Ragdoll Metaphysics: Could The Xbox 360 Be The Last Console You Buy? (or, The Actual Most Important News of E3)
Oft-quoted industry analyst Michael Pachter, of Wedbush Morgan Securities, had something to say about E3's announcements. All that games chatter was one thing, but Pachter thought the real news was all the other web media deals that Microsoft had made for the 360.
"The announcement that I thought was missed was the opening of the Xbox Live Dashboard interface to the internet," Pachter told Gamasutra. "Later this year, Microsoft will allow members to access last.fm and to select music, to access Netflix and instantly watch films/TV shows, to access Facebook and interact with other friends, and to access Twitter and post/read tweets."
Pachter argues that the gaming media entirely missed the significance of this announcement, which puts the 360 firmly in the same territory as Apple's AppleTV, only with a library of awesome games. With so many 360s already installed around the world, MS have a good chance to become the default choice for web media on your TV. A colleague of mine - one of the big boys of the games media who definitely didn't miss out on the significance of the this particular announcement - proclaimed that "Microsoft have won, and no one even said anything."
My kneejerk reaction was to say that no, it's not that this idea has been ignored - indeed it's been bounced around for so long that I don't think it really came as a surprise to anyone and, consequently, it didn't get a great deal of coverage. But, far more importantly, this is gaming, and the platform which ends up having the best library of games will win.
But maybe that doesn't make any sense anymore, not least when you look at how we play games. Perhaps Pachter and my chum are right. All I have to do is consider that I already spend most of my time gaming on a PC. Partly that's because I'm an old man with a fetish for humming boxes that I built myself, and partly it's because I want all the other features that a PC offers: instant access to my email, Twitter, screen-grab software, and my own music to replace generic rock track X on racing game Y.
If the 360 does start to support all these things (there's no confirmation as to whether Last.FM will be able to run in the background as a soundtrack to your games), it'll become the kind of gaming machine that I want to spend my time with for more reasons than just because it has some games that my PC doesn't.
It will become a device that has more of the networked infrastructure, and more of the media tweaks and toys that I take for granted as part of my desktop computer.
Now it could be that I'm just a mutant with a job that means I play too many PC games, but I don't think this kind of feature-proliferation and convergence is limited to a single platform, or even a single mode of media consumption. When I look at my own behaviour towards electronic gadgets, I can see that I want them to do more than simply deliver games.
A while back someone said to me, of the iPhone, that "a real gamer has a DS, not a glorified cellphone". And he was right, I do have a DS, but - actually - it's my iPhone that I take everywhere, and my iPhone that is costing me a freakin' fortune every time some miscreant like Brandon posts a list of awesome games. The point about the iPhone is not so much that the games are pretty good - although lots of them are - but that the games are embedded in a device that offers more. And if more is on offer, that's what I'll use.
In fact, smartphones have only really made sense in my head with the appearance of the iPhone. Our imagination, I think, ends up spoiling quite a lot of tech. It's imagination that feeds half the grumbling threads of commentary across the internet. Sure, game X looks pretty awesome compared to its predecessors, but I can still imagine how it might be better. And I can do that with almost zero effort.
It's been the same for me and mobile gadgets. Okay, they can do some useful stuff, and the cameras are a nice touch: but where is my all-encompassing pocket nano-computer with wireless, video, and decent games? Oh, there it is. The iPhone, it seems, is finally up to speed with the future I was expecting.
And so, perhaps, these kinds of expansions - and changes in perception - will end up delivering a similar change in status for the 360. Sure, it does games, but that's why you bought it. Someone else might be buying into it to watch TV, to read emails, to listen to music. Rather than having to release a new console, the 360 just gets cheaper, and makes more sense, to more people, because it does something that it didn't do before: Guitar Hero, Last.FM, Twitter, motion-tracking control... A spiralling feature list, a net that gets bigger and drags in more people.
The 360 evolves back towards its PC heritage: a machine that is awesome not simply because of its processing power, but because of the things you can adapt it to do, and the modularity that it demonstrates. A device you can bend to your interests, rather than its stated purpose.
And what, indeed, of that other possible future for gaming: Cloud Gaming? Hasn't the fact that we've again and again needed more powerful client-side architecture for gaming always been the argument for why the all-in-one set-top box cannot work? Clearly the 360 is powerful enough to handle the decoding end of things in this gaming-on-demand future. Assuming the infrastructure hurdle for Cloud Gaming can be cleared, then why would anyone try to reinstall boxes, when it could just be another service for the 360, or indeed the PS3?
[Jim Rossignol is an editor at RockPaperShotgun.com and the author of This Gaming Life, an account of the life of modern videogames and some of the people who play them. Ragdoll Metaphysics is his Offworld column exploring and analyzing gaming's vast world of esoterica.]
