I really can't understand the strategy behind announcing that "Advertising has been a central element in the design process".
Do these guys think before talking to the press ?
Well to be fair, advertisement has also been a key point for Gmail and such. They try to adapt the advertisements to your tastes so you're less annoyed by random shit.
I don't think that screenshot is almost entirely ads. If I'm understanding it correctly, Live TV, netflix, IE, HBO, Skype are recently used apps. So only the 3 on the right are ads. Which still is annoying, though, because people are paying fucking money for your XBL service. Either have them pay or have them watch ads. Not both.
I had c64, gameboy, mega drive, ps1, ps1 then won an xbox and then got an xbox 360 and no ps3 (yes i know, i would love to play some of the amazing ps3 games )
but all this xbone stuff (ads, Kinect) and how slow and advert packed my 360 is now, I fucking hate it. looks like i'll be jumping from xbox next gen
Yeah, Ged. But it's not a free service. It costs €5 a month.
Which is a fair price for an ad-less service. I spend €5 a month on Spotify to get rid of the ads (not €10 because I don't care about the extra features) and would do the same in a heartbeat for an ad-free YouTube.
But MS is multi-dipping here, heavily. They have subscription income, ad revenue, platform royalties on boxed sales, maybe additional royalties for digital sales, and they would take a cut of second-hand game sales. Not even mentioning microtransactions on avatar pants and hats.
Well to be fair, advertisement has also been a key point for Gmail and such. They try to adapt the advertisements to your tastes so you're less annoyed by random shit.
I don't think that screenshot is almost entirely ads. If I'm understanding it correctly, Live TV, netflix, IE, HBO, Skype are recently used apps. So only the 3 on the right are ads. Which still is annoying, though, because people are paying fucking money for your XBL service. Either have them pay or have them watch ads. Not both.
I'm not trying to defend MS's ad strategy, I totally agree that its annoying and they shouldn't be bombarding people with ads if they are paying customers, but I think they are looking at TV services as a role model and people pay a lot more and get bombarded with a lot more ads =/
Being slightly less douchebaggy, is not really an endearing quality to most customers, especially when they have a choice to not be douchebags at all.
The difference is, TV channels don't often get paid by content creators to broadcast their stuff, TV channels pay for nearly all the content they show (and pay premiums for exclusivity), then offset that cost with advertising. Obviously some channels do create their own content, but very few do exclusively (the BBC come to mind, but they get paid for via a ridiculous 'licensing' system AND they sell that content to other channels later).
Microsoft don't go around paying publishers / developers for all the content they release on their platform. They've wangled the market so that publishers / developers end up paying them.
If they go through with this, launch titles wouldn't be able to take advantage of this right? Making a change this late, while devs have been working with what they thought were going to be certain limitations? Somebody enlighten me.
Sounds a bit desperate changing it now. They've already announced the specs albeit the memory wont make much difference its going to be years before they can use all of it.
Sounds like nonsense to me. If this piece of hardware is supposed to be on shelves in November in millions, it needs to be rolling through factories already - a hardware change now would require altering their production game plans and sourcing the parts to do so, which can take months.
Edit:
In the picture above you'll notice many variations of hardware design leading to the idea that these might also contain different variations on internals that are still being tested even days before the reveal.
I wonder if there is more behind this than the article suggests, since the article is based on rumors/opinions. Maybe MS has asked developers to up the GPU Clocks, as a way to test hardware. ie; crank it up, and see if it overheats. It doesn't seem like you'd want to involve your developers in your hardware testing at this point, but why not use that giant pool of hardware?
What are the statistics of people using the 360 for TV rather than games. With two kids in my house thats all it gets used for these days and with the average gamer age being maybe 35 I can see why the management at MS are making these choices. It backed fired at E3 due to all the die hard gamer fans but then what did they expect? Never bite the hand that feeds you! and MS forgot that gamers are the trend setters for there TV console 'Xbone'
What are the statistics of people using the 360 for TV rather than games. With two kids in my house thats all it gets used for these days and with the average gamer age being maybe 35 I can see why the management at MS are making these choices.
The crazy thing is, I think there may actually be a market for the XBox One of people who just want to use it for its media features. If Microsoft can get the thing to also function as a DVR, or even just work properly as an interface for existing DVR boxes, they could do even better with it at launch.
