No surprise I wasn’t invited to the big tent. Despite my recent venting of frustration on the state of xBox, I’m honestly crossing my fingers that the xBox-720/xBox-8/xBox-∞/neXtBox XBox One announcement goes well today and they have a successful launch this fall.
It will go well if they demo a game that blows our mind and that we want to play. It will go poorly if there is no unique game demonstration and we are instead shown a lengthy set-top-box-tv-app-platform-bullshit-bullshit demonstration.
Great must-have games, sell consoles. PacMan, Pitfall! and Asteroids moved the Atari 2600. Mario sold the NES and Super NES. Zelda, 007-GoldenEye and MarioKart sold the Nintendo-64. Tony Hawk, Metal Gear Solid, and Grand Turismo sold the Playstation 1. There was that Halo xBox thing that seemed to have worked pretty well, also. This isn’t a truism just about consoles – this is a truism for all computers and operating systems and phones and tablets and e-Readers and devices as well. PCs were originally mostly purchased for Multiplan – there’s always a “killer app” or set of apps or content which kickstarts the market. Since the new xBox and Playstation 4 aren’t going to be backward-compatible with their old titles… there had better be some very unique and must-have content ready for launch.
Sony’s Playstation 4 announcement event and PR did a good job focusing on games and game-tech, and everything about the event, the graphics, the PR was fine-tuned to gamers. This was solid and refreshing versus the guide-tv-movies-netflix focus that Microsoft has been spewing of late. I remain impressed that Sony are holding back on showing the physical console – this is terrific restraint and gives them strong opportunities to take back press coverage from Microsoft post xBox-announce today. But the games – inFamous Second Son, Killzone: Shadow Fall, Watchdogs, some others – while truly fantastic looking, did not look particularly approachable or compelling to me. I think Sony better have some very compelling games up its sleeve for launch. These are good but not buy-a-new-console good, in my opinion. And I don’t seem to be alone in this opinion.
Alex St. John (another former Microsoftie and, oddly, also an Alaskan) wrote an insightful post giving his perspective on the new xBox — it’s worth a read, I agree with quite a bit of it. His point that xBox is being run and guided by non-hardcore-gamers and old-dudes who think more about places to watch Sponge Bob and listen to music than they do about games is particularly spot-on. I also agree that technologically it’s good that Microsoft is returning to more of a PC architecture and hopefully more of a PC operating system kernel (likely since Dave Cutler is working on it these days). I was the original proponent of xBox using the Windows kernel so that we could share technology and improve the PC+Windows experience with everything we learned about stability, fast-boot and UI/UX from consoles. This goal took a bit of a back-seat in the original xBox and was completely tossed-out in xBox 360, and as Alex notes, it caused damage to the PC game ISV community, as they became fractured — DirectX was consistent between PCs and xBox, but everything else about programming them was different.
Like Alex, I’m not overly excited about the expected hardware. I do think it’s interesting that it will have HDMI-in as well as HDMI-out, there are cool things to do there — if done right (a big “if” given who we’re talking about) you could make the console the primary input and control point for the TV, as I pointed out in my post about what I’d want in an Apple TV device. This is a strategic point to own.
In any case, I’m looking forward to watching the live-blogs of the launch. If the device is quiet, small, and really fast and has at least one cool games, I will of course get one.
Actually, I’m lying. Even if it’s big, loud and slow, if it has a kick-ass unique game that looks playable and approachable and fun I will buy one and many others will as well, despite whatever horrific TV-guide and Blu-Ray and Netflix and lame third-party apps are announced and demonstrated in the big tent today.
(update: the announcement was almost the very worst of every horrible possibility I could have imagined. TV-focused. No live-game demos. Bad jokes. Horrible presentation. No game footage at all until 35m in – overall we saw more Price is Right footage than game footage. It’s not clear yet if the launch titles will be super-compelling, we’ll have to wait until E3.)