MS preys on Consumer Ignorance with Xbox 360/One

[forevercloud3000]

d21lewis said:

forevercloud3000 said:

http://www.examiner.com/article/what-really-grinds-my-gears-of-war-microsoft-hopes-you-aren-t-paying-attention

“"I think it's fair to say there's a segment of consumers at this show (E3) in particular who really pay attention, who are very passionate about all aspects of gaming, and that we listen to closely. In a broader set of community, people don't pay attention to a lot of the details. We've seen it in the research, we've seen it in a lot of the data points."

 

This Article has other pertinant information to this argument but I will center on the main statement. The quoted line above is from  Microsoft PR, Mehdi Yusef. Its not really new knowledge but it isn't something you usually hear admitted aloud. Ive always seen MS marketing tactics for what they were. 

Back when PS2/Xbox/Gamecube ruled the octogon, I went exclusively PS2, its a product I grew up with, it was familiar. Yet I have no qualms with the others. In fact I was quite envious of KOTOR and Fable on the XBOX back in that day. Just after those console's reign came to a close, I decided I would pick up an XBOX system for cheap, yet right around that time many stores stopped carrying XBOX stuff. At that point I looked towards the next gen. PS3 was a logical choice as many of the games I loved would assuredly go there, but 360 was interesting too. It came a whole year earlier and so much positive media going for it at the time. I remember being in Walmart and seeing King Kong in HD on the system, blew my mind. Yet I had to wait on getting any next gen console due to financial troubles. What I learned during that waiting period I found troubling, and was basically why I ended up going exclusively Playstation once again....

 

1. Faux Cheaper Price tag. At the time, 360 looked to be the cheapest and quickest way to jump into HD gaming. Yet if you pay attention, 360 is/was the MOST expensive of them all. With things like rechargable batteries, wifi capability, HDMI support(new models),Gold Membership, and sometimes hard drives,it all makes the 360 the most taxing of systems. One might say "Well none of these are necessary" but in reality, majority of 360 owners own/ed these accessories at some point.  So many hidden fees to get it comparable to both other generation systems.
2. Played it safe Tech wise: In order to even get the 360 at the price it was, it had to ignore certain benefits that the PS3 did have; Bluray and standard hard drives. It might not have been that big of an issue the first 3 years, but later on, the fact that it didn't was a huge drawback for the generation as a whole. Games stayed small because they always had to take in account of 360's lack of better specs. At some point developers had to start ignoring the fact 360 didn't have HD and they built their games for it anyway. This meant the millions of people who bought 4GB systems would be shut out of playing some of the recent AAAs. GTA4,Battlefield 4 are two that come to mind. Both require more harddrive space than the 4GB can offer, meaning all those people came rushing to stores to get HardDrives so little Timmy can actually play his Christmas Present. That was going to run you a bare minimum of 100 bucks. I find this insane that they would do this to consumers and the consumers as a whole just let them get away with it.
3. The lack of gaming support from the 1st Party after the first 4 years is the most troubling. They had gotten the HardCore on their side already so what do they do? Totally forget them and persue the Casual Market with Kinect Games. They knew most were far to monetarily/socially invested to just give up on the 360, so their dominance at the time was safe. Xbox Live Yearly fees, Big Hit game series like Halo, the fact that theyve invested so much on just making their gaming system competent would trap them in place.
4. Spent more on Biased Advertising than actual compelling exclusives. In the later years, MS forgot that a system needs exclusives to differenciate it's offerings from the competition. One of their remedies was to just throw a lot of money at advertising Multiplatform games as exclusively on 360. This was the yearly COD cycle. To this day......many casual gamers believe these games are only available to them if they have a 360. This false illusion definitely works, but how misinformative it is?
5. Let us not forget RROD, one of the biggest manufacturing blunders in my lifetime. 40% failure rate was being spoken at the time. Insiders told us that the only reason the issue existed was because MS refused to relinquish their head start over Sony. Yet MS shrugged this off in the media as common place with most gaming console devices(not true in the slightest) and downplayed the shear amount of failed consoles out in the wild. Many either had MS fix it for them....or just went out and bought ANOTHER console, some people did this more than once. I don't understand how this is so easily forgotten....