I can't blame Microsoft for the direction they're taking. I CAN blame them for their decision to push the Kinect, and thus over-inflate the cost of production. It would have been a much better idea for them to have built the microphone into the system itself, and made the high-definition camera an optional peripheral. Speech-control is going to one of the big selling points for the XBox One as a media machine. Wave and swipe control isn't going to be nearly as important.
While I agree, I don't want to speak commands to my TV, there are some people that like the 'waving' for navigation. Again, personally, I don't want to motion my guide around.
The point really is to get into the UI game, for TV, like google and apple (and many others) are trying. The thing is, the other products out there are small devices, or integrated into TVs already. SO, the people who are in the market purely for navigation, won't want this larger box. The gamers, were turned off by the lack of game talk. Even the E3 presentation was lacking excitement about exclusive games.
Totally don't get that ... I have zero interest in talking to my TV. None.
This. Also, if I'm playing a game at night, I don't want to have to yell at the tv for voice chat. It seems an odd choice to not include a headset, and claim kinect's microphone is a good replacement.
I'm actually quite interested in the media functionality, but not really using kinect for it. With that said, I think including the kinect is the right choice long term. Sony might as well abandon the move/camera if it's just going to be another add-on this generation. I'm not a fan of splitting the userbase.
Both MS and Sony were going to make the camera part of the initial bundle. That's why the PS4 is now stuck with glowing gamepads. It was a last minute move from Sony to take the pricing edge at E3 and capitalize on the MS debacle.
The good thing is that the PS4 will be pretty cheap. The bad thing is that most probably any interesting use of these cameras will be reserved to first party titles on the XBone, and we won't see any on the PS4
What are the statistics of people using the 360 for TV rather than games. With two kids in my house thats all it gets used for these days and with the average gamer age being maybe 35 I can see why the management at MS are making these choices. It backed fired at E3 due to all the die hard gamer fans but then what did they expect? Never bite the hand that feeds you! and MS forgot that gamers are the trend setters for there TV console 'Xbone'
I think you're missing the point somewhat - people aren't going to spend £400 + an Xbox Gold subscription + the cable TV subscription, when just the cable TV subscription will suffice. People might watch TV through their 360, but that's because they have the device and it's plugged into the TV already, and not because they bought it to do that.
The thing they're going for is a unified experience where you use the Xbone in place of all of those machines including the cable box and DVR.
Which is why it grinds my gears that they didn't advertise it as a GAMES machine first with amazing included TV features, but instead did it the other way round. You guys are right, who would buy the Xbone as a horrendously expensive DVR?
Well if Microsoft made it clear that this was an amazing games machine then we would certainly go out and buy that. So now we have this machine in our houses we can plug in a cable and watch TV on it, just one device, bought for the games and now also a convenient all-in-one. We could be watching TV and then *bing* one of our friends is online, oh cool lets just play right now, I'll just press record on the show I was watching.
Sell it for the games, sell even more for the benefits. Not the other way round.
Its not an all in one machine though. It has pass through functionality, you have to have the dvr box as well and then connect that to the Xbox. The only benefits are being able to switch quickly and do six things at once.
Its not an all in one machine though. It has pass through functionality, you have to have the dvr box as well and then connect that to the Xbox. The only benefits are being able to switch quickly and do six things at once.
my surround sound system has this function, and i'd have to plug the xbone into that as well to get the benefits of a good sound system. so... again i just don't understand the benefit of this.
especially since digital tv (at least here in england) sucks the bawls so hard that all of these functions will become devoid of meaning.
X-box, tv - xbox changes to tv.... and then what? i still have to use the sky remote to change the channel i'm watching. how is that any less effort than changing the tv channel on the remote to the digital box input from the xbox?
Switching quickly is a matter of pressing two buttons on my TV remote already. The only actual 'advantage' is being able to watch TV and play a game at the same time (yeah, right).
All that remains is justifying/reducing the price.
Whoa there, buddy. The current reaction from the indie community is cautious optimism. It's way too early to throw out the phrase "all that remains." Details on their new publishing policies has been extremely sketchy. All we've heard for certain is that there will be some form of self-publishing on the XBox One, and that the commercial hardware will be able to serve as a makeshift development box.
Having the retail unit as a dev kit is a nice feature. But this was also true of the XBox 360, so not that much has changed. And the fact that they are taking the same tack with the hardware implies that they may take the same approach with the software and services. We could just be seeing a resurrection of the XBox Indies channel. While this would technically be self-publishing, it also wouldn't reverse the mass indie exodus from the XBox brand.
