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XBox (Games)

State of the Xbox 127

Posted by Zonk from the xbox-nationality? dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Xbox head-honcho Robbie Bach has written up a State of the Xbox in which he gloats about the continuing success of the console but fails to say a word about its evolution." From the article: "You may have seen the October Game Developers Magazine, which announced its top 20 Publishers of the Year. Microsoft Game Studios was named the number two publisher, just behind EA, based on revenue as well as use of third-party developers, average critical response to titles, percentage of original intellectual properties (IPs), and developer opinion."
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State of the Xbox More

State of the Xbox

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  • Rumours Abound (Score:4, Informative)

    by Damhna ( 56361 ) on Thursday January 06, 2005 @03:47PM (#11280369)
    http://alexalbrecht.typepad.com/alex/2005/01/xbox_ ii.html

    So in my travels this weekend I came across a Microsoft employee and talked him up about Xbox II... here are the facts I found out.

    1) Hard Drive... Yes! There was some speculation that MS was going to take the HD out to make it more difficult to Mod.

    2) Flash based HD... Yes!!! It was told to me that the HD was going to be flash based... small size fast access... BAM!

    3) No Stupid Dongle DVD playback... Yes!!! The reason that the first Xbox didn't have built in DVD playback is a simple one, Sony owns the Intellectual Property rights for DVD playback. Nuf said...

    4) Xbox II at E3... Hell Yes!!! There will be an Xbox II maybe more at E3 this year...

    5) Xbox II release date announced at E3... another Hell Yes!!! MS will be announcing a release date for Xbox II...

    Now this is not like the "rumors" about IBM before these are hard cold facts from the horses mouth...

    • Re:Rumours Abound (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ivan256 ( 17499 ) * on Thursday January 06, 2005 @04:38PM (#11281068)
      Hard Drive... Yes! ... Flash based HD... Yes!!!

      So instead of having some widely used removable flash memory format as a memory card or a large high speed (flash is slow compared to HDDs), high capacity cache space, they're going to build some flash memory in - essentially a soldered on memory card - and that's better? What next, are they going to put a little lithium button battery on the board and only allow three saves per console? Sounds like we're moving backwards here.

      Whey the hell hasn't any of these companies used CF or SD or, hell, MemoryStick as a memory card format and stopped this silly crap?
    • If the rumors are true about the flash based hard drive I don't see it as a good thing.
      Most likely it will allow MS to put some proprietary device in there making modding and upgrading harder.
      Flash also is not faster than a modern hard drive and has a much higher cost per megabyte.
    • "So in my travels this weekend I came across a Microsoft employee and talked him up about Xbox II"

      Was this before or after he was finished vacuuming?

      "The reason that the first Xbox didn't have built in DVD playback is a simple one, Sony owns the Intellectual Property rights for DVD playback."

      You misspelled "DVD Consortium." Anybody willing to pay the fees can play DVD movies (that, or get strung up under the DMCA). Sony opted to pay it. Microsoft decided not to (and yet the MSRP was still the same)
    • 3) No Stupid Dongle DVD playback... Yes!!! The reason that the first Xbox didn't have built in DVD playback is a simple one, Sony owns the Intellectual Property rights for DVD playback. Nuf said...

      Hmmm... in fact, I'm reasonably sure it's because a licence for DVD playback costs money, and rather than roll that into the cost of the base machine, they sold it as an optional extra. Else why sell the dongle at all, which is ultimately just a remote and the license?

      And remember: for a while, many Japanese c
    • So in my travels this weekend I came across a Microsoft employee and talked him up about Xbox II... here are the facts I found out.

      Heh. I'll bet he and his coworkers in the mailroom had a good laugh about the wide-eyed kid he met this weekend.

