What Microsoft Should and Shouldn't Do For the Xbox 720 502
donniebaseball23 writes "Xbox 360 just came off a record November, with more than 1.7 million units sold in the U.S., but behind closed doors Microsoft is planning its next move for the successor to the popular console. Plenty of Xbox 720 rumors have surfaced in recent months, but veteran games journalist Chris Morris has filtered through them to provide a realistic take on what Microsoft should and shouldn't do with Xbox 360's successor. In particular, he notes that Microsoft should adopt the Blu-ray format from Sony. 'A DVD drive as a medium for storing larger and larger games is outdated – and it steps on the toes of a system that bills itself as the high definition leader,' Morris writes. 'Microsoft resisted the move to Blu-ray this generation without any ill effects. It even survived picking the losing side in the format battle between Blu-ray and HD-DVD, but it can't rely on the DVD to take it into the next generation.'"
Never going to happen. (Score:5, Insightful)
Optical? (Score:4, Insightful)
I wonder whether the next generation of consoles from Sony and Microsoft will use discs at all. Perhaps we are not yet at the point where it is practical to download 30GB of game data, but with incremental background downloads it might be feasible in the 720's timeframe.
Ultimately the OnLive model is clearly what we will all be using, but it'll be a while yet before low-latency broadband is ubiquitous.
Re:Optical? (Score:5, Insightful)
Discs will remain as long as broadband speeds make downloading 50 GB (on a blueray, not 30) an irritatingly slow process. Besides which , not everyone wants to rely on always having a net connection just to use a piece of equipment.
Re:720 degrees? (Score:3, Insightful)
Improve Build Quality (Score:5, Insightful)
I know I amount to anecdotal evidence but when I see that large a collection of device failures (and the friends of whom I speak are spread across multiple countries from coast to coast so it isn't a local phenomenon), I have to think I'm actually not anecdotal evidence - I feel I'm witnessing a significant trend.
The most important thing Microsoft needs to focus on with a new XBox is build quality. Everything else should come a distant second.
Re:Optical Media? (Score:5, Insightful)
A pressed optical disc is a matter of a few cents. That's significantly cheaper than the cartridges of yore and flash memory of the same amount. If you are implying user brings their own key to a kiosk, that *could* work, but I think you'd have a low attach rate for stores carrying the kiosks as most of the potential customers would be net connected and with the store being no different than buying it via network, the market is too small.
In terms of going full download over the internet, that really depends. First, you have to ascertain what percentage of the market has the capability to reasonably download the games. I suspect the percentage is relatively high, but I know of a few anecdotes of rural areas with no reasonable high speed internet option. Second, you have to figure of those that can, how many prefer optical media. On tech sites the community gives the feeling of being all in on download-only distribution models, but in the market I know several people who buy movies and games on disc even when they have downloadable options. If that is a large chunk of the market and MS dumps optical media and Sony doesn't, this could be a significant differentiator.
Finally, your options for backwards compatibility are limited. If your older library games just won't physically fit in the system, that's a problem.
Re:Optical? (Score:5, Insightful)
Discs will remain as long as broadband speeds make downloading 50 GB (on a blueray, not 30) an irritatingly slow process
How long would it take to only download the title screen and first level? You don't always need to have everything ready to get started
Use memory cards instead of optical discs (Score:5, Insightful)
Since I don't own games like PlayStation, Wii or X-Box, I have no ideas on what other improvements or pitfalls should be there.
A few of my own (Score:5, Insightful)
DO: Make a sensible sized hard drive standard for every model. The 360 suffered early cycle because games were tentative about assuming that they could use a hard disk (the "core" model didn't have one). The 4GB drive that ships with the current model is also inadequate. 20GB for the bottom end model should be considered an absolute minimum.
DO: Pack in the RAM. Of all of the factors that are driving developer frustration with the current console generation, RAM seems to be at the top of the pack. It's worse for the PS3 (with its awkward memory-split and larger OS footprint) than for the 360, but still... RAM is pretty cheap and packing plenty of it in will pay dividends in 5 years time.
DO: Continue to develop what you've been doing on voice controls for the console's UI. I have mixed feelings about Kinect, but voice activation is really great - and has an appeal to a wide demographic.
DON'T: Worry too much about making a loss on each unit sold for the first year or two. MS's objectives should be to get a large installed base early on and to make sure that their machine is fairly future-proof. This probably means selling at a loss early on. The real profits from a console come later in the cycle, when component prices have fallen, so you can reduce prices and still sell at a profit, and when you have third party developers giving you free money, by putting out games for your system (and paying you a fee on each copy sold) without you having to invest in development.
DON'T: Allow your dev team to push out firmware updates every 5 minutes. The 360 has had a few too many firmware updates for comfort, but perhaps not to the extent of being a deal-breaker. With the PS3, the sheer frequency of updates (and the length of time they take) is intensely frustrating, when you just want to fire up the console and play a game.
