The Xbox One throughout 2013 was lambasted pretty badly by most people who had a right proper head on their shoulders for the DRM policies and anti-consumer measures. Nevertheless, there were die-hard fanboys for the green brand that were going to buy Microsoft's $500 box even if it was a VCR player that only played tapes stitched together out of the feces of Guantanamo Bay prisoners.
Well, Microsoft was hedging big bets on the hardcore of the hardcore to be their base; the first adopters to the rescue. Looking forward, Microsoft is hoping that casuals will be their prime market within the lifespan of the Xbox One.
Spawnfirst caught wind of comments from an interview with Australia's Gameplanet, where Xbox's New Zealand lead Steven Blackburn commented about who the consumer is for the Xbox One, saying...
“At launch it’s the early adopter, the core of the core, guys that are passionate about core gaming experiences. There’s a buy-in either because of the brand association, or it’s looking forward to the future, or people responding to specific pieces of content, like Killer Instinct, Dead Rising, Forza. It’s absolutely as male and core-skewed as you can imagine, but that will change. We need to have the ability to be that broad church. It also needs to be easier. Gamers are willing to spend time configuring things, but someone who just wants to watch TV is not.”
Well that's laying it out thick and honest, eh? Using core gamers to beta test, basically. Not much to argue with... except for the fact that that plan totally burned Microsoft with the Xbox 360!
Towards the end of the seventh gen, and entering the eighth gen, the Xbox 360 saw itself being passed over by the PS3 frequently in monthly sales, leading up to the PS3 eventually surpassing the Xbox 360 in global sales in early 2013, as reported by Digital Spy.
Microsoft's abandonment of the core audience in 2010 in favor of the casuals didn't quite produce the same sort of results as Nintendo with the Wii or the ever-so-dominate 3DS.
Nonetheless, Microsoft's Australasian vice president of retail sales and marketing, Alan Bowman, had this to say about the adoption of the Xbox One...
“We can’t let the tech be a barrier.”
Then why didn't you guys make the UI and OS better?!
Had they done right by the audience in the first place maybe they wouldn't be trailing behind the PS4 by more than a million SKUs.
Microsoft is as baffling as right wing extremists using Obamacare; which in turn is almost as baffling as Google forcing people to attach their plus accounts to YouTube, so now you get to see who the real person is behind a comment so retarded that it makes the monkey from the butt-sniffing video look like a prodigy of Stephen Hawking.
Rumors around the gaming gossip block is that there's a 10% performance boost inbound with the latest patch for the Xbox One. The patch is part of a new wave of OS improvements that Microsoft is expected to roll out through 2014, as they iterate, iterate and iterate some more until the Xbox One is finally appeasing enough to attract more than just super-core, testosterone-laden young men who have sexual aggression issues and seem to have a deep fascination with expressing all forms of dialogue circulating around the act of rectal penetration whenever commenting about console wars and daily life.
Maybe with a bit of an overhaul to Kinect to support more than just NSA spying and shoddy voice-commands, Microsoft will finally be able to tap the same audience that Nintendo reaches with their casual devices and down-to-Earth marketing that captured them the majority of market share during the seventh generation of gaming.
(Main image courtesy of Destructoid)
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