5 Year Lifecycle – Xbox

Historically game consoles were on a roughly five-year lifecycle. After about five years the hardware would start to show it’s age and the market for that device would be sufficiently saturated. This hasn’t been a strict rule but a pretty good estimation when new hardware will start coming out. Magazines (now websites) would start publishing rumors about new games or hardware specs. I point this out because we have now reached that point in this generation of gaming. The XBox 360 is heading into its sixth year and the Wii and PS3 are heading into their fifth year. Taking into account that the hardware inside these machines was probably a year or so old at the time of launch the hardware in these machines is pretty darn old. So I ask how would you change them?

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Today I am going to take a look at the 360. The original 360 came in two different SKUs, an arcade version with no internal storage and a premium edition with a 20 gig hard drive. Other then that the guts where the same. The reason for this is reportedly because of Gears Of War. When Epic showed the game to Microsoft they loved it but there was a problem. The game required twice as much ram as they were planning on putting into the console. So Microsoft asked them if they installed the game to the hard drive would they get the same level of graphics? They said no they needed the ram but they didn’t really need the hard drive. So Microsoft came up with the solution we have had ever since. Two SKUs. Since launch we have had 7 SKU’s not counting special editions.

I’m not against multiple SKU’s. My 360 is an Elite as I was waiting for an update to get a 360. I think the slims are a great update but I don’t like the idea of spending another 300 dollars on a console if my elite breaks again (when it breaks again) it’ll be cheaper to just fix it then buy a new one so that’s what I’ll do.

So what will I change for the 720? Some of the changes have already been implemented like the inclusion of Wi-Fi. Microsoft was cutting cost’s left and right to get the price down at launch so I don’t really blame them for not including it. I blame them for charging 100 bucks for the add-on. So the next console has to have Wi-Fi out of the box. That’s a given.

I also believe that digital distribution is only going to get bigger and bigger. Because of that, a paltry four gigs of space won’t cut it at all. Hard drives must be a standard on all SKU’s. And not tiny ones either, 250 gigs should be the smallest available. Hard Drives aren’t that expensive but add a lot to consoles. Microsoft knows this that’s why they included one on every single ORIGINAL Xbox ten years ago.

Also enough of these crappy wired/wireless headsets give me blue-tooth connectivity or get out. At least for the headsets. It would be nice for blue-tooth keyboards as well.

Allow the next XBox to read drives plugged into it to read NTFS drives. Currently it can only read FAT32 drives. Which is really stupid as the machine is a great media extender. It’s a feature not many people know about but it’s a stupid thing that it doesn’t do.

I’m not sure about Blu-Ray. Yes it’s a great format and holds a ton but the read speeds are slow as crap. I don’t want to install a game for 20 minutes just to play it. If the NeXbox comes out in 3-4 years the speeds of the drives could be dramatically faster that this doesn’t matter but I hate loading screens and hate the idea of game installs on a console.

A de-emphasis on shooters for the next gen would be nice but probably impractical considering that the controller will probably be the same.

Lastly, they need to rework the Live situation. The gold membership provides so much extra goodies it’s hard to imagine using the console without one. Microsoft was the first gaming company to utilize the Internet for social gaming and have done it the best. But a 60-dollar a year tariff to be able to fully utilize the machine is steep. It’s one extra game a year that gamers are paying for. If it can be free on the PC why not consoles? Maybe it can’t be free but it’s dangerously close to be too much to pay far. There is a lot of upkeep to keep Live as good and reliable as it is so I don’t mind spending some money to keep the quality up. But not much has changed in the years since it’s launch (gaming wise) and that should change. I’d like to see more integration with social networks not just access to them. I’d like to see a move away from the MS Points to real money. I’d like to see the Kinect camera used for more video chat ability. Yes this will bring more penises but if Chat Roulette can figure out how to de-dongify their service Live can too. If instead of a little icon of a speaker next to your Gamertag when you spoke a pop up of the video as you spoke would be interesting. Think Wing Commander and you get what I’m thinking. This won’t be perfect but it would be interesting.

So after reading what I would like changed on the NeXbox I ask what would you like changed?