Microsoft's XBOX 360 - A Retrospective

Absolute Dog · May 9, 2013

At a time when Microsoft (MS) is planning to unveil it's next generation XBOX it may be just the time to reflect on the past. Some companies will, seemingly, will unabashedly promote their newest products well beyond any realistic measure in order to get the biggest sales return possible. A story I recently read by Andrew Groen of

Wired took a look back at all the hype offered by Microsoft surrounding the XBOX 360 and he provided an interesting retrospective of sales versus reality.

These insights may better help the gamer to weed through the onslaught of hype, as experienced most recently with Halo 4, and the reality, as seen by the current population that still plays the game. The reality there is an unfinished game was sold to the consumer to hit a sales period for the holidays instead of taking the time to finish the product, which without a doubt, would have given the playing population a fully functional game that met the standards spoken to by it's producer and maintained a much stronger presence in the gaming world. The jubilation they thrived in briefly about sales was soon darkened by the reality of the disenfranchised fan base. This decision also affected a supporting company, Certain Affinty, whose reputation, and most likely income, depended on DLC content and their work on forge for Halo 4.

Hopefully these companies will see this reality for themselves in a manner that will allow them to continue to produce quality products and experiences for their consumers without loosing sight of the consumers need to be able to trust in the very products and services they provide.

The story as offered at

wired.com

7 Years Later, Has Microsoft Kept Its Xbox 360 Promises?

BY ANDREW GROEN - 04.25.13 - 6:30 AM

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wasn’t shy about predicting that Xbox 360 would change the world of entertainment as we know it, but has the company delivered on its huge promises?

Photo: Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com

Microsoft was more than a little bombastic when it began hyping up the Xbox 360 before its 2005 launch.

“In the next generation, Xbox 360 will transform the way people play games and have fun,” said Robbie Bach, former president of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices division, at the company’s 2005 press briefing at the Electronic Entertainment Expo.

Certainly it did, but not necessarily in the ways that Microsoft promised. Xbox 360 was a great gaming device, one that Microsoft continually improved upon in a way that was unheard of in the game business until this generation. It constantly added significant new features, upgraded the user experience and moved from an also-ran to a major player, forcing the competition to follow suit. The PlayStation 2 you bought in 2001 was the same exact machine in 2005, but the Xbox 360 you bought that year would be unrecognizable now. Xbox 360 did change everything.

But many of the things Microsoft talked about at the beginning of the generation turned out to be so much vaporware. And often instead of pursuing them, Microsoft allowed the competition to. It’s pretty clear Microsoft was shining us on about… well, a lot.

On Wednesday, Microsoft officially announced what all of us have known was coming for years now: It will unveil the next generation of Xbox hardware at an event in Redmond, Washington on May 21. This follows the sort-of unveiling of PlayStation 4 by Sony in February, at which it made grandiose pledges such as saying that PlayStation 4 will “make you feel emotions that you have never felt in real life.” Sure it will. As we pointed out at the time, Sony made many similar promises about PlayStation 3, many of which failed to materialize.

What about Microsoft’s hype about Xbox 360, back in 2005? Here’s what executives said, and what really happened.

“A product with games at its core, surrounded by limitless connected digital entertainment.”— J Allard, then Xbox chief experience officer, at the 2005 E3 press briefing.

“Limitless” was obvious hyperbole, and yet it ended up being truer than even former Microsoft evangelist Allard probably believed at the time. At the time, “connected digital entertainment” meant people would use their vast knowledge of 2005 technology to plug in an iPod to hear songs through the TV. Today, 360 users can access the internet, Twitter, Facebook, ESPN apps, live presidential election coverage and thousands of movies, TV shows and songs.

Verdict: True ^

“For us to say we’re going to go through a whole generation without an HD capacity drive — I think that would be naive to assume that we’ll be sitting here at the end of the Xbox 360 generation and no such device will have shipped… We’re not going to be sitting here in five years saying, ‘Oh jeez, we don’t have HD DVD-type storage.’” – Steve Ballmer, Engadget interview, published May 2005.

We suppose that Ballmer was technically correct: After launching Xbox 360 with a standard-capacity DVD drive instead of a high-density disc, Microsoft did release an HD-DVD drive that plugged into an Xbox 360 via USB. This was only for watching HD-DVD movies, not playing games, and Microsoft hastily discontinued it when HD-DVD lost the format battle to Blu-ray — a battle that may have been won solely because Sony put Blu-ray into every PlayStation 3.

Had every Xbox 360 played HD-DVD discs, Blu-ray might have gone the way of Betamax.

Seven years later, Microsoft is sitting here saying, “Oh jeez, we don’t have HD-DVD type storage.” Just call him Naive Steve.

Verdict: False ^

“On the [Xbox Live] Marketplace… she might never pick up a controller, never take a run in the halfpipe but she’ll be able to design and sell stickers, shirts, boards, soundtracks and even design her own skate park for those hardcore gamers.” — J Allard, 2005 Microsoft E3 Press Briefing.

The “she” in this particular statement was the infamous “Velocity Girl,” the online screen name of a hypothetical young female non-gamer who would use her Xbox 360 as a place to create and sell her own designs and products.

Microsoft promised an online modding community where users could sell their digital wares for cash on the Xbox 360 marketplace, but the company never really even tried. Throughout the system’s lifespan Microsoft never implemented any large-scale programs that would have brought about the non-gaming hipster-design revolution that it prophesized.

We’ve seen a couple small attempts over the years, though. The Forza Motorsport storefront, for instance, allows players to create car designs and other goods to sell for in-game credits — but not real cash.

Players creating items and selling them at a profit has actually has become a reality — but it’s Valve doing it on the Steam service, not Microsoft.