Thankfully, I'm using Unity for my current development, so I have plenty of platform flexibility. I can just continue as normal, and take advantage of this XBox One self-publishing if it proves to be the real deal. I don't think anyone is going to throw their development weight behind the XBox One on information this shallow though. Details, I need details!
take the bullet... make a loss on each box to begin with, match sonys price, and include your kinect. it'll sell you consoles, a lot of consoles, and you'll make profit on the other peripherals in the long run, and as the manufacturing cost goes down, you'll start making profits on the boxes again.
otherwise you're going to lose market share as well as revenue.
Microsoft spent a lot of money on the Kenetic, it makes their console different that the Wii U or the PS4. No devs will use the Kinect if adoption rates are low. If games aren't being made for the kinect it was a waste of money and time. They are hoping with 100% adoption rates on the Kinect there will be a niche for developers that want to take a risk. If a dev makes the next Wii Sports, they might have a system seller game that causes casuals and all other gamers to flock to the console. Most likely the PS4 wont be able to compete against Xbox One's kinect titles because there would be no reason for dev's to make a PS4 Eye title over a Kinetic title, because there will be less people that own the Eye.
Whoa there, buddy. The current reaction from the indie community is cautious optimism. It's way too early to throw out the phrase "all that remains."
Not really. I don't even think it was too early months ago when they said there would be no self-publishing.
I understand the need to declare Microsofts policies a disaster in order to get them to listen and change but setting up barriers that make it difficult to publish quality games on the platform would be a funeral for Microsoft and they'll just keep changing their policies until that's no longer an issue. They're going to be doing it as aggressively as possible until launch to try to salvage their horrid job marketing the console so far.
No devs will use the Kinect if adoption rates are low.
I wouldn't expect more developers to flock to the Kinect than are already there making the typical sports/dance/fitness titles.
The biggest problem with innovative hardware is that star console titles are now overwhelmingly cross platform and adopting hardware in anything but a superficial way means significantly expanding your design complexity to develop for multiple platforms or locking yourself into one console.
Microsoft spent a lot of money on the Kenetic, it makes their console different that the Wii U or the PS4. No devs will use the Kinect if adoption rates are low. If games aren't being made for the kinect it was a waste of money and time. They are hoping with 100% adoption rates on the Kinect there will be a niche for developers that want to take a risk. If a dev makes the next Wii Sports, they might have a system seller game that causes casuals and all other gamers to flock to the console. Most likely the PS4 wont be able to compete against Xbox One's kinect titles because there would be no reason for dev's to make a PS4 Eye title over a Kinetic title, because there will be less people that own the Eye.
yeah i completely understand all that. but the other thing to bear in mind is that the target demographic for the wii was completely different from the 360 anyway.
there might be a dev out there somewhere that's willing to take the risk on the xbone. but... why would they, really? the wii still sells, and it's still a popular console with a proven track record for those kind of games. while the xbox is extremely shady by comparison.
if i remember rightly too, the kinect games that were released also sold abysmally. people just don't want them.
oh well, i guess we can all just wait and see how it all pans out. it could be a goldmine for them, it could also be a shit-pile. we'll know in about 18 months after the first year results are out!
I understand the need to declare Microsofts policies a disaster in order to get them to listen and change but setting up barriers that make it difficult to publish quality games on the platform would be a funeral for Microsoft and they'll just keep changing their policies until that's no longer an issue. They're going to be doing it as aggressively as possible until launch to try to salvage their horrid job marketing the console so far.
If they were really so keen on pushing these initiatives "as aggressively as possible,"
I would think that they would have been pursuing them earlier. And that they would have significantly more details now. As it stands, it really seems like Microsoft is dragging its feet. We're seeing a large company with a lot of inertia that is taking its sweet time in tuning its internal workings.
I'm not going to cry gloom and doom. Microsoft has already averted the worst-case scenario by back-pedaling on the DRM issue. At the same time, we are a long way from "all that remains." I agree that the Kinect was a poor choice. It would have been much better for them to make an attached microphone array required, and made the camera optional. Hand-waving control isn't going to be a big selling point for the XBox One, but voice-control has a future. And Microsoft's slow response on a lot of the issues that have plagued the XBox One's marketing and direction continues to hurt. They are still playing catch-up, and there are many areas they still need to improve on.
