Microsoft recently announced their price cuts on the Xbox 360, effective today, but what is motivating them? Microsoft’s not going to make much additional money by passing off the savings to the customer but they will, more than likely, sell a bunch of great new Xbox 360‘s to a new crowd of gamer.
Motivation? Sony.
“I’m not at a point where I can say we’re going to beat Nintendo,” says Don Mattrick, senior vice-president of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business. Indeed, Nintendo is likely to run away with the lead in the current generation of console gaming, leaving Microsoft and Sony to battle for second place. (businessweek)
Who would have thought Sony and Microsoft would be battling out this generation for second place while Nintendo breezes through with their Wii console and a handful of games with mediocre game reviews? Don’t answer that, it’s a rhetorical question. If you saw this coming and you’re not on the marketing or project planning for one of these console makers you better prep your resume!
The battle isn’t cooling, Microsoft drops their price to compete with their big competitor Sony which also brings it closer to the price tag on the Wii getting two bird with one stone. The reason Wii is winning is clearly due to its broad demographic of grandpa and grandma non-gamers along with hardcore gamers who have to collect all the consoles and younger gamers that want to fit the trend.
Microsoft’s clearly shooting for second place by installing more units into the consumers home as possible. They’ve got a great library of first person shooter titles, a few RPG’s and RTS titles and the typical contraversial titles like GTA and Saints Row with more hot blockbusters (read: Gears of War 2) arriving soon.
I see this as a great opportunity for casual game developers to get into the Xbox Live Arcade market and start making themselves (and Microsoft) some money off the new gamers that will buy their first Xbox 360 for $199 and up. Microsoft’s getting closer to the low-budget gamer crowd with their price cuts so it would be great if they can take advantage of that market with lower cost titles as well.
If you’re a game developer looking for console stick time and you want to grab the attention of a large pool of gamers, the Xbox 360 isn’t a bad start!
While Microsoft isn’t aiming at Nintendo just yet, there is no doubt Nintendo will be in their sights if they can smoke the pants off Sony in the near future (by this holiday).
@PS3 Hacking Begins in Earnest, and Sony “Looking Into” It:
Well, Sony is in a lose – lose situation: they change the key, and existing apps become worthless, or leave it, and existing apps can be pirated at will.
As for the complexity of the hack, well, it’s enough to build ONE image for a given game, and that will be multiplied like hell.
Jonah is right however. With the right key, there will be no way to distinguish between pirated and legit games, not by using the key that is.
One way that could be done, would be to do some sort of a CRC/hash on the Blue-Ray disk, then send it over PSN to Sony HQ, and compare it with the CRC of the original one; I expect differences: because of the way the key will be ‘injected’ in the hacked executables, they will have a different CRC than the original, despite being injected with the same root key.
Still, what was left from the image of “console = DRM box” is slowly vanishing. Good news for PC users, since producers will ditch the console exclusive deal and start making stuff for the PC as well.
@Mac App Store Cracked:
Ha ha ha :)) this is incredible … 2011 starts to look like the year of the hackers.
One reason why Steam it is hard to crack is because it keeps full records of what you bought/received as a gift on their servers. So they always know if you really own the software or not.
@Kinect hacks:
Derrick has a point there, hacks or no hacks, MSFT wins. And yes, MSFT is good at building frameworks/APIs. And again, yes, official support of Kinect on PC will end up in huge sales of the device, and maybe, a shitload of games for it.
@Interplay Calls Bethesda’s Legal Claims Absurd:
What can I say … these are the pains of selling IPs …
@Lord of the Rings Online Triples Profit:
Well, profit = intake – costs. Since they’re tripling the profits, it means that (1) they have a profit and that (2) they’re now making more money.
That sounds like a good decision for me.
@Question of the week:
Hmm … the only console I had was a NES clone. Compared to the other clones, it had the Sega style D-pad, with the C button doubling the A one. The layout of the D-pad I find it to be very nice, and that’s the feature of choice. Another feature was on another NES clone: it’s D-pads had earphone jacks …
@PS3 Hacking Begins in Earnest, and Sony “Looking Into” It:
Well, Sony is in a lose – lose situation: they change the key, and existing apps become worthless, or leave it, and existing apps can be pirated at will.
As for the complexity of the hack, well, it’s enough to build ONE image for a given game, and that will be multiplied like hell.
