Wherein I join the ranks of the RRODed…

I suppose I was foolish to ever think that I had dodged a bullet with my XBox 360.  As countless other publications declared 100% failure rates with their XBox 360s, I thought that, perhaps, since I was not a “professional” game journalist that my well-ventilated 360 born circa April 2006 would just survive to tell its story to the next generation of consoles. How naive.

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Pint-Sized Playability

OK, one more brief thought on Shadow Complex while I’m on the subject: one of the most common recurring themes in game reviews for the title is that SC represents a “great value” because it includes a full-sized game in an Xbox Live release.  The thought occurs to me, however, that this might not be a good thing for developers.

The basic problem, as I see it, is that if Xbox Live simply becomes an arena for discounted AAA titles, it hurts everybody.  Developers will be forced into an arms race to produce cheaper but high-quality games, essentially lowering the starting price point for new games and squeezing their profitability.  Gamers who, like Michael Abbott, are drawn to “bursts of [streamlined] fun,” will have a harder time finding the more casual titles they treasure, because they’ll be sandwiched in between more premium titles.  And hardware manufacturers, who responded to this issue first with the Wii and Live/PSN, will find themselves in much the same predicament as they did before the current generation.

I’m hardly one to bemoan getting more for less.  But I do become concerned that the more we blur the lines between the delivery of AAA or hardcore games and casual titles, the more we actually end up hurting ourselves.  Definitely think of this more as a thought experiment if this trend were carried to an extreme, rather than a complaint about Shadow Complex, which I like quite a bit: is it possible that segregating our games by type and channel is actually beneficial?

Natal Project Natal

Natal is still nascent, but reading this IGN preview suggests that it may have some difficulty in fulfilling much of the promise that was initially offered by the Wii.  The latter console, while quite a bit of fun, unfortunately was less of an accurate motion sensor than initially believed.  Similarly, IGN indicates that Natal, while fun, has many of the same problems: accuracy that is somewhat questionable at best and which, when compared with the lightning reactions that gamers expect from their controllers, falls considerably short. 

I recall seeing fairly accurate motion sensing technology at Epcot Center some 10+ years ago.  Why it hasn’t come further is an interesting question.

MS Store Redux

“Microsoft has a problem: Everyone in the world uses its products, but few of us appreciate them.”

Farhad Manjoo weighs in favorably, if unpersuasively, on the Microsoft store concept which I discussed earlier.  Manjoo’s main thesis appears to be a distillation of the above - that Microsoft needs retail to help humanize its products in the same way that Apple’s store provides an introduction to their corporate image.  Unfortunately, he ends up underlining rather than undermining what he cites as critics’ main objection to the idea, which is that, like the Zune, a Microsoft Store is a pale copy of the Apple reality.

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Good deal

In a recent interview, Microsoft’s Robbie Bach mentioned that the current generation of console hardware will probably last longer than the last generation.  This is actually something I myself predicted not too long ago because of the financial crisis, but I think it actually makes a good deal of sense for other reasons as well.

1) The current crop of consoles debuted at higher prices than the previous gen, and therefore are still pretty expensive.  Certainly, they’ll come down in the next 2-3 years, but the cheapest PS3 is still a ways away from getting into the “mass-market” range, and even the cheapest, somewhat incomplete $200 360 is still not quite at “mass-market” pricing (and, of course, the Wii is still selling out all the time at it’s original launch price).

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Geoff’s Games Of The Year 2008

I’m going to be in Steamboat Springs and Australia starting at the end of the week, so I’m getting all of the game of the year nonsense out of the way before I go.  I’ve always found the idea of anointing one game “the best” of its peers to be subjectively absurd at best and downright flamebait at worst.  So why am I doing it?  It’s entertaining and I think it’s worthy of debate, if not resolution.

So herewith, my games of the year, for each console which I own.

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Murphy’s Law

Naturally, just as I finish Dead Space and come home with Fallout 3 and Gears 2, my 360 stops working.  No red ring of death, but it freezes continuously after a few minutes (whether a disc or hard drive is attached).  Hopefully Microsoft will repair the damn thing, but I can’t say it endears me to the company that I’m going to be out of gaming commission for 3 weeks or so.

