Xbox360 Uncloaked eBook

[sonyps35]

Wow. About a billion dollars. What the hell? I wonder why it cost so much?

Well, Microsoft shipped about 24 million Xbox's at last count..probably more by now. Further they really cut that console off early.

Point being, they would likely ship at the very least 30 million 360's.

So $30 in extra cost per unit=900 million dollars. I can easily see the extra 256MB GDDR3 averaging $30 extra cost over the life of the system.

Apparantly MrBob over at GAF thinks based on this book that if the 360 is a success, Epic deserves a lot of the credit, probably for this decision and others supporting the 360.

You could print it out...

Sounds like a waste of ink and then what..flat pages?

Not trying to be negative..I'll check it out later. Maybe I'll buy it from amazon..though I dont wanna wait a couple days.

 

[Tap In]

..I'll check it out later. Maybe I'll buy it from amazon..though I dont wanna wait a couple days.

http://www.spiderworks.com/books/xbox360.php
$24.95 hard copy (paperback)

top right hand corner under buy online (referrer not working)

 

[sonyps35]

Tons of interesting tidbits in X360 uncloaked book

I'm only like 20% through but..

btw if you're interested I highly recommend it. It seems only available online right now. However I bought it from Amazon and it only took like 2 days to arrive, this was choosing the cheapest 3.95 shipping as well. Will be like $28 bucks overall. I also heard it will be available in brick and mortars perhaps in 4-6 weeks.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/09...f=pd_bbs_1/103-9337359-3417448?_encoding=UTF8

You can also order it, or in ebook form for $15 , from the publisher online here

http://www.spiderworks.com/books/xbox360.php

Anyways some stuff

-IBM took the OOOE out of Xenon not MS. Ms was crestfallen about it.

-Ms considered many options including a microprocessor startup called Broadcom on the Cpu

-The HDD cost MS perhaps 1 billion of the 4 billion in losses on Xbox. It was $50 at first and later only fell to $30-and that was because Seagate cut them a great deal, even losing money on the HDD for a short time. The platter and spindle cannot be cost reduced.

-MS had a choice between two exclusives pitched to it, one from Epic and one from Valve. Inexplicably, they only had funding for one. They choose epic and the rest is Gears of War history. But why with MS funding they didn't grab Valves project too is beyond me. Of all the places to skimp on costs..Among the reasons said why they went againt Valve were Valve's reputation for being somewhat difficult, and being tardy shipping with games. It worked out well though, as Epic pushed the UE3.0 engine onto X360, which could be big for third parties in the future. Also Gears of War is considered X360's Halo in liue of Halo..

-J Allard and Ed Fries didn't seem to get along. We know who survived.

-Allard thought Bungie could be pushed to get Halo3 at launch. He said qoute "do your job, that's their job". This was another example of how Fries saw games as art and Allard more as, a business or something that could be pushed. Noting how EA ships a football title every season no excuses.

-Rare left Nintendo because they kept pushing big projects and Nintendo would come back and say "can you do this game for $2 million?". Nintendo no longer believed in $20 million games and this frustrated Rare.

-Nvidia and MS developed a lot of friction. The agreements MS had where very bad, Nvidia was under no obligation to cost reduce the chip and felt it could not spare the engineers. The second arbitration case between the two was over a measly $100,000 as MS rode Nvidia hard to reduce costs while Nvidia balked.

-One thing that stuck out to me was that MS analyzed Xbox 1 games and discovered the CPU, not the GPU, was typically the main bottleneck. This guided their thinking on making Xenon more powerful/multi-core.

 

[Powderkeg]

-MS had a choice between two exclusives pitched to it, one from Epic and one from Valve. Inexplicably, they only had funding for one. They choose epic and the rest is Gears of War history. But why with MS funding they didn't grab Valves project too is beyond me. Of all the places to skimp on costs..Among the reasons said why they went againt Valve were Valve's reputation for being somewhat difficult, and being tardy shipping with games. It worked out well though, as Epic pushed the UE3.0 engine onto X360, which could be big for third parties in the future. Also Gears of War is considered X360's Halo in liue of Halo..

With as long as Half Life 2 took to produce I wouldn't sign Valve either. MS wanted to have a game within the first year, not within a year of launch of their next system.

 

[Deepblue]

Ultimately MS made the right decision considering Valve is giving them exclusive console support anyway.

 

[sonyps35]

My thing is though, if you've got Microsoft's pockets, why not grab the Valve exclusive TOO?

