Xbox Launch History

[Reasonable]

Goddbless said:

Reasonable said:

My favourite little titbit is the following so far:

 

"The DX team had a clear understanding of what was happening in the console and PC games businesses at the time, and posited that it was better to lose PC gamers to a Microsoft console than to one made by Sony or Nintendo"

 

That right there sums up so much about MS initial direction with Xbox and the 360 and why the console initially was only really embraced in the US and the UK - IMHO anyway.

Well you can't really say that because according to those articles the ideaology for Xbox changed so much and so many times by the time it was greenlit it was totally different from what they first conceived. It's interesting to me that so many people were against it. I mean I could understand third parties being hesitant but the majority of their opposition was internal.

I don't believe that element of the ideaology changed much at all from the article (and other information).  Sure a lot of core stuff did change - Windows never became the OS for example - but the Xbox was heaviliy targeted at more of a PC type gamer than existing console gamer at that time.  Halo, the growth of online with Halo 2 and of course the 360 and Live were all a hit really with gamers who would otherwise have been drawn to PC.

Essentially, for a long time (until fairly recently arguably) MS success has rested with switching a generation of potential PC gamers in the US, the UK and to a lesser extent other English centric countries like Australia, to play online FPS/TPS games and graphically intensive games on a console platform instead of PC.

The Xbox (and the 360) core USP has been cheap PC gaming without the hastle and in your living room instead of some small office room.  If MS hadn't manged to draw in that demographic (and without Halo I doubt they ever would have) I doubt MS would still even be in the game.  Until Kinect (again mainly in the US/UK) MS really remained locked into that demographic with Nintendo taking the more family/casual audience from Sony with the Wii.