Xbox 360 fully backwards compatible (?) and leaked brochure!

[Crow_Nest]

*Saves Before it gets taken down*

 

Thanks for the information!

 

What he said ^_^

[BCanr2d2]

Backwards compatibility is only a recent addition. After swapping from Nvidia graphics cards to ATI, they had to come to an agreement(ie $) with Nvidia about the code developed to display the games on the Nvidia cards, and then develop a way for the ATI card to show it......

 

Remember guys, this is a console, highly specialised tricks and shortcuts suited to the hardware, not just a DirectX layer like in Windows.

[Kurgan]

I don't see the big deal about price. All game consoles are sold "below cost" pretty much. They make up for it by gouging people with the games (compare the price of a console game vs. it's PC counterpart that's usually better, and required more testing to be compatible on more configurations!).

 

As for stripping out features, the Xbox required a special kit in order to play DVD's, despite the Xbox itself using DVD format when it was released. The only console that had DVD support out of the box was the PS2. Since HD-DVD hasn't even taken off yet, I wouldn't expect a console released in the next 6-9 months to have support built in. It just wouldn't make much sense to have a console to do something that you can't even buy affordable stand-alone players yet. HD broadcast isn't even used by that many people yet. Plenty of people who own HD or digital sets don't even use them for HD.

[access_flux]

I don't see the big deal about price. All game consoles are sold "below cost" pretty much. They make up for it by gouging people with the games (compare the price of a console game vs. it's PC counterpart that's usually better, and required more testing to be compatible on more configurations!).

 

 

 

yeah but thats where M$ lost all their money on the XBOX first time around. the consoles were sold cheap in hope that games would let them rake it in, where as with a simple mod and HDD upgrade, you can put as many "procured" games on as you wish. that way, microdollars lost out. i wonder how they will improve on that now.

[Kurgan]

Well the thing is, all consoles are sold below cost, and all of them that I know of (except perhaps the Gamecube) got pirated. Copying games to a hard drive is neat, but just about any system has had people crack, rip, copy and distribute games for it illegally. And who cares if the system itself has internet access, people still got the games off the internet primarily (or traded with friends, or rented and then copied). Mod chips are well known for allowing these kinds of things too.

 

The Gamecube I don't know if it was ever actually cracked, a few games were leaked and passed around but they tended to be very small or only playable via (primitive) emulators. Nintendo went all out on their copy protection schemes...

 

So anyway I don't see why the same mistakes won't be repeated, they're just standard for gaming consoles in the last decade. A gaming company can't expect to stop all piracy, they can only do a reasonable amount of work on it. Likewise the public expects to pay a certain price for a gaming console, so rather than make it too high seeming (most gamers are console gamers after all.. and new gaming-level PC's are considered out of reach of many of these folks), they cut the price to increase sales. They can't very well raise the price again later, because they want to stay competative.

 

All the major companies cited losses due to piracy, etc, but they all also made profits. It's not as if the Xbox was a failure due to game copying. If it was, I never heard that or saw the evidence for it.

[toms]

Frankly i can't see that the number of xbox owners who are hardcore enough to know about or add in a mod chip and a hard drive is going to be very high at all.. 1% of the total market?? And they are likely to be the sort of gamers who would buy games cheap, 2nd hand or on ebay anyway... not the "hardcore casual" fans who spend a fortune on new release games in highstreet stores. Can't see that they would have much effect on MS losses at all. MS fully expected to make a loss on their first round in the consoel war... but considering the ground they've made up (remember - lots of people thought they would crash and burn) they'll be happy. Now they will start trying to use games sales and subscription services to make money this round.

 

I still think the initial price for a (decent) 360 is too high, but they probably reckon that as first to market they can fleece the "early adopters" who will pay that price, then drop the price to something more reasonable once the PS3 is about to launch.

 

I still think that the "with and without HD" options are going to be confusing, and most of the casual gamers who WANT backwards compatibility are going to be the ones who buy the cheap version and then get confused when some of their games won't play, but Halo 2 will.

 

[edit]PS - i heard the reason the xbox shipped wthout DVD playback by default was that sony gets a percentage of all dvd players (due to copyrights) and MS didn't want them getting a % of all XBOXs. I guess they wanted to give them a 5 of $20 rather than a % of $300...

[Kurgan]

Not everyone who gets a mod chip in their console is a pirate. Many people got one for the Xbox so they could use free homebrew programs like audio players, freeware games and emulators (that allow you to play other emulated games on the Xbox).

