' the longer they give Sony the limelight in claiming next gen attention.

I think it'll have a noticeable effect this time. This won't like MTV 360 unveiling with underwhelming PDZ wall guy, or PS3 E3 2005 $599 and target render videos.

 

[XpiderMX]

They don't need to. No-one's buying these boxes tomorrow, so current opinion is immaterial. MS only needs to make a move when they are ready with enough time to inform and educate.

Edit: especially when at the moment it's just rumour vs. rumour. On Thursday, MS execs can have a meeting about what Sony shows tomorrow, where they stand, and how they'll compete. Which might involve waiting a few months letting Sony get all the early, virtually worthless limelight. As a loose comparison, Sony had all the attention prior to PS3's unveil, with years of Cell talk. Then BAM, $600 plus Wii, and PS3 became yesterday's cold chips wrapped in the day before's soggy newspaper. Nintendo didn't need any long term market battling when they were able to spring something of massive interest when it was needed.

I know all are rumors, but I don't think that the "negativity" is a good sign for a company. MS is getting a LOT of negativity, not only for next gen consoles.

Why are they not reacting to the bashing?
If rumors are false... Who is behind of it?
If rumors are true... well, I hope no...

EDIT: What if Sony start to accept pre-orders before Durango unveiling?

 

[Bagel seed]

Well, they can't react to the bashing because that would be the shittiest way to officially declare the existence of your console. They can only say 'we don't comment on rumors or speculation' for now.

As for pre-orders, I think that's a smart idea. I would be very surprised if they announced that tomorrow though, or if they even do it at all.

 

[dragonelite]

I know all are rumors, but I don't think that the "negativity" is a good sign for a company. MS is getting a LOT of negativity, not only for next gen consoles.

Why are they not reacting to the bashing?
If rumors are false... Who is behind of it?
If rumors are true... well, I hope no...

EDIT: What if Sony start to accept pre-orders before Durango unveiling?

Those that preorder would already have bought the ps4 no matter what.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I know all are rumors, but I don't think that the "negativity" is a good sign for a company. MS is getting a LOT of negativity, not only for next gen consoles.

They are not ready to talk about their next-gen platform, simple as that. If the rumours are true regards the hardware, the only 'comeback' is to show the whole platform as an incredible experience. Show Kinect and the new interface and the whole experience in a big, impactful splash. What else are they supposed to do? Tweet "our hardware is great" or worse, "yes, the hardware rumours are true, but its actually quite a good, well balanced system"? And if it's not true, all these rumours are immaterial because when MS do unveil, people will care about what the platform is, not what they thought it was. No-one's going to avoid buying an awesome machine because they believed it wasn't much cop before it was unveiled.*

There is absolutely nothing to be gained by revealing before you're ready, showing glitchy software, incomplete interfaces, games you hope will be finished and impressive. Whatever hype exists for Sony's console hasn't been because Sony have been generating it, prior to 20/2/2013. It's just been gossip. Neither Sony not MS were ready to reveal. Sony feel they having something worth showing at this point; MS will wait until they have something they feel will engage gamers.

*And that's using the common gamer vernacular. The hardware, even if rumours are 100% accurate, could still be a compelling experience at excellent value and the platform a majority of console gamers want.

EDIT: What if Sony start to accept pre-orders before Durango unveiling?

Just stop a moment and think that through. Preorders aren't binding and you can cancel. When Ms are ready, they unveil their machine and blow Sony away, and all those preorders are retracted. If MS can't do that, can't compete with Sony and win customers over, then it really doesn't matter when they start talking. Ergo, the only sane, logical thing to do is bide your time and prepare your message. It really doesn't matter at all what goes before your info. Only a few numpties are going to go crazy over unreleased boxes and runoured specs. The rest of the world makes sure they know what they are getting and buy a moderately informed choice, or buy brands blindly where it really doesn't matter.

 

[XpiderMX]

They are not ready to talk about their next-gen platform, simple as that. If the rumours are true regards the hardware, the only 'comeback' is to show the whole platform as an incredible experience. Show Kinect and the new interface and the whole experience in a big, impactful splash. What else are they supposed to do? Tweet "our hardware is great" or worse, "yes, the hardware rumours are true, but its actually quite a good, well balanced system"? And if it's not true, all these rumours are immaterial because when MS do unveil, people will care about what the platform is, not what they thought it was. No-one's going to avoid buying an awesome machine because they believed it wasn't much cop before it was unveiled.*

But I'm not talking about explaining their plans, I mean try to generate hype, I remember the OurColony back to 2005, a thing like this, trying to get people busy, IMO, is a good idea. But well, they know more than what I know about business

 

[Bagel seed]

But I'm not talking about explaining their plans, I mean try to generate hype, I remember the OurColony back to 2005, a thing like this, trying to get people busy, IMO, is a good idea. But well, they know more than what I know about business

OurColony started on March 14. If they don't do anything by then you can start to worry more

 

[DJ12]

You cannot generate hype when someone has stolen your thunder with better specs, the only way Microsoft can reply is by showing how great everything works and if none of it is ready that's going to be a very hard sell.

