So dominate. Very first placezors. Much console.
Allow me to write sixty four thousand pages about it.
The Tale of the Benevolent Dad of Xbox & The Very Naughty Children of Third-Parties
Part I - The Naughty Kids of the Third Party Set Out on their Own
First of all, Xbox is the DOMINATOR so they have formulated a plan. Xbox is smart. They looked ahead and formulated a strategy. Third parties had a chance to hang out at their dad's, but they wanted to run off in the bushes and puke up stolen beer. Dad was a benevolent console, though, and he understood they just needed a chance to grow. So, he walked up in a tiny hat and said 'Kids, I know what you're doing is just a part of growing up. Just give me your keys so you can't drive and hurt yourselves.' The kids gladly handed up the keys and passed out face down in the grass. But Dad just chuckled because he had been that age before.
So he went inside and ate some Doritos. The next day, when the third party children woke up in the lawn, their t-shirts covered in vomit, they staggered back inside. "Well," said Xbox the Holy Father of the Land, "you want your keys back?"
This is where the third parties surprised Xbox. "No!" they shouted with a chorus of joined voices, their unison loud and booming in the Dad's living room. "We will make our own keys! We will learn to hotwire the cars of gaming and drive them down the highways of cinematic presentation! We will take the off-ramp to immersion and dine at the drive-thru of high-resolution displays and surround sound abandon!"
Dad just had to shake his head and chuckle because he had heard it all before. So, he sat reading his paper and somehow magically spewing out video game perfection from his navel like some kind of Hindu god, while the naughty, puke-soaked third party children crossed the black wire with the red wire and drove their Winnebagoes down the crosstown road of network integration until they reached the land of 16:9 displays, laughing and patting themselves on the back at their own ingenuity.
But Xbox, their loving Dad, sat on the toilet of pure gaming genius and crapped out the excellence that lined his intestinal tract.
Meanwhile, back at the naughty hotwire kids major stolen car convoy, the childish third parties were fueling up at the gas station of heavy development costs. Storm clouds of some other kind of metaphor, like increased processor wattage, threatened in the distance, but the third parties just shrugged and said 'Rain comes, and rain goes, and we have to have a 22nm processs to power our ultimate storm front of precipitous pixels.'
And so they rode down the highway of high-resolution, pedals of processing pressed to the floorboards of gigaFLOPS, when they encountered their first big obstacle - the roadblock of raw bandwidth. They screeched to a halt.
"What you got in your car, kids?" asked the Traffic Cop of Texture Mapping. "Anything I should know about?"
"Gaming goodness!" replied the naughty kids of third partydom, feeling smug.
"Well, I'll let you though!" replied the cop, "but only if you can shoulder increased production costs."
"We can!" agreed the children happily, pressing pedal to the metal of menu options once more.
Meanwhile, back at home, the genius wizard Dad Xbox sang in the shower of pre-programmed shaders, confident that his No-Controller games of soap scrubbing would clean the dirt of the day's events from his soiled butt of build quality.
When it comes right down to it, the kids cruised safely on to the land of large risk games, an AAA-atmosphere making it hard for them to breathe the breath of beautiful return on investment.
Meanwhile, the Dad laughed because he had planned out every step of the way.
The Tale of the Benevolent Dad of Nintendo & The Very Naughty Children of Third-Parties
Part II - In Which the Soda Can of Server Offloads is Guzzled and the Fried Rice of Frame Rates is Munched Down
Camped out by the side of the road, the third parties rejoiced at their newfound freedom from their parental patriarch.
"How free I feel, at long last!" cried little Arnie Activision.
"I know! Without that pukey old Pops, I feel like a million bucks!" cried Ernie EA.
"Of course," replied Arnie, "but it'll cost at least seventy times that much to make even a modest AAA game within the parameters we have dictated."
"Ahh!" added Urkel Ubisoft, "but think of the rewards! They will be one HUNDREDfold times greater."
"In-FINITY times greater!" chuckled Sally Square-Enix, and they all agreed and laughed, rubbing their naive hands together.