 

Now mod chips require you either have some hardware know-how yourself or you paid somebody to give you a modified chip (the latter technically isn't legal I don't think, at least not in the US). Modding the system yourself I think just voids the warranty. In any case, simply modding the system doesn't mean you were going to pirate games, anymore than buying the HDD meant you were going to pirate games. It would certainly make it easier.

 

Note: I'm just going by what I've been told and read. I don't actually own an Xbox console.

 

Sony has the copyright on DVD technology? That doesn't sound right. Unless it was a Sony-made drive I highly doubt that was the case.

 

What got me about the Xbox DVD thing was that I thought it was a case of simply the machine had it "turned off" and the "kit" just turned it back on (and gave you the remote). Then again the kit may have been the decoder card for movie playback. Just because you have DVD capability doesn't mean you can read movie discs. The Xbox uses the DVD format for its storage capabilities, just like the PS2 did. If it was a decoder card, I can see why they left it off. At the time it came out, far fewer people had a home DVD player than they do now, and the dvd player would just drive up the overall price.

 

Before the "next generation" (soon to be outdated term) of consoles (Dreamcast, PS2, Xbox, Gamecube), there was a move by console makers to produce "multimedia" stations, which meant that their game consoles included other abilities like the ability to play CDs, VCDs, CD+G, Karaoke, PhotoCD, etc. The idea was that you could not just play games but do all this other stuff. But as a selling point it was fairly poor. I think this is also true of the DVD playback... that with the console you could either buy a game machine with a crappy or overpriced version of the multimedia machine you wanted, OR you could buy the actual multimedia player and get a better playback for the same or less price (or just slightly more).

 

For an example, compare the price of the "Panasonic Q" which was a Gamecube system with a DVD movie player built in. It cost more than it would have cost to buy a decent stand alone DVD player AND a standard gamecube system. So what was the point other than the novelty of having two machines in one?

 

My point about the consoles being sold "below cost" was that this alone shouldn't have ensured M$'s failure, since all console companies (that I know of) were doing it as well.

[Lynk Former]

Yes, all consoles are sold below cost, the software makes up for this. The only company who is able to do this is Nintendo since they release a lot of software to make up for the losses made by selling their hardware. Sony on the other hand releases very little software. 99% of PlayStation games are third party games which means those third party companies such as Square-Enix makes all the cash from selling their games. Microsoft's Xbox was sold way way below cost, there was no secret that it was an expensive console to make, but that wasn't the point. The point for Microsoft was to get into the market any way they could and they have. It is also very clear that if it wasn't for Halo 2, Microsoft would've suffered an extremely big loss compared to what they went through with the success of Halo 2. Microsoft were smart enough to realise that software is what rakes in the cash which is why they invested so much money into buying Rareware and Bungie.

 

 

And about the whole DVD thing with Sony... it's not the DVD format which Sony has invested in, it's the programming to be able to play DVD video. That's why Microsoft made people buy the remote, the remote is what had the programming to play DVD video, the Xbox itself does not. It will be the same thing with the Revolution, Nintendo will make people buy an "add on" instead of having DVD video playback built in.

[lukeskywalker1]

Cool, then I won't buy the Nintendo add on, because I don't need it. Its just a waste of money. If the Rev shipped with the DVD player, would I use it? Yeah, most likley. Do I need it? No. Do I want it? Not really. It would just up the cost for me, which is something else I don't want. I think the smartest thing to do, like they are doing, is to ship a DVD add on elsewhere, but not with the system itself.

[toms]

As with most technology these days DVD tech was covered by hundreds of different copyrights (disc tech, reader tech, copy protection, video compression, audio compression, etc... ) so loads of different companies get parts of royalites for dvd players. Sony does hold a large number of the copyrights though. This is why MS is trying to push its tech onto HD DVD (so it gets royalties, and a say in licensing) and is so anti Blueray.

It usually becomes so complex to deal with all the copyrights involved that they set up a licensing body that controls all the copyrights involved and then license them as a big bundle. (like the MPEG licensing group, etc..)

Its just a rumour that MS used the dongle route to avoid paying as much to Sony etc.., but then MS would hardly admit it.

 

$700 for a console bundle does seem a bit excessive though. imho.

[edit]on the other hand the $1,200 Gamestop Ultimate bundle sounds peachy...