I wouldn't expect more developers to flock to the Kinect than are already there making the typical sports/dance/fitness titles.
This, unfortunately. The real problem with Kinect, is that it just isn't a very good input device for a lot of scenarios. It's going to be hard to supplant the controller.
Replies
Do these guys think before talking to the press ?
(Yes, that is an Xbox home page consisting almost entirely of adverts).
http://sticktwiddlers.com/2013/06/28/xbox-one-dashboard-created-with-advertising-in-mind/
I'd recommend reading it, because if you read between the lines it's sounding quite unpleasant
I don't think that screenshot is almost entirely ads. If I'm understanding it correctly, Live TV, netflix, IE, HBO, Skype are recently used apps. So only the 3 on the right are ads. Which still is annoying, though, because people are paying fucking money for your XBL service. Either have them pay or have them watch ads. Not both.
I had c64, gameboy, mega drive, ps1, ps1 then won an xbox and then got an xbox 360 and no ps3 (yes i know, i would love to play some of the amazing ps3 games
but all this xbone stuff (ads, Kinect) and how slow and advert packed my 360 is now, I fucking hate it. looks like i'll be jumping from xbox next gen
Which is a fair price for an ad-less service. I spend €5 a month on Spotify to get rid of the ads (not €10 because I don't care about the extra features) and would do the same in a heartbeat for an ad-free YouTube.
But MS is multi-dipping here, heavily. They have subscription income, ad revenue, platform royalties on boxed sales, maybe additional royalties for digital sales, and they would take a cut of second-hand game sales. Not even mentioning microtransactions on avatar pants and hats.
Being slightly less douchebaggy, is not really an endearing quality to most customers, especially when they have a choice to not be douchebags at all.
Microsoft don't go around paying publishers / developers for all the content they release on their platform. They've wangled the market so that publishers / developers end up paying them.
https://xboxuncut.squarespace.com/microsoft-asking-developers-about-an-increased-gpu-clock-and-an-increase-to-12-gb-of-ram
If they go through with this, launch titles wouldn't be able to take advantage of this right? Making a change this late, while devs have been working with what they thought were going to be certain limitations? Somebody enlighten me.
is this part supposed to be a fact or it's just speculation evolving?
Edit: .
Umm, no. I just see lots of identical kits.
The crazy thing is, I think there may actually be a market for the XBox One of people who just want to use it for its media features. If Microsoft can get the thing to also function as a DVR, or even just work properly as an interface for existing DVR boxes, they could do even better with it at launch.
I can't blame Microsoft for the direction they're taking. I CAN blame them for their decision to push the Kinect, and thus over-inflate the cost of production. It would have been a much better idea for them to have built the microphone into the system itself, and made the high-definition camera an optional peripheral. Speech-control is going to one of the big selling points for the XBox One as a media machine. Wave and swipe control isn't going to be nearly as important.
The point really is to get into the UI game, for TV, like google and apple (and many others) are trying. The thing is, the other products out there are small devices, or integrated into TVs already. SO, the people who are in the market purely for navigation, won't want this larger box. The gamers, were turned off by the lack of game talk. Even the E3 presentation was lacking excitement about exclusive games.
This. Also, if I'm playing a game at night, I don't want to have to yell at the tv for voice chat. It seems an odd choice to not include a headset, and claim kinect's microphone is a good replacement.
I'm actually quite interested in the media functionality, but not really using kinect for it. With that said, I think including the kinect is the right choice long term. Sony might as well abandon the move/camera if it's just going to be another add-on this generation. I'm not a fan of splitting the userbase.
The good thing is that the PS4 will be pretty cheap. The bad thing is that most probably any interesting use of these cameras will be reserved to first party titles on the XBone, and we won't see any on the PS4
I think you're missing the point somewhat - people aren't going to spend £400 + an Xbox Gold subscription + the cable TV subscription, when just the cable TV subscription will suffice. People might watch TV through their 360, but that's because they have the device and it's plugged into the TV already, and not because they bought it to do that.
why am i going to spend £429 up front, and then an extra £5 per month for a glorified remote control?
Which is why it grinds my gears that they didn't advertise it as a GAMES machine first with amazing included TV features, but instead did it the other way round. You guys are right, who would buy the Xbone as a horrendously expensive DVR?
