ManaByte said:
WAAAAH
Back in 2001 everyone was swearing that the Xbox would instantly flop. Now, the system is right up there with Sony in terms of consumer mindshare. The PS2/Xbox thing now is a lot like the SNES/Genesis battle back in the 16-bit days as those are the two big systems fighting for consumers' money. You see a majority of third party games being PS2/Xbox and next gen announcements have been just PS3/Xbox2 so far.
I'd say Microsoft has done an incredible job positioning the system for a "rookie".
Looking at the entire picture, perhaps, but there is still some major holes in their strategy that has yet to be rectified. Consumer mindshare is one thing, if you can even gauge that appropriately, but it's not a total victory yet.
In the Genesis/SNES days, SNES was... what... 54 million and Genesis was 38 million worldwide? That's a pretty close race. In these days, PS2 is 80 million and rising super fast, and the Xbox is... what... 18/19 million? That's barely a quarter of what Sony has, so who has the most consumer mindshare is
extremely debatable. It's even debatable that they're "right up there" yet.
This of course also overlooks that you can't really be on even footing if several major markets completely ignore you. It was fine for this generation, but the upward momentum can only be maintained if the
world is on your side, not if only a few of the key markets like what you offer.
I'm being overly negative because I want to be level-headed about Microsoft's propositions. They excite me for a lot of reasons, and I love competition. But it has not been a perfect road and they still have to patch up a lot of things before I can 100% be impressed. I'm an American and I hate [most] anime and 95% of Japan-o RPGs, but even I can recognize that not having Japan (and other Asian countries) as well as Europe (compared to PS2) is a big, big hurdle.
Now to be positive, there's a lot of things no one can deny. Microsoft is
the online console force to deal with. As online gaming becomes increasingly important to a tech-heavy world, they are in a prime position to capitalize on that investment. They've made huge strides in developer relations in the US and the XNA is the veritable top of the heap to work towards. They've proved they could market games to certain audiences with astounding success (Halo, Halo 2) and turn it into a near-cultural event (all they need to do is expand this to other markets with more than one major franchise). They provided a powerful system that is above the competition and they make it easy to create games for. And although no one can truthfully claim how much of an impact this Mistwalker announcement will have, it can only be seen at the very least as a huge extended hand to the Japanese market for another round of consoles.
That's my take. There's good, there's bad. I'm happy Microsoft is in the console world and I'm happy there's someone who might soon be able to go toe-to-toe with Sony. Let's bring on the next console generation
). They have proven that they are very seriously commited to the system, and MS is not known to make the same mistake twice. Next generation should be very interesting, this will be a true battle of exclusives titles and developers on both sides and I'm pretty sure the overall games quality will be up thanks to this.