 Now comes Xbox One, which in turn, does even more to "trick" consumers into things they will surely regret. They continue the nickle and diming with accessories(requiring seperate rechargeable batteries, headset adapter to make premium headsets functional) and the system costs $100 more with weaker specs than PS4 to boot. Horrible DRM was about to seep into the gaming industry before massive outrage by hardcore. After they fixed that issue tho, the whole situation was just glazed over by most who I feel just don't see the bigger picture. Xbox One WILL repeat many of the things 360 did. You will recieve some top notch "exclusives" like Titanfall early on but they will dissapate as the years go, with many of them eventually going Multiplat as they are not 1st Party.

The unfortunate truth is that MS is right. The larger base of consumers do not pay attention to these factors, and simply follow the leader. I think if they really thought about them, they would be forced to reevaluate their buying habits.

 

1.  I would really like to see sales information showing how many WiFi routers, extra Hard drives (I never purchased one from Microsoft--and it was made compatible with my 500GB Seagate HDD that I got from Wal-Mart back in like 2008), etc.  And how in the heck is HDMI support an additional cost?  My PS3 had HDMI and it didn't even come with an HDMI cable.  Even the slim I got on Black Friday of last year.  Like the PS4 does now, the Xbox 360 let you pick what you needed instead of forcing you to pay for everything.  No features are being forced on us with the PS4 like how the Xbox One forces Kinect on us whether we want it or not.  I'm a Kinect fan but I would be okay with it being optional.

To this day, I've never needed to use WiFi for my PS3.  I never had the option to NOT have Wifi.  With the 360, I saved money on that wireless adapter.  And how many 20GB PS3s were sold in those early days?  Isn't there a 12GB PS3 available now?  I had an 80GB PS3 and I was erasing stuff all of the time because of all of the MANDATORY installs.  You can attack M$ for doing something and not condemn Sony for doing the same thing?

2.They ignored the stuff the PS3 had standard because the Xbox 360 launched at least a year earlier than the PS3.  Some people claim the Xbox 360 launched two years earlier!  And Blu Ray wasn't an asset to the PS3.  We always expectec those more detailed textures etc. but the truth is that the vast majority of the time, games ran faster and better on the Xbox 360 right up to the end.  Blu Ray in the PS3 was Sony's trojan horse to establish the format after the success of the PS2 making DVD such a success.  Did little Timmy have to buy an HDD to play DC Universe online on his 12GB PS3?  The system that dumped card readers, USB ports, backwards compatibility, Linux, etc.?

3.  Historically, most consoles are dead and moving towards their successor after 4-5 years.  Microsoft supported the Xbox 360 with first and third party exclusives for approaching ten years, now.  Halo, Gear, Forza, Fable, and other titles were released pretty much annually with other games (sometimes shared with the PC) filling out the library.  Xbox 360 fans, to this day, are not suffering from a lack of games to play.  I promise you this.  And don't even get me started on the Arcade titles.  It shouldn't be "most troubling" for a PS3 fan, should it?

4.  There were just as many "misleading" PS3 commercials as there are misleading Xbox 360 commercials.  Even now, you can find commercials for the PS4 advertising games like Watch Dogs as if they are exclusive to the PS4.  Why do you point at one and not the other?  Even Nintendo used to advertise 3rd party games during the Gamecube era (though it didn't help them).

5.  The RRoD was very real and Microsoft spent over a billion dollars fixing consoles, extending warranties, and offering a free month of Xbox Live.  

 

I own the PS4 and the Xbox One.  The PS4 is more capable hardware but the Xbox One has more packed in the box.  It costs $100 more because they didn't skimp on things to get the price low like Sony did.  Open the PS4 box and you'll find cheap packaging, a flimsy wire for a headset, a $10 code, the console, an HDMI cable and a controller and a couple of quickstart guides.  Open the Xbox One box and you'll find elaborate packaging, a real quality feeling headset, the console, a month of Xbox Live, a higher quality HDMI cable, some pamphlets, and a frigging HD Kinect camera/microphone.  You're paying $100 more because, if the consoles were the exact same price, you get $100 more in the box.  And the "premium headset funtional" thing will not be an issue when companies make premium headsets for the Xbox One.  

