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Stupid, Stupid xBox

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Re: Stupid, Stupid xBox

#21

Post by clobber »

GuiA wrote: post #7

"how it is crushing its original console competitors" Previous gen: > Xbox sales: 24 million > PS2 sales: 153 million Current gen: > Xbox 360 sales: 76 million > Wii sales: 100 million > PS3 sales: 70 million (all data from each console's respective Wikipedia) How is it "crushing" its competitors? Otherwise, I bought an XBox360 recently to get the Kinect for openFrameworks hacking and played a little bit with the con…

Nobody seems to remember just how much money Microsoft and Sony have lost on their consoles.

- Through 2005, the Xbox gaming division had lost over $4 billion [1]

- Microsoft took a charge of $1 billion dollars on its June 2007 income statement to account for the cost of replacing bricked Xbox 360s [1]

- Xbox 360 and PS3 losses total $8 billion [2]

Luckily for Microsoft, they've had the cash to burn to strong-arm their way into the market. The units sold is nothing too impressive when you account for losses.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360#Timeline_2

2. http://www.vg247.com/2013/01/07/xbox-360-and-ps3-losses-tota...

Re: Stupid, Stupid xBox

#22

Post by mtgx »

manicdee wrote: post #18

Why can't you write software tomorrow and have it available to xBox customers the next day? Why can't that other malware author have his Trojan ready to install on millions of xBoxes? If you are going to sell to console users you have to accept that the platform will live or die based on how easy it is for consumers to use, and how safe they feel using it. The platform will need developers, but it doesn't have to cat…

I don't think Microsoft is charging developers on the order of tens of thousands of dollar per game update, just to check if they maybe put some malware in there.

Re: Stupid, Stupid xBox

#23

Post by ChuckMcM »

WestCoastJustin wrote: post #4

He has a massive point -- " Why can’t I write a game for xBox tomorrow using $100 worth of tools and my existing Windows laptop and test it on my home xBox or at my friends’ houses ". I am wiling to guess that game development will follow the path of app stores. Consoles like the OUYA [1] will start to take over. The cycle from development to distribution will be cut by orders of magnitude. xBox needs to get on it an…

This is the promise of things like the Oouya console but they have yet to be proven commercially viable in the market.

There are some interesting forces at work here. The amount of time and effort needed to build a truly cutting edge game console has historically been high, further tools to get the most performance out of the hardware have required similar investments in expensive engineering time. This combined with selling the consoles into a very price sensitive market.

In order to recoup those costs, given the market realities, the console makers have traditionally resorted to extracting a 'tax' out of the game developers. On the theory that charging a few extra $ for your game to cover the cost of the tools / access is possible, whereas trying to fund the tool development on the back of base console sales is not possible.

Historically this has been the PC's "secret" weapon against game consoles for a long time. The cost of building tools was offset by developer fees across a much wider base of developers. "Free" tools were good enough if the hardware was sufficiently over powered, and gamers would spend $3500 on a machine that "normal" people would budget Then there are the phone games, which like PC games, have the advantage that the phone is useful for other stuff and there are more developers trying to write apps for it.

Ooya's promise is that the existing Android infrastructure / developers will support tool development, and the wide variety of handsets will constrain there efforts to work on systems that are similar to the modest abilities (relative to all android platforms) of the Ooya console.

So to respond to the articles point, the reason you cannot write a game for Xbox using $100 worth of tools is because if Microsoft only got $100 from everyone writing a game for the Xbox you would not have enough money to actually create the tools, much less support them decently. Their best effort at this was XNA but they have since killed that due to lack of adoption, if you are EA you can pay big bills, if you aren't, there are not enough of you to pay any bills.

Re: Stupid, Stupid xBox

#24

Post by natbro »

Wilduck wrote: post #13
GuiA wrote: post #7

"how it is crushing its original console competitors" Previous gen: > Xbox sales: 24 million > PS2 sales: 153 million Current gen: > Xbox 360 sales: 76 million > Wii sales: 100 million > PS3 sales: 70 million (all data from each console's respective Wikipedia) How is it "crushing" its competitors? Otherwise, I bought an XBox360 recently to get the Kinect for openFrameworks hacking and played a little bit with the con…

My guess would be the author is referring to US markets, where the Xbox 360 is outdoing the PS3 by a more significant margin.

yes, apologies for over-stating it generally or under-specifying US as the "crushing it" market. i do mean US and in general the fact that xBox currently has the most "mo" getting xBox ahead of Nintendo and Sony in their native territories was always expected to be a long, uphill slog.

Re: Stupid, Stupid xBox

#25

Post by mnicole »

czr80 wrote: post #17
GuiA wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's more, this point applies to ANY consumer device today: "Why can’t I write a game for tomorrow using $100 worth of tools and my existing Windows laptop and test it on my home or at my friends’ houses" If as a company you're going to push for any device (game console, tablet, TV-box, phone, etc.), that seems like a number one pre-requisite to significant market share.

Really? The number one pre-requisite? I think you're greatly overestimating how much the general population shares your particular hobbies.