I believe the book calls it a case of being Goliath but acting more like David..

I definitly agree if it's a choice, the Epic deal looks better..

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I believe the book calls it a case of being Goliath but acting more like David..

David won... So being big and strong like Goliath and adding smarts and dexterity like David has to be a good thing.

Anywho, people think of MS having limitless pockets but they are still run like any other business. They can't keep throwing substantial sums of money at projects with no guarentees of returns. The open market isn't like law-courts - you can't just throw money at the problem to win. So MS have to decide how much they're willing to lose on a venture and set aside that much money. If they win, great. If they lose, it's only damaging by so much and doesn't take down the entire company. You and I might think 'buy exclusives all over the shop' looking at their bank balance, but they have to consider other plans they have, keeping investors happy, etc. and thus partition their funding. The gaming deivision gets x billion to play with and no more, and then they decide how to spend it.

 

[sonyps35]

Understand all that Shifty...

But I think it's a little silly when Micrisoft with 34 billion in cash acts like they're more broke (or people act like they're more broke) in the console business than Sony that has lost a lot of money of late AFAIK.

Yes I know that in the CONSOLE business MS has done much worse.

I haven't got that far, but I gather late in the book Takahashi scolds them a bit for just that-not putting more money into the 360 venture.

 

[pipo]

I really liked the chapter where they all got together and decided how to spilt the budget...

With the (fake) $10M bills.

I haven't got that far, but I gather late in the book Takahashi scolds them a bit for just that-not putting more money into the 360 venture.

Yeah, but it's a bit strange though. After all they also made that $900M decision to upgrade the RAM to 512MB.

 

[avaya]

Understand all that Shifty...

But I think it's a little silly when Micrisoft with 34 billion in cash acts like they're more broke (or people act like they're more broke) in the console business than Sony that has lost a lot of money of late AFAIK.

Yes I know that in the CONSOLE business MS has done much worse.

I haven't got that far, but I gather late in the book Takahashi scolds them a bit for just that-not putting more money into the 360 venture.

IIRC that cash is now actually there to serve as a pool for their share dividend. Maximising shareholder value for them over the past couple of years has been achieved through returning cash to their shareholders, since there are not many projects and options avaliable to them that would generate significant returns.

 

[jpr27]

Im sorry but Im not a great supporter of J. Allard. Although I will give him some credit he is more business / Hardware based thinker. I think he needs to leave the MS based franchises in the hands of someone who looks at the overall picture and not just business based development cycle. I believe there was a clash between him and Bungie leads about the Halo franchise even before the release of the upcoming Halo 3. I read exerpts (and was noted in this chat) about how he looked at game creation in the form of EA's methods and development style. (Well dont get me started on EA ) I think that one of Bungie leads threatened to quit or resign over disagreements at one point? (People with the book probably could expand on it.)

As for the future Xbox's, I wonder if they are going to use pretty much the same CPU configs (updated in appropriate technologies and cores etc.) and an advanced GPU fitting for the next generation console. I would think now that they have XNA and the start of solid game creation software, (MS is a software company after all ) they would want to expand on the software and coordinate with future hardware to help developers make the transition to a next gen console easier and more cost effective. That way developers dont have the chore of learning to take advantage of a whole new system but in essence have a solid foundation of familiar software tools expanded to take advantage of next gen technologies and power. (All designed with the assitance of developers input).

By owning most if not all the IP maybe MS might be headed this direction?

 

[mckmas8808]

As for the future Xbox's, I wonder if they are going to use pretty much the same CPU configs (updated in appropriate technologies and cores etc.) and an advanced GPU fitting for the next generation console. I would think now that they have XNA and the start of solid game creation software, (MS is a software company after all ) they would want to expand on the software and coordinate with future hardware to help developers make the transition to a next gen console easier and more cost effective. That way developers dont have the chore of learning to take advantage of a whole new system but in essence have a solid foundation of familiar software tools expanded to take advantage of next gen technologies and power. (All designed with the assitance of developers input).

By owning most if not all the IP maybe MS might be headed this direction?

Hmmm.... Good thoughts. I think you may be right. I hope MS does tread down the path that you just laid out. Knowing MS they seem to care about the devs more than Sony does, so I think they would try to make the life of the average dev a little easier with that approach.

 

[pipo]

This is not from the book, but related to the money discussion.

