man it’s amazing how microsoft managed to completely fuck themselves out of the best position they could possibly have been in in the gaming industry
like, back in 2008, “Xbox” was synonymous with “video games.” you didn’t say “wanna come over and play video games,” you said “wanna come over and play xbox”
then the xbone incident happened and that just fuckin’ flew out the window. like, almost overnight all of their brand recognition and loyalty just dropped. it’s wild.
tbh that’s more a reflection on the consumers than anything
video games is a business where most of the base will ditch you the moment one thing doesn’t happen one minute after it’s said it was supposed to be done
companies may fuck up, but there’s really no loyalty or general logic anymore. it’s just “what’s the most perfect thing I can get at this moment in time” and “if it isn’t 110% perfect, fuck it all”
I feel like you’re underestimating the power of console brand loyalty, as well as how severely Microsoft fucked up with the announcement and launch of the Xbox One. (If anything is a powerful testament to the power of brand loyalty, for instance, it’s the never ending Nintendo apologia even during the low days of the WiiU.)
Deep brand loyalty has been ingrained into videogame culture since the days of the SNES and the Genesis. An entire generation of marketing was built on taking potshots across the road at the other company, trying to make them look bad while making yourself look cool. Things got a bit muddied when the aborted Nintendo+Sony deal resulted in Sony entering the console market on their own in earnest, but the folding of Sega and Nintendo’s refusal to stop doing their own thing (the graphical prowess of the Gamecube was kneecapped by their insistence on using weird proprietary discs based on mini-DVDs) meant that we eventually wound up once again with a heated two-horse race between Sony’s PlayStation 2 and Microsoft’s new Xbox. PS2 had the library advantage, but Xbox had superior hardware and much better online support, not to mention Halo.
The tension between the two only grew stronger in the following generation, where Sony fell into the same trap that Nintendo did (weird proprietary hardware in the form of the Cell Processor that wound up scaring developers away) and lost ground to the Xbox 360, with Nintendo not even pretending to compete on account of going for the grandma audience with the Wii. This left the core console market as a two-sided affair, which is the perfect recipe for an “us versus them” brand war. The Blu-Ray/HD-DVD format war also factored into a strengthening of the battle lines, as did the general perceived demographics of the consoles. The PS3 was the Japanese anime game device, whereas the Xbox 360 was the American multiplayer shooter platform. You either picked one or the other, and brand loyalty shitposting hit an all-time high, with arguments about consoles exploding or having no games on them.
As much as I love the PS3, there’s no denying that the Xbox 360 was the clear winner in the North American market. The only reasons the PS3 didn’t crash and burn with its disastrous price and lack of library were because it got Metal Gear Solid 4 and because the early Xbox 360s had a catastrophic overheat failure rate, which made the expensive PS3 a slightly more appealing option once word of the overheats got out. By the time Microsoft ironed out the hardware problems, the PS3 had finally gotten more games on it, but it still wasn’t enough to defeat the 360 in terms of sheer popularity. 360 was easier to develop for and had the killer app of Halo 3, and the rest is history.
The Kinect is partially to blame for Xbox’s downfall, but not just for existing. The Kinect circa Xbox 360 wasn’t a massive success, but neither was the PS3′s Move controller+EyeToy setup. It was a case of both companies experimenting with motion controls after the Wii struck gold, but doing it too little and too late. Where the problems hit was when Kinect was included as a mandatory part of the Xbox One. In theory this was a good idea for developers since they could count on the Kinect being part of every unit and thus develop for it more confidently, but this backfired due to the Kinect itself being unpopular with the Xbox’s core demographic and inflating the price of the Xbox One, making it $100 more expensive than it would be without. On its own, this would have been an awkward handicap, but not insurmountable. The biggest shot in the foot for Microsoft was that they paired it with absolutely anti-consumer policies.
When the Xbox One was announced, the plan was that it had to be always-online to work, and wouldn’t support used games. Always online is a tall order for some customers (especially those with data caps), and always online with a mandatory camera+microphone device is extra skeezy. The used-games lockout was also very anti-consumer, since it would also potentially prevent you from sharing games with your friends. The real kicker though was when consumers asked about an offline option for the Xbox One, they were told that Microsoft already had a product for people who couldn’t have a constant internet connection: The Xbox 360. They essentially told all their customers to fuck off and stick with the old hardware if they didn’t want to be constantly online. The fact that marketing focused more on TV apps, sports, and media box stuff instead of gaming only further seemed to tell the core gaming audience to piss off.
