Carrot on a stick.

Do you offer the carrot, or do you use the stick?   Well, if you have a carrot on a stick, you can do either or both.  Neither is probably always an option as well.

One problem there is what if they don't like carrots. Add to that, what if they aren't bothered by the stick?

It's more like rock and a hard place but that's so overused and exceedingly trite.  Just typing it makes me feel like I do when I hear the sounds of the current Xbox 360 (which everyone calls the 360 of course).   I mean, it's all fine to be childish or proud of a Wii or prancy-dancy uber-queen-style gay or  ultra-feminine all 1950s-like or a fan of the overly dulcet or a product of the times in general, however you want to put it.    Somebody has to watch reality TV shows or there wouldn't be so many of them, QED and quid pro quo.    Yet not everyone appreciates trying to be converted to a certain point of view, especially those who already are.  

Obviously even that mild sort of thing is sure to bring disapproval or even anger, but like what much of the rest of this talk is about, those are all the sorts of things we'll discuss.  Ideas, personal preferences and how we react to things.   Examples are wonderful things, sometimes.




The recent reveal of the XBox One was.....   curious.  Maybe.  Which like calling the first the Xbox, the second the 360, this one just flows with XB-One or more concise, xbone, however you pronounce it.  We might ask, is there anyone really thinking here about what fans and detractors might say about the name, or is that all part of some plan.  Does anyone cut Microsoft any slack for a reboot?      That all rather misses the point, even though it is an interesting question.    Who's in charge here, is somebody at the wheel.    Does anyone even know where they're sailing to.

There are other fish to fry besides the names of things.  The Reveal, for those who bothered watching it?    Well that's an issue right there.   When you already have an idea one team is going to smash another one, you might just not watch the glorious but somewhat disturbing spectacle of the mismatch (if it's your team winning) or the ignoble defeat (if it's your team losing) and just take a gander at the score by halves or the final score after the fact.      Which is a cute idea, what if instead of getting a football game, you got a talent content.    Then there's always the people that do other things during commercials and halftime or stretches, or don't even care about sports.

But we digress.   The Reveal spent at least half the time on the Entertainment (non-game-entertainment) side of things.  Which isn't surprising given how the ads in the week or two before it lead up to it.   And even less surprising watching the "Kinect drive" or how the dashboard layout, content, color scheme and sound scheme have been playing out in the last year or so.    The deals with Verizon and Comcast and ESPN and Netflix.   Or the addition of a web browser, something that seemed impossible two or three years ago.  That The Reveal was rather Apple-like, they are the biggest company of that type these days, and it's not because of their attitude or their computers, right?

The short of it though is that this was annoying and aggravating but not a surprise.   It's a logical progression, and  it's actually already been happening.  So let's talk about some of those things, many of which the concepts apply to many of the others as well.   Think big-picture.

1.   The Kinect is a cool gadget, a gimmick of sorts, but it does a lot of things well.    Interactive content for children, sports and exercise, dancing, curious touch screen games brought to life. Futuristic video phone ove IP!     But for the games, some are more painful than others. And a number they've just given away.  Drawn people in, proven their concept.    The possibilities are there with the current Kinect, which I suppose we could call an experiement, and an experiment that succeeded.    Sure, some games are painful.    Sure, sometimes when trying to select things on screen  --  even with good light and proper space  -- gives a queezy icky sort of feeling as things jump around while you try and hold your hands steady so it  recognizes somebody's holding their hand there.   Picking up the controller to more quickly easily friendly move around the screen rather defeats the purpose.   Even still, not everyone has a Kinect, even at whatever price cut they took to offer it at $150.   So nobody can count on a Kinect being there when they develop a "normal" game or app, even when it might benefit greatly from having body and voice recognition et al.

So, what if the Kinect was more stable, with better resolution.  What if it had more awareness of who was who and where every part of everyone was.   What if everyone had a Kinect,  and game and app developers and content providers could count on it being there.    That is pretty good thing.   Great even.   If.

The issue though relates to what we started on.   What about the kickback, the bad feelings, the impression you're being force-fed the device.     Well, we don't know how that will impact who, but we'd imagine that Microsoft has thought of that.   Have they actually though?  And in the correct way with the correct questions, answers and decisions.  

There's another aspect to that of course -- it's still a few months before the XB One comes out.   Five, six, more.     A lot can happen.   There is room to maneuver.   There is E3 coming up.   (Although we wouldn't expect that anything they do at E3 is really going to wipe anything much that's "on the bad side"  out, E3 goings on won't address all the important considerations or solve the major problems.)   There's also that Sony hasn't really gone into detail yet.    What they do (will do) and how they put it will make a difference as well.      They don't seem to be going about it the right way in the present, but when it's all said and done, it might turn out that hindsight is the man in the skinny jeans doing parkour.

2.  Content, convergence, multitasking, games, et al.     There were a number of millions who got the Xbox or the 360, to play games.   That's the core, but recently 360 sales have picked up in a number of areas of the world.  Specifically North America at least.    Gamers alone are not responsible for that, unless you count the new style of gamers, who might just want to switch from game to browser to app to game.   In some style the xbone is going to do some of that.   Lots of people (many of them the new millions) are going to want that functionality.

The question is will that be enough soon enough to make an impact.    How many are going to jump on the xbone (or the psfour for that matter) when they come out?    Perhaps the Wii versus WiiU might tell that story, partly, maybe.  But most people might agree there's not really much of a way to compare the threesixty to the psthree to the we, at least not directly, or meaningfully.    Just glancing at the top sellers on each might answer that question of comparison.    So we probably have to wait until say November 2013, or maybe even this time in 2014 to get any sort of an answer on what happens with the Xbox One and the PS4 and the sales of them and their games.

