2767

I wrote a short blog post commenting the “news” on the front page:

I was reading this quote from an Activision exec:

It’s up to them to win the value argument. If you do a focus group of a gazillion people and you show them two prices for two competitive products, 100 percent always prefer the lower price. I think from a first impression standpoint the win goes to Sony, at least as it relates to pricing. Microsoft is going to have to win the hearts and minds and convince people that the higher price point is worth it, and that it provides really meaningful capabilities that will be meaningful to consumers. And it’s a long game, so I am sure that’s what they intend on trying to do.

While it’s not coming from Microsoft, you can imagine that it’s the mantra everyone repeats over there: we must convince people that our product is better!

That’s the epitome of what’s wrong in business management. All their efforts go into CONVINCING PEOPLES.

If they actually were building a console that they wanted to sell, “convincing people” would be a secondary objective. It’s very obvious for one who still has contact with reality, that the best way for Xbox to win back customers without changing that price is about delivering a BETTER product.

They’d do their best to have a smooth and fast interface, hassle free, with the customer in mind. They’d have an online infrastructure that is rock solid and never gets in the way. If they handle all this better than Sony, and if they are able to offer a BETTER SERVICE, then “convincing peoples” comes naturally.

People buy your product, are pleased by what they find, spread their opinion.

But nope. Being a businessman means seeing the world ass-backwards. They’ll try to persuade you the Xbox is a better product through marketing.

What happened with the Xbox in the last couple of weeks is instead the actual PROOF that you can’t convince people. These last weeks have demonstrated that this strategy IS A FAILURE. They tried as hard as possible to convince us how NEXT GEN the Xbox was, and how all its limits were indispensable to go INTO THE FUTURE.

Did it work?

Did they learn?

What’s the new strategy? Convincing people.

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To do that they’d have to drop Kinect. Non-starter – I do not give one shit about playing Yet Another Call of Madden 36 on Yet Another Console.

I am very much interested in new gaming experiences possible with a vastly higher resolution kinect and better microphones, though.

The PS4 is a far better console than the PS3, no doubt. It’s the first playstation worth a damn as far as I’m concerned. I’m just not “yet another iteration of standard console” is what matters any more.

I think Xbone is a much smarter play, and as the PS3, which was at least 30% technically inferior to the Xbox 360 (with half the ram!) showed, slightly better stats just don’t matter that much in the medium and long game.

2769

The problem I see with this is that a higher rez kinect and better mike isn’t really a new gaming experience. It’s an improvement but not something different. Microsoft has some marketing to do to convince us they are bringing something new to gaming. Most of what I’ve read is about all the non-gaming stuff Microsoft wants to do with the Xbone as being a major selling point.

When the Wii came out it was obvious. We can play a game using body motions similar to the activity we are doing in the game. That was brand new and people got it right away. It passed the classic elevator pitch test. What is brand new about the Xbone? What about it will make people look at it and go wow, I get it now. This really is something new?

2770

Oh baloney. Every product everywhere, that has a competing product at a lower price point leaves one company trying to convince a buyer of the value of paying more. MS is no different in that basic regard to my choosing which toaster to buy at Walmart.

2771

In this case so much depends on the service being offered. The interface, the online features. Being consumer friendly. That’s what they should focus on. It seems instead they only go upstream.

They already tried to convince customers, see all the emphasis on sports, TV, and kinetic. It didn’t work out so well.

They can win back customers if they listen to them and offer them what they want. They lose them if they pretend to TELL their customers what they want (like they did until now).

As I said, this is ass-backwards.

2772

I think Sony not bundling their camera with the console will kill motion-sensor games in the long run.
No developer can assume Move on PS4s now and therefore no AAA will invest heavily into it on either console (bar exclusives).

We will probably have to thank Sony not only for used games, no phoning home, trade-in but also for killing motion-sensor gaming or at least stemming the tide.

2773

OK, then what’s the selling point of PS4? It is literally a higher res PS3. That’s it. What is PS4 bringing new to the table, exactly?

(I’m not saying the status quo is necessarily bad, but… I’m really bored with it, personally.)

2774

Just a “side-question”, I’m not a console player and am not planning on picking up either next-gen console, but is that really something many console guys care about, “exciting” new controllers as a selling point?

