RickH
5169
I think MS and Big N screw up in their own unique ways.
MS: Amass a user decent base, then abuse the hell out of your own customers because you think can impose your will on them. (that good old fuck-em-if-you-can MS spirit) But that doesn’t work when customers have alternatives, even when the alternative is sticking with the last generation of Windows or your game console.
All of a sudden nobody wants to pay you for your new TV control system with a mandatory motion controller that watches you all the time (and didn’t work all that well the first time you sold them one) that by the way also plays games (but not any of the games you already paid them for) that you can’t re-sell (that have to be installed in 300gb or so of un-expandable hard drive space so don’t buy too many or it will auto-delete stuff and you’ll have to re-download a 40gb game so you can play it sometime tomorrow), unlike every other game console ever. But the power-point slide said people would love giving us control of their living rooms! And we would feast on the revenue streams!
From the same company that wants $150 to upgrade to a new OS that trashes everything that has come before and turns your desktop PC into a tablet emulator, and thinks it’s a great idea to create a software store that only works with the new OS and then wonders why developers need bribing to come on board. Because they got spoiled when people had no choice but to hand them money to get stuff done on PCs.
Big N: Attract attention with cool creations, then ride the wave as long as possible without planning ahead while rejecting or minimally supporting all ideas that didn’t originate with the company – like the internet. Under-invest in your primary revenue source, in-house software production, despite huge piles of retained earnings, allowing the stream of cool creations to become a trickle. Then get caught in a mad scramble when the audience’s attention wanders and push out something half-baked. But that doesn’t work in the console space because you can’t bring out a WiiU XL or Lite that fixes all the problems in the original.
Only other thing that comes to mind is that exclusivity clause thing the indie devs have been concerned about.
Phil Spencer told IGN that “the price probably won’t be exactly $100” for the standalone Kinect when he was asked about the MSRP for the unit.
$129? $149? Surely not less than $100!?
My guess is they’ll only sell it with a bundled game, so people don’t get one home, set it up, and go “now what?”
HERPES IS A FEATURE, NOT A BUG
Kinect Xbox Fitness bundle! A $159.99 value* for only $129.99!
*Xbox Fitness free for everyone anyway.
That is an excellent post. The whole RROD fiasco and then only finally admitting after journalistic investigations forced their hand kind of shows that attitude as well. I think Dan Matrrick took way too much credit for past xbox success neglecting to recognize that a lot of it was due to Sony’s missteps and an amazing Microsoft engineering team. Then he figured he could do whatever he wanted and people would just eat it up. Going with cheap cruddy memory meant he could take home a bigger paycheck in the long run to make up for the demanding Kinect 2.0 inclusion not even bothering to think that many people didn’t want an xbox to run their tv but to just play games. Some people like it but to go with ancient memory to force a device a lot of people didn’t care about (and wouldn’t work right out the gate) shows arrogance and a total disconnect from the target market.
I don’t think that’s the case with the Xbone. MS knew (or thought that they knew) that they had to come up with something really innovative and special because Sony was gaining on them fast and erasing their lead from the previous generation despite a more expensive system. Rather than rest on their laurels from the 360, MS swung for the bleachers with an overly-complicated, expensive, heavily-integrated machine. I’m sure Microsoft was grinning when Sony appeared to do with the PS4 exactly what they had done with Windows ME: release a more-of-the-same system with modest improvements and charge more for it.
You can chock up their (so far) failure with the Xbone to lots of things: poor understanding of the market, bad engineering decisions, terribly tone-deaf customer relations, etc… but I don’t think “hubris” really fits. If anything, it show a an inferiority complex that led them to overcompensate.
Wish PS4 had Dead Rising 3 and Plants Vs Zombies…And looking forward to the future, Crackdown 3…But it doesn’t…Which means at some point I’m going to have to buy an XBONE
Wha?! Crackdown 3 coming to Prism One?
This changes everything.
I don’t think it’s been announced, but they’d be stupid not to be throwing money at it as hard as they can. They need to leverage every advantage and exclusive they can muster against Sony.
Oh, so they’re not going to make it?
If only Spencer had been in charge of the Xbox One from the beginning like Mark Cereny was for the PS4 the situation could be far better for them than having this last year wasted on making up for one mistake after another.
