How I know the Wii will dominate this holiday season
Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 10:46pm by Jack
OK, so no one *knows* anything until it actually happens, but something came across the Infendo news wire today not directly related to the Big N and confirmed in my mind the Wii will dominate the holiday–again.
Weird thing is, it was an Xbox 360 box and the press release that accompanied it.
Jeff Bell, MS PR drone, take it away:
“As families gather together this holiday, it’s the perfect time to launch a new low-priced, high-value Xbox 360 that plays games, TV shows and music for everyone to enjoy,” said Jeff Bell, corporate vice president of global marketing, Interactive Entertainment Business at Microsoft. “In addition to offering an incredible all-in-one package for families to get right into the fun, the Xbox 360 Arcade system features the industry-leading Family Settings, which allow parents to control what their kids are watching and playing — and we know how important that control is to families around the world.”
Nintendo has PR spinners too, but my BS meter just blew a gasket and went on sabbatical to recover from that one. I can see the families gathered around Gears of War as we speak! “Nice head shot, Timmy.” “Thanks Mom, that chainsaw kill was one in a million!” “Daaaad. Did you have to unload your entire clip into my corpse? Hell-ooo!” And then little Susie gets a 2nd degree burn on her arm when she goes to play blocks with the power supply. Merry Xmas!
MS did a great job marketing this system truthfully for the past two years, but now all of a sudden this billion dollar behemoth has a sudden change of heart? The cliche is you can’t switch horses midstream, and it’s a cliche for a reason: they’re accurate. MS sees a winner in Nintendo’s cheap little system, and has attempted to put some mom-friendly lipstick on a pig (and to a lesser extent the hapless Sony releases a white PS3…). Another cliche, I apologize.
Chris Kohler said it best over at Game|Life today: The Xbox is for shooting people in the face. Mothers around the world tolerate an Xbox 360 as their sons shoot monsters and kill things. They welcome the Wii. It’s family-friendly and has Super Mario Galaxy this holiday. It dominates and starts 2008 with a bang. IMO, natch, so tell me why that won’t happen.
October 24th, 2007 at 11:07 pm
Agreed.
October 24th, 2007 at 11:16 pm
I lol’d.
playing DOAX: “Daddy! She’s wearing strings! Look! I’m wearing strings, too! Bouncy bouncy!”
October 24th, 2007 at 11:24 pm
I think this isn’t so much trying to steal the Wii’s thunder (they’d have included a simplified controller if that were the case, even if it were the Scene-Idiot controller) as it is trying to create the image of the 360 as the “default” system of this generation the way the PS2 was last generation.
But yeah, it would ring a little more true if they hadn’t hit the “OMG SO HARDCORE” button so hard, over and over again, for the last 2 years.
October 24th, 2007 at 11:26 pm
The Xbox 360 actually has a pretty wide range of games, and it makes sense for them to market all of them. Would you have them ignore a portion of their games? What sense does it make for them to try to pigeonhole themselves?
Uno, Texas Hold’Em, TMNT Arcade Game, Catan, Carcassonne, Pac Man Championship Edition, Viva Pinata, Madden, NBA Live, NCAA Football, PGR 4, Dirt, Virtua Tennis 3, Portal, Space Giraffe, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, Table Tennis…
These are all great Xbox Games, many of which are exclusive. None of them are First Person Shooters, and none of them are violent, with the POSSIBLE exception of the football games.
You make it sound like there’s absolutely no reason to release the Xbox 360 Arcade SKU unless it’s trying to compete with the Wii, and of course it’s trying to compete with the Wii, but it’s not trying to be the Wii anymore than the Wii is trying to be the 360 when it puts out games like Medal of Honor, Metroid Prime, Twilight Princess, Metal Slug…
October 24th, 2007 at 11:41 pm
I agree enough with you Jack…but I would tend to look at the games roster for evidence of dominance more than anything.
As a side-note, the cheaper the other systems get, the more interested I am in buying one of my own (though I have a roommate with a 360 for the time being)…the 40GB PS3 looks good enough, and I’ve been tempted by the 360 tard pack before…but not just yet.