DON'T: Allow region locking. Sony have already ditched this and it did them no harm. MS knows region coding is junk; it doesn't use it for any of its first or second party games. Take the option away from developers; its time for them to grow up. It also reduces the incentive for people to get consoles mod-chipped - which in turn means they may be less likely to look into a bit of piracy. Which brings me onto the final point:
DO: Assume that whatever copy-protection you put into the machine will get broken sooner or later and plan accordingly. Reduce the incentive for people to mod their consoles, rather than going for the punitive route. Don't region lock. Do offer up an "other OS" walled garden. Do make it as easy as possible for indie developers to get their software onto the platform.
Re:Not necessarily (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.gamespot.com/pages/profile/show_blog_entry.php?topic_id=23916169&user=skektek [gamespot.com]
So terribly slow. I mean, look, this Blu-Ray drive is only 4x where this DVD is 12x!
Blu-ray 4x: 144MBps / 18MBps
12x DVD: 66 - 132Mbps / 8.2 - 16.5MBps
I mean, who would want the drive that's not running like a turbo jet to stream data to the device.
Re:Why bother with a DVD/Blu-ray drive at all? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not just have a 1TB HDD? Or a swanky SSD? That's the inevitability anyway. Store games in the cloud a la Steam and download them at your convenience. Don't fear the cloud. These days, such a move isn't bound to exclude many as it would have in the past.
This would be a disaster as the XBox experience would be out of control of Microsoft. Instead they would be at the mercy of ISPs. This cannot be overstated. Regardless of the availability of fast Internet connectivity there is a lot to be said for the immediacy of plugging in the XBox, slapping in a disc, and just playing.
Steam is an interesting experiment, and does work, but if you have issues with access to your account you can easily lose an hour or two sorting it out by which time you've lost your time to play.
What MS Shouldn't do is prevent purchases. (Score:5, Insightful)
I have three Xbox360s, each for a different room of the house. In addition to game consoles they function as media consumption devices for Netflix and for my mountain of movies on the NAS. However, It is such a pain in the ass to migrate between them (and you must, if you want your gamer profile & saved games to interoperate), that I've actually disconnected TWO of them and replaced them with smaller quieter Linux media centers (screw it, If I can only play games on one, I'll only play games on one).
The DRM they employ is hurting their business. I'm thankful that I can re-download my content on different consoles, or swap my hard-drives around, but the fact is, I can only be signed in to XBL in one room at a time, and my Netfilx bandwidth isn't tied to XBL servers except artificially. When I want to play a game online, no one else can watch the movies or surf the marketplace which I pay to access. Yes, I can use separate accounts, but I shouldn't have to fragment my usage needlessly. Besides, I tried that already, trying to find the right drive or profile to play a specific game or movie is RIDICULOUS.
Also, this "online pass" bullshit that's bundled with games has to stop. I already pay for XBL services, MS provides the matchmaking API, its XBL. Dear Epic, I've bought and played every game you ever made from Zork to Gears, but when your activation code prevented me from playing the game I purchased, because another player had used the online pass first, I decided to boycot you... We have 1 disc. Only one of us can play at a time online anyway. You once did produce truly beloved Epic MegaGames, but this bullshit attempt to rape the used game market has caused me to hate you.
In short: SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY! People will spend a lot more if you make it easier us to do so. Get rid of the DRM, or at least make it marginally usable.
Until then, I think I'll start investing in your competitors: The DRM free, truly cross platform, charity supporting, indie games [humblebundle.com].
Re:What Microsoft Shouldn't Do For the Xbox 720 (Score:4, Insightful)
1- People will confuse 720 for 720p and think that's the only resolution it goes to.
2- The next one after the 720 would have to be 1080 or 1440. Those are awkward names.
3- They should do like everyone else and call it "Xbox X". Or adopt the animal naming meme and call them something like "Xbox Rhino", "Xbox Elephant" and "Xbox Landwhale".
Re:Not necessarily (Score:4, Insightful)
As best I understand from some cursory googling(coming from PC-land, where we haven't really worried about optical media speeds since the difference between a 2x and an 8x DVD writer was some pretty serious stuff, man) "1x" in Blu-ray land is 4.5 MB/s while "1x" in DVD land is 1.4 MB/s. This would suggest that a first-generation blu-ray drive, pitted against some cheap and mature 24x DVD drive, will be feeling the pain; but that blu-ray's far higher data density would give it a superior speed ceiling(since the rate at which you can spin a cheap, questionably balanced, polycarbonate disk on a cheap, questionably balanced, spindle is fairly limited and should be roughly similar for the two disk types) and that at ~8x, BD-ROM should be absolutely faster than DVD.
Regardless of absolute best case stream speeds, though, optical media are always going to have random access times that make HDDs look positively snappy, and HDD seek times are pretty damned miserable compared to flash, which is similarly un
Re:Use memory cards instead of optical discs (Score:5, Insightful)
Cost of flash as a medium is not comparable to a sub $1 bluray disc. Microsoft would burn a lot of game studio karma if they roll out a system which adds extra cost to deploy.
Re:Never going to happen. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah , online great idea. I mean why bother just putting a disc in a tray and waiting 30 secos for the game to boot when you can wait 48 hours for the 50GB to download first instead.
Re:720 degrees? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's why it's comedy.
Re:Never going to happen. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Never going to happen. (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, the only places I see people complaining about optical discs in game consoles are on technophile sites like this one.