Meanwhile, back at home, Daddy Xbox, wearing his bathrobe of back catalog games and drinking a cup of console-crafting coffee, sat down and went over his budget. He saw that he had plenty of room in the ledger to release six times the games that his kids planned on making.
He looked down at his trusty pet dog of development, the Coder Canine, and said knowingly "We can put all our effort into effortless design, and let those youngsters spend all their coin on asset-creation. Meanwhile, we'll reap all the profits!"
The pooch merely looked up at him with a look of adulation and said 'Woof!'
Back at the roadside camp, the third-party kids got back in their cars of computing speed and said "This would be easier with a minivan of middleware! We could get almost anywhere with an easy to use Engine of End-User design!"
They agreed it would be a blessing indeed, and contacted their friend Eugene Unreal to design a tool that would help them make game after mindbending game.
"I can do that," the Engine replied, "but it might come at the cost of individual expression."
"Let 'individual expression' wither on the vine of consumer confidence!" sneered the third party kids.
So it was that the motor of middleware placed the engine of equality in all of the third party kids' lunchboxes.
"Hope it gets you where you need to go!" said Eugine Unreal.
"Oh, don't worry!" said the kids with no small amount of braggadocio, "We're well on our way already."
The Tale of the Benevolent Dad of Xbox & The Very Naughty Children of Third-Parties
Part III - The Dad's Secret Weapon - The Soothsayer Fan Neighbor
The Third Party children were hunkering down with their new Middleware Pooch, happily cranking out game after game and bringing them to market, while good Daddy Xbox stuck to his guns and produced quality craftsmanship, creating works so wondrous and perfect that nobody understood or really enjoyed them (Banjo Threeie, etc.). Just then, he overheard a ruckus outside. Going to his big fatherly window, he espied some of the neighbor kids standing on their lawn, calling out for all the world to hear.
"There are those who say the benevolent Father who lives in this house," here the children pointed at Big Daddy BoxBox's home, "has lost his way. That he no longer produces pleasantry for the people! If you'll stop and listen to me for forty five minutes rambling on in a novella length screed I've pulled from my sainted ass, I will SHOW you that Ol' Pappy Xbox is really none other than FATHER XBOX REPUBLIC!"
Big Pop Xbox-man laughed, gripping his fat belly as it jiggled and wriggled. Young lads like this neighbor folk were exactly how Xbox knew his masterfully laid-out plan to destroy all other companies - all while looking like he was selling less than his competitors by far - would truly come to fruition. With the young neighbor proselytizing to those who had lost the faith, Dear Father Xbox knew his herd of sheep-like third-party children would soon come back into the fold. So he could murder them and put them out of business forever.
The young neighbor children didn't always sound too clear on that: was Daddy Xbox going to take back his flock of departing, wayward third-party children or slaughter them like helpless goslings? Xbox, sitting back down at his workstation, decided it didn't really matter so much. No specific fact really mattered. All that mattered was his SUPER SECRET PLAN, which is already starting to work.
"I'll lure those third-parties and other consoles into a false sense of complacency, by hemorrhaging money," he chuckled, putting the finishing touches on a game by carefully slicing off anything resembling achievements, "then I'll produce a one-two punch that is sure to stop them in their tracks: I'll have the worst second-holiday console sales in Xbox history and THEN have my shares shed a fifth of their value in a few hours when I cut my FY 2013 consoles sales forecasts down to less than a THIRD of what I've maintained for an entire year!"
Father Daddy Xbox laughed and laughed, to the point where spittle flecked his old white beard. To the point where he began to scare himself. To a point where he could not stop.
"Oh yes," he said, through the laughter that was echoing off the walls of his empty house, "they won't know what hit them, will they? My plan..." he guffawed, "is already working!"
He glanced at the pale reflection of his haggard face in the window as the neighbor child, across the lawn, cried "Xbox will sell 240 million consoles IN TWO DAYS!"
"Yes," said Daddy Xbox, still laughing, tears streaming down his cheeks, "already working."
TO BE CONTINUED
~ Mod edit ~
This user was moderated by TruckOSaurus for this post.