Verdict: False ^

“It’s a future where my games are always personalized to match my desires.” — “Kim,” the ultra-hip introduction presenter at Microsoft’s E3 2005 press briefing.

In the early days of its marketing campaign, Microsoft used cringe-inducing statements like this to brag about how much Generation Me was going to be able to “express themselves” through their Xbox 360.

While Microsoft has done some great work in making the console itself more flexible to the user’s interests (you can even still buy those staggeringly pointless faceplates that Microsoft abandoned years ago), the games themselves have rarely fit that description.

Downloadable content has provided an avenue for players to somewhat personalize some games, but giving a company more money for new digital character outfits hardly counts as “personalization.”

Verdict: False ^

Microsoft executive Robbie Bach had to walk a careful verbal tightrope when he talked about Xbox’s backward compatibility. Photo courtesy Microsoft

“We will make money, and a lot of money in this next generation!” — Steve Ballmer, interview with Engadget published May 18, 2005.

Microsoft spent four tough years with the original Xbox in which it operated the division at a big loss — reportedly $4 billion over four years — in order to try to gain a foothold in the videogame market. So investors wouldn’t have been pleased if Microsoft said they’d have to wait another generation for the profit to begin flowing.

Though Xbox 360 also operated at a loss for its first few years, Microsoft’s fortunes finally turned in late 2008 when it posted the first net profits for the Entertainment and Devices division (which includes Xbox, Windows Phone, PC gaming and Zune) since its entry into consoles.

It got off to a rough start, though. Xbox 360 faced a $1 billion setback when Microsoft extended the system’s warranty to three years due to the dreaded Red Ring of Death error, resulting in a disastrous $1.9 billion operating loss for the division in 2007.

It will take more time for Microsoft to erase the massive multi-billion dollar loss accrued in the early years, but the division is now profitable and Microsoft is now a major market player.

Verdict: Somewhat true ^

“Tonight we are pleased to announce that Xbox 360 will be backward compatible with the top-selling Xbox games.” — Robbie Bach, E3 2005 Microsoft Press Briefing.

This is Microsoft’s most infamous statement prior to the launch of the Xbox 360. When Bach made this announcement, the crowd went wild before he finished his sentence, allowing him to mumble the “top selling” bit. It seemed, at first, that he had just said the Xbox 360 was backward compatible with original Xbox games, and anybody who purchased a 360 would be able to catch up on the first Xbox’s library of games.

We soon found out that you really have to parse every single word of Microsoft’s statements. It indeed only intended to make the top-selling Xbox games backward compatible with Xbox 360, not the entire library. And it didn’t even do that, not at first: Less than a third of the Xbox’s library worked on Xbox 360 at launch, and the emulation software that ran the games was often glitchy, sometimes to the point where the game played much worse than it did on the less powerful machine.

Many of the “top-selling” games were actually missing, since they were harder to emulate than the cheapo games: Splinter Cell didn’t work, but Barbie Horse Adventure was good to go.

Over the next two years, Microsoft did work to add more games, eventually getting about half of the library emulated and adding most (but not all) of the biggest games on the platform.

Verdict: A sneaky half-truth ^

“Microsoft will inevitably succeed in Japan.” – Takashi Sensui, general manager of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business division in Japan.

The worldwide videogame business was a much different industry in 2005. Though Japan’s influence has recently begun to slip, in 2005 it was seen as a major key to success, and the original Xbox tanked miserably there.

With Xbox 360, Microsoft devoted considerable resources to changing that, but not even two exclusive RPGs from one of the most famous designers in Japan (Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi) could overcome the widespread apathy toward Xbox 360.

In June of 2011, Microsoft announced it had sold 1.5 million Xbox 360s in nearly six years. To contrast, the Nintendo DS has sold over 33 million consoles there to date. Hardly a good showing.

Verdict: False ^

“We’ll get there by making games more approachable for people who didn’t grow up with a game controller.” — Robbie Bach, 2005 E3 press briefing, on expanding the market.

Microsoft didn’t manage to do this when it launched Xbox 360, but Nintendo did the next year with the Wii’s motion controller. It was later revealed that Microsoft had turned down the rights to the underlying core technology of Wii. After Nintendo’s success, it was much more receptive to the idea for Kinect, a different type of motion controller.

Kinect has brought about some of the most wretched games in the history of the console. But it did have a couple of highly successful, demographic-expanding, controller-free games like Dance Central. On the other other hand, Kinect has mostly been successful at selling to small kids who can’t yet handle a controller, not grownups who never learned to use one.

Verdict: Half true ^

“Wouldn’t it be cool to have the game that has the person on the PC being the general who is driving the strategy, and the person on the console on Xbox Live executing the strategy? That is a completely new genre… and it leverages everything that Steve [ballmer] talked about that we’re putting in place.” — Robbie Bach, interview with Engadget, published May 18, 2005.

Seven years later, no game even remotely approaching this type of PC-console cross-play has been released. There have been some instances of console and PC players being able to play the same game together, but unfortunately for Microsoft they were mostly on PlayStation 3.

The only game that seems somewhat similar to this dream is Dust 514, a multiplayer shooter which is bound to the outer space MMO EVE Online. In Dust 514, players can coordinate with groups in EVE for funding and even artillery bombardments which can help them win battles. But this, too, is a Sony exclusive.

So yes, it would absolutely be cool, but Microsoft hasn’t bothered to do it.

Verdict: False ^

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June 18, 2013

Very informative information! Pretty sure I will always be an xBox 360 fan but I didn't know a lot of the stuff you pointed out so I appreciate that.
http://ms4r.com/

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