 

Why some of you feel the need to educate people on a console you never intend to own is beyond me.  We get it.  You like Sony and you hate Microsoft.  You feel like they're the devil.  That's why Sony adopted many of Microsoft's business practices to keep from going bankrupt after bleeding money on the PS3 since 2006.  All of the free games, price cuts, PSN features, free online, etc. that they did to stay competitive with the Xbox 360--that was out of love.  Not because they wanted your business.  Microsoft is a bunch of demons.  Sony are a bunch of saints.

1. I work at retail, and I see quite a few people running into roadblocks because MS's barebones system skus left them wanting for one thing or another. Not everyone needs wifi.....but a good enough sum of gamers do because of their gaming setup.I'm near a few colleges and they ALL pretty much need one.  According to MS's own online agenda, constant internet connection should have been a priority. That attachment costs an additional $100. There goes that money they supposedly saved on getting 360 right there.This is worsened by the fact that both PS3 AND the Wii came with Wifi........standard. When I included HDMI, I was speaking of the fact that some early 360 models did not have an HDMI port. MS knew HD was where it was going yet they knew that cheaper price model would be more appealing and they could get the consumer to buy a new console for a very basic feature the "other" console had already. I understand giving consumers more choice but many of those things became necessity, I would like to say 80%(not a hard figure) of everyone that picks up XBO is also picking up that 25 buck play&charge kit. I hear people give lame excuses as to why MS does this. Batteries........do not last longer than rechargeable. And Recharging is as simple as plugging it in for an hour, and u can continue playing while it does this. PS3 and PS4 do this by default. By the time your rechargeable battery wears down, you can easily buy a new controller and still have saved money on batteries(which are $4-5 a pack). I will return to this "options" argument later....

 2.The reason we saw so few games utilizing the benefits of Bluray was because most devs are multiplatform and they always had to be wary of 360's DVDs. Rage developer outed that some content was cut from game because developers are charged a fine for every disc over 1 they make their game(unless waved by MS for special cases). He later had to retract this but its out in the ether now. If Bluray isn't needed........why do both WiiU and XBO have it now? PS3 did trojan it in but it was a good idea culminating, and now it is standard. We could of had larger gamers earlier if not for 360 once again shooting for bare minimum. No normal game has an install over that 12gb, MMOs are a special case as their install is constantly expanding and they are usually massive games. In fairness, Sony was basically copying MS's approach of barebones in order to compete with HDD'less 360 skus. I don't condone that either, yet it is a presedent MS set and made it hard for Sony to not follow suit if they didn't want to get left behind. This is why PS3 had to shake off so many features, so they could compete with the allusion that 360 was cheaper but gave same capability.

3.This is the impression I get from 360 owners, not from me. They feel dissappointed at the annualization of Forza, Halo, Gears and wanted NEW games.

4. This is a presedent established by MS yet again, that Sony unfortunately had to bend to or else be left behind. Still not a good one.

5. I can't see how anyone could trust a company that willingly and knowingly put out a defective product, only to be able to best their competition. How can this not scream foul to you?

The Xbox One comes with one notable thing that PS4 does not directly compare.....Kinect. Both come with Mics and by popular opinion, the PS4 one is better. You just were talking about giving consumers choice a minute ago but now its ok to force people to buy their scammish camera? In comparison, you can get a PS4 Camera for 60-70 bucks, so quite a bit less. PS4 also has a few voice activated commands you can pull off WITHOUT even owning a camera, they just don't advertise it. There is also about only one motion based game out at this moment (Just Dance) so what is the point of the thing?

MS was/is not trying to give added benefit with Kinect. The only reason they wanted it in every home is so it can survail you for advertisement purposes. Google makes billions off of your search data, MS stood to make the same off of your clothing habits, the things you say, in general what you do in your home. This is MS's kinect based future. Many do not vibe with this idea.