MS on rushing Forza and TV is apparently important

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Xbox Consoles Feature: Xbox One exclusives: Phil Spencer talks assembling Microsoft's biggest line-up ever - Xbox 360 - The Official Magazine

The gist I got from this was:

- We're rushing the next Forza out the gate because Mario Kart and Gran Turismo are coming soon
- Xbox One is the future of how we'll watch TV. No, seriously, it totally is.
- We revived Killer Instinct just because.
- We will support 360 for years to come.

I don't get their reasoning for rushing out Forza for launch, though. Gran Turismo 6 is a PS3 game last I checked and Mario Kart 8 is going to miss the holiday because, unlike MS, they seem to want it to be a good, polished and complete game. Add to this that all three games shoot for different audiences.

GT is more of a gearhead's racer. Its not something I want, but I get why there are people really into that. Mario Kart is just pure arcade chaos. I was left with the impression Forza was somewhere between sim and arcade style racer.

TV - don't care, if I want TV, that's what the TV was already for.

Killer Instinct - fighters aren't MOBAs, stop treating them like they are. You too, Namco and Tecmo-Koei.

As for supporting 360, yeah, I think it would be wise to. Considering Sony and Nintendo keep their platforms in rotation for years after the new consoles and that's part of what helps their operations remain profitable, dropping 360 like MS did the original Xbox would be kind of a bad idea.

Nintendo is profitable this year partly because (well, aside from them always being that way save for last year) they have DS, Wii, 3DS and Wii U out there. Wii U might be suffering, but Wii and DS still sell and 3DS is doing really well. Sony was wise to keep PS2 in rotation for as long as they did considering PS3 had a rough start and didn't find traction until its third year - PSP did get cut short in the West, though. At least it did in the US.

[Malacite]

Re: MS on rushing Forza and TV is apparently important

PSP got cut short because it was failing miserably, which apparently was due in large part to piracy.


Otherwise... tl;dr = MS still has its head way up its own ass, nothing new to see here folks lol.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: MS on rushing Forza and TV is apparently important

I don't really think the PSP was a failure. Slow-starter, maybe, and rampant piracy was an issue, but as far as I know PSP games still get made in Japan and its sometime beats Vita in weekly sales wheras it used to do that rather consistently.

[Malacite]

Re: MS on rushing Forza and TV is apparently important

It was a failure in North America. In Japan it did quite well (and also got a lot of good games we never saw, not to mention online support... f'ing Ad-hoc) but not so much here.

A shame really, as I'm still very fond of my PSP and don't regret buying it for a moment. My DS is another story.

[Firewind]

Re: MS on rushing Forza and TV is apparently important

Forza and Gran Turismo are both sim racers. Forza gained a lot more population due to the online features and community as well as things like the ability to trade cars and custom designs. The customisation tools were very powerful and used vector graphics tools only seen in very powerful CAD stuff. Forza also had online leaderboards where you could compare times with friends and things like that if you didn't want to race against other people but still wanted to see how good your times are. There was also a huge number of real world tracks and things like that. Basically it was an example of how you add Online Play and Online Features to a game while taking nothing away from the already very good single player experience. Basically they combined the Racing, Simulation and RPG genre into one very fun game series.

Compare to GT5 which was just well...Shit. It felt exactly like 4 with shinier graphics and has hardly any cars or tracks. Plus the AI never acknowledged the existence of the player and your times would be void if you were hit by an AI driver even if it wasn't your fault. They also took out the ability to customise cars and the ability to tune the cars to each track, and they took out damage and the like. Basically it had half of the features of GT4 and Forza and gave people little reason to play GT5 over GT4 or Forza.

Forza Horizons are an Arcade racer though. I never played it so I can't tell you much about that. I tend to just play Need for Speed or Mario Kart if I want to play an Arcade style racer.

Basically for Simulation Racers, Gran Turismo, F1 and Forza are the main games in the market (at least in the EU). F1 is the only third party one and tends to sell stupidly well in the UK due to being by a UK dev. Forza and GT are still popular though I'd say they have about the same number of fanboys, and given the EU is a good market for Racing games, I can see why they would want it out to beat GT and Mario Kart. However, we all know what happens when you rush out a game to beat your rival. Just look at FFXIV 1.0 and Dragon Age 2.

So basically the game is a pretty important one to get out because it has a pretty big market, especially outside the US; Europeans do love their motor racing and sports games in general after all. TV stuff, nobody outside of the US cares about since it is all US ONRY. That said...Yeah I'm a big fan of Forza and I do NOT want it to be rushed out.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: MS on rushing Forza and TV is apparently important

Now that think back, GT5 cut those features to justify the DLC cars, didn't they? So it went form being the gearhead game GT3 and 4 were to more of a pay-to-win game.

[Firewind]

Re: MS on rushing Forza and TV is apparently important

Pretty much yes.