Why did MS think future of gaming was multimedia?

We all know us gamers want games first, then whatever other feature second. But MS seemed to think they could make a console that emphasized media/general entertainment. Which would've been ok I guess, if not for them purposely gimping the hardware and trying to include Kinect. Now everyone knows PS4 is the powerhouse console. But either way - why did MS put so much risk in trying to invade our living room? It doesn't seem like the industry was going that way at the time. And also, the anti-consumerist policies like DRM and online check-in. What gives, SW? I ask you because you must have the answer.

kwak kwak

3 reasons:

1. That was their goal from the very beginning

2. They saw how nintendo landed big with the wii

3. They know that they never had a chance to compete against Sony if it comes down to buillding a gaming machine.

This most of all. The 360 was supposed to be doing what the Xbone does but Allard and Bach pushed back. It's all part of a nearly 20 year project to "control the living room" which is now more or less an abject failure.

Simple XBOX live...

MS always track everything on live and they saw that live user actually spend more time watching movies than playing games,there is even an article on it,not that PS3 fans didn't to the same.

From there they got the idea of heavy multi media oriented,Kinect we all know is an Eye toy rip off which they still hold to this gen because they actually believed it would be their wii mote kind of thing.

And DRM no used games because games on xbox 360 were pirate as hell and MS knows it,and those pirates still even get into xbox live and play those free copies.

@GrenadeLauncher:

I really dont know why they are still in the console business. The "control the living room" train sailed a long time ago with smartphones and tablets while they will never be number 1 in the console business as long as Sony is putting out consoles. What are they gaining from it? After this gen is over, they will have 20 years of failure and billions of Dollar in losses in their book.

Why do people call the ps4 a beast, its marginally more Powerfull than an x1 (less than a minor gpu upgrade)

Also its weak compared most mid/low range PCs and pathetic compared to high end and enthusiast

STRG + F = beast = 1?

Edit: Why are people calling the 970 and 980 a beast, its marginally more powerfull than other cards on the market?

I can see why they're switching to "mobile first cloud first" and investing in stuff like Minecraft and not new first party studios: that's the future of their ambitions when it comes to content delivery, not Exsbawks. This is gonna be their last console.

They wanted it to be all in one multimedia device because other companies are trying to do the same. Androids are becoming more powerful and mainstream. As someone said few months ago that handhelds are already multimedia devices and all companies like apple need is a controller to turn their device into a console and a full multimedia device. Obviously MS saw that as a threat. That's the reason why Valve is also trying to bring PCs in the living rooms, to make them more accessible at the same time (Gabe himself said that they're trying to stop closed platforms from getting inside the living rooms). However, Gamers didn't like the idea of xbox one or let's just say that they weren't ready for the change.

To enrage lemming.?

well duh, you are paying more for higher specs. MS is asking for the same price.

Microsoft wanted to create the complete package and make every household feel the needed a ONE.

Basically the only difference between the xbox one and PS3 Yes i say PS3,is that it allow you to use HDMI in,and run multiple apps,aside from that the PS3 is every bit as multimedia as the xbox one is,and the PS3 came on 2006,when Android or Ios wasn't even popular,Ms didn't saw Ios and Android as a thread the xbox 360 was also mult media just not as the PS3.

There is nothing wrong with doing multi media,the problem was MS focus and a freaking whole conference to highly those features,you show the unit for the first time after months of speculation and people raging on forums back and forward about the leaks not been or been true,and you basically confirm that you will no longer has a powerful console (which your user base is use to) and start to talk about TV for about 2 hours.

Indeed. Microsoft wanted to provide excellent value with excellent exclusives and system features.

It was Sony who initiated the future of gaming as multimedia. First with PS1 to play music (CDs), then PS2 to play movies (DVDs), and then PS3 as an HD multimedia hub (BluRay).

I was going to say that.

Because lemmings are stupid enough to buy into anything MS say so they tried it out on everybody else and found that most weren't as stupid as their core fans so they they had to go back to the drawing board

#RIP KINECT

.........

Seriously, the answer is that MS never really cared about gaming and don't want to invest money into games they don't have a guaranteed maximum return on.

With this one basic concept it's easy to analyze the entire history of how MS handled the Xbox platform.

They wanted to push their media portal in livingrooms around the world to grow their business. Microsoft's biggest fear is that some other company will pull an iTunes on them and corner the market for content delivery where they want to expand beyond their operating system business.