People would be much more apt to become hobbyist developers if they even knew where to start; we're all curious beings with problems we want to solve. My interest in web came only after I realized how easy it was to look at the innards of a site and go from there. It's not that simple for most software and games at the moment.

Re: Stupid, Stupid xBox

#26

Post by csense »

WestCoastJustin wrote: post #4

He has a massive point -- " Why can’t I write a game for xBox tomorrow using $100 worth of tools and my existing Windows laptop and test it on my home xBox or at my friends’ houses ". I am wiling to guess that game development will follow the path of app stores. Consoles like the OUYA [1] will start to take over. The cycle from development to distribution will be cut by orders of magnitude. xBox needs to get on it an…

Why do the tools need to cost anything at all?

Re: Stupid, Stupid xBox

#27

Post by InclinedPlane »

GuiA wrote: post #7

"how it is crushing its original console competitors" Previous gen: > Xbox sales: 24 million > PS2 sales: 153 million Current gen: > Xbox 360 sales: 76 million > Wii sales: 100 million > PS3 sales: 70 million (all data from each console's respective Wikipedia) How is it "crushing" its competitors? Otherwise, I bought an XBox360 recently to get the Kinect for openFrameworks hacking and played a little bit with the con…

These are just hardware sales. Of all of these the 360 has the most follow-on game/other services sales.

Re: Stupid, Stupid xBox

#28

Post by theevocater »

I've been shouting this for as long as I could: Once Apple (or maybe an Android company or even someone new) enters this market in earnest, Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo should take watch.

Apple has the infrastructure to deliver games, has tiny/medium/large touch devices that can connect via bluetooth in many customers hands (which already play games), and many many game developers familiar with the platforms. Every big studio has an iDevice team and there are hundreds of good iPhone games out there. If Apple can position the AppleTV as a console (maybe open it up to developers) or build something more along the lines of a traditional console, they will crush.

You can already do cool stuff like stream the game to the TV via airplay and use the device for a score/map screen (basically a WiiU) and it works surprisingly well and doesn't need cords or anything.

The only other real competitor here I see is one of the bigger android vendors like Sony or Samsung. If Sony could get the company in shape and stop producing products that compete with each other, they have many of the same advantages as Apple. They have android devices, experience making console/tv/etc hardware and even own game studios. They make every kind of electronic that goes in the tv room. But Sony has had this for years so that seems unlikely. They have already had huge employee slashes and are floundering.

Samsung has the same thing going on. They make everything and they have huge android phone/tablet penetration. I could see them easily jumping in on this and I hope they do. More competition blowing the doors of this stagnant industry could lead to a renaissance of smaller game studios.

EDIT I should add that Valve also has a chance here. There are many rumors swarming about a valve console or something similar. They have the distribution system and the games market experience, but have no experience with how to make hardware. Remember the last time that happened? I believe they called it the "red ring of death". I'm not saying valve can't pull it off but hardware is hard to get right. I look forward to what they do.

Re: Stupid, Stupid xBox

#29

Post by wmf »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #23
WestCoastJustin wrote: post #4

He has a massive point -- " Why can’t I write a game for xBox tomorrow using $100 worth of tools and my existing Windows laptop and test it on my home xBox or at my friends’ houses ". I am wiling to guess that game development will follow the path of app stores. Consoles like the OUYA [1] will start to take over. The cycle from development to distribution will be cut by orders of magnitude. xBox needs to get on it an…

This is the promise of things like the Oouya console but they have yet to be proven commercially viable in the market. There are some interesting forces at work here. The amount of time and effort needed to build a truly cutting edge game console has historically been high, further tools to get the most performance out of the hardware have required similar investments in expensive engineering time. This combined with…

MS could make development cheaper but still charge a 30% tax on game sales (which would actually be double what they take on a disc game).

Re: Stupid, Stupid xBox

#30

Post by natbro »

manicdee wrote: post #18

Why can't you write software tomorrow and have it available to xBox customers the next day? Why can't that other malware author have his Trojan ready to install on millions of xBoxes? If you are going to sell to console users you have to accept that the platform will live or die based on how easy it is for consumers to use, and how safe they feel using it. The platform will need developers, but it doesn't have to cat…

ha! i guess i write mostly crap software, too :) i really wasn't trying to imply that you should simply open up the market to self-publishing with no restrictions or oversight. that would screw the customers and therefore the brand very quickly. we did this poorly at microsoft with windows in the early days, and they are still doing it. it's tragic how easily malware still spreads on windows. it's amazing to me that android has so much malware, that google didn't think through security and sandboxing well enough. or revocations, etc. if i were to make a recommendation for xBox development, it would be to build a developer program where I could develop on my console and a few other (100?) consoles (so i could test), akin to how we can do iOS development, and apps would have to be submitted to a store and approved with a little less weird oversight than Apple uses, but quite a bit more oversight than Google or Microsoft uses, to make sure they aren't doing something evil or stupid or aren't malware. it's not so much a belief that making life easier for developers is the most important thing as it is the belief that a free market will allow customers to get great apps and will prevent artificial barriers in distribution and promotion from blocking innovation. customers will spend money where there is innovation.
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