Sounded like he was kind of forced to, but I guess if they just stressed they felt this was best he'd agree and sign off. And that artwork was outsourced, right? I'm hoping when filtered through From either it comes out better or is limited to special sets rather than being the design norm like we saw with something like Fire Emblem Awakening.
True, that was a convoluted system and I can see it being one they COULDN'T make cheap easily. They were doomed from the moment they thought releasing by surprised at $400 was a good idea. I do wish fewer niche games had to suffer (though at the same time SCEA could've had nicer damn policies.)
I do wonder, I know we won't see a repeat of what happened with SEGA or at least not for the same reasons, but more likely I'd see it being like Zune or at an extreme Kin, where something completely fails to take off and they just cut their losses. But I kind of expect just CoD fans buying the system by default could give it a steady foothold to at least have a few million systems even at worst, at that point we'd just have to hope Microsoft considered it a waste of resources and bails, even if they could stubbornly stick around if they really felt like it.
Before the rumor of the Sony contract, I assumed he had been reassigned to direct the new iteration in the Armored Core series, seeing as it was FROM's most successful franchise prior to the Souls breakout success (King's Field was always a niche franchise that only validated a new sequel but little else). As to the art, as far as I can tell, FROM brought him and probably a few other outside contractors to shorten development time on Dark Soul's 2. Or more likely they needed to contract outside to replace their internal artists who are busy working on Sony's game; which is likely a sequel to Demon's Souls.
FROM has been on the defensive with every new piece of information is leaked. This is compounded by the fact that the Souls series is new so they need to tread lightly when making drastic changes to what worked in prior iterations. I have to imagine that they're being very careful with what they will incorporate into the game.
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Yeah. The surprise release wherein SEGA tried to corner the market by monopolizing launch titles, thereby alienating third party developers. And limiting the stores where you could actually purchase the system, to a few franchises certainly didn't give SEGA a good platform to compete with Sony or Nintendo either.
I understand why they did it, but I still blame them for not releasing titles though. At the time the titles would have been sent to be translated, the market in the US and Europe was already turning sour. So after manufacturing and marketing, SEGA couldn't guarantee a profit.
Do you mean the 2D vs 3D stance that SCEA and Nintendo were taking?
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SEGA was a Console company that banked on each system doing well to survive. Microsoft is a massive company that still makes over seventy percent of its profit licencing legacy products like Office and Windows and other Business services. They've been wasting billions of dollars trying, and failing, to penetrate new markets dominated by tech companies like Google or Apple. The Kin redefined failure. I have a friend who still refuses to talk about it, I'm pretty sure it stays off his resume also. GAFFERS have been talking about how Microsoft is misunderstanding the market with it's focus on TV features. As bad as the Xbox One's target demographic maybe, it pales in comparison to Microsoft's inability to define not only who they were actually trying to appeal to with the Kin, but how they were going to market the device to them. The Device itself was ill designed and the software was half baked when it released. Everything that could have gone wrong with the development, quality control, and marketing of the device did. Microsoft has been mum on the total sales, but rumor and use of the Kin's own social software pin total sales at less than 10,000. They spent upwards of 1 Billion on the project, but it's hard to determine how much was actually lost by Microsoft due to the Kin, because the lessons and tech were rolled into Microsoft's Windows 7 Phone (lol) and the entire remaining Kin stock was repackaged as regular phones after the program was killed. The Kin was dead before it even launched. Even with the ambiguity, Microsoft probably lost the same on the marketing and development of the Kin as SEGA did on its last two consoles. The Zune, and its sequels (which were often actually better than the competing apple ipod) never broke more than %10 market share in the MP3 market. The only positive thing that came out of the millions spent on the project was some UI and design experience that ended up in other Microsoft products. They've wasted over 8 billion on MSN/Bing alone, a search engine that was so bad that Bing used to actually borrow Google's algorithms to find results. And not only is the search engine still worse than Google's, but it still hasn't gained massive traction. Even with these failures over the past decade their profit margin is still increasing and is around 10-17 Billion.
Unlike those failures, the Xbox line has successfully competed against and gained meaningful market share. They have somewhere around 40 million Live subscribers. And they've been filing profit's for the last few quarters iirc. This is really their only success story (Bing has a multi-billion dollar hole to climb out of). And now they've already announced that they spent an additional billion on the TV services and time locking CoD DLC. And if the rumors are true, Microsoft has been spending a lot of cash in order to moneyhat exclusives from third parties. Microsoft is not going to abandon the console like their previous failures.
