Microsoft Aims to Boost the 360's Family Appeal

Bloomberg is reporting on Microsoft's efforts to be more inclusive to 'family' game players. Essentially, Micrsoft admits they're looking to Nintendo as the generation leader this time around, with low cost and family appeal driving their sales numbers ever higher. To that end, Microsoft is looking at a possible price cut and shift in strategies to appeal to a broader audience. This dovetails with comments made by Bill Gates at the AllThingsDigital event regarding motion controls in the future of the console. "Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer wants to avoid the fate of the first Xbox. The console appealed mainly to hard-core gamers, generally males between 15 and 29 years old, and trailed Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 2 in sales by a 5-to-1 margin ... Microsoft's initial attempts to target children didn't live up to the company's expectations. A November game called Viva Piñata, in which kids build a garden and raise animals that look like piñatas brought to life, didn't make it into the top 20, even with a Saturday morning cartoon created to promote the game." It might not have sold, but VP was an awesome game.

Re:MS is still not getting it

[maddskillz]

You can't on the one hand promote games like Halo 3 and Gears of War as your premiere games (and whoever actually publishes them, MS has gone out of their way to promote the system using them) and then on the other hand try to market your system as a "family system". It's one or the other.

Why must it be one or the other? You can even have two separate advertising campaigns.
If I were a parent, I would like not having to buy two pieces of hardware, to do essentially the same thing. I am not saying I would want the kids to play my games (or for me to play theirs) but I wouldn't want to have to duplicate hardware.

Wrong Target

[JamesRose]

Look, they say family market, which means they're targetting the quite concentrated range of 6-60 year olds.If you target the parents and the kids at the same time you aren't going to please them both, and at best if you do please them both they'll buy one for the house and probably share it. However, only target kids, or only target adults, much easier to please your target market, but at the same time, the same amount of people end up with xboxs in their homes. Why is common sense a quality completely lost in corporations.

Not going to work.

[stonecypher]

The only way you can pick up the family safe demographic is by discarding all other demographics, and it takes years for parental trust to change for a given company. They couldn't take the family demographic without throwing away everything they already have, or coming up with some form of radical departure from current business models.

Whereas I applaud Microsoft for looking to learn from its competition, and for admitting that this generation belongs to Nintendo, this is not something they can adapt by graft without doing tremendous damage to themselves. It would, in my opinion as a professional game designer, be a fatal error.

Re:Remember

[Altus]

Don't get me wrong, there are great online options but running an 8 player halo game over the internet is not generally a "party game" so its different than what I was trying to describe on Nintendo.

Nintendo has really gone after the market segment where a group of people get together impromptu and play some simple fun game in a group setting. I'm not talking about a Lan party where everyone brings over a system but just the sort of thing that can be picked up when you have some friends over.

Im sure there are good 4 player games for the X box... Halo I assume, allows 4 players on 1 box. But it seems like there are more of these on Nintendo's consoles historically and it seems to be even more true with the Wii. Also, there seems to be a definite attempt with the Wii to make party games that are very easy for people to learn, without the ramp up required to be decent at Halo.

Im not trying to say that Nintendo is inherently better here, just that their focus is different and that is part of what is driving their current success in the family market.