The truth is videogames ARE the future of media. Look at how many ads online are little interactive games. Look at how much time Generation X, Generation Y and post-millenials spend playing videogames? Look at the size of the videogame industry itself. It's clear to see that interactive entertainment is what needs to be focused on but their ambitions never truly focused on gaming as an end-goal which is why they rely so much on third parties to carry their brand.

They originally wanted to use the Kinect to send target advertising to your Xbox One to make money off of you especially when you watch TV with it. They also stupidly thought cssual gamers wanted motion controls like the Wii so they could play shit like Wii Sports but forgot to factor in that people do not buy expensive consoles to do that and they already have a Wii for that.

They were not targeting gamers, they thought they were targeting the most customers (which they stupidly thought were not gamers). I guess it went something like 'people like TV right? they liked the Wii right? then we have something for you...'

having multimedia features is great, focusing on them is bad, no device should lose the FOCUS of their main use, phones today can have a thousand apps but their main focus should always be related to communication, as for xbox they went wrong when they lost their focus on gaming.

But you loved your PS3 didn't ya?

*edit*

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2009/08/27/it-only-does-everything/

I swear people have very short memories around here.

Give this man a cigar!

This. A million times this.

All I heard at the X1 unveiling was:

1) TV

2) Sports

3) CoD

It was even in that order. Idk that they'll be ever fully be able to wash away the stain of Mattrick's legacy.

my memory may fail me but i don't remember sony ever doing a 2h reveal focusing on those features.

@Krelian-co: maybe not 2h but recent E3s have had sony talking a lot about TV and Movies. Remember the boring ass Powers presentation

it was half hour and not nearly the focus of the presentation, it wasn't the reveal of a console either

Yeah I agree they start out well but once they started talking about media features I just shut off.

Still though, sony has had plenty of focus on media features

I told Microsoft I loved features.

They said Yes Sir B4X. We're on it.

Who do you think made them dump Kinect?

That was me too.

Increase the relevance of the device and broaden its appeal? Kinda a no brainer.

Fair enough it seems to work

Those other cards its marginally more powerful than are a beast as well (R9 290X, GTX 780)

The Fact its weak compared to mid range cheaper PC's showcases this generations console weakness, from a hardware point of view anyway its too early to judge software properly yet.

Probably because of games like The Order 1886.

People these days would rather just prompt their movies to advance rather than lost themselves in an interactive world.

Because gaming and other media have been intertwined for decades.

The same CDs that PS1 games came on could contain music.

The same DVDs that contained PS2 games could contain movies.

The same Blu Rays that contained PS3 games could contain High Definition television shows.

The same Internet connection that allows online gaming, allows online streaming of music and posting screenshots and videos of funny or interesting gameplay experiences.

The 360 allowed me to listen to my own music at any time, in any game. Would never do it in an atmospheric single player adventure game, but for sports, racing, fighting, and online multiplayer games? Fantastic feature.

The Xbone made mistakes but every console uses media features to it's advantage. Even the frigging Wii had Netflix! So don't pretend like Xbox was this great evil and everyone was "pure" gaming. Everyone includes multimedia in their gaming systems, and that's a dam good thing.

Because Microsoft lack vision and are out of touch with what their customers want,they want to give you what they think you should have and not really what you want or need,they also do this with windows,for god sake they limited the windows store app to windows 8 only,at the time about 68% of their user base was on windows 7,and surprise surprise the windows store is a half arsed attempt at an apple like store which nobody uses.

They do this with everything, Ms are masters at sabotaging themselves and the back tracking of the XBOX ONE was a prime example of this.

@slim70 said:

But you loved your PS3 didn't ya?

*edit*

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2009/08/27/it-only-does-everything/

I swear people have very short memories around here.

Lets all overlook that the PS2 really mainstreamed the "Your gaming console is also a DVD player" aspect as well but you know the Sony crowd never can blame for the real culprit (Sony).

Because Sony made bunch of movie games and bunch of dumbass gamers bought those movies games making them successful, so MS was like "DUR we needz make moviz into gamez and gamez into moviz!" BAM! multimedia.

MS wanted to wtfpwn the front room with their incredible technologies they also wanted to take ALL control out of the hands of the gamer so they could sell them any old shit and make sure there was nothing else available because they killed the second hand market. All these decision were made by people who have never played a game in their lives. Result: MASSIVE fail.