    • Why do so many people think flash memory is fast? That's not true at all. It's actually slower than a modern hard disk and, quite naturally, much much slower than RAM.
  • I felt that he was conveying genuine pride in this project. It appears that MS is getting their feet under them, and with the continued sucess, it appears that gamers will be the winner.
    • It's because if you don't hate MS here (oops, meant M$) at slashdot then you are a commie.
      • Why shouldn't people take outside opinions of Microsoft into account when judging the Xbox? What evidence do you have that they won't do the same thing in the video game console market that they've done in every other market they've become the leaders in if they manage to crush the competition? Do you look forward to a world where the Xbox 4 is essentially the last console that exists, because the Xbox 5, 6, anc 7 will just be the same thing in fancier colors and there isn't anybody else out there pushing t
        • Right, cause Sony is this tiny little company with victim written all over them.

          When perception diverges from reality, there you will find Slashdot.
          • Right, cause Sony is this tiny little company with victim written all over them.

            Remember Netware? 1-2-3? Microsoft is capable of taking out industry leading players. They've done it before... You just won't see any brilliant open source developers building billion dollar chip fabs to pressure Microsoft in to further hardware innovation once they own the console market.

            I'm not saying we should all be Sony or Nintendo fanboys because otherwise they'll be crushed by the evil empire. I'm just saying you shou
            • Remember Netware? 1-2-3? Microsoft is capable of taking out industry leading players. They've done it before...

              The PlayStation is a relatively insignificant sliver of what makes Sony what it is today, and console gaming is the only significant market in which they compete with Microsoft.

              In most of the markets where Sony participates, they are a far worse example of abuse of monopoly-level powers than Microsoft has ever been -- it's just that activity in those markets aren't nearly as high profile as the
      • The original point was that in the interview the man is taking pride in how well his product has done. In typical slashdot fashion the anti-MS bias interpreted this as something negative like "gloating".

        The tough thing about prejudice is you usually can't tell when you have it.

        ----

        Sony and Nintendo both have a huge installed base of both users and games. The number of available games for the PS2 when the XBox was released was a daunting challenge for any new competitor. Yet Microsoft is now a serious
    • ...and with the continued sucess...

      I guess it depends on what you mean by "success". If success means losing [itworld.com] tons [gamesindustry.biz] of money all the time, then yeah, the X-Box is a success. This type of financial spending is what Japanese companies in the 80s were doing, taking huge losses on products in order to get a stranglehold on the market.

      • Re:The submitter used the term gloat. (Score:4, Informative)

        by Ayaress ( 662020 ) on Thursday January 06, 2005 @07:34PM (#11283053) Journal
        They weren't trying to get a stranglehold on the market. They were doing something that's called "entering a market." I will give you one million dollars (if I had that much anyway), and let you pick any existing industry. You then have five years to produce a return on my investment by doing business in that industry. Very unlikely in ANY industry. Getting recognized as a legitamate name costs a lot of money and a lot of advertising. Microsoft needed to get contracts and partnerships that it didn't have before and start doing things and hiring people that it hadn't done before.

        It's pretty equatable to a store (just with a few extra 0's on the bankroll). The initial investment is huge. You need to purchase property, and either build a suitable structure or remodel the existing one to fit (or pay a likely higher price on an already fitting location), you need to invest in initial inventory, hardware and electronics, pay the connection or transfer fees on all the services, and then you need to hire a workstaff. At this point you have still not made a dime, but boy are you spending it.

        Once you open for business, you have a mountain of debts, which turns off investors (this is one of the few areas where a pre-existing corporation entering a new market has an advantage. it can offest these costs with profits from other divisions. However, many major investors will see this new division as a big gaping black hole and will be more hesitant to invest), meaning odds are those debts aren't going anywhere just yet.