The sum of all this is that Microsoft was announcing a console that was more expensive than it needed to be to accommodate a peripheral that the core audience didn’t want, all the while seeming to actively antagonize the core gaming audience who would buy it in the first place. That’s enough to give people pause about where their loyalties lie.
The final nail in the coffin was Sony’s response to Microsoft’s tone-deaf announcement. Having been humbled down from their high-horse during the PS3 days and eager to regain ground, the PS4′s announcement was pretty much a direct “take that” at Microsoft. Their console was announced at a price $100 below the Xbox One with no mandatory motion bullshit, and their presentation on how to share games on the PS4 was a simple 3 second demonstration of physically passing the disc from one person to another. There was no used games lockout, no always online bullshit, and no wasting time on sports and TV to the detriment of games. Hardware wasn’t a limitation either, since both the PS4 and Xbox One were based on x86 PC architecture and had more or less comparable specs. Microsoft couldn’t even rely on Halo to move consoles because the IP got handed over to 343 Industries, who proceeded to shit on the lore and alienate Halo fans. It could also be argued that the popularity of multiplayer shooters had given way to what we now know as the Soulsborne genre, and PS4 had Bloodborne as its killer app for added incentive.
As one might expect, the combined effect of Microsoft pushing their audience away and Sony eagerly pulling them in resulted in many people flipping to PS4, leaving Xbox One in the dust. While Microsoft eventually realized the error of their ways and tried to reverse course by axing the Kinect and disabling always-online via a patch (ironic considering you need internet to download a patch in the first place), the damage had already been done and they lost loads of market share.
To add insult to injury, Microsoft since then seems to have been intent on digging their grave even further. While Halo has lost the draw it used to have, Microsoft still had some tantalizing exclusives up its sleeve, such as the Remake and Remaster of the cult hit Phantom Dust, Crackdown 3, Cuphead, and the Platinum-developed Scalebound. Microsoft evidently decided this gave them too much of a chance to recover, so they cancelled the Phantom Dust Remake after sabotaging it with changing goalposts (reports say they cancelled it BEFORE announcing it publicly, which is extra baffling), released the Remaster for free on Windows 10 (probably to get people to upgrade to Windows 10, which was facing its own consumer crisis), released Cuphead on Steam instead of as an Xbox exclusive after a long status of being MIA and presumed cancelled, left Crackdown 3 also MIA, and most terrible of all cancelled Scalebound and ended their partnership with Platinum only to later announce it was un-cancelled and being developed internally by what we can only assume is a much less capable mercenary crew of devs frankensteining together the existing assets into some kind of shambling mess.
The Xbox One’s downfall isn’t just consumers being fickle, impatient, or impossible to please. This is quite possibly an example of full on corporate suicide, where a company completely out of touch with what their core demographic wants proceeds to push that demographic away, and burn any possible bridges back for good measure.
This is an amazing in-depth look at the dive that Microsoft has taken over the past few years, but what baffles me the most (in the best way, I assure you), is the fact that this was pulling the receipts on everything Microsoft fucked up on, to prove the last guy wrong, in a very well-structured and down-to-earth manner that engaged me. Moontouched-moogle just shot out an essay on a whim whereas I can’t do that with a week’s worth of planning.
Expanding as an actual post because my tags got cut off:
And even in the event of a true worst case scenario with one of their flagship series, they can MORE than cover the slack with any one of their other IPs, and they’re coming up with new stuff all the time that strikes gold (Splatoon) because they’re actually innovative and put out creative stuff that appeals to a wide audience of all ages, and is just plain fun to play. They are the unequivocal powerhouse of the gaming industry. For one simple reason: Nintendo is FUN. They don’t pump out annual Pentagon-backed Call of Duty clones with a 2% more realistic grenade effect or sharper blades of grass on a bloody battlefield. They’re here to give you a good fucking time. Contrast the way you feel watching ANY Sony/Microsoft E3 trailer with Pokemon Let’s Go. Or the number of reaction videos of fans taking in all the Smash Bros Ultimate reveals.
Or the fact that Nintendo barely gives a shit about E3 at all.
Nintendo has their own hype machine entirely separate from one big event. They put out “Nintendo Treehouse” (even the NAME just oozes a feeling of youthful excitement and imaginative fun) reveals all the time. They showed virtually no new Pokemon Let’s Go details at E3 because they’re playing their own game entirely, and they are unambiguously winning it. Their E3 stream was barely an hour long and immediately afterward they had their OWN stream, from Nintendo Treehouse, of a Smash Invitational Tournament where everyone was competing on a brand new Smash game they had just seen their first footage of 30 minutes earlier. They reveal things on their own time, market on their own schedule, host their own streams regularly, and they consistently outplay every other company in the market, to the tune of $30 million profit per year guaranteed, EVEN on a flop console generation like the WiiU.
