Yeah, if Live hadn't been such a success, hard to say what would have become of the 360. I think the success of Live told them that if they just made a normal console and focused on having a great online service, they could win, and they did. Meanwhile, the PS3 lost every single dollar the PS2 made and then some. Microsoft looked at the outcome of the generation and said, "Yes, but what if I pointed a shotgun squarely at my foot and pulled the trigger?"
The way I’ve heard it they did that because the XBox started life as a bunch of engineers going ’how little do we actually need for DirectX to run?’.
Microsoft entered the 8th console generation with the same arrogance and mindset that Sony entered the 7th. Making the console be more about general entertainment than gaming, a ridiculous price tag, except at least the PS3 had some decent exclusives like MGS4. XBone had what, Halo 5? The MCC? The latter being a bug-infested touch-up of past games, the former being the most hated game in the franchise, more hated than Halo 4?Yeah, if Live hadn't been such a success, hard to say what would have become of the 360. I think the success of Live told them that if they just made a normal console and focused on having a great online service, they could win, and they did. Meanwhile, the PS3 lost every single dollar the PS2 made and then some. Microsoft looked at the outcome of the generation and said, "Yes, but what if I pointed a shotgun squarely at my foot and pulled the trigger?"
Sure, but at least back then, most media and gamers still talked about games in specifics, not about bullshit SJW politics or corpo cutting corners with AI and firing a thousand people. It's practically nostalgic to worry about a game for it's own sake, or to think that back then, people cared about the lore of franchises like Halo, Mass Effect, Starcraft, and Star Wars.
The official story was that Xbox started life as Seamus Blackley trying to figure out a way for Microsoft to beat Sony at its own game, and coming up with the idea of a console cobbled together out of PC parts.
They abandoned it because they lost a billion dollars due to an inability to bring costs down; using commodity parts meant they had no control over design or manufacturing, which then meant they had no ability to redesign the system for lower costs over time. Blackley had made a bunch of incorrect, unspoken assumptions about how and why PC parts get cheaper over time. See my earlier spergpost.
Isn't a hard drive just a hard drive? I remember reading something about some OXboxes having unannounced 10gb drives. Why couldn't they just stick an el cheapo 40gb HDD in there near the end of OXbox's life?
Because "cheapo" is relative. The hard drive added a high fixed cost that had little to do with the drive's size - let's say it was $50. If they buy 40 GB HDDs later, it doesn't save them money, only get them more storage. They also hard-coded the Xbox's drive sectors to a total of 8 GB, oops.
I think that's a lot more work (ie time & money) then you're making it sound. You mention the backward compatibility on 360 which worked via emulation, but that straight up didn't work for all OG Xbox games, and there were still bugs and issues for some of the officially supported ones, and software updates via online connection were needed to update the emulator and game profiles to fix or add games.
You are absolutely autistic if you have taken the word creation and run with the nuts and bolts concept.
The number I remember was around 1/3 failed within the warranty period, and it was a combination lead-free solder and poor thermal management.
They extended the warranty and while two of my Xbox's died with RRoD, both were fixed by the workaround; put it in the freezer, then take it out with a bath towel wrapped around it and run the console for 15 minutes.
Never heard about the freezer thing. Very interesting.
It sounds batshit insane and I only tried it because the console was knackered anyway. It worked.
It took MS, what, 14 years to officially figure out the cause of it? Or at least, 14 years to publicly announce it? You know how many YouTube videos exist of the Red Dead of Death from the 360's prime? What a time capsule. I think the 360 scratching discs should've been more publicly known and accounted for along with the RRoD.
The disc scratching was more retard related and because the 360 was the first consoles that could be used horizontally or vertically. A friend of mine shredded one of his discs and when we asked "how?", as we didn't want to suffer the same fate, he said "An FMV was playing and I was bored so decided to lay my xbox flat to see what it looked like". Stupified, we asked him to clarify "while the disc was spinning?" He confirmed.
I cannot think of any other CD/DVD/Blu-Ray player that would damage discs from movement. MS cheaped out on the disc drives by not adding rubber cushions near the lens. The drives did not securely align the disc in motion. And earlier Xbox 360 models were known to be MORE sensitive to any vibration, which would cause the circular scratches.
AVGN or Spoony (can't remember which) mentioned that the Jaguar CD's drive lid would press against the disc. I don't know if it caused damage to the disc or just prevented it from spinning.
I used to watch them regularly, it was awesome.