Well if Microsoft made it clear that this was an amazing games machine then we would certainly go out and buy that. So now we have this machine in our houses we can plug in a cable and watch TV on it, just one device, bought for the games and now also a convenient all-in-one. We could be watching TV and then *bing* one of our friends is online, oh cool lets just play right now, I'll just press record on the show I was watching.
Sell it for the games, sell even more for the benefits. Not the other way round.
my surround sound system has this function, and i'd have to plug the xbone into that as well to get the benefits of a good sound system. so... again i just don't understand the benefit of this.
especially since digital tv (at least here in england) sucks the bawls so hard that all of these functions will become devoid of meaning.
X-box, tv - xbox changes to tv.... and then what? i still have to use the sky remote to change the channel i'm watching. how is that any less effort than changing the tv channel on the remote to the digital box input from the xbox?
http://www.polygon.com/2013/7/24/4553946/microsoft-details-xbox-one-indie-self-publishing
All that remains is justifying/reducing the price.
Whoa there, buddy. The current reaction from the indie community is cautious optimism. It's way too early to throw out the phrase "all that remains." Details on their new publishing policies has been extremely sketchy. All we've heard for certain is that there will be some form of self-publishing on the XBox One, and that the commercial hardware will be able to serve as a makeshift development box.
Having the retail unit as a dev kit is a nice feature. But this was also true of the XBox 360, so not that much has changed. And the fact that they are taking the same tack with the hardware implies that they may take the same approach with the software and services. We could just be seeing a resurrection of the XBox Indies channel. While this would technically be self-publishing, it also wouldn't reverse the mass indie exodus from the XBox brand.
Thankfully, I'm using Unity for my current development, so I have plenty of platform flexibility. I can just continue as normal, and take advantage of this XBox One self-publishing if it proves to be the real deal. I don't think anyone is going to throw their development weight behind the XBox One on information this shallow though. Details, I need details!
Even though I don't like the kinect, I think that is a bad idea.
take the bullet... make a loss on each box to begin with, match sonys price, and include your kinect. it'll sell you consoles, a lot of consoles, and you'll make profit on the other peripherals in the long run, and as the manufacturing cost goes down, you'll start making profits on the boxes again.
otherwise you're going to lose market share as well as revenue.
I understand the need to declare Microsofts policies a disaster in order to get them to listen and change but setting up barriers that make it difficult to publish quality games on the platform would be a funeral for Microsoft and they'll just keep changing their policies until that's no longer an issue. They're going to be doing it as aggressively as possible until launch to try to salvage their horrid job marketing the console so far.
I wouldn't expect more developers to flock to the Kinect than are already there making the typical sports/dance/fitness titles.
The biggest problem with innovative hardware is that star console titles are now overwhelmingly cross platform and adopting hardware in anything but a superficial way means significantly expanding your design complexity to develop for multiple platforms or locking yourself into one console.
yeah i completely understand all that. but the other thing to bear in mind is that the target demographic for the wii was completely different from the 360 anyway.
there might be a dev out there somewhere that's willing to take the risk on the xbone. but... why would they, really? the wii still sells, and it's still a popular console with a proven track record for those kind of games. while the xbox is extremely shady by comparison.
if i remember rightly too, the kinect games that were released also sold abysmally. people just don't want them.
oh well, i guess we can all just wait and see how it all pans out. it could be a goldmine for them, it could also be a shit-pile. we'll know in about 18 months after the first year results are out!
If they were really so keen on pushing these initiatives "as aggressively as possible,"
I would think that they would have been pursuing them earlier. And that they would have significantly more details now. As it stands, it really seems like Microsoft is dragging its feet. We're seeing a large company with a lot of inertia that is taking its sweet time in tuning its internal workings.
I'm not going to cry gloom and doom. Microsoft has already averted the worst-case scenario by back-pedaling on the DRM issue. At the same time, we are a long way from "all that remains." I agree that the Kinect was a poor choice. It would have been much better for them to make an attached microphone array required, and made the camera optional. Hand-waving control isn't going to be a big selling point for the XBox One, but voice-control has a future. And Microsoft's slow response on a lot of the issues that have plagued the XBox One's marketing and direction continues to hurt. They are still playing catch-up, and there are many areas they still need to improve on.
This, unfortunately. The real problem with Kinect, is that it just isn't a very good input device for a lot of scenarios. It's going to be hard to supplant the controller.
[ame]www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QrZP0AmUvk[/ame]