From The Annals Of Bizarre Logic

Via Patrick Klepek, a truly odd rationalization on the part of Microsoft’s Netflix partnership.  The question is why it requires a Live Gold membership to access the Netflix titles.  The answer is a non-sequitur:

“I think it’s about adding value to the gold membership,” said Xbox director of marketing Albert Penello. “I mean, obviously, the partnership there — it’s a lot of bandwidth. Obviously, there’s the cost of the licensing on the Netflix side, so…you’re not really paying for the movie. On silver, you have to pay for the TV show or movie that you download. Here, you don’t…”

Let’s unpack this.  There are three points here.  The first is something about “adding value” to the gold membership.  This may be true, but it’s about adding value for Microsoft, not the player.  After all, MS is the one who decided whether to require the Gold subscription - which means that this is really not about adding value to Gold but rather limiting the value from Silver memberships, such that players feel compelled to upgrade.

The second point seems to imply that the Gold membership is required to offset the technical costs of offering the Netflix service.  (Mr. Penello doesn’t seem to notice that this directly contradicts the previous point - that Gold was required to reflect the additional value that is delivered by Netflix.)  But this doesn’t make a ton of sense, unless Microsoft negotiated a truly terrible agreement - are they not getting any money from rentals or new subscribers?

Finally, the notion that customers aren’t paying for their movies is pretty absurd on its face.  A Netflix subscription is required to access the service.  MS may not be charging incrementally, but they are just passing through the service’s costs - plus a decent profit of which they’re surely getting some cut.  The fact that Netflix doesn’t even need to bear the costs of shipping out the DVDs and administering them means that even more of that price is profit. 

The bottom line is that Microsoft is using the Netflix subscription as a carrot to force people to upgrade their own memberships.  There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s insulting to our collective intelligence to pretend that it’s for our own good.

One Prospective Answer

IGN takes a stab at the “what next” question, for the 360 at least.  Their prescriptions are basically of three types: cut pricing, redesign the hardwre, and redesign the extras.  As one commenter notes, this might satisfy either the hardcore (who love things like hardware revamps) or the casuals (who could benefit from more accessible controllers or some such) but leaves the fat middle high and dry. 

The pricing issue is essentially adding a peripheral price drop alongside the hardware pricing announcement - I fully agree on  the concept, because peripheral pricing is outrageous for non-cosmetic requirements like wireless adapters ($100) or HDMI cables ($70-$150).  If I can buy an HDMI cable online for $10, this isn’t just insulting, it’s downright offensive.  But regardless, it’s not going to move consoles.  People just don’t research that stuff before making a purchase decision.

The hardware redesign is more interesting; IGN suggests adding Blu-Ray in addition to changing the design of the console and adding a “casual-friendly” remote.  I could see this being useful, and at a bare minimum BD should be offered as an optional add-on.  On the software side, playing up Netflix probably isn’t going to get Microsoft anywhere for a while - people just aren’t using these types of services widely yet - but making Live free would be a huge step to downplaying some of the major structural advantages that Sony retains.

In fact, these mostly seem like prescriptions to fend off Sony rather than to move the industry forward in significant ways.  That may be what Microsoft needs right now.  Sony definitely has more momentum.

So Now What?

Chris Kohler asks the excellent question apropos of the recent Xbox 360 price drop.  He makes the valid point that the console wars are effectively over; Nintendo has won this generation, and neither Microsoft nor Sony are going to reach the position that the PS2 managed to hit in the previous one.  So what is Microsoft doing?

I think that Kohler is largely right in his analysis.   But you need to consider that  that Microsoft isn’t really strictly competing with Sony any longer for the core gamer set: there are outliers, but many gamers have chosen to purchase one or both of the systems at this point.  Both Sony and MS, then, are trying to figure out how to get those remaining holdouts to take a chance on the console they didn’t purchase… and since the feature sets are set at this point, price is basically the only lever they have to pull.  That’s why Microsoft has dropped its pricing for the holidays - not to get people to purchase a 360 instead of a PS3 per se (although I’m sure there are some people who haven’t gotten either yet), but to get people to buy a 360 in addition to the PS3 they’ve already got at home. 

By the way, I’m guessing that with respect to those who haven’t gotten any console yet, I’m guessing a Blu-Ray player isn’t a particularly compelling feature.  Either they’re just unimpressed with either console’s line-up (which I suspect isn’t too likely at this point, even if they’re only passingly familiar with gaming), or they’re just very frugal - and are thus unlikely to have the higher-end hardware required to take full advantage of Blu-Ray in the first place.  So the price drop seems pretty smart to me… Sony’s already lost a ton of money on the PS3 and probably isn’t too interested in losing more in the short term, and thus probably won’t respond too aggressively to the move.  Microsoft can take advantage of that fact.