Like so many folks, I have toyed around with the Wii for a while and I came to the conclusion that the motion gimmick was nothing more than that, a gimmick, which can be fun if used in the right game, but is ultimately something that gets in the way of fun in more genres than it enhances.
I haven’t used either a Kinect or Move, but both seem to be similar in that they’re gimmicky. Yeah, you can have cooler party games with them, but are they really essential to down-to-earth gaming sessions, from the viewpoint of you console guys?
Btw., nothing wrong about gimmicks, but they are different to essentials. Like the instruments you can get for the guitar hero type games or the mat you played DDR on back in the day.
Just wondering if wumpus is an outlier here or most console guys feel this way…

rezaf

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Sony still supports bluetooth and USB headsets on the PS4 as well.

I agree, Alien and Alien 3.

2776

Well, the Wii is a shitty infrared mouse pointer. That’s it. That’s all. It is literally, a horrible infrared mouse pointer you control in your hand with the Wiimote.

The 1st gen Kinect actually sees you, which is startling enough – but also more than enough to make it what the Wii said it was going to be in the first place. Thus you get Kinectimals, Dance Central, and games where you actually play with your body, not sitting on a couch lazily flicking an infrared remote pointer Wiimote with your left hand.

However, the 1st gen Kinect was also kind of loosey-goosey it couldn’t see your hands, it couldn’t see your face, and it also took a LOT of space to even work at all.

2nd Gen is a whole different animal, orders of magnitude improvement:

Who knows, might totally suck ass, but I’ll take even the promise of Kinect 2nd gen over “Yet Another Higher Resolution Console” any old damn day of the week.

2777

Interested read at IGN on this very topic. http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/06/26/sony-sacrificed-the-playstation-4-camera-to-beat-microsoft-on-price

A few highlights:

So for those who thought Sony called an audible at E3 on price, nope. This was a decision they made months ahead of time. From a gaming industry perspective, one can’t help but wonder how differently things would have been if Microsoft had never gone down the DRM road. Without the uproar on the Xbox One over “always on” and the ability to play used games, I think there would have been much more buzz about how utterly unsurprising the PS4 is as a console.

Which means that smiling blue sensor for the PS4 controller is actually frowning.

For those who think, I didn’t like or buy Kinect or PlayStation Eye games/features last generation (I’m raising my hand on this one), also consider:

So I definitely don’t want to play my favorite Xbox One games by “flailing my arms” or “shouting at my TV,” but let’s be honest with ourselves - those aren’t the only options. As someone who likes his Vita (happy that more of you are joining every day), I like and appreciate the small ways that developers incorporate the built in features of the Vita into games. When done right, these small touches bring me into the game and make me appreciate the cleverness of the developer community. And games aside (SHOCK), I absolutely love my Kinect every time I’m watching Netflix, my phone rings and I can simply say, “Xbox, pause.”

2778

Oh, I wasn’t trying to make the case that the Kinect isn’t an improvement over the WiiMote, just that it’s nothing more than a fringe-scenario controller in a similar way.
Like you said, you play games by actually moving physically, which is awesome for a dancing game - who’d want to play that with a joypad only? - but is completely useless for “normal” games you’d want to play for hours.
Like FPSs, RPGs, strategy games or most everything that’s not a simulation of a physical activity.

I have only limited knowledge about it so far, but I COULD imagine coming with something like the Octulus (sp?) and a way to control it properly COULD be a game changer, but that’s not in the cards for this console generation anyway.

rezaf

2779

Wow. I disagree with you on so many different levels here it’s hard to know where to start, but I’m going to try to keep this brief:

  1. The marketing team is totally different from the engineering team. The engineering team designs and builds the console, including the software. They build to the specs that have been set out, and attempt to design the best product possible. Both Sony’s and Microsoft’s engineering teams have put together decent hardware for the next gen; the main differences will be software-based (operating system and games).

  2. Marketing is, for better or worse, critical to selling a console. Just because you have a superior product doesn’t mean you’ll win, even if your superior product is less expensive (although price is an important tool to help with marketing). History is replete with superior products that failed to sell well and were overtaken by other standards (heck, Sony is famous for betamax, a technology superior in every way to VHS and one which was, at the outset, price competitive). Marketing (in all its forms, including generating buzz, social marketing, traditional mass market advertising, etc.) is critical to informing consumers about the value of your product. You seem to be arguing that the only valid form of marketing is word of mouth; even a basic understanding of how advertising and marketing works shows that word of mouth is important, but only one of the many tools in any marketing arsenal. Incidentally, MIcrosoft’s marketing team this last month failed miserably, and didn’t use any of the tools at their disposal well.

