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Stupid, Stupid xBox

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Re: Stupid, Stupid xBox

#31

Post by redblacktree »

clobber wrote: post #21
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 the…

Isn't this how the console market works? You lose money on console units, but make it back in licensing?

Or are you saying that, taking licensing into account, the Xbox still lost money for Microsoft?

2005 and 2007 were a long time ago. Do you know of more recent numbers?

Re: Stupid, Stupid xBox

#32

Post by sophacles »

tibbon wrote: post #15

The modern round of game systems are quite flawed from a UI/UX perspective, as the author here points out. My Playstation 3 forces me to do various updates to watch Netflix (which is what I use the system for 90% of the time). All of the systems ask you to input text in a super-awkward way to setup various aspects of the system (on-screen keyboards really suck for typing in complex WPA2 passwords). The XBox 360 is th…

Seriously, the fact that I can't plug in an old keyboard to the PS3 for the occasional password or search drives me nuts.

Re: Stupid, Stupid xBox

#33

Post by autarch »

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…

I just bought a fairly capable gaming PC for around $1,000. It's not the absolute fastest thing but it certainly performs more than well enough for all the indie games I've bought.

Re: Stupid, Stupid xBox

#36

Post by tobyjsullivan »

The segment about terrible error messages really resonated with me. I was actually just thinking yesterday about how, after so many years, Windows errors on personal/home computers still tell you to talk to your "system administrator". Microsoft has never understood the basics of the personal market. Bad UX is in their blood.

Re: Stupid, Stupid xBox

#37

Post by anigbrowl »

theevocater wrote: post #28

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 st…

It'll be interesing to see what Sony reveals next week when they unveil the Playstation 4; one hopes this device will be capable of downloading something in the background.

I have to say I find a lot of Apple stuff maddeningly quirky as well, and don't think they have a magic fix for this space. But they could certainly shake the space up if they choose to enter it, and I wish they would since more competition is good.

Re: Stupid, Stupid xBox

#38

Post by OmarIsmail »

I don't know if people on HN are following the rumors related to the next-gen consoles, but it looks like MS is going to be addressing at least one of these issues: UI fluidity. If the rumors are accurate, then MS has a multi-pronged approach to making the UI a lot more fluid. While the 360 reserved 32MB of RAM for the OS, rumors suggest that MS is reserving 3GB (out of a total of 8GB).

Furthermore, MS is apparently using a hardware-based display plane system where there are 4 independent display buffers that can be refreshed/displayed at different resolutions and framerates. 3 of the display planes are for the game to use (one for the HUD, 1 for foreground, 1 background) and 1 plane dedicated to the OS.

I do 110% agree with the author that having a more app-store like ecosystem would be absolutely huge, and if MS were to properly implement, would let them compete vs Apple.

If I had the money I'd buy both MS and Apple stock, because one of them is in the best position to win the living room in the next 5 years.

Re: Stupid, Stupid xBox

#39

Post by ghjm »

redblacktree wrote: post #31
clobber wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

Isn't this how the console market works? You lose money on console units, but make it back in licensing? Or are you saying that, taking licensing into account, the Xbox still lost money for Microsoft? 2005 and 2007 were a long time ago. Do you know of more recent numbers?

The overall division really did lose $4 billion that year. In 2011 they made $1.3 billion. Overall, I think they're about at break-even for the program since inception.

Re: Stupid, Stupid xBox

#40

Post by natbro »

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…

what you describe ("if you aren't big and selling enough games, there aren't enough of you to pay the bills") is exactly the thinking I used to see inside Microsoft, not just around xBox, but around various development tools. it is a really really weird mindset today, though I think for xBox in the early days, when you really needed some low-level hardware tools to get the best juice out of the GPU, it still held a bit of whater. but that was then, and now game engines and GPU programming are much much easier. both Apple's XCode and Android development tools are basically free and there is a vast quantity of good quality graphics and physics and GLSL open source to draw on. they need to change their thinking about tools and access. they have to believe that developers will come and make great games and will be willing to give you a cut if you give them distribution, promotion, and access to your huge installed base of consoles.
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