Looking back on 2013, it is quite the entertaining year for gamers. I’m sure the PS4 and Xbox One launch will be looked back as a case study on what and what not to do in both marketing, PR and project management.
Start of 2013, rumours have been boiling about the next gen consoles, Orbis (PS4) and Durango (next Xbox). It was only a matter of who would make the first move.
The Playstation is coming, and the 8gb GDDR5 bombshell
February, Sony suddenly drops the news that there’ll be a Playstation Meeting on the 20th of Feb. There was no doubt what the meeting is going to be. PS4 is coming.
This is quite the cunning move, just weeks before Kaz in interviews was saying they’d wait for the competition to make the first move, “Why go first, when your competitors can look at your specifications and come up with something better?”, he said.
Then in the meeting, it was announced that PS4 will have 8gb GDDR5 ram. This was in a time when in forums people were hoping PS4 will have 4gb of GDDR5. That the PS4 will have 8gb of the stuff was a bombshell and took everyone by surprise. Words on the street was the decision was held such close to the chest, some of Sony’s devs didn’t know about it until they heard it in the announcement itself.
Considering that manufacturers like Hynix only announced the high density GDDR5 ready for mass production at the start of the year, it’s quite likely Sony decided to shoot for 2013 Holiday release the moment they secured supply of GDDR5.
Sony bet the house on GDDR5 coming onto market in sufficient density for them to afford 8gb of it, and it paid off. It came onto market faster than people predicted, which meant the PS4 was being released both earlier than MS was ready for, and with more rams than they were expecting.
The first MS can play catch-up, the second will likely reverberate and haunt the guys at Redmond for the entire generation.
Xbox One, TV TV TV
The general feeling is that MS bet the Xbox One to take on Apple and Google, aimed to claim the stake as the go-to media device in the living room before either Apple or Google TV can take root. The irony is that their decision not only destroyed their ambitions before the device is released, it’ll barely hold against the PS4, which MS no doubt once considered a done deal.
The unveil focused on Xbox One’s TV features, which always seemed abit puzzling considering how few of the features will ever come out outside of US and UK. But perhaps MS thought it was a worthy trade-off if it meant they could get there before th Mountain View or Cupertino dudes.
MS wanted the Xbox to have 3 OS: Game, Metro and a 3rd to integrate the first 2.
Problem is this decidedly have a high memory footprint, which meant 8gb of ram from the get go. While Sony was okay with going in with less ram as long as they were the fast GDDR5 kind, MS could not afford to go in with 2 or 4 gb of GDDR5. It had to be 8gb, and at the early stages they could only guarantee such amounts using DDR3.
But DDR3 is slow, to compensate they decided to put in 32mb of ESRAM to compensate. The 32mb is a compromise. It is already eating into silicon budget, causing a significantly weaker GPU vs the PS4, worse, from what I understand by people knowledged in graphic rendering, 32mb is not enough to do straight forward deferred rendering in 1080p. Either developers need to drop resolution or think up workarounds.
The fact that MS even put up nonsense like 5 billion transistors as a bullet point spoke how much weaker MS knew the Xbox One was.
All the same, I don’t think a performance disadvantage would have sunk the Xbox boat.
Adam Orth, Deal with it
Then #dealwithit happened. Adam Orth, maybe joking, maybe half seriously, but ultimately beside the point, let the always-online-drm-cat out of the bag.
Outside MS being caught off guard by the early PS4 launch, I consider the Adam Orth fiasco the single greatest event to damage the Xbox.
For a long time there has been rumours that next gen consoles will be always online. My take is that MS was committed to it while Sony was thinking about it, purely because MS have been diving foolhardily into the SAAS and have the most to gain from an always connected console.
While both side played mum about the issue, Adam Orth’s comment meant that while Sony could continue to play the no comment card, MS could not. They had to answer or they’d hear no end of it at E3 and any message they wanted to put out to reverse the TV TV TV image they had from the initial unveil.
It’s quite clear MS was never ready to let loose their DRM policy this early in the game. It was bad news for gamers, and you don’t bring bad news this early in the news cycle, and they haven’t worked out all the details yet. They made the DRM a 24hr check-in, an arbitrary and laughably short period surely just so they can play the “it doesn’t need to be always online” card, when it might as well be.
There were also some vague mention of a family sharing plan, which they never could quite elaborate on, probably because they haven’t managed to reach a deal with the suits at EA and ActiBliz.
But they had no choice, so MS played its hand a dozen days out from E3, clearly trying to ride out the criticism and then bury it with a strong showing at E3.
In the days to follow, Orth, his twitter pic, his famous last words of “deal with it” and “why would I live there” will become a meme that ridiculed MS and epitomized their hubris.
E3, the perfect storm
Unfortunately, it meant gifting the trump card to Sony.
Even if Sony was never going to implement, they would not have been able to drop the hammer on MS so effectively and in such dramatic fashion.
Instead of talk surrounding DRM dying down, focused moved to Sony with the #ps4nodrm twitter campaign, and all eyes waited for what Sony had to say.
To standing ovations, Jack Tretton announced PS4 was not going to have any of that nonsense, no 24 hour check-in, no restriction on shared game, no restrictions on selling used games. There was the deftly sneaked in multiplayer needing PS+ subscription, no body cared though, Sony was the hero of gaming. The Official PlayStation Used Game Instructional Video, made probably on a budget of a night’s bar tab, reached epic viral level, with millions of views within hours, topping 14 millions by now, not even counting the re-uploads by other media sites.