        Most importantly, you're new. Few people know about you, and even those that do don't know wether it's worth doing business with you. You need to spend money to get people to do this by advertising, and it's usually neccessary to cut prices to razor-thing profit margins (or even temporary losses) so that people are more likely to gamble on a "test" purchase from you. Microsoft did this by selling the Xbox at a loss initially. Nintendo has done this, Sega did this, I'm pretty sure Sony does this, although I've never cared enough to look up the particulars, and Microsoft had to do it to keep up. I don't know if Atari ever did this, but if they did, then it would have hurt them far worse. Nintedo was an old and successful card and board game producer, Sony had a long line of successful electronics, and Microsoft has operating systems. They all had to take the initial entry pains to get into the video game market. The fact that Microsoft is dealing with those pains the same way Nintendo and Sony did should not be suprising. In fact, it should be [reassuring or troubling, depending on wether you want to be reasonable and open or simply want Microsoft to fail for failure's sake]. It worked for the the other consoles. That's not to say it'll work for the next one, but it does strongly suggest that it's a pretty good way to go.

        About the only company that didn't take initial losses on entering the gaming system market is Nokia. They went and tried to sell their handheld system at $400 out of the gate (I can only hope they were trying to profit off of system sales without having to rely on game sales or gamble on continued future success, anyway. If they were selling below cost, then they have worse problems than I ever thought). Had they started out with the sort of prices they cut it down to, I still don't think they would have succeeded, but they would have had a decent shot at getting some impulse buyers on the hook.
    • It appears that MS is getting their feet under them, and with the continued sucess, it appears that gamers will be the winner.

      Sounds good. Now maybe they have the excuse they need to stop producing their crummy OS.

  • reading the article (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Fr05t ( 69968 ) on Thursday January 06, 2005 @03:54PM (#11280484)
    but I stopped when he started bragging about the "awards" xbox games won at Spike TV's second annual Video Game Awards. The award show I saw I wouldn't brag about to anyone.
    • I agree with you entirely. I eagerly set my Mythbox to record that with high hopes. I started watching the first ten minutes. I really couldn't speak. That 'awards' show single handedly set back society's image of gamers 15 years in ten minutes.

      Thank god for 'delete'. I just wish society had such a button.
    • You're forgetting that the Spike award show and the Xbox both have the same target audience. Microsoft wants to attract the people who actually liked what they saw.
    • Ooooh, good call. Also note that the #1 publisher of the year is Electronic Arts, which, despite selling the most games, is now far from admirable from the standpoint of advancing the art of game design.

  • Whoa (Score:1)

    by slumpy ( 304072 )
    Xbox is cool, and selling very very well and I don't understand microsoft's rush to release Xbox2....Xbox has finally come into its own, just in time for the release of the Xenon or whatever. I like new consoles and better graphics, but I think microsoft should slow down.

    • Re:Whoa (Score:2)

      by Thag ( 8436 )
      They're losing money on every XBox 1 they sell, that's why they're in a hurry to get XBox 2 out.

      XBox 2 is designed to be profitable, both at launch and at the end of the life cycle. And will hopefully be small enough to sell in Japan.
    • Halo 2 already overstresses the Xbox though, and frankly without the goods from Bungie, Microsoft doesn't have a ton going for them.
      • Halo 2 already overstresses the Xbox though

        No kidding. On mine it doesn't even play the ending! At least I assume that's the problem...

        • Re:Whoa (Score:1, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Unfortunately, the only people who are going to understand that joke have already experienced the same let-down that you did.

          So for the sake of everybody else who is still wondering if Halo is as polished as the picture Microbungie had been painting since before its release: No, it isn't. It doesn't have a proper ending, whole scenarios that were in the preview movies as the main point of the game (like, oh, defending the Earth in a full-scale ground war) were basically not present. Further, players WIL
      • Halo 2 already overstresses the Xbox though

        Untrue, actually. The upcomming Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict looks better than Halo 2 (IMHO) and seems to run much smoother than the final release of Halo 2 from what I saw at E3.