  3. If your argument is that companies should listen to consumers, that totally ignores the value of leadership. While I personally don’t like Apple, they are the prime example of how leadership in technology allows you to build market share (and in some cases build entire markets!) Part of what you do with any product is try to anticipate needs or desires that your consumers don’t even know they have and design a product to meet those needs or desires.

  4. If your argument is that companies should listen to consumers, you should be extolling Microsoft’s virtues for the 180 they pulled on DRM. Consumers spoke, they listened – and did so in a way that is virtually unprecedented for any major corporation.

I would agree with you that Microsoft did a lousy job of convincing folks of the benefits of the Xbox One (heck, they did a great job of confusing and angering folks instead!) I would argue that, rather than being proof that marketing is a bad strategy overall, it provides an object lesson in how not to market your products. I’m sure that the folks we saw on stage at E3 have some strengths, but marketing clearly wasn’t something any of them knew a damn thing about, and the marketing team who put them on stage is, I’m sure, in for some bloodletting.

I’m not convinced that Xbox One is a superior platform to PS4, or vice versa. I believe that last two generations of consoles showed that it really comes down to two factors: games, and what platform your friends are buying. If you look at the current generation, PS3 dominates in Asia and Europe, based on a combination of the games they have appealing to audiences in those areas and the platform being widely adopted by consumers’ friends (and hence creating a steamroller effect). The same happened for the Xbox 360 in North America. The flip flop we saw in dominance between two generations ago (where the PS2 creamed the Xbox) to the most recent generation (where the Xbox 360 edged out the PS3, at least until very recently) shows, to me, that brand loyalty is not dominant among console consumers in the way Sony assumed it would be last gen and Microsoft appears to be assuming it would be next gen. I suspect the field is pretty wide open right now, and consumers will speak with their wallets. Marketing is going to be a critical piece of helping consumers decide how they’ll speak.

2780

I’m not HRose, but I believe his underlying argument is that he’s willing to believe the shortcomings of the Xbone development and campaign must be the fault of a few well-intentioned but clueless individuals who were put in charge of it. Frankly, I’d like to believe that as well. I don’t, but I’d like to.

And no, Microsoft gets no bonus points for “listening to customers” that late in the cycle. They had to respond because the company was going to take a bath if they didn’t do something to change the momentum.

2781

First generation Betamax had a limit of 60 minutes per tape. VHS could do two hours at standard speed (which is what commercial products were recorded at), and four hours (enough to record an entire football game) at extended speed.

The combination of extended recording time and not generally needing multiple tapes per film is what crushed Betamax, and the marginal advantage Betamax had over VHS on image quality largely went away when Sony modified the format to get more recording time on a tape.

So, no, Betamax was not superior in every way. It was in fact inferior in a key area that the market cared about.

2782

double post

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  • double posts *
2784

I think that’s mostly correct. First gen betamax (introduced in '75) did only an hour, while second gen betamax (introduced in '77) did two hours – the same as VHS on standard. VHS did do more on extended, but that was pretty marginal (esp. in commercial apps, which is where the VHS vs. Beta fight was happening in the late 70s; IIRC home use exploded in 80/81). Beta also lost out because of the Sony tax, something that subsequent Sony technologies also sought to emulate (and hence doomed several Sony standards). Manufacturers (other than Sony) didn’t embrace Beta because they weren’t excited about subsidizing their competitors. Heck, the Sony tax is what caused VHS to be developed in the first place.

However, my point was that simply the superior technology doesn’t make for dominance of the marketplace. Beta may not be the best example, but I think the point still stands.

2785

The pricier toaster is usually stainless or nicer. The ONE is one of those toasters with like, a corndog warmer. And made of plastic, vs. a CHEAPER stainless super toaster.

2786

I don’t care or want it, so I am glad it will be less developed in that direction. I do not need to talk to my games.

One day in the future, if I can have a realtime generated conversation in an RPG instead of multiple choice with canned replies? Ok fine, I’ll talk. When talking is just replacing a button command, I do not need it.