 

[ERP]

But I'm not talking about explaining their plans, I mean try to generate hype, I remember the OurColony back to 2005, a thing like this, trying to get people busy, IMO, is a good idea. But well, they know more than what I know about business

They've got 9 months before they are likely to ship anything, they will ship less units than they can sell. They have plenty of time to generate hype.
My guess would be either at or around GDC or E3.
There is just no rush at this point.

 

[upnorthsox]

Well as a lifelong White Sox fan I can say with experience that it's true you can't win a penant in April.

It's also true that you can lose a penant in April......

 

[XpiderMX]

You cannot generate hype when someone has stolen your thunder with better specs, the only way Microsoft can reply is by showing how great everything works and if none of it is ready that's going to be a very hard sell.

But I'm pretty sure that Microsoft knew that PS4 would have better specs... why not to act before Sony?

 

[ERP]

What good would it do if Sony is going to have the better presentation anyway.
I'm not sure there is any advantage/disadvantage with going first either way people will compare and what's going to matter is what's shown/revealed.

 

[(((interference)))]

But I'm pretty sure that Microsoft knew that PS4 would have better specs... why not to act before Sony?

How do you know that?

All signs seem to indicate they are following the leaked 2010 roadmap and targeting 6-8x 360, which Durango certainly is.

They probably only learnt about the Orbis specs when we did (2012), and it would be too late to change much by then (unless they were ok with missing the 2013 launch date).

 

[Acert93]

But I'm pretty sure that Microsoft knew that PS4 would have better specs... why not to act before Sony?

You need to be schooled in PR:

"The Xbox 3 has a significant edge over the PS4 in terms of technology. The Xbox 3 packs in twice as much system memory (8GB vs. 4GB), twice the CPU processing power (204GFLOPs vs. 102GFLOPs), and a beady of host processors (DSPs, Sound Chips, etc) that not only make developer life easier and offer a richer experience to gamers they also leave more of the horses to our talented developers to make the games of tomorrow. All this as well as a cutting edge DX11+ GPU from AMD. But don't take our word for it, just look at the best in class features: a cutting edge next generation gaming console that has full Kinect 2 voice and gesture integration in every box with instant Skype overlays to gaming as well as a robust DVR running in the background. All in a small, silent form factor that uses more than 120W. Our competition is trying to focus on a couple numbers to boast about their technological superiority, but we saw how that went in 2005. The bottom line is we have twice the CPU power and twice the memory and our rich suit of features, packed in day one mind you, clearly show the Xbox 3's technological superiority."

When we asked about the rumors of the Xbox 3 GPU being 33% slower than the PS4's GPU MS PR responded, "We are completely confident in our, and our partners, technological choices to bring the richest experience to gamers on any platform. It would be easy to look at check boxes and raw numbers but you need to dig deeper and look at the technology and architecture. The PS4 has a small edge in peak flops but we have a 5,000% more embedded memory with our large 32MB on-chip memory. Ask yourself this: We invested a lot more into our GPU design than Sony and spent over a billion extra transistors on 32MB of on-die memory. This is an amazing solution that AMD's best engineers and MS's engineers, unbridled from legacy platforms, came up to make AMD's great GPU technology even faster. This memory is low latency and fully writable opening up a world of new compute scenarios. With the Xbox 360 generation we hit a wall in terms of throwing more shaders at graphics. Better graphics is now all about compute. And The Xbox 3 GPU is in a class of its own when it comes to compute. Local memory access and latency, more so than sheer compute, is the real measure of great graphics. That isn't to say we don't have a lot of power in the Xbox 3 -- we did include a sound chip with over 100GFLOPs of CPU performance and doubled the performance of our CPUs over the Playstation, so we are not cutting corners! -- and we have over 1TFLOPs of raw GPU performance. But it is all how you use your hardware and with the extra research and custom design we get far better utilization of the hardware. Our own internal tests show that tith embedded memory our GPU is over 60% more efficient than the Xbox 360 GPU. Paired with AMD's newest technology and our 32MB of on die memory Durango can perform almost like a 3TFLOPs GPU. From what I hear there are rumblings the Playstation developers are grumbling over the high latency of their SoC sharing bandwidth between the CPUs, which are the #1 client, and the GPU. Our competition gave developers a lot more latency--we believe latency is the key to great performance and no GPU, ever, has had this much memory with this low of latency."

At the end of the day we believe the Xbox 3, like the Xbox 360 and Xbox before it, are the better machines. Sony may trumpet their raw numbers but last generation showed it isn't just in numbers in paper, but how they are used. The Xbox 3 continues the tradition set forth by the Xbox and Xbox 360 in providing the best hardware and software for the living room experience consumers want. Come Fall 2013 consumers can see for themselves with great software like Halo: Reach for the Money Hats, Forza 5: Money Pit Stop, and of course my favorite Fable 4: The Lost Features."

 

[TheChefO]

... it would be too late to change much by then (unless they were ok with missing the 2013 launch date).

This is true especially if a custom design is in the cards.

I say if they were planning on roughly standard tech, why not off the shelf units with "custom glue"?

Example:

Standard 8 core jaguar cpu (two 4 core modules)
Standard cape verde
Custom northbridge connecting them, the dsp(s), and Ram

This way, the important components of the machine are quickly changeable should a performance deficit present itself...

Sorta like what Sony did

It's not too bright to invest so much R&D & time into a custom design which aims so low as to allow a competitor to easily outperform your offering...