http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1608007,00.asp
According to the gaming “expert” Dvorak. I’m sure glad we have people like this publishing such insightful articles. Otherwise we might not realize that so many hopes were pinned on TFO. We might have also jumped to the conclusion that being the number 2 console first time out of the gate is a pretty decent standing. Seriously this guy needs to go out and purchase an XL Cluestick™.
I took one look at his photo and realized he’s totally unqualified to talk about gaming at all.
We might have also jumped to the conclusion that being the number 2 console first time out of the gate is a pretty decent standing.
Are they number 2? I wonder if the second place console maker has ever been so far behind the leader before? Did Nintendo dominate the way Sony dominates now?
During the peak of the NES days they had about 85% of the market share. The Master System and others shared the remaining 15%.
Dvorak has never been a fan of Microsoft. He’s always hammering on every weak spot in their armor. And from a financial perspective, this is still a big weak spot. It makes for good D00MED press, ya know?
–Dave
He’s comparing the Xbox to the 3DO machine? I really think this guy just sometimes thinks about stuff too much and starts to see just wierd connections and such.I’ve personally started to think of him as the Ebert of the tech world.
[quote=“DaveC”]
During the peak of the NES days they had about 85% of the market share. The Master System and others shared the remaining 15%.[/quote]
Yeah, I thought the only race that was ever close was the 16-bit Genesis overtaking the SNES. Otherwise, one platform has always heavily dominated - Atari 2600 vs. Intellivsion; Colecovision vs. Atari 5200 and others; NES vs. Master Sytem; Playstation 1 vs. N64, etc.; and now the Playstation 2. Sony is the only company to dominate more than one generation in a row.
That article is one of the worst trolls ever.
Dvorak has always been an idiot.
None of you guys calling him an idiot watched that video I posted obviously.
You know, the one where the Microsoft rep says that 3D0 was ahead of their time and that the XBox2 and XNA is going to be what 3D0 should have been?
Guess not. ;>
You obviously have a problem differentiating between “what 3DO should have been” and “what 3DO turned out to be.” Totally different kinds of fruit here.
— Alan
That’s the problem with columnists. Sometimes they write columns when they have nothing to write about.
That article is a waste of time.
And WTf is he talking about with this:
"suffered from the same problem that the Microsoft Xbox has suffered from: high-expectation syndrome. "
High-expectation syndrome? WTF is that, does anyone here suffer from this disease?
Sort of. Despite what the title of the thread seems to imply, he says the Xbox could be the next failed American system, like the 3DO was. I disagree, but here’s the quote:
From http://gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?section_name=dev&aid=3587
“Moore admitted that in the past six months alone, Microsoft has “probably kissed goodbye to $15 million in development funds” as a result of killing off projects in development”
A 15 million dollar loss from cancelled projects will compound the problem that the Xbox is not a profit center for Microsoft. Is this an eroneous statement? I didn’t see the part of the article where “all hope is pinned on TFO”, so I can’t comment on it.
So, TFO was cancelled. It joins the ranks of cancelled projects on so many platforms. My point is that he mentions TFO like it was an indicator of the Xboxes success or failure. It’s not. I was looking forward to having a gander at it, but it wasn’t at the top of my list and I hardly think I’m alone in that. Is it better to cancel games when you see they are becoming a sink hole? Yes. Which highlights his cluelessness. I agree with Desslock, it’s a poor troll.
I’ve not read the article yet, but would just note that the 3DO console had two huge problems that the XBox doesn’t have.
It was initially sold for $700. That the price dropped a good deal later on, when third party manufacturers made the market more competitive, didn’t matter. The admission fee had made its impression on the consumer mindset.
3DO decided to separate itself from Nintendo and Sega by exercising little to no control over the games that appeared on its system. I suppose the idea was to quickly build up a substantial library. This they did. But a side effect was a large number of cheesy games (and a good deal of soft porn, as I recall) which cluttered the market and tarnished the machine’s image.
And, while I don’t want to be overly simplistic, there’s the whole money issue. I don’t know how much dough 3DO had from VC and Trip at startup–probably some hundreds of millions–but I always had the sense that it was a finite resource.
Microsoft is made of money. It can afford to make mistakes. It has spent its way into second place, past a company that’s been making game systems and games since the early '80s.
The 800 pound gorilla of the game market may not know the neighborhood as well as its rivals. But it weighs 800 pounds. And it’s a gorilla. :)
Peter
Oh? When was the last time Nintendo or Sony cancelled 3 high-profile 1st-party projects in a row? The last Nintendo one I can think of were the Retro sub-projects before they all got moved over to Metroid Prime, back in… what, 2001?
No, he used it as an indicator of Microsoft’s inability to turn the Xbox into a profit center.
Riiiiiight. I’ll ignore the articles proclaiming 2004 the year of the Xbox RPG and all the posts on message boards (like IGN) hyping it everytime new screenshots were released.
Maybe? Were they cancelled because they were sinkholes? Or were they cancelled because everything but Halo sells poorly, and there’s no way they’d make their money back?
Everything but Halo sells poorly? Wow, can I use that in my garden, my carrots need extra fertilizer? The writer is clueless about games, especially console games, and it shows in spades through the article. I’m not sure what other high profile games you are refering to that got cancelled recently. I know they dropped the publishing rights to a couple, but that’s far from being cancelled.
P.S. - Aren’t you guys going to be making games for Xbox now? Are you afraid they will sell poorly?
I think the TFO cancellation was just an acknowledgment that no one yet knows how to make considerable money with client/server, persistent world subscription games on the console. The maintenance costs are high enough that you think twice about it in an uncertain market.
It is also probably pretty smart for MS to concentrate the focus on what XBox Live does best: retail hybrids with fewer than 64 players per session.
As for whether XBox is the next 3DO: as long as MS keeps their resolve to be in the market, it doesn’t matter whether the machine is #1 or #3. They have more money than several gods; they can afford to outspend others for a long time and try to buy marketshare.
People should be cautious with this argument. Microsoft has a lot of money, but they have a lot of non-profitable departments too: business software, high-end servers software… and the XBox of course.
There are no public numbers, but “industry sources” say their main profit center is Windows + Office. Go take a look at at MS’s website and you’ll see they have a lot of different departments. When time will come to cut branches, they’ll have to choose.
I’m not saying they will abandon the XBox product line, but no company can keep bleeding money forever.
Another point people neglect is that the XBox wasn’t very successful as a branding tool for Microsoft. It’s only my opinion but I think part of the mission for the XBox is to establish MS as a strong brand in the general public and I think it’s failing for now.
Microsoft already is a strong brand. Even most of your average joe schmoes know who MS is in general.