Phil Spencer has turned it around, good luck to him. Marginal technical difference between PS4 and X1 is still a problem but only in perception i.e. gamers now firmly believe the PS4 is much more powerful even though it isn't. They need exclusives to survive as multiplats are seen as inferior no matter how marginally the perception is there.

Don't fool yourselves though. If Spencer goes they will go right back to being fiercely anti consumer and renege on all about turns they have made this gen because they are as greedy as they are stupid. It will happen.

For the record I have no agenda I own all current gen systems (PC, PS4, X1). I skipped on last gen Wii U.

M$ killed the Xbox TV dept and fired TV exec Nancy Tellum and others from that division so there's that.

MS correctly recognized that all tech is blending together. Gaming, movies, internet, and music are going come from the same place. MS wanted to offer a blended space where you could jump in and out of a game instantly (which is a big upgrade to the experience imo) but they failed to recognize that their tech wasn't up to the full task yet. It's supposed to be about fluidity but their kinect interface was anything but that, and they found they had to sacrifice gaming hardware to make it work.

It's a brilliant idea, but it's just not time for it yet. Just like all those people who said that smartphones would be a place for handheld gaming, the first attempts were awkward failures but you didn't have to be that smart to figure out that they would figure it out in time.

They didn't see the future of gaming as multimedia. It's just another way they fail at trying to reach even more people with one product. There's nothing smart about it, it's a widespread faulty trend.

Their is a perfectly sound reason to think the future of the gaming device is to not be just a gaming device but the central hub of the living room.

The problem
-MS forgot the early adopters are usually not the mass audience
-MS's pr was supremely shit, as was some of their decision making
-Google, Apple, and all these other things like aroku (or however you spell it) shits exist so MS is late as **** on this shit

It was always primarily a gaming console, it tried selling itself as doing more. I see it as a double standard though, PS3 sold itself as a Blu-ray player and didn't eat shit for that. It's still a gaming console, plays many of the same games except exclusives not on it, and has come pretty close to parity with PS4 in little time.

I think MS's biggest mistakes wasn't marketing itself as an all around entertainment unit, but the negatives from its reveal and post-reveal news regarding DRM checks and no used games which itself was remedied by a convoluted trade system. I know it doesn't get any talk and is pointless now but I've a feeling MS's biggest problem was their original plans to have a disc free system. What I think they were really trying to do was make the Xbox One like a PC in terms of buying a physical game then having it register to a system/account, whereby it's forever retained digitally and the physical copy can just be discarded. I'm sure that itself wouldn't require any complex DRM system other than an initial online registration. I think the DRM crap came about with sloppy damage control on MS's part to keep the system disc free while trying to allow for used games, and that itself is where I think the most damage came from. If MS wanted to promote a disc free system then they should have really built a reason for people to go digital with their purchases. In many ways that's already happening by itself, if people want disc free gaming they can buy digitally, and more and more people are going that way now even on consoles.

I also think they really hurt their launch potential by forcing the Kinect SKUs on customers when the PS4 was $100 cheaper. I think their saying how essential Kinect was more of an excuse on their part than anything essential to the console functionality. It should have remained a separate peripheral and maybe people wouldn't resent it as much.

I think people are playing stupid though thinking that app integration into a console doesn't have an significance in the consoles all around value. Regardless though, there's very little apps a modern console can utilize that a last gen one can't, it's nothing new, but it's still an important feature of the consoles nonetheless, especially if the companies that make consoles want it to be the cornerstone of the home entertainment experience.

Probably the same reason all your threads suck, we'll never know.

They were smarter about it though. Well, except for the PS3 when Ken Kutaragi lost his mind.

There are no consoles stronger than the PS4?

Why? Well its called trying to be first at something. It was a bad move, as believe it or not, many first attempts are. But had it paid off? Thank god it didn't. Still as Sony and the PSnow streaming is introducing and a few here have called it the beta for PS5, it may be the future. Why not milk people for access to games they don't own by disguising it under the term "convenience"? I bet if next gen this is the staple, cows praise Sony for it.

@AdobeArtist: "It was Sony who initiated the future of gaming as multimedia. First with PS1 to play music (CDs), then PS2 to play movies (DVDs), and then PS3 as an HD multimedia hub (BluRay)."

OK, but Sony cares about us........................

They listened to tech pundits who said a device that "just plays games" would not survive the long term because consumers want multi-functional devices.

There is actually a precedent for that - look at smart phones and tablets.

It's funny because I must have a dozen devices in the house between my famaily that can all play netflix :?.