Bolivar687
Banned
Microsoft’s foray into the games industry has been uninspired, harmful, and only promises to impede further progress if their reckless misadventures continue.
The original Xbox was an overdesigned, repulsive monstrosity that deserved to fail as hard as it did. But it would be a mistake to dismiss it as only a harmless embarassment. It irremediably poisoned the console industry by demanding its users pay a subscription for the privilege of playing with friends. For PC gamers at the time, this was heretical, but it has since become the orthodoxy of today.
Redmond followed up their disastrous introduction by pouring another toxin into gaming's bloodstream: the Moneyhat. Up until this point, third party publishers partnered with the console makers who could offer the most appropriate audience and tools for their game. When Square moved Final Fantasy to PlayStation, it wasn’t solely because they had been given a ton of money, but because the expanded storage of CD’s allowed them to create a larger RPG interspersed with full motion video. Gamers as a whole benefitted, as discs became the norm and games began to blur the lines between the cinematic and the interactive.
I contend that Microsoft’s Moneyhatting of JRPGs for the 360's launch lineup is largely responsible for the extinction of Japanese AAA console development. It polarized the top studios and games to a machine no one in Japan was ever going to buy. It suppressed PS3 early adoption and removed a roster of games that would have been ready and waiting to entice post-pricecut buyers. After Microsoft’s Japanese gambit failed, as everyone said it would, we then settled for an entire generation where the largest Japanese publishers sent their marquee development teams to work on the PSP and Nintendo DS. This is why Motomu Toriyama directed Revenant Wings instead of making FFXIII the best it could be. It’s why Tetsuya Nomura oversaw, completed, and shipped a dozen or so games before ultimately stepping away from Versus XIII. It’s why we got Peace Walker in 2010 instead of Ground Zeroes.
The damage has already been done and we will not recover from this. While Western games have always been a major part of console catalogues, it was always Japan that pushed their boundaries and moved them forward. After dominating last generation, we see what the West has given us for their encore: not just more Assassin’s Creed and Battlefield in general, but specifically more Far Cry 3 and Black Ops II, and a handful of outstanding games that you would much rather be playing on PC.
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Purely from a dollars and cents perspective, the most (and, arguably, only) successful and profitable days of the Xbox brand were under Don Mattrick’s leadership, around the time when their E3 conferences began devoting more time to Kinect 1.0 and streaming services, years before the suicidal reveal of the Xbox One. As all corporations have an ethical obligation to make money for their shareholders, Microsoft has every incentive to one day orient gaming back in that direction, not burning milllions to convince us that Phil Spencer isn’t the executive who ran their first party division into the ground.
What else can Microsoft give us if they remain in the console business? Will their new exclusives be every bit as captivating as Recore, Crackdown 3 and Quantum Break? Will they forge new and mutually beneficial third party relationships according to the Scalebound model? Will anyone really care?
We say the seventh generation was an anomaly for a very good reason: because it was. There is nothing Microsoft can do to challenge Sony or its constellation of strategic advantages (Jim Ryan is a beast). Their upper ceiling of reasonable expectations is to cannibalize second place status by taking gamers away from Nintendo, thereby depriving another, more innovative competitor of its audience.
Alternatively, Microsoft could return and rededicate themselves to their raison d'être: Windows PC. They could open up their catalogue to Steam, deterring Epic’s misguided, Chinese-funded colonialism. They could continue to improve DirectX in conjunction with Nvidia and AMD. And they could put inXile and Relic in a position to succeed by getting out of their way, as they once did for Ensemble.
It might not be the most glamorous option, but at least it won’t lose as many hundreds of millions of dollars as their next also-ran machine undoubtedly will.
Happy #NationalMakeaNeoGAFThreadDay everyone!
The original Xbox was an overdesigned, repulsive monstrosity that deserved to fail as hard as it did. But it would be a mistake to dismiss it as only a harmless embarassment. It irremediably poisoned the console industry by demanding its users pay a subscription for the privilege of playing with friends. For PC gamers at the time, this was heretical, but it has since become the orthodoxy of today.
Redmond followed up their disastrous introduction by pouring another toxin into gaming's bloodstream: the Moneyhat. Up until this point, third party publishers partnered with the console makers who could offer the most appropriate audience and tools for their game. When Square moved Final Fantasy to PlayStation, it wasn’t solely because they had been given a ton of money, but because the expanded storage of CD’s allowed them to create a larger RPG interspersed with full motion video. Gamers as a whole benefitted, as discs became the norm and games began to blur the lines between the cinematic and the interactive.
I contend that Microsoft’s Moneyhatting of JRPGs for the 360's launch lineup is largely responsible for the extinction of Japanese AAA console development. It polarized the top studios and games to a machine no one in Japan was ever going to buy. It suppressed PS3 early adoption and removed a roster of games that would have been ready and waiting to entice post-pricecut buyers. After Microsoft’s Japanese gambit failed, as everyone said it would, we then settled for an entire generation where the largest Japanese publishers sent their marquee development teams to work on the PSP and Nintendo DS. This is why Motomu Toriyama directed Revenant Wings instead of making FFXIII the best it could be. It’s why Tetsuya Nomura oversaw, completed, and shipped a dozen or so games before ultimately stepping away from Versus XIII. It’s why we got Peace Walker in 2010 instead of Ground Zeroes.
The damage has already been done and we will not recover from this. While Western games have always been a major part of console catalogues, it was always Japan that pushed their boundaries and moved them forward. After dominating last generation, we see what the West has given us for their encore: not just more Assassin’s Creed and Battlefield in general, but specifically more Far Cry 3 and Black Ops II, and a handful of outstanding games that you would much rather be playing on PC.
Purely from a dollars and cents perspective, the most (and, arguably, only) successful and profitable days of the Xbox brand were under Don Mattrick’s leadership, around the time when their E3 conferences began devoting more time to Kinect 1.0 and streaming services, years before the suicidal reveal of the Xbox One. As all corporations have an ethical obligation to make money for their shareholders, Microsoft has every incentive to one day orient gaming back in that direction, not burning milllions to convince us that Phil Spencer isn’t the executive who ran their first party division into the ground.
What else can Microsoft give us if they remain in the console business? Will their new exclusives be every bit as captivating as Recore, Crackdown 3 and Quantum Break? Will they forge new and mutually beneficial third party relationships according to the Scalebound model? Will anyone really care?
Of course they won’t.
We say the seventh generation was an anomaly for a very good reason: because it was. There is nothing Microsoft can do to challenge Sony or its constellation of strategic advantages (Jim Ryan is a beast). Their upper ceiling of reasonable expectations is to cannibalize second place status by taking gamers away from Nintendo, thereby depriving another, more innovative competitor of its audience.
Alternatively, Microsoft could return and rededicate themselves to their raison d'être: Windows PC. They could open up their catalogue to Steam, deterring Epic’s misguided, Chinese-funded colonialism. They could continue to improve DirectX in conjunction with Nvidia and AMD. And they could put inXile and Relic in a position to succeed by getting out of their way, as they once did for Ensemble.
It might not be the most glamorous option, but at least it won’t lose as many hundreds of millions of dollars as their next also-ran machine undoubtedly will.
Happy #NationalMakeaNeoGAFThreadDay everyone!
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