Because what was running at the same time as the WiiU?
The 3DS line. Which practically SHITS money JUST on the Virtual Console alone. Because they can resell old games at a reasonable market value, sometimes full price (heavily discounted for older goldmines like, oh, POKEMON R/B/Y AND G/S/C, which you’re GOING to buy even if your old physical cartridges are still in perfect condition like mine). And they can do that with ZERO MANUFACTURING COST because it’s all downloadable.
Nintendo won the First Console Wars when SEGA started to falter (honestly before that, since SEGA’s only truly lasting IP was Sonic, which, surprise, Nintendo now has the most access to). Sony and Microsoft have never needed to be on their radar. The Gamecube, despite its weird discs and sub-par hardware compared to same-gen consoles, utterly decimated the Xbox/PS2 era on both exclusive IP and profit, and Nintendo never had to give either ‘competitor’ a second thought.
Because their next console was the Wii.
They couldn’t keep up with the demand on that thing for MONTHS after it was released, and for the next 8 years it stayed dominant because its popularity barely slowed down while Sony and XBOX were trying to take cheap shots at each other for their control of the "”””hardcore"””” gaming market.
The “best position you could be in in the gaming market” is always wherever Nintendo is. Even with consoles that seem like they should be substandard, their ‘competitors’ have barely turned a profit, if ever (I think it’s Sony that has finally started scraping a tiny profit on their games division while Microsoft has consistently lost millions on the XBOX every year). Nintendo has never had a bad year. Not during the 2008 financial crisis, not during the WiiU era.
The Sony/Microsoft history I can’t argue with. Good stuff. But I take issue with even the slightest implication that Nintendo isn’t hands down the dominant force in the gaming market.
Every single year people act like Nintendo is going to die at the conferences or that they’re in “financial trouble”. Literally every year.
Then, right around summer or fall they announce a fucking blockbuster of a game that everyone is going to want to get their kids. And come Christmas everyone is like “OMG NINTENDO IS DOING SO WELL WHAT DID THE OTHER TWO COMPANIES DO WRONG???”
But straight up? Nothing. Nintendo is just a huge fucking monster of a company and they market well. They’ve been around for ages and they know how to sell a game and not just to sell it to targetted markets. I mean they do that but they also have plenty of games they’re marketed over the years as being for everyone which has worked out well for them.
And they know how to bank on nostalgia and keep old series going. I was thrilled with Breath of the Wild because the series needed that revitalization and Nintendo did it very well. Zelda was one of my first games as a kid and now, 30 years later, it still is. And that’s cool and wild and Nintendo absolutely gets money from me because of it XD
Reminder that the Wii absolutely destroyed the competition in its console generation, with the XBox 360 being an awkward second place, no matter what you snidely say about the “grandma market” as if the casual vs. hardcore divide has ever been anything but elitism and gatekeeping with a suspiciously gendered twist to it. (the best predictor of something being labeled “casual” is whether it has a primarily female audience, rather than playstyle, content, or anything else. @prokopetz has gone into this a fair bit)
Also, a reminder that, regardless of revisionist history and spinning, the PS2 was actually the technically weakest console of its generation. The Gamecube had issues due to its proprietary discs, true, but it could still run circles around the PS2 – there’s a reason PS2 ports of Gamecube games were so often hobbled, glitchy, or just didn’t look remotely as nice, exemplified by the PS2 version of Resident Evil 4.
Yeah, I may be a Nintendo fan girl, but when people ignore the fact that the Wii sold TWICE AS MANY UNITS as the PS3 or Xbox360, it baffles me. The one thing that people used to bitch about was that the Wii was in the home of damn near everyone who could afford a gaming console, but so many AAA games were “PS360,” as we called it.
Yeah Nintendo might have had some misteps but they’ve never missteped so hard they’ve fallen and can’t get back up. That’s the power of pine sol baby.
everyone at E3 getting hype about how you can be gay in a video game now is just absolutely going to flip their shit, bust a nut, and burn their brisket when they hear about how you can be gay in real life
if my pitched-down, chopped-up remix of the wii shop channel theme gets stuck in ur head as much as the original gets stuck in mine, then i’ve accomplished my goal. if not then fuck u
This is the character select theme for the chillest arcade cabinet racing game where every level takes place at 2am in the most inexplicably neon-lit city. Any time you crash into another object it just makes a satisfying “ding!” sfx that layers on top of the music.
GhostKitten's shitpost pile 