Xbox 'Encouraged' Console Wars To Drive Competition, Former Exec Says (eurogamer.net) 20
Former Xbox executive Peter Moore has said his team "encouraged the console wars" during his Xbox 360-era tenure -- as a way to drive competition between Microsoft and Sony. Eurogamer reports: This competition has helped the industry, Moore continued, and saw Microsoft continuing to commit to video games despite the Xbox 360's costly "Red Ring of Death" debacle. "We encouraged the console wars, not to create division, but to challenge each other," Moore said, speaking on the Front Office Sports podcast (thanks, IGN). "And when I say each other I mean Microsoft and Sony. "If Microsoft hadn't of stuck the course after the Xbox, after the Red Rings of Death, gaming would be a poorer place for it, you wouldn't have the competition you have today."
Moore helped launch the Xbox 360, following years of service during the Dreamcast era at Sega. Memorably, he announced Halo 2's release date via a tattoo - though sources disagree on whether the stunt was faked. "If we didn't resolve Red Rings of Death the way that we did I know darn well there'd be no Xbox today," Moore continued, referencing the infamous circle of error lights which showed on failed Xbox 360 hardware. Estimates differ, though millions of consoles were believed to have been affected.
Moore helped launch the Xbox 360, following years of service during the Dreamcast era at Sega. Memorably, he announced Halo 2's release date via a tattoo - though sources disagree on whether the stunt was faked. "If we didn't resolve Red Rings of Death the way that we did I know darn well there'd be no Xbox today," Moore continued, referencing the infamous circle of error lights which showed on failed Xbox 360 hardware. Estimates differ, though millions of consoles were believed to have been affected.
So xbots was a fairly true statement? (Score:1)
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The main thing he's doing here is trying to justify that the Xbox was losing a lot of money for Microsoft (due to poor engineering, among other things).
Simply using ancient tactics (Score:1)
True, but how could it not be? (Score:4, Interesting)
"Encouraging the console wars" is also known as "competition". I guess maybe that was sort of novel to Microsoft at the time, given their near monopolies in PC and in productivity software.
But if you believe for a moment they wouldn't have just loved to stomp out the competition utterly the way the PS2 did to the Sega Dreamcast... This is retroactively putting the best spin on not dominating their competition like they were hoping.
Obviously, I agree with his ultimate conclusion. It's a good thing the three console makers powerhouses (funny he doesn't even mention Nintendo) are fighting for marketshare. Sony was fucking insufferable to publish games for during the PS2 era. Funny how much more helpful they were when you wanted to make a PSP title. Same thing with Nintendo whenever they had a big success. The asshole-factor is 100% proportional to the success of these company's products, at least from a game developer's perspective. So actually, we're in a pretty good place right now with a reasonable three-way balance of power.
And of course, for normal gamers, this holds true as well, only the companies work a little harder to hide it.
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He's saying it was good for Microsoft to continue throwing good money after bad. That is despite the fact that they lost tons of money on the Xbox, it made the world a better place, etc.
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It WAS a good decision in the long run. Microsoft generated over $16 billion in revenue from their Xbox division last year alone. For comparison, it's estimated they spent about $1.5 billion replacing RRoD hardware.
Hardly "bad money."
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How much *profit* did they generate though? You can't pay down your debts with revenue.
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Microsoft generated over $16 billion in revenue from their Xbox division last year alone. For comparison, it's estimated they spent about $1.5 billion replacing RRoD hardware.
Microsoft didn't make any profit from their Xbox division for at least a decade. After that I stopped following it, so I don't know if they are profitable now. Sounds like revenue is up, though.
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Yeah,that was widely discussed. They're sort of cagey about releasing actual profit numbers (since obviously revenue looks better), but my understanding was that they became profitable a number of years ago. And they never make any money on the console itself, of course, which is a loss leader.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/... [theverge.com]
Whether or not this makes for overall profitability historically, hard to say, but I think it's hard to argue that Microsoft's Xbox division isn't in a pretty good position right now
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(funny he doesn't even mention Nintendo)
Why would he mention Nintendo?
Nintendo made clear with the announcement of the Wii and its (at best) previous-gen technology that they were not going to participate in the technological race of the Console Wars. Instead they went after a completely different market segment with relatively cheap low-power hardware and a novel, intuitive control system to appeal to children, casual gamers, and geeks like me who had been waiting far too long for anything offering even a taste of a VR/holodeck experience.
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True, Nintendo sort of lives in it's own technological and market space, but to be honest, I think the industry / pundits are fooling itself if it thinks Nintendo is a "completely different market". It does capture more of the casual market, but I think there is plenty of overlap in certain segments where they are definitely competing for the same videogame entertainment dollars. Whether they admit it or not, when Nintendo sells a lot of consoles, that's still sucking at least some air out of Sony's and M
"Handle it the way we did" (Score:2)
What he means by the way they decided to "resolve" the red ring of death was to ship a product they knew to be defective so they could beat Sony to the market by a year. They knew once people invested in the console and some games, they would less likely to switch to Sony's platform a year later. So they shipped a product they knew to be defective and just figured, "fuck it, we'll warranty 100% of them, it'll cost us out the ass and greatly inconvenience our customers, but it'll give us an advantage over So
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So they shipped a product they knew to be defective and just figured, "fuck it, we'll warranty 100% of them, it'll cost us out the ass and greatly inconvenience our customers, but it'll give us an advantage over Sony."
My experience with Microsoft's RRoD warranty repair process on the 360 completely sucked. Microsoft claimed to never have received my Xbox, and the shipping company (I'm fairly certain it was UPS, but it's been many years and my memory isn't what it used to be) claimed it was delivered.
I never did manage to get that resolved, and haven't bought another Xbox since.
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Yeah, they were queuing repairs for months leading many to attempt the DIY fixes which wouldn't work long-term due to cracked solder balls. Then they'd deny warranty repairs based on their illegal "warranty void" stickers.
This was of course after months of lies about how the defect only impacted some tiny percentage of overall systems which kept climbing to match some small fraction of what users were experiencing.
Still after all that Microsoft remains a large player in the market segment is a mystery. Cu
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Xbox was a distraction and perverse incentive (Score:2)
Why is the Xbox the only console without exclusives now? Because Microsoft finally recognized it for what it was, a distraction which created perverse incentives to harm the PC. Management clearly put their foot down and imposed a top down reform on the Xbox division to make it an extension of Windows PC gaming. The floundering of consumer Windows and the loss of the market to Apple apart from just general incompetence, was caused mostly by the Xbox. One of the greatest mistakes Microsoft ever made.
In an id