October 24th, 2007 at 11:51 pm
The holidays are all about gathering by the fire with egg nog and chestnuts with family and friends so Microsoft is just playing to the season. Yes they may be trying to emulate the Wii in some ways to try and keep up with Nintendo, but my mama always told me, imitation is the best form of flattery. Unfortunately for Microsoft, my holiday bucks are already reserved for Nintendo products.
October 24th, 2007 at 11:56 pm
what are you trying to say here? that ninny wins b/c ms is going after the social demographic? this is a core system dressed up for family/casual gamerd. the core system, after all, really is just about casual gamers.
ms has been trying to play nice with families for a while. kameo was meh but viva pinata is quality gaming. just like ninny has been dropping hardcore megatons all september.
all systems have really always tried to be appealing to all (see eternal darkness). this is hardly new.
still, ninny will win the holidays worlwide. not so sure about NA thouugh.
October 25th, 2007 at 1:06 am
@andrew,
You’re right, there are some non-violent family oriented varieties of games for the 360, and honestly most of them are on live arcade. This machine with no harddrive is not really equipped to download much in the way of games though. Thats why they’re throwing in a disc with some arcade titles on it.
If they really wanted to market this thing as a casual/family device, they would have included some internal memory/HDD and a years worth of LIVE so you could have all the great access to the casual games. No, this SKU smacks of a reaction. Its trying to hit a market that Nintendo has exposed, but its doing it in a half hearted fashion, as if they feel obligated to say, “well, look, we’re not ignoring that casual family market”, when in fact, they have done little but that for the last 2 years. A slightly lower cost and some casual games is NOT whats making the Wii a success. Yet that is all this new SKU offers.
You ask if it makes sense to NOT market a segment of your games portfolio. The obvious answer is, no, it doesn’t make sense. So explain why MS has done just that for the last 2 years, focusing almost exclusively on the hardest of the hardcore gamer. In fact, they’ve been all about the hardcore for the last 6 years. Not until Wii found success in a broader market is the 360 suddenly embracing that concept. Admittedly, they have little choice though and considering the very limited success the hardcore market has provided thus far, this might not be a bad move for them.
October 25th, 2007 at 6:10 am
Even those family friendly games are not something my older siblings/parents who don’t play games would buy an expensive piece of electronics for. If they wanted to play Pac-Man they would do it through a browser, they will not understand that CE is a new version with new features. If they wanted to play Uno they would get the cards out.
The bottom line is not actually that there are no th enough games on the 360 they may enjoy, but none of them are going to be a real hit at parties the way that Wii Sports, Rayman, WarioWare, and even Mario and Sonic at the Olympics have been or have the potential to be. The controller novelty goes a long way and the games that focus on group fun locally not across the internet. The people who are buying Wii as expanded audience were looking for something to entertain with because the conversation had run out at dinner parties IMO.
October 25th, 2007 at 7:52 am
The meager selections of family friendly games on the 360 isn’t enough for casual/family oriented players to shell out the money. Sure Live Arcade is nice, but not $300+ nice. I find it funny that Microsoft is trying to pander to this demographic when they’ve done nothing but force their hardcore status to everyone for the last 2 years.
October 25th, 2007 at 8:16 am
Actually, while I agree that not having a hard drive on this console is absolutely insane (for the reason you mentioned, and also because it continues to segment their market and force developers to keep the non-HD users in mind), every Xbox user has a Silver membership at no cost, which is all you need to download arcade games. You need Gold to play with people online.
I don’t disagree that the price of entry for XBLA is pretty high if that’s really all you’re interested in, but the fact remains it’s there, and it’s what this SKU is all about.
Also, personally I don’t know what you guys are talking about when you try to say that 100% of MS’s marketing has gone toward “hardcore” recently. I’ve seen them devote a *ton* of coverage to the vision camera, and how it interacts with their XBLA games. On top of that, they’ve been pretty forward and forthcoming about their marketplace in general. Say what you will about the XBL Marketplace, but what it’s doing is great, and Nintendo could learn from it. Free Demos, Free trailers, they even had free ComiCon coverage this year with hours of free video. *EVERY* XBLA title has a trial version. Isn’t this a good thing for consumers?
Microsoft has never wasted an opportunity to talk about how great their service is, and rightfully so. This new 360 SKU is the natural evolution of that.
Sorry guys, you’re looking for a fight where there isn’t any. Anyone who’s owned an XBox or followed their strategy for ahwile can see that they’re not the “Halo Box” that you guys want to make them into. There’s a lot of great, and even family-oriented, content on the system.
October 25th, 2007 at 8:22 am
While I’m at it, I’ve said it 100 times, but these “tear down the enemy” types of articles are very tired. Microsoft doens’t have to be “wrong” for Nintendo to be “right.” You want Nintendo to be successful, and I get that - I do too - but we’ve already talked at depth about how Nintendo and MS/Sony are playing two totally different ballgames here. Why get on their case about this? It reeks of arrogance.
October 25th, 2007 at 9:00 am
“Microsoft doens’t have to be “wrong” for Nintendo to be “right.””
I don’t think the point is that MS is “wrong”, but rather, they were doing their thing and now they are trying to do more what Nintendo is doing.
“I don’t know what you guys are talking about when you try to say that 100% of MS’s marketing has gone toward “hardcore” recently.”
No one is talking about recently. In fact, just the opposite. Only recently has MS decided to focus on this market. I’ve never seen a commercial for LIVE marketplace. Ever. I’ve seen a lot for gamer fuel though, and tons for gears of war.
“You want Nintendo to be successful, and I get that - I do too - but we’ve already talked at depth about how Nintendo and MS/Sony are playing two totally different ballgames here.”
Thats the point. They WERE playing different ballgames. We’re saying that MS is trying to join Nintendos ballgame. Its relevant because there is a lot of speculation that Nintendo was making the wrong decision, that they were abandoning gamers and it would hurt them. The fact that MS is starting to see the benefits of Nintendos strategy stands to support the fact that the strategy was perhaps a good one after all.
I don’t have anything against MS, (I’m sure some people do) but you’d have to be blind not to see their strategy shifting since the success of the Wii. Its not all their fault, I think this caught most of us off guard.
Jack is a little smug, because he was one of the few who saw this way back when. He was one of the few voices of dissent claiming the brilliance of Nintendos strategy, long before the arcade SKU was a glimmer in MS’ eye. You can’t blame him for a bit of the “i told you so”.
October 25th, 2007 at 9:03 am
On the contrary, I think MS dramatically changing their message this late into the game is incredibly significant, not only for Nintendo, but for gaming in general.
Ignoring this news simply because it’s cool to say supporting Nintendo is “tired” is irresponsible, but I’m used to it by now.
MS suddenly trying to be “family friendly” ??? Newsworthy in every sense of the word.
October 25th, 2007 at 9:09 am
“Ignoring this news simply because it’s cool to say supporting Nintendo is “tired” is irresponsible, but I’m used to it by now.”
No one said that.
October 25th, 2007 at 10:53 am
Microsoft’s strategy all along has been to secure the enthusiast gaming crowd first. Then expand the audience. It’s the most common way to market and grow a product.
MS has done a steller job at controlling the enthusiast market. They are now just starting to market to the casuals. I don’t believe that they are “changing their message”. They are trying to expand their audience, which has always been their plan.
XBLA has been around since the console has been released. It has always been aimed at the casual crowd. They are now just evolving their marketing to expose this feature more. Nothing new here.
October 25th, 2007 at 10:54 am
I think the Microsoft “The Games Everybody Wants To Play” commercial (where they spoof a Wii airport gaming session) is much worse than this.
October 25th, 2007 at 11:26 am
This is sort of embarassing for M$. Microsoft is trying to toss their hat into the casual gaming market, even though they don’t really offer that experience or even one that’s worth the pricetag. With Wii you’re basically getting a form of disk storage along with exclusive functionality and a physical input device that’s unmatched. The experience Xbox is trying to market is basically the same crap people use their PC’s for, so good luck trying to sell America another PC.
October 25th, 2007 at 11:48 am
everyone here is missing the point. although they may be trying to like nintendo now………they’re doing it in a different way. through software only. they don’t have the hardware capability to do so. the wii remote is unique and will be that way for quite some time, for this generation at least. that makes the wii unique and that is the big draw of the wii to a much broader audience. and the software made for wii is specifically for this hardware which no one can imitate at the moment. problem is, MS and sony have already introduced their hardware and if they were to copy nintendo, per se, it would definitely confuse their loyal consumer base with another peripheral. the wii remote is the system, and no software released by MS can ‘copy’ the wii or its marketing. i don’t know why anyone would get worked up over this because MS’ approach is quite a bit different.
October 25th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
While I agree with the “perceived” image of both the Wii and the Xbox 360, we have to recognize that these are consoles, and therefore their genres are as broad as their software. MS, for example, did try to reach to the family audience early on by hiring RARE to create Kameo and Viva Piñata. Their perceived image is just a fabrication of their respective marketing department, which is the point that I believe Jack was making…
October 25th, 2007 at 1:43 pm
Andrew MG has reason, here Nintendo is competing with the games that are not violent on Xbox 360, but, seeing the Nintendo sales and their games catalog for the holydays, I think that Nintendo wins anyway.
October 25th, 2007 at 2:07 pm
Guess you guys never played Viva Piñata, the only thing family oriented in that title was the price and the character colors. Eating other piñatas and macro-management tediousness, really showed its true colors. I tried playing it but its like the Sims + Animal Crossing on steroids, too much to keep track of.
Microsoft knows that after Halo 3, it’s all downhill. You really can’t do much trying to get the attention from future Wii purchasers. But hey, it has the highest attach rate, doesn’t it?
October 25th, 2007 at 3:22 pm
whats the point of watching what your kids play if the parents buy them the rated M games anyway?
October 25th, 2007 at 3:53 pm
That sounds like a typical family gathering for me
October 25th, 2007 at 9:03 pm
@videoanime,
“Andrew MG has reason”
This sounds like a direct translation from spanish. Are you a spanish speaker? Sorry for the off topic, but I’ve got to keep my skills fresca!
October 26th, 2007 at 4:54 am
I think MS realized that going for the hardcore gamer market alone isn’t going to be enough, money-wise. As we can see 360 adopters are the same people that bought the original Xbox.
I wouldn’t put MS in direct competition with Nintendo, tough, as I don’t see them playing the same ball game that someone said.
As some other one said it will require a new peripheral of some sort to achieve that.
Instead, MS is playing cards that already has and work well:
1)They are marketing the Core system in a different way, loaded with some Pro stuff (except the HDD and headset).
2)Low price: Core system goes away just for 30 bucks more than a Wii
3)Packed with some minigames that are good for multi.
4)Tons of other stuff on XBLA ready to be purchased.
5)Upgradeable to a Pro in case things get serious.
If anyone of you blame MS for going after casuals, you shoot yourself in the foot… As you can look the other way round for Nintendo going after a hardcore installed base.
Did anyone noticed how the VC titles have turned to HC gamers lately??
Nintendo NEEDS a HC installed base as much as any other competitors, as they are the one that sustain the market, even in ‘down’ times.
Alienating them means losing sure income (the one that kept the Gamecube going, even if it was last overall).
The difference for Ninty this time is that they went first for the casual (with just Zelda as a title for HC) and then for the HCs.
And while MS this Christmas will be happy to see more casual coming to their ship, so will be Ninty to see more people (maybe casual-now-turned-HC) going for their HC titles.
October 26th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
whats the point of watching what your kids play if the parents buy them the rated M games anyway
October 30th, 2007 at 8:29 pm
Microsoft offers a great system experience, but I think the weird part here is their strange inclination to push Pac Man and Uno as selling points. I can get Pac Man and Uno at a garage sale for less than a buck.