Microsoft's E3 Conference Displays Company Confidence 147
The tone from Microsoft tonight was one of celebration and anticipation, as they ran down their successes since the 360 launched and hyped their lineup between now and the end of the year. Peter Moore framed the discussing by recalling the blockbuster holiday season of 2004, which was driven by the Grand Theft Auto, Madden, and Halo franchises. Moore stated that 'the only place to play all three games' this year is the 360. In addition to showing off other heavyweight titles like Mass Effect (which is due in November), the company had a few new announcements: They'll be releasing a version of the movie trivia game Scene-It with a quartet of special controllers, for a standard game price. They've partnered with Walt Disney and its associated companies to bring their family of movies to the Xbox Live service, with many titles already available tonight. CliffyB officially revealed Gears of War for the PC; it'll have additional content as well as co-op gaming via Live for Windows. Resident Evil 5 will be coming to the system (the only game from their conference not releasing this year). The event was capped by a live-action short piece meant to show what a Halo movie might look like, the announcement of a Halo 3 special edition 360 sku set to launch alongside the game, and a new trailer showing a bunch of Halo 3 in-game footage. For further details on the event, click below for other sites' liveblog coverage.
Call of Duty (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Call of Duty (Score:4, Interesting)
Overall, I think it was an odd presentation. They only showed stuff coming out this year, and while there are a lot of quality titles coming in the next few months, it might come back to bite them. If Sony's presentation tomorrow contains all kinds of gorgeous footage from games that are still more than a year away, people will come away far more impressed. This is a lesson they should have learned from 2 years ago during the unveiling of the consoles. Sony showed CG footage that they hoped would represent in-game graphics, and even though it was BS, people came away wowed.
Re:profit (Score:3, Interesting)
You know: if, if, if...
If Sony didn't focus on things like blu-ray, hd-dvd would've taken edge, and they'd lose a far more lucrative revenue source than gaming.
If Microsoft didn't burn so much money on sales at loss, maybe they'd still gain edge since XBOX260 was the first 3G console on the market, and with solid online service.
Last but not least, if Nintendo didn't screw Son with the CD players, PlayStation wouldn't exist in the first place.
But if or not if, the situation is like it is, and I pretty much believe there won't be PS4 ever. Sony plans to keep PS3 for something like 10-15 years, and with poor growth, exclusives and features like this, XBOX480 (or whatever) and WiiPeeDoo 2 will basically finish them completely.
Microsoft have confidence in the sector for a reason.
Re:/. is funny sometimes (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Call of Duty (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Lots of dick waving, not alot of substance (Score:3, Interesting)
What the fuck is this "I want innovation in games" whining that's been going on for years and years now? It's getting very annoying. Why does everyone want innovation for innovation's sake? Do you even know what you want, or are you just repeating the popular catchphrase of the moment? Even if developers do release innovative or different games, people still keep repeating "moar inovation plz" like some kind of fucking parrots. A game doesn't need to be innovative in order to be fun.
This is pretty much like the "more gameplay, less graphics" bullshit that people keep spouting. They must be completely out of the gaming loop since they keep demanding something that's been around for decades.
Note to moderators: no, this isn't a "troll" or a "flamebait." If you don't know what trolling and flamebaiting are, leave moderating to people who actually know what the fuck they're doing.
Re:Confidence? (Score:3, Interesting)
What boggles my mind is that his 360 had only 200 hours of game play on it. 40 games, 5 hours a piece? yipes!
Re:Celebrating their monopoly... (Score:2, Interesting)
Apple does the same exact thing with the Mac. It's not a PC, it's a Mac -- product differentiation into a different market. Once you're with Mac, you don't have choices as to hardware, you just have Apple. It's ultimately the same goal. The iPod is similar in that it ties into iTunes. And OSX is similar in that it's tied directly to their hardware and software offerings. You could say Apple has a monopoly in the "Mac" market just like Microsoft has a monopoly on the "360" market or Sony has a monopoly on the "PS3" market, and like the Mac/PC competition there is some overlap -- but not everything for the PC is available for Mac, and not everything for the Mac is available on PC. To ultimately have "everything", you have to get both.
The goal is to make consumers think that rather than competing products, that they are different products and that you may need both of them to get everything you want. Do you have two different branded razors? Two different branded gallons of milk in the fridge? Those are products competing directly with each other. The consoles would be closer to juice vs milk -- you might want one or the other in your fridge, so they compete in that regard, but to get the calcium you go with milk, for the antioxidants you go with the juice so you may still want to get both.
The PS3 and the XBox360 are the two ice cream stands that are 10 feet apart on a beach a mile long and competing for a large portion of the customers, but each one has slightly different offerings (in the ice cream stand example -- Hotelling model for spacial competition -- the difference is distance to walk).
Watched the G4 coverage of the E3 MSFT preview (Score:2, Interesting)
Take home message, other than a few games (Halo) that we already knew were xBox360 specific - not much behind the PR.