        The problem with Halo 2 isn't that it stretches the Xbox to its limits, it's that even with 2 years of working on the game, Halo 2 was still rushed out. That's why there's all the problems of texture pop in, in-game engine cinemas having horrid pop in (buildings, text

  • fails to say a word about its evolution? Why would the existing Xbox evolve more with only a year left in its lifespan? I don't give a crap about the system evolving nearly as much as I'd like to know about the evolution of Xbox Live functionality. Not to mention the fact that consoles, which are fixed systems (unlike a PC) don't technically 'evolve' anyway.
  • Touting their average critical response is a joke. The gaming press is not exactly a hive of quality journalism. Most gaming magazines and websites are simply deliverers of the gaming industry's press releases. They call it news and charge you extra for movies and such. Review scores are determined by how much hype has been generated and how well the the reviewer is treated by the company. The Driv3r scandal [spong.com] last summer is an example of this.
  • His last name is spelled Bach, not Back.

  • Xbox will gain in the short term (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Leknor ( 224175 ) on Thursday January 06, 2005 @04:47PM (#11281188)
    The PlayStation 2 is older and less powerful that the Xbox. The PS2 is showing it's age and IMO it's already saturated the market.

    My response to MS gloating about how many units they sell is "so what, all the gamers that already have a PS2 are now getting around to buying an Xbox also."

    That said Xbox Live is a great thing that I didn't understand until I had used it for a while. Sony and Nintendo would be making a mistake if they don't build an equivalent in their next consoles.

    • Re:Xbox will gain in the short term (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Play Metal Gear Solid 3 and then tell me the PS2 hardware is showing its age.
    • My response to MS gloating about how many units they sell is "so what, all the gamers that already have a PS2 are now getting around to buying an Xbox also."

      Exactly. I've had my PS2 for ages now, and it wasn't until very recently that I even considered buying an XBox.

      Having said that, I'm actually quite pleased with it, the newer, smaller controller is far more appealing than the huge chunk of shit that I first played with (which put me off buying it altogether)

      The other reason for the recent ris
    • The PS2 is showing it's age and IMO it's already saturated the market.

      Saturating the market is a good thing. The real money is made not on the console sales but on the software sales. You achieve maximum software sales when everyone already has your console.

      The war is already over on this generation of game consoles. Sony won handily. Maybe Microsoft will dominate the next round (and maybe not), but crowing about the success of the current Xbox is just silly.

  • state of the xbox (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ColonBlow ( 120356 )
    approx. the same as the state of the pc 3 years ago.

  • Xbox is a nice cheap wonderfully mod-able system (Score:3, Insightful)

    by snuf23 ( 182335 ) on Thursday January 06, 2005 @04:54PM (#11281302)
    Take a $150 Xbox, solder in a mod chip, throw in a big HD and even a USB keyboard if you like. What do you get? A great little media center box and an awesome box for emulation, oh yeah and it runs Linux too.
    I know it's all illegal but I swear one of the reasons for the Xbox's increase in popularity is the mod community.
    Because it is x86 based it's been pretty easy to port existing emulators over to the Xbox. Currently you have arcade machine emus, NES, SNES, Gameboy (up to Advance), Genesis, Sega Master System, Game Gear, Atari 2600 & 5200, Atari 8 bit computers, Atari ST, Commodore Pet, Vic 20 and 64, Amiga, PC Engine (Turbographix), Apple II and IIGS, Sinclair Spectrum, Lynx, Wonderswan, MSX computers, Colecovision, MS DOS, Intellivision, Neo Geo, Odyssey, Amstrad CPC even Playstation and N64 to a degree. All easy to use and play from your TV set.
    Plus XBMC for playing DIVX, XVID and other video files, viewing pictures and playing mp3s. Oh yeah it will show you a current weather report too.
    Amazing stuff.
    Let's see how hard MS works to kill off the mod community with XBox 2.

    • Re:Xbox is a nice cheap wonderfully mod-able syste (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I have never seen, nor heard of anyone, other than here on Slashdot and other tech related sites, of someone modding an xbox.
      I can do everything you listed above, with more ease, on my computer, which can also be hooked up to my TV. Which I would rather do than have my Live account cancelled because I modded my xbox.

      Seriously, I don't find that very amazing. I doubt enough people in the world do either to make any type of signifigant increase in xbox sales.