Got it from the 'Shadowrun blogs': http://spaces.msn.com/adnauseam/blo...gpart_blogpart=blogview&_c=blogpart#permalink

Here’s a secret about Microsoft – the company doesn’t have big piles of money, the board of directors do. Individual product groups have very tight budgets and have to fight for and justify every $ they spend. When you’re a big product like Office, it’s easier to get money, which means more developers, more testers, and more features. When you’re a smaller product group and your total forecast revenue would be a rounding error for the Office team, you have to make do with what you have.

 

[Geo]

An itty-bitty point, but he quotes a spin cycle at 12-16 weeks, when I had it figured at 8-12. I wonder if he's right.

Another little one --ATI had a bug that almost screwed the schedule, and this is described as being due to the fact that it lived "a couple levels down" (or words to that effect) from where their tools could find it. Given the R520 problems on the same node, one does see the need for better tools, and I wonder if they've actually done something about that. Orton said something along those lines at a CC around R520 release time, but I wonder if there was follow up and result?

 

[sonyps35]

I've sort of downgraded my regard of the book.

I got a bit bored halfway in, and dont have great desire to continue.

It's written at too basic a technical level for B3ders. It also features a ton of repetition and jumping around in time.

I find myself basically often skimming ahead in the book for the too-few technical revelations, the good parts, with the rest of the book not interesting enough.

I guess it's still a good look into the behind the scenes, though.

btw, the book does claim Sony used a two-cell approach, one for graphics, and then later tried to develop a GPU with Toshiba based on raw fillrate strength, which was their strong point, but that developers strongly objected to both designs, so they were rescinded in favor of the Nvidia solution.

 

[Tap In]

An itty-bitty point, but he quotes a spin cycle at 12-16 weeks, when I had it figured at 8-12. I wonder if he's right.

Another little one --ATI had a bug that almost screwed the schedule, and this is described as being due to the fact that it lived "a couple levels down" (or words to that effect) from where their tools could find it. Given the R520 problems on the same node, one does see the need for better tools, and I wonder if they've actually done something about that. Orton said something along those lines at a CC around R520 release time, but I wonder if there was follow up and result?

I'd forgotten about that.

that bug almost screwed the pooch for a 2005 launch. ATI worked their butts off (evidently) to resolve it.

 

[Tap In]

This is not from the book, but related to the money discussion.

one of my favorite parts from the book re: money.

I thought this was a cool exercise.

Doug Hebenthal had printed a stack of $10 million bills for the occasion, with each one about three inches by five inches. On the board on the wall was a list of things that Microsoft could spend its money on. Based on Bryan Lee’s spreadsheets and the overall plan to spend a total of $17 billion on the Xbox program over a decade, the executives had to decide where to spend their discretionary money. Most of the $17 billion had to be spend on components such as console parts, but Robbie Bach had decided that Microsoft could spend $770 million in discretionary money over the five-year life of Xenon. That was the amount they could spend and still hit the profit targets over the decade.

That wasn’t the total amount of money they had to spend. That was simply the amount of money that they had not yet allocated but were free to spend. Under the long-term budget, they could still hit their profit targets – set by Steve Ballmer and Bryan Lee – even if they spent this money.

The scenario assumed that Microsoft would capture about 40 percent of the market, roughly equal to Sony’s 40 percent share, while Nintendo would have 20 percent. But different plans and assumptions would kick in if Microsoft’s market share grew to 60 percent, or it stagnated at the current 20 percent.

The categories on the wall included third party games, first party games, Xbox Live, software tools, marketing, the costs of goods, marketing, advertising, the effort in Japan, and a variety of other categories. Each of the executives and the few members of the Xenon Integration Team team present had to decide how to allocate their 77 bills. The voting was revealing, and it forced everyone to think about their budget as part of the whole.

“We did this wonderful exercise on where to make our investment,†said one person who was present. “That was really managed well. Every meaningful decision was made there.â€

Cam Ferroni, who was now heading software, took what he called a “perverse pleasure†in seeing the territorial executives now faced with a zero-sum game.

 

[pipo]

one of my favorite parts from the book re: money.

I thought this was a cool exercise.

I totally agreed with you one page back.

 

[scooby_dooby]

That's exactly how we do things in my organization when developing our business plan for the upcoming years, except we use little sticky dots instead of $10million bills!

 

[3dcgi]

An itty-bitty point, but he quotes a spin cycle at 12-16 weeks, when I had it figured at 8-12. I wonder if he's right.

I don't know what the correct numbers are, but time can vary based on how much money you're willing to spend and how busy the fabs are. Pay more money and you jump to the front of the line.