Poll is Microsoft a misunderstood victim? (15 votes)
For a long while now, I've given MS and their Xbox 360/One a lot of crap for what they've done. But over the past week, I think about where they are now, and where they were one year ago. And more importantly, where we in the gaming world are now, and where we were a year ago. I'm starting to think that MS might have been more than a little precognitive of where things are going, and found themselves without a real ship to float on.
Let me clarify where things are right now. The triple-A gaming market, is now constantly collapsing in on itself. Dead Space 3, needed microtransactions and had to sell five million units, just to break even. Tomb Raider, a great reboot of the franchise, is considered a LOSS because it sold only six million. Titanfall, a game meant to establish the Xbox-One, sells modestly on it, and does very little to help move the system itself. Big name game companies are looking for gaming numbers that literally exceed the number of consoles sold to play the games they are making. And that triple-A business, is what drives Sony and Microsoft. It's their nest eggs, their security blankets as times get tough. And that nest egg's getting smaller and less fulfilling with each outing.
Now, last year at E3, Sony obviously saw the writing on the wall. That's why they shared their stage with dozens of smaller game developers to push how the PS4 is the indie console place. They knew that they weren't going to be able to rely on big name developers like EA to keep clunking out PROFITABLE sequels. I'm sure there will be another CoD/BF/Madden/UFC/whatever-franchises-haven't-been-sold-to-a-competitor, but the profit for those games is shrinking with each iteration.
Nintendo isn't really in this fight, because they've always done their own thing. So for them, big name developers not making money, just means there's less competition for the next Super Mario whatever or Metroid whatever. It doesn't hurt them in the least, if they can't field an impressive spread of third party games for the WiiU.
But Microsoft? We know they're not friendly to the indie scene, because unless you forswear the love of all others for the giant X-Bone, you are a heretic, cast out from the dark light of the Kinect. :-) But really, they had nowhere to go EXCEPT into the multimedia space. Even assuming they just threw money out to studios and said "Make us good games" there's no guarantee that would happen. And if you can't compete with Sony in the indie fight, you're just throwing more good money after bad.
And then, there was last year's E3. In that E3, Microsoft made it clear their plan for riding out the AAA implosion, was pretty much to ignore it and gaming, and focus on the Kinect and it's multimedia aspects until the next generation of gaming came out. But reversal after reversal, sank that plan, and left the X-1 as "a game console" It's not THE game console, it's certainly not the indie game console, it's just a game console, like the 360 or the PS2; not forgotten, but not doing anything impacting the gaming sphere now.
Which brings me to my question above: Was Microsoft back then, a misunderstood victim of bad circumstances? Granted, the AoDRM and used game stuff stunk to high heavens, but it seems in hindsight, they really didn't have much of a move to make. And we can't blame MS for what's going on in the AAA-space right now. Those games have dwindled down to so few independent ideas, that I think you could swap the audio tracks between BO2, BF4, and KS: SF, and not be lost anywhere. But, really, what move did they have?
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