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).
@EA deletes Tweets: Glad they removed the poor taste in tweets that was like rubbing salt into a wound.
I’d like to defend Indy games as you don’t need great graphics for great gameplay. Braid is a nice puzzle platforming game. I’m glad you mentioned Dust an Elysian Tail, Jonah. Not all the Indy games are 8-bit, Dust being one of them. I just completed the game and it was fantastic and very impressive that one person was able to do so much in making that game. Any game that adds to the diversity of games available to play is a good thing.
Also many of these Indy games are on Steam and GoG now.
@Parity Policy: It would be nice to have LAuchn Parity like when Skyrim came out and all DLC was released on Xbox and PC first and it wasn’t until months later that PS3 got anything. That was really unfair that PS owners had to wait so long to get the DLC’s for Skyrim.
I think some people are willing to wait though for the game to come to their prefered console. Take Minecraft for instance First on PC, than Pocket edition, Xbox and finally PS and each platform just adds to the sales of the overall game.
QotW: My favorite game related April Fool’s prank would be when Mojang did Minecraft 2.0. They got several YouTube Minecraft LP’ers to make video’s showcasing the features of Minecraft 2.0. The features ranged from the ridiculous Pink Wither, Diamond chickens, redstone bug monster, & exploding furnaces; to the features that we actually now have like Coal Blocks, Slime blocks, Hay bales, etc. It was a fun laugh to have and even more interesting to see the features that they actually are implementing from that prank.
Alpha: The delay of Skyrim DLC on the PlayStation 3 was strictly a technical issue.
Hey guys,
I couldn’t disagree with you more regarding porting and re-launching titles on different platforms even months after the original launch.
Saying that if someone had wanted to play a game they would have already done it doesn’t make much sense, in my eyes. I only own Sony consoles and my laptop is not able to support even the less demanding titles, since I mostly use it for work. This means that I’m naturally cut off from titles that are not available on PlayStation. That’s why I believe it’s a good idea on Sony’s part to port games such as Fez or Minecraft on PlayStation to make those titles available for people such as me who otherwise have no access to them.
By no means are such titles system sellers but being able to play them on Sony’s machines makes it less and less probable that a given gamer will buy another console, which is good for the company, I presume.
I agree with Alphashard that some people, including me, have no problem waiting for a game to come to PlayStation, in my case. I don’t need to buy all the newest titles since my backlog would keep me busy for months. And if a fun, although older, game comes to PlayStation, I might consider getting it.
@Infamous Second Son
I just started playing the game last week and I’m some 4 hours in. I don’t really see how ‘dumbed down’ the title is compared to the first two games. Jordan mentioned that all the opponents are the same, which I can’t agree with. I already encountered 4 different D.U.P. soldier types and there’s also the drug dealers so I don’t think it’s that different than in the PS3 games. So far I feel that it’s just another Infamous game, with a similar, forgettable story and cool powers and action scenes. I enjoy it quite a bit.
@QOTW I deliberately avoid news sites on April Fool’s so I don’t really have an answer to the question. Let me chime in on last week’s QOTW, though. I used to subscribe to a video game magazine called CD Action, here in Poland. What was great about it was that every month they would include one or two full versions of games on CD/DVD and also tons of demos and other stuff. Back in the lat 90’s the CD also contained funny pictures, gifs, etc. so it was like an offline version of 9gag. I don’t buy such magazines any more, but I also don’t visit video game news websites that often. I get most of my news from podcasts and I don’t mind the delay of several days before the news reach me.
League of Legends never ceases to amuse with its ‘URF’ related jokes 🙂
Great podcast by the way 😀
@EA flogging a dead horse
That was deffinetly a lapse of judgement. In my opinion every company should have an IT expert that approves all internal internet posts. So that if he sees something stupid he can find the person who posted it and slap some sense into him. It’s not nice making fun of disabled companies that are impaired by their management.
@Microsoft Indi
I played some good Indi games on Xbox 360. Mostly rip offs of PC games (Day Z, Minecraft). But they are cheap and mostly multiplayer, so make for a good blast. I absolutely don’t care when and where they are released. If a game is good enough I will eventually play it. I have no problem waiting. Plenty of other games out there.
@QOTW
A long time ago (2007?) the website gamefaqs.com (a cheat, hint website) had an April’s fool joke where entering the website greeted you with a page saying that cheating in video games was a crime and you should enter at your own risk. That was quite amusing. Also, a few years ago we had the Assasin’s Creed Kinect video. Wish it was true.