Zylon
5182
Oh please. The Xbone was in every way a living room power grab. The all-seeing eye, the desire to be your “One” and only media hub, the always-on requirement, the ad-stuffed GUI… everything about its design was oriented toward monetizing their own customers, not serving them. And they actually thought they could get away with it. That is textbook hubris.
I totally see the XB1 as being the same sort of hubris-driven mistake Sony made with the PS3.
The figures I’ve seen actually put XB1 and PS4 sales neck and neck in America, but the PS4 is well ahead in Europe and of course the XB1 isn’t even out in Japan.
Nintendo? I’ve given up trying to figure out what the heck they’re doing.
So do I buy this sucka or wait. I want to play watch dogs and for whatever misplaced reason I have some loyalty to M$ but 173 pages in I just keep reading about F ups. That said Sony isn’t wooing me either and their controller sucks.
Completely disagree.
Sony’s primary mistake with the ps3 was in betting on the whole cell processor mess. If it had caught on, it might have given them a huge edge, but it didn’t. Even so the ps3 did not lose to the 360 in the end (it remains to be seen if xbone will similarly end up in the lead in the final days). I suppose this could be seen as arrogance on sony’s part, but more i think this was just new technology that didn’t pay off (kind of like the HD Dvds).
Microsoft’s problem with the xbox one is that they overreached in what they thought their customer base would put up with and they underestimated sony. They thought they owned the USA and we would buy the xbone no matter what, so they could do a long list of anti consumer things without anyone telling them No. This backfired majorly and forced them at financial gun point to slowly back up step by step. Along these lines, even with the near universal hatred of the kinect, they thought they knew better and wanted to force it on their customers. This probably just shows a complete disconnect from their customer base.
Microsoft basically handed sony the start of this generation on an xbox golden patter and sony did a pretty good job of capitalizing on it.
There are a lot of similarities in what you said there. Sony bet on the cell processor; MS bet on Kinect. Similarly, Sony overreached the price their customers would accept, and their PR last generation was almost as poor as Mcrosoft’s today. Remember “you should work more hours to pay for the PS3”? Sony thought they owned the world; the PS2 was astonishingly successful. Same deal with MS and the x360; they came out ahead last generation and thought that would translate to this one. MS handed Sony the start of this generation; Sony handed MS the start of the last.
Really it matches up 1:1.
Has microsoft really had any Pr problems this generation? I categorize anti consumer features as a design problem, not a pr problem personally. It isn’t the PR guy’s fault that Microsoft wanted to include the kinect or that they wanted to attack the used game market. If management is making stupid decisions, it is going to be hard to spin that no matter what you do.
Yes, now that i think about sony did have their PR gaffs last generation (the bet about not being able to find ps3s), but this is more a management problem than someone saying something stupid.
I also don’t see the kinect as the same. Last generation it would have applied. Microsoft tried something, it failed and was rejected by customers, end of story, or… it should have been. The problem is that story didn’t end there, microsoft brought it back to terrorize us again. I am just glad that Sony didn’t make the same mistake with their kinect.
Microsoft’s PR for Xbox One info releases was horrendous. Immediately upon the Xbox One reveal people were like - WTF - no information on games? Jusr DVR crap? And this went on for months. People kept begging them for proper information and they just kept mum then when they finally did demonstrate games and “features” gamers were enraged about each feature set that was supposed to be great, but just looked like money-grabs by MS. Then there was the “Internet must be on snafu” and Mattrick telling people it didn’t matter cause they could buy an Xbox 360 instead. Not to use bad language but it was a clusterfuck of clownage proportions that was only eclipsed by Sony stating people should be happy to get a second job to own a PS3… which with the $500 pricepoint of the XboxOne is what a lot of gamers were feeling they’d have to do anyways to get that console… just MS didn’t outright tell them to do it.
Honestly, every time they talked I kept shaking my heading thinking of how they were paying PR execs 100+k per year with no gameplan, no way to control the message, no connection with the userbase, and the affinity to destroy any goodwill Microsoft had in the console market. And the PR team knew exactly what was heading their way as they had the fortuitous, “just deal with it” blowup before all this hit the fan and apparently the PR execs were like “Hey we’re MS - they’ll eat anything”!
