It will only be close to an actuality? So we’re buying a product that really almost exists?
There are two possibilities:
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Ballmer ACCIDENTALLY announced a major new product set to ship next year, only weeks after E3.
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He’s talking about the same obvious thing everyone else is: A 360 with Natal in the box and probably some new branding and packaging.
I like the nested quotes. Was Ballmer making air quotes when he said “really, really close”?
He was quoting himself, when he said that just 5 minutes before.
Remember when I said “5 minutes before?” Now would be a great time for The Narrator to quote me.
I’m going with number 2
We are probably more than a year away from a confirmation on the Natal release date, I hope that this constant rumors and hypes fabricated by every little thing a guy from Microsoft says dies down until then. There will not be any drastic change to the 360 console in 2010 all the games that don’t use Natal will work with your 360, all the games that use Natal will work with your 360 if you buy the camera that is all.
A couple of years ago I’d have much the same reaction to this as most other people in this thread (disbelief based on the fact that consoles are better off as fixed platforms). Today? It sounds plausible to me based on the fact that the console market has become pretty comfortable with multiple SKUs, even on the extremely mass market portable systems (GBA/DS/DSi, etc) and now Apple is doing the same sort of thing with the iPhone 3 GS (not a console, but clearly gaming is a big market for it).
I have no idea where these rumors are coming from and they could just be fanboy wishing, but I don’t think the idea of an Xbox 360+ with perhaps more memory (and I mean unified system memory, not just flash) and a beefed up GPU is all that unlikely in a year or two. Such a split need not even really be much of a drag on developer resources. If Microsoft were to pop a new GPU in that had the same basic capibilities but enough extra performance for games to run at full 1080p with no sacrifices that would allow a nice boost to current 360 visuals while making it real easy to just fall back to 720p (or lower-res and then upscaled like Halo 3, et al) when running on Ye Olde Xbox 360. This would require very, very limited extra developer resources compared to current 360 development and while it would be an extra component cost in a world where lower price is king, MS will probably have a $99 entry level classic 360 by then (for the super price sensitive who have no need for 1080p anyway) and other than the Natal unit cost the extra component cost of, say, double the RAM and a slightly beefier GPU wouldn’t be that much to worry about while also extending the life of this generation sigificantly which is another kind of cost cutting.
I doubt it, but you never know. At GDC they put out PR on a new dev kit model with double the RAM. The amusing/annoying thing about the 360 is usually dev models have extra RAM, but they decided to expand the RAM in the 360 late enough in development that it meant they just ended up…matching the dev kits.
Also disbelief based off the notion that a CEO would offhandedly mention an unannounced major product in a random speech, when the previous iteration of that product was announced by Frodo on MTV.
How about disbelief based on the fact that Ballmer’s words don’t actually imply anything more than a repackaged 360?
Is it possible you’re thinking of them announcing that the new Arcade 360 would have double the flash memory (storage) rather than double the RAM? The recently increased the built-in memory card on new units from 256 MB to 512MB.
I only ask because somebody made the same mistake in another thread.
The way Ballmer talks about future products tends to get them into this kind of trouble a lot. It happened with the Xbox 360 working as IPTV thing, it happened with Zune and phones, it happened with Windows 7, etc. It’s as if the way future products are explained to him and the way he internalizes them are somewhat different from what the plan actually is, and then he gets excited and talks about them from a business point of view that doesn’t mesh with the product point of view.
From a business perspective, they’re probably going to treat a 360 with Natal bundle as a “new console.” Insofar as earmarking money for marketing, launch events, what the message is about the types of games, and so on and so forth. But it’ll be a 360 (perhaps cosmetically changed) with natal unit packed in. Ballmer sees the business angle of things and so he talks to investors about a “new console in 2010.”
Takeway: Ballmer gets too excited sometimes.
Oh, I’m not suggesting there is any reason to believe the rumors that have been fantastically spun out of Ballmer’s vague comments, especially as Microsoft has publically gone on record trying to play the comments down. I’m just saying the idea of a beefed up 360 isn’t as outrageous as the idea of a console hardware bump used to be and I wouldn’t be totally shocked if they did such a thing.
Regardless of Microsoft’s actual plans, I do think putting more memory and a faster (but otherwise architecturally similar) GPU into a new Xbox 360 so that the system could support 1080p (in real games – the 360 can do 1080p now, of course, but you can’t really use the 1080p modes and display reasonable graphic fidelity at the same time because the fillrate just isn’t there) isn’t a half bad idea. Especially if they are serious about extending this console generation out to 8-10 years. Such a bump would be far less radical than the Apple iPhone 3 GS’s leap from fixed pipeline to shader-based 3D. Developers wouldn’t have to do much more than set the presentation parameters to request a 1080 framebuffer if running on the new box and then also do some extra testing. Of course they should be free to use the new GPU power however they want if they want to put in the extra effort, but just using the increased fillrate to support 1080p is an easy no-brainer.
If consoles start receiving annual incremental upgrades then this will take them one stop closer to being like pc’s. If you want to play the latest games at their best, then you will need to upgrade your hardware every year or two. Isn’t this what people complain about as being a perceived flaw of the pc games market?
Well, this would be a 5 year upgrade cycle if Microsoft did it, which is a lot different than a 1 year one. Also while this would be an ‘upgrade’, it would be a fixed upgrade and one for which Microsoft could update their TRCs to make sure all new games run fine on the old Xbox 360 as well as the new. The upgrades issues in the PC world often have to do with uncertainty – not even knowing if your new PC will run Crysis at the resolution you want, etc, because there is no centralized quality assurance.
Consoles have already made the jump to being systems with common zero day patches (and many people thought this would be harmful to them, but it really hasn’t), I think they can become hardware upgradable too as long the upgrade period is a substantial amount of years and the complexities of it are managed by the console maker and not the end users.
That would be interesting, because then reviews (and comparisons) would get that much more complicated.
Graphics: 360.2 > PS3 > 360.1, etc.
Specifically referring to the dev kits, the idea that the RAM expansion would be rolled into a future retail bump is pure speculation (and I’d consider it more unlikely than likely).
Yeah, I just don’t see this working. If it’s strictly just a resolution bump then maybe but I don’t think many are clamoring for 1080p instead of 720p. But offering up substantial graphical differences or even different levels of performance just sounds messy. I think the multi-SKU approach was a big mistake on both MS and Sony’s part this gen and I think this would be even worse.
Wii HD would be more viable IMO only because there is probably a decent amount of demand for a 480p to 720p jump.
You’re right. It’s not a half-bad idea, it’s an all bad idea. What would doing what you propose require? First, spending hundreds of millions developing and manufacturing a brand new GPU. Second, losing any price advantage over the PS3. Third, fragmenting your user base in a way that will likely engender discontent. Fourth, putting the whole Xbox business back into the red right when they were finally starting to make a profit! All in the middle of a huge economic crisis. How many times is MS going to take a run at this before they try and make some actual money? They have shareholders to answer to. They may have to explain themselves to the governments of the world if it becomes more obvious the only purpose of Xbox is damaging competitors and not making money.