MonstaTruk on 18 February 2014
| binary solo said: I was considering starting a thread, but I guess asking the question here is as good a place as any. What would the Xb one look like if Kinect was an optional peripheral like the PS Eye? We know that 8GB DDR3 RAM was locked in to the design early, and there's no way removing Kinect would have had MS plugging in GDDR5 at the early design stage, they wanted 8GB RAM at a good price and at the time only DDR3 fit the bill. Or was it locked in? If MS was less focussed on Kinect and perhaps then less focussed on multi-media functionality might they have done initial designs with 4GB GDDR5 like Sony did? Hard to speculate on that I guess so I'm going to stick to the assumption that MS was going 8GB DDR3 regardless of the Kinect situation. But in terms of the rest of the box, it's specs and price point what would MS have done differently to the box we have today? Could it have substantially improved the specs, and launched at $399, and been at a slight profit? By most accounts Kinect is <$100 to make so the Xb one we have today without Kinect would still be at a $399 price point to be profitable from day 1 (as opposed to a lower spec'd machine launching for $349, which is far more acceptable to the consumer). So could MS have spec'd up the box with more or less the same bells and whistles as PS4 and launched at a profit? Sony has more or less confirmed that PS4 is not selling at a profit on hardware alone, they need the buyer to buy 1, maybe 2 games and/or sign up to PSN+. Does this mean if MS felt compelled to have a box that was profitable on HW alone then even at $399 without Kinect they would have had to live with a lower spec'd machine with the benefit of being able to drop the price sooner? Was there pressure from the anti-Xbox faction inside MS what drove the Xbox guys to make sure the box sold at a profit at launch? Selling at a small loss at launch is a decent strategy for consoles if it's going to secure market share (and better yet if it's going to secure gen on gen growth and hopefully market dominance). Has MS sacrificed market position for HW profit, which, even without Kinect, could be at the cost of not achieving gen on gen growth and failing to secure market dominance (other than the USA and maybe UK)? Could a packed in Kinect Xb one at $449 have been much more competetive with PS4? It's a $20-ish loss but that's no big deal really, especially not for MS. Except for the fact that the aggregate profit/loss history for Xbox is still a net loss despite Xbox 360 being profitable on an annual basis for a number of years. There were a lot of decisions made about Xb one which individually probably seemed very sound at the time, but the sum of all those seemingly reasonable decisions ended up putting Xb one in a disadvantaged position. And this is even if you take out the DRM debacle. Is it because their design philiosophy from the start was too complex and convoluted: We want a great all-in-one box, as opposed to Sony's apparently more simple design philosophy: We want the best gaming machine $399 can buy? They both achieved their starting design goals, but MS's end product has proven a lot more difficult to market. |
Very good question.
It would be a FIGHT, again. It would be a fight that, with Microsoft's financial resources and marketing savvy, they could be in contention of winning. Or make it a competitive run, at least. Microsoft knows that it's the KINECT, we'll have to wait and see if being in the gaming industry is worth it to drop the KINECT. Sounds crazy, right? I mean, why would MS have an emotional attachment to the thing! lol I just think there's more to the KINECT story than just for games, and apparently, according to January sales, so do a lot of other people... :-/