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Andrew Ferguson
#1 – 12:46 PM June 24, 2009
I ignored this announcement because as 'revolutionary' as you claim this is, it's still a very small walled garden.
We all remember how well those worked out back in the 90's.
The custom interfaces for web apps (last.fm, twitter, whatever) are useful and cute. But at the end of the day, I'm not going to consider the device as a be-all end-all for this sort of thing until it has a usable web browser. No console has provided that yet.
Yes, I know about the Wii's browser, but I disqualified it when I said 'usable'.
If my 360 had a usable web browser, it would be one huge step towards owning my living room and becoming irreplaceable.
The other two things being better navigation/usability for music streaming and more codec support for video. iTunes integration maybe? I'm not re-creating my smart playlists in Windows Media Player, that's for sure. And I shouldn't have to download TVersity to play common video codecs.
With those three things, the 360 leaps ahead of the other consoles and supplants all the features I'd use on an Apple TV. Instant ownership of my living room.
A New Challenger
#2 – 6:16 PM June 24, 2009
If they stopped breaking without any wrongdoing on the part of the user that would help tremendously.
Icupnimpn2
#3 – 7:17 PM June 24, 2009
I don't own a 360, but this doesn't make me jealous. Bonus functionality? Sure, why not. For those who want it. I don't tweet, I don't live on Facebook, and I don't listen to music on the web.
I play video games on my video game machines. I also watch video, cuz that's useful on a TV. If using the web on your TV was really a killer app, Microsoft would have had things sown up with web TV years ago. Not impressed here. The integration is meaningless to me. No console war win.
If someone does win the console wars, I hope its for the games.
Agies
#4 – 7:44 PM June 24, 2009
The real win would have been Hulu. Twitter and Facebook are nice if the integration is done right.
SeattlePete
#5 – 8:44 PM June 24, 2009
The 360 will be the last platform I ever buy as soon as developers stop making PC games. I game on my PC, and I also do everything else on it. I don't have to wait for the 360 to catch up as long as I have a PC. I suppose that there is a reason that people own consoles, but for me there really hasn't been one since about 1986 or so. Back when I traded in my Atari for a Tandy 1000.
shadowfirebird
#6 – 9:22 AM June 25, 2009
When they give it away for free (a la Little Brother), then, maybe.
danbanana
#7 – 9:24 AM June 25, 2009
i think the commentors are missing a critical aspect of the article: price. i was in the process of researching to put together an HTPC for my living room 8 months ago when i decided the 360 was simply a better deal for what i wanted the HTPC for: games, streaming media from my main PC, and netflix. try building an HTPC that has that capability for $300; it's tough, and the common person isn't going to want to go through that trouble.
frankly, i couldn't care about facebook or twitter or last.fm, but what those mean to the xbox is more than those specific features. it means that MS is willing to expand and improve their product offering. so next up, let's hope for a decent browser and a better interface for streaming.
biffpow
#8 – 11:33 AM June 25, 2009
I agree with Icupnimpn2--the winner of the console wars should win due to good games, not the other stuff that one can already do on a computer or phone. I mean, I can game on my laptop anywhere I want, as well as do all that other stuff already. Yes, my laptop costs more than a 360, but it costs less than a 360 and the TV I need to hook the console up to in order to do ANYthing with it. Game writers often talk about consoles as though they are stand-alone devices, which they are (increasingly) not. Want to use your 360? Buy a TV. Want X-Box Live? Buy it every month.
username
#9 – 1:14 PM June 25, 2009
I just wish they would sign a deal with MLB.tv....
Grim Beefer
#10 – 2:11 PM June 25, 2009
I think there's a pretty big dichotomy here between geeks and the rest of the population.
Just because a techie and all of their friends appreciate this stuff (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) enough to want to use it on their TV for some reason, doesn't mean it will be all that important to the general customer base. Remember, a significant amount of the population is still using dial-up internet connections, for example.
Nice features, sure, but not the "ZOMG CONSOLE WAR OVER" proclamation this article implies. Maybe it's over for Interweb geeks, but that's not everyone...
Todd Sieling
#11 – 3:19 PM June 25, 2009
The xbox 360 is in a death-struggle with the apple tv for control of my tv time. I've been surprised at how well its held up in the 4-some years I've had it, and I sometimes have to remind myself it came from Microsoft because I like that much.
The first thing that struck me that this was something different happened in unboxing: the ethernet cable was long. Very long. Reach across the living room, around the corner and over a chair long. To see an accessory actually spec'd to be useful was the first clue that this was a machine I could really like. And I still do. I still sometimes think that it's from parallel universe MS.