      • Well, that may be true for you - but I heard and saw about it from numerous friends. Most who are not techies at all. They play video games and don't read Slashdot.
        I also can do everything I listed with ease on my computer. However I wanted a media center pc for my living room and I didn't want to spend a lot of money.
        As for emulation on a pc vs. the xbox - all the Xbox emulation software benefits from the standardized controllers. On the pc it's a crapshoot as to whether a particular emulator will support
    • It's not illegal unless your mod chip violates Microsoft's copyrights. Some mod chips do, some don't.
    • Oh yeah it will show you a current weather report too.

      Yeah, but so will windows.

      Every morning I wake up and look at windows and I've got a current weather report.
    • Currently you have arcade machine emus, NES, SNES, Gameboy (up to Advance), Genesis, Sega Master System, Game Gear, Atari 2600 & 5200, Atari 8 bit computers, Atari ST, Commodore Pet, Vic 20 and 64, Amiga, PC Engine (Turbographix), Apple II and IIGS, Sinclair Spectrum, Lynx, Wonderswan, MSX computers, Colecovision, MS DOS, Intellivision, Neo Geo, Odyssey, Amstrad CPC even Playstation and N64 to a degree.

      Do you work for Infinium Labs, by any chance?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • arcade machine emus

      Is this the next thing in the "flightless bird video game" series after Tux Racer?
    • I don't know if such is driving xbox sales in general or not, but it's why I bought mine. Oh, and you can flash the TSOP onboard with any cbox made before March '04, so no mod chip required.

      It's an incredible media PC, and an indispensable part of my entertainment setup now. Thanks Microsoft, but sorry if I'm not buying games, I'd hate to help you make money. (btw, I'm not copying them, either. I just don't play any)

  • Blah blah blah (Score:3, Interesting)

    by scot4875 ( 542869 ) on Thursday January 06, 2005 @05:23PM (#11281623) Homepage
    One thing they fail to note, among all those glowing numbers and SpikeTV accolades:

    Have they actually made any money yet? Or are they still bleeding money like they had been the previous 2 years?

    --Jeremy

    • Re:Blah blah blah (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Who cares! Snoop Dogg said Halo is the shizzle!!!
      • Snoop Dogg said Halo is the shizzle!!!

        OMG! Snoop Dogg is clearly the most reliable reviewer ever. What am I doing reading slashdot when I could be buying an XBox and Halo?

        Hang on... what does shizzle mean?
    • The point isn't whether they made money off this generation (which I think they are starting to do with all the games sales, but I don't have any data to back that up). Their goal is to dominate the market in the next generation of consoles. Microsoft hasn't exactly been shy about their goal of being the exclusive provider of home entertainment hardware and software.
    • When you have over $50B in the bank, who gives a shit?

  • Success? (Score:3, Funny)

    by SetupWeasel ( 54062 ) on Thursday January 06, 2005 @08:13PM (#11283421) Homepage
    Microsoft is the only company who can lose a billion dollars on a product and consider it a success.
  • a whole state? I could see fitting a township in there, maybe even a county or two. Anything more is just silly.

  • Top 20 Publishers of the Year (Score:3, Insightful)

    by PhotoBoy ( 684898 ) on Thursday January 06, 2005 @09:42PM (#11284168)
    Any "Top 20 Publishers of the Year" list that puts EA at number 1 will get no respect from me.

  • Spike TV awards? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by unclethursday ( 664807 ) on Friday January 07, 2005 @12:58AM (#11285229)
    From the article:

    "Fable" was awarded "Best Role-Playing Game" at last month's Spike TV's second annual Video Game Awards.

    Do you REALLY want to mention that the Spike TV Winners Bought and Paid For By Advertisers Video Game Awards are really the way to say how good a crap ass RPG like Fable is?

  • How is the Xbox doing in Japan again?

    Has Xbox Live managed to break the worldwide 1m users mark yet?

    Hey wait, if 6m people bought Halo 2, then most of them aren't playing it online. Is that because online console gaming isn't a big deal after all, or because consumers don't want a hideously crippled online gaming 'service' which third parties are loath to support? Or both?

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