Then there’s also the matter of the 399 price, against Xbox One’s 499.
This was the moment which spelled doom for Xbox. The atmosphere turned toxic against MS. Within moments the net was filled the comments like “RIP XBONE 2013-2013” “We just witnessed the console version of the Red Wedding. Sony send their regards” “XBONE, DOA”
The name Xbone (which was coined since the unveil) became its namesake.
Throughout E3 all everyone could talk about was the DRM. Despite MS’s efforts to deflect the topic with “have you seen Titanfall?” (which backfired brilliantly to become a meme itself as a symbol of MS’s non-answer to everything), the press was set on talking about how terrible the Xbox’s DRM was going to be.
MS was not helping themselves either. There were several fantastic and “did he really really just say that?” moments.
When asked if MS would reverse the DRM, since it can be done like a switch, Major Nelson snatched the mic from Angry Joe and belittled him for not being a dev. Rudeness aside, the scene will frame Major Nelson for ridicule just a week later.
Don Mattrick famously said the words of “Fortunately we have a product for people who aren’t able to get some form of connectivity; it’s called Xbox 360”, which caused major uproar and a masterfully photoshop of Don Mattrick against Marie Antoinette with the words “Let them play Xbox 360”.
It was both hilarious and sad at the same time to see MS flail against the rising tide of gamer and media storm, digging themselves ever further with each disastrous PR statement.
They tried, they tried to offer up a feeble sweetener that was the family plan, but without concrete details few bought it. Ironically people didn’t buy it because the plan as told was too good, which it probably was because MS could never elaborate on what if any restrictions it entailed.
As if things could not get any worse, the news reached mainstream. It’s one thing to anger a bunch of gamers, rabid fanboys they may be but end of the day not that many. It’s another to have the media call you out for abandoning serviceman abroad. And if there’s one thing about PR in America, it’s that you don’t appear to not care about the troops. I could already see the headline on Faux. (though it was actually CNBC that fired the first shot). MS failed spectacularly at stopping the hemorrhaging and quarantining the issue to the gaming circles.
News of the DRM went mainstream, and MS will spend long long days trying to salvage that image, burning resources and time they could ill afford.
The 180
Perhaps it’s the pre-order numbers, perhaps it’s the news going mainstream, or perhaps someone in Redmond woke up one day and told the Xbox division to stop the nonsense (Mattrique Dontoinette did jump over to Zynga in a hurry….).
Whatever the reason, MS came out a week after the bloodbath of E3 and said they were going to drop the DRM.
It stopped the bleeding, somewhat. It also got the Xbox a new name. The Xbox One Eighty, or Xbox 180.
Prism
2013 was really a terrible year to launch the Xbox. Just when I’m sure MS was glad they put a stop to the bad news surrounding the DRM, the focus shifted to PRISM and the always-on Kinect.
MS did themselves no favour by being one of the first companies to sign onto PRISM, and failed to allay fears that the Kinect would not be collecting user data. It probably is planned to do that, just not for PRISM, but advertisement, which is just as bad a thing to admit.
Despite MS saying it could be turned off (which one would argue, why then does it need to still be connected? Is off really really off? huh?)
Eventually MS dropped Kinect always connected as well, but stubbornly insisted on bundling the thing and conceding the $100 price difference to Sony.
Unfortunately, this decision only enforced the Xbox 180’s image, a device being launched with its initial plans in ruins and now without focus and without backup.
Balance?
After all the 180s, Xbox slowly but gradually found its footing. Every gamer it managed to get was only getting back one it had lost, while every gamer Sony got was one it didn’t have before and took from Xbox. But surely, it was recovering its ground.
Until the balance talk came out.
For now with all that delicious drama behind, gamers got onto what’s important in a console war. The specs and how much power each had.
MS, with the weaker platform, tried to put out a bunch of PR spin to convince gamers there were not going to be any big differences, a for a long time it worked.
But I’m not sure what MS was thinking, or what was their plan.
I think this is the different approach between Sony and MS come into play.
Sony has a very close and personal relation, with Shuhei actively engaging with people on twitter and always quick to dispel rumours or promise improvements, putting bad PR dead before it could take hold. And importantly, being the president of Sony World Wide Studios, what he said counted. People trusted him, and trusted he is in a position to know any details he was saying, and has the authority to ensure what he says gets implemented.
In contrast MS only had PR people, and a head of product design who probably is playing PR, trying to put out the fire. However being in the position they are they, either they could not speak with enough authority, nor be high enough to be privy to needed information.
When it was revealed not all of Kinect’s voice command would work, people asked for a list of what voice commands worked for which languages/countries, and was promised a chart explaining it will be coming. A promise later reneged because such a chart was up to marketing to release. While no fault of person, he was burning creds he could ill afford.
Throughout the period, MS signed checks that the Xbox will be similar in performance to the PS4, contrary to most technical explanation and rumours. Checks they will not be able to cash.
Perhaps their internal team over-promised for fear of their job. Perhaps MS sought to buy as much time as possible and push the pre-orders. Perhaps they simply had no idea what to do.
All that promise blew up with resolutiongate, COD: Dog and Battlefield 4 were going to be 720p while PS4 900p and 1080p respectively.
Instead of easing their fans to the news that Xbox might not be as pretty but look at all the great games it’ll have, fans who bought into the narrative were treated to a rude awakening.
The backlash was only expected.
Xbox 180, became Xbox 720…..
Can’t wait to see what the end result of this interesting year is.