3.    The state of the gaming environment.   This is the big one.  

Not all gamers are on consoles.   Nor will they be.   Computers (essentially,  Personal Computers running Windows) have better hardware.  At a cost of course, but for graphics and CPU and RAM performance, none of the consoles can compete at all.   Number of monitors possible, resolutions.    Even on the network side of things.   Then there's mouse and keyboard, which many would say are far superior in all ways to controllers, which with adapters, you can use any of them from any console on a computer too.   That's even when a game is made to work on a controller.    Although when it comes to computers,  there are a number of people who dislike Valve and Steam as much as they dislike Microsoft or Sony and their products and methods.   A wash in terms of a lot of things.

Then there's the phones, really smartphones, which we might as well call handheld computers.   Which people seem to do very little actual calling on.     Same goes in a lot of ways for tablets, which some of the smartphones are small tablets.     Games a plenty.  There is much competition out there, how does somebody cope?

Used games, that's another.   It's not just those who don't buy games when they come out, which in practice "all cost $60".   Aside from season passes, DLC, multiplayer unlock codes, and the like, nobody publishing or distributing games makes anything from the used ones.   Of course, nobody makes anything if nobody buys the games ever either, or doesn't even get your console in the first place.   How is that fixed?   With a computer and digital delivery, you can have sales if they don't sell well, and you can sell them for years, there's no money there either.   Who wants to pay $60 for digital if the physical costs the same?   These are issues to work out, and there's no easy answer.

But what if the physical is just a method of distribution, with the licensing and purchasing all done for the software rather than for the media?   How does that help or hurt in the drive to compete with computers, desktop, laptop, tablet, handheld.   What does the pricing structure look like.


There's also that game installation to hard drive bit and such.   With 30 gig games, 500 gig isn't much, so for those who often are playing off and on 5 to 20 games at a time, that's kind of an idea they've dropped the ball on, maybe.     Something to consider.


Yet what about the choices?    If the xbone and psfour as the two choices, and if they both do things the same way, does that help or hurt things versus all the rest out there.  Does the way they do things drive people further to weyou, non-consoles, and so on?   Gamers are gamers it's true, but many people are not gamers. Probably most people are not.   (Out of every 10 or 100 random people, how many would say they are hardcore gamers.)    So maybe the question isn't even how you appeal to them (as appears the track Sony is more taking with their hardware and more pure gaming sort of console, if you will) but how you engage everyone in all the demographics in a household (as appears the track Microsoft is taking with their hardware and more non-game type of entertainment focused console, if you will).    Maybe the question is who has the money or who makes the buying decisions.

4.   Backwards compatibility.     How do you make a new console with seven years worth of technology improvements play things made for a $200 or $300 console?   The easy answer is, you don't.    The simple solution is for those with the current console is to keep it, and play their games for it on it.    Seems both Sony and Microsoft have decided that, and what else can you say.    A question about that is, how long after the new consoles come out will there be new games and support for the 360 or the PS3?     Another for the xbone in particular is can you feed that signal from the 360 in like you can with a cable box.   How about the psfour?     We might imagine that for as many existing consoles are out there, they'll be available and playable and replaceable for quite a long time, and there are many many many current or used games that somebody could just keep buying.     Not everyone is going to have the desire or the funds to get a new $400 or $500 console anyway, and there's always those "other computers" to play games on.  

5.   Achievements. This is pretty particular to the 360/One (although there are trophies for the 3/4 as well).    When it comes to that, adding a bunch of fluff is the same as adding a bunch of new ways to add to your gamerscore.    Does that "weaken" the impact of those who have all of theirs from gaming?    We could suggest that with GFW, Windows 8, Windows Phone, as well as normal titles and arcade games, that's already happened.    Toss in the number of games that are "easy 1000".   And that except to the most ardent fan (if you prefer, illogical psychotic) most buyers and potential buyers in most ways only give three things about them; jack, doodly, and squat.    

It's not a question if anyone is going to be upset and angry and feeling betrayed about them, as they should.   The question is what does it mean overall big picture.    Hey, you can always break it down by real games you really play, rather than how you managed to get 1000 points by visiting the grocery store, playing  King Kong, 2K6 Baseball and Avatar The Last Airbender.   Or by doing a bunch of tricks to actually hit 1000 on Final Fantasy XI, Rumble Roses XX, Chromehounds,  Battlefield: Bad Company, Lost Planet 2, Guitar Hero II, Guitar Hero III, Guitar Hero Van Halen, Beatles Rockband, Lego Rockband, and Max Payne 3.

6.   Live Gold.  (Or PlayStationPlus if you wish to compare.)  For an Xbox of some sort, nothing much is going to change there probably, perhaps.    For $40 a year (or thereabouts, if it doesn't change) players get access to the network, the apps, discounts, freebies.    This kind of ties in with the Bing and Rewards ways to add MSP, if that stays around.     Some of this some of that, not really a consideration in a lot of ways -- at least not compared to the rest.

7. The Cloud.       Calling random computers out there holding some data "The Cloud" is perhaps the most meaningless sort of vapid silly thing.  Oooh, data storage that lives on another computer of some sort that you can get to remotely, wow.    64 Gig flash drives aren't always supported on a device, no.   So yes, sure, it's convenient often to box or skydrive things from your "phone" or to have persistent data out there on a server someplace from your gaming console (entertainment command center).   Just like it's convenient to have  gigs of email space, or even better, support for emailing large multi-gig files. The Cloud!!!!  Such functionality has been needed for a while, but it's hardly make or break, or even much of a differentiator necessarily.   Just like downloading files to local storage or what have you.

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There's probably a lot more out there, and a lot more to discuss for some.   For others, it all boils down to one thing, do they spend a few hundred dollars in a few months on a new console, or don't they.    The consoles not yet out will end up how they end up.   They' