The Smartphone Killed the Xbox | Hacker News Reader

The Smartphone Killed the Xbox

ravi64.com

21 pointsmerlioncity16 comments

Branding surely played a role too, microsoft is constantly upping the ante on naming things as terribly as possible. I'm an avid gamer who follows gaming news and I couldnt tell you the difference between an xbox series s vs xbox one vs. xbox series aeiou and sometimes y. It's almost as bad as .net framework -> .net core -> uh.. lets just call it .NET actually that won't be confusing for anybody

100% this (for me at least). I’ve owned all the Xboxes since the first one up through the… Xbox One, I think? Was that one? I think I actually had an Xbox One X as a mid-lifecycle refresh, and when the next one came out and had a terrible name, pricing and storage situation, I threw up my hands and stopped trying to keep up.

The "one xbox one x box" meme is well over a decade old at this point lol. Definitely a "hold my beer" moment from MS after nintendo's uncharacteristic marketing misstep of wii -> wiiu.

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fh...

Oh yes. It's such an easily avoidable unforced error it's downright incomprehensible - especially after failing by naming their third generation "XBox One" (and the WiiU fiasco providing a cautionary tale). Even Wii was an example of a product good enough that overcame its mildly confusing name. Console naming isn't actually hard.

I blame the rise of "Institutionalized Marketing Departments" inside tech companies dominated by careerist middle-managers who've never actually created any marketing themselves. They just hire and manage creative, ad, PR and branding agencies. The branding agency hires a naming consultancy for a million dollars who has a bunch of hipster creatives brainstorm a short-list of very clever names, do surveys and analyses overflowing with data (and false precision) then package it into an incredible pitch presentation delivered by their most attractive hipster with the coolest foreign accent. All to sell some "too clever by half" high-concept name - because that's the only way to justify their million dollar fee.

I'm pretty sure Sony didn't pay anyone a million dollars to spend three months coming up with "You should name the Playstation 3's successor... Playstation 4."

Exclusives aren't consumer-friendly but they shift boxes. Everyone knows if you want to play a Mario game you need a Nintendo.

The exclusives ship has sailed for the Xbox now so the best they can do is try to compete with the new Steam Machine with what will essentially be a PC and allow all storefronts.

It seems Valve has gone for an entry-level machine while Xbox is going for a premium one so it'll be interesting to see how it all pans out.

It will be interesting to see how the market will determine whether subjective “fun” is the same in an entry-level versus a premium experience. Short of some ego boosting element, the experience is likely the same.

Entry-level gaming PC is still quite high up there on the performance scale compared to consoles. They haven't announced a price yet but it'll hopefully be similar to current consoles on the lower storage model. Anything higher will put it in range with existing prebuilt gaming PCs.

> Robbie Bach (Chief Xbox Officer): I said, okay, well then, let’s not do it.

> Ed Fries (VP, Game Publishing): And then somebody says, “What about Sony?”

> Jeff Henshaw (Software Design): Microsoft had owned the den and the office. And the thought of Sony owning the rest of the home is offensive to Bill [Gates].

> Ed Fries: Bill kinda pauses, and he thinks, and he says… “I think we should do this.” And Ballmer’s like, “yeah, we should do this!” And then they start getting excited and it starts going back and forth. “We should do this!” “We should let these guys do this!”

In Zero to One, Peter Thiel argues that Microsoft and Google were so bent on competing with each other for its own sake (Bing, ChromeOS) that they allowed Apple to dominate the next generation of computing with the iPhone. This seems like another part of the same story.

Indeed. Building a home PC is very different from building a game console. Microsoft is still very much this stupid. AI isn't a panacea for sales.

The xbox series x has sold almost 30 M units. It seems alive and well to me.

Yes, the ps5 has sold like 85 M units, so it has the larger market share, but the xbox is "killed"? Please.

> It could generate real-time graphics far beyond anything ever seen before.

No. The ps2 was on par with a budget pc.

Sure that's lifetime sales number. But if you look at numbers from recent quarters, that's absolutely abysmal.

It looks pretty linear to me: https://www.vgchartz.com/article/465601/ps5-vs-xbox-series-x...

Also, it’s a 5 year old console. I’m surprised they are both going this strong.

The console business has matured in the last ten years. Due to platform lock-in and social spread (friends buy what other friends have), any significant lead now becomes iteratively compounding growth and the effect appears to be accelerating.

But the real reason why MSFT is no longer committed to the console hardware business is that hardware margins are much lower than software, subscriptions and cloud services. It brings down the corporation's blended gross margins. That's why they spent $100B buying game studios. Even giving Sony a cut, it still maths out better.

MSFT will continue to do console hardware but they're changing their strategy to still reach their margin and revenue goals with the #2 or #3 hardware platform. That means there's no reason for MSFT to go 'all-in' on the next-gen hardware (meaning they'll won't intentionally plan to incur tens of billions in losses in the first three years of a new generation and make it up in the last four years). But console hardware is still huge for Sony and existential for Nintendo - so they will go into deeper and longer hardware losses. XBox execs have already indicated that the form factor of their platform hardware is going to change for the next generation. Industry insiders interpret that mean they're giving up going head-to-head against Sony on the traditional console form factor.

My eyes tell me that the gap is getting larger and larger.

Just another data point to the unbelievable strategic failure of MS in ceding the mobile market so early on. Imagine a world where we had portable devices capable of natively playing Direct3D games from the beginning.

The article mentions the significant impact of the failure of the XBox One but then goes on to lay the ultimate blame on smartphones in the last sentence (and headline). I don't agree. Playstation and Nintendo have both successfully navigated the smartphone-centric competitive landscape with different strategies.

The XBox business never recovered from the XBox One - which was a huge fail on almost every dimension. And that was the worst generation to fail on - because PS4 didn't fail. While PS4 wasn't perfect, it didn't have the critical issues PS3 did (high cost, extremely difficult to program, reliability). It was also the generation when the console business stabilized and platform ecosystems (subscriptions, online-only games, backward-compatibility) greatly increased user loyalty and platform lock-in.

While the XBox Series X generation returned to hardware, cost and feature parity (or close enough), Playstation had already pulled away enough and thanks to social stickiness (friends buy what other friends have), any lead compounds. Also - while it's a more minor issue - I have to mention... after screwing up the "XBox One" name (yeah, calling the third generation "One" won't confuse anyone), they screwed up again naming the next generation (WTF does "XBox Series X" even mean? What other "Series" are there?).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com