Jeremy Read

Predictions on Microsoft

May 14, 2008 on 12:14 am | In Uncategorized | | Jeremy Read

Sometimes, I hear a piece of information that in a single sentence changes my world view.

The XNA Community Games Platform team has announced the first feature of the coming XNA Game Studio 3.0, the ability to build games for the Zune platform.

It took a while for this to sink and then I realized the enormity of this statement. I’d be willing to bet money that Microsoft is going to enter the handheld gaming platform market and take a massive chunk out of Nintendo’s “gameboy” pie. I really want a Zune now. I care about it, if Microsoft make this I’m thinking it’s going to be as successful as the Xbox360 rather than the GP32.

And to be honest, it’s the most successful out of any of the consoles, they won this time. Sure Nintendo managed to sell marginally more Wiis but you forget Xbox Live. Which has more active subscribers than WoW. Combined with them owning the IP in their chips, thus when Opus and Valhalla come out we’ll see both system stability (no more red rings of death) and higher profit margins. Microsoft is simply raking in the money.

How did this happen though? Well simply put, it’s the best platform to develop for. Microsoft is a platform company, it’s simply a lot easier to hit F5 and it “just work” in Visual Studio than it is anywhere else. And this is where XNA comes in. It’s a development framework that lets us write code and it “just work” by hitting F5 on BOTH the Xbox360 and the windows platforms. Users don’t care about this, developers do. The thing is though, only developers count. I can’t write easily to do what I want on the PS3, if I want to write for the Xbox360 it’s a breeze, so given a choice I’d choose the Xbox.

Now what Microsoft is trying to do is harness these developers so that they WANT to write code for the “Zune” platform. I want to write code for it now, so it passes the litmus test.

All they need to do now is rebrand the platform and they’ve won the handheld war as well. Whoever has more developers wins. So go download XNA
and have fun.

I’m also guessing we’ll see support for Windows Mobile possibly in version 4.

2 Comments »

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  1. you forget that the zune has horrible DRM, and is selling like poo in a wrapper, also, the xbox 360 sales flattened out, and the Wii outsold it with a 8 month handicap. the Wii is still selling fast, and the 360 sales have flattened.

    Comment by Jonny Chaos — 2:02 pm — May 16, 2008 #

  2. xbox360 sales flattened out because it had an 8 month lead. People who were going to buy one allready bought one.

    Also it only outsold it worldwide. In the US it’s winning (http://uk.reuters.com/article/technologyNewsMolt/idUKN1451805520080515)
    and granted most of the sales of the Wii are going to be from Japan, an American console making inroads into the Japanese market is incredible
    Who else has managed that?

    Also the Zune’s sales are increasing, it’s slowly gaining market share (http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/05/ipod-loses-mark.html), going from 0% to 4% of the market is not a trivial matter.

    Comment by Jeremy Read — 4:00 pm — May 16, 2008 #

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