Jonah is right however. With the right key, there will be no way to distinguish between pirated and legit games, not by using the key that is.
One way that could be done, would be to do some sort of a CRC/hash on the Blue-Ray disk, then send it over PSN to Sony HQ, and compare it with the CRC of the original one; I expect differences: because of the way the key will be ‘injected’ in the hacked executables, they will have a different CRC than the original, despite being injected with the same root key.
Still, what was left from the image of “console = DRM box” is slowly vanishing. Good news for PC users, since producers will ditch the console exclusive deal and start making stuff for the PC as well.
@Mac App Store Cracked:
Ha ha ha :)) this is incredible … 2011 starts to look like the year of the hackers.
One reason why Steam it is hard to crack is because it keeps full records of what you bought/received as a gift on their servers. So they always know if you really own the software or not.
@Kinect hacks:
Derrick has a point there, hacks or no hacks, MSFT wins. And yes, MSFT is good at building frameworks/APIs. And again, yes, official support of Kinect on PC will end up in huge sales of the device, and maybe, a shitload of games for it.
@Interplay Calls Bethesda’s Legal Claims Absurd:
What can I say … these are the pains of selling IPs …
@Lord of the Rings Online Triples Profit:
Well, profit = intake – costs. Since they’re tripling the profits, it means that (1) they have a profit and that (2) they’re now making more money.
That sounds like a good decision for me.
@Question of the week:
Hmm … the only console I had was a NES clone. Compared to the other clones, it had the Sega style D-pad, with the C button doubling the A one. The layout of the D-pad I find it to be very nice, and that’s the feature of choice. Another feature was on another NES clone: it’s D-pads had earphone jacks …
First of all, I thought you would be interested in this link from Destructoid :
http://tinyurl.com/4n7wmmz
And http://aol.it/hLvgJx from Joystiq.
As a 1st gen PS3 owner, I am personally wishing that the court order throws that gimp in prison for releasing the codes. Yes Sony made an error, but putting it out there to allow others to crack the hardware is superlame. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that if you bought the hardware, it is yours to ruin the warranty by taking it apart (for the old style mods chips), but hacking into the main program is on a different level. This is one thing that won’t go away, and no doubt will get worse. GRRRRRRR.
As for the features, I have found some of the PS3’s extra features quite useful. I like being able to use the Blu-Ray player, but would quite happily have coped with a DVD player if they left in old hardware. Another feature I like from PS3 is the TV functionality. In UK you get 3 on-demand catch up services from main terrestrial channels (One of which you can also get on the Wii), and X360 having one for the satellite channels. We don’t have Netflix over here, but we now have Lovefilm, which is the closest we will get.
As for features that are pointless, I felt that the CD-player in the Sega Saturn / PS1 were useless. Why would you use your tv, and another bit of hardware, just to listen to something you could hear in better quality on your stereo?
@ 3DS – I found that I couldn’t play on my DS Lite for more than a couple of hours without feeling nauseous and cross-eyed, but I would expect to not need to plug it back in again straight afterwards.
First of all, I thought you would be interested in this link from Destructoid :
http://tinyurl.com/4n7wmmz
And http://aol.it/hLvgJx from Joystiq.
As a 1st gen PS3 owner, I am personally wishing that the court order throws that gimp in prison for releasing the codes. Yes Sony made an error, but putting it out there to allow others to crack the hardware is superlame. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that if you bought the hardware, it is yours to ruin the warranty by taking it apart (for the old style mods chips), but hacking into the main program is on a different level. This is one thing that won’t go away, and no doubt will get worse. GRRRRRRR.
As for the features, I have found some of the PS3’s extra features quite useful. I like being able to use the Blu-Ray player, but would quite happily have coped with a DVD player if they left in old hardware. Another feature I like from PS3 is the TV functionality. In UK you get 3 on-demand catch up services from main terrestrial channels (One of which you can also get on the Wii), and X360 having one for the satellite channels. We don’t have Netflix over here, but we now have Lovefilm, which is the closest we will get.
As for features that are pointless, I felt that the CD-player in the Sega Saturn / PS1 were useless. Why would you use your tv, and another bit of hardware, just to listen to something you could hear in better quality on your stereo?
@ 3DS – I found that I couldn’t play on my DS Lite for more than a couple of hours without feeling nauseous and cross-eyed, but I would expect to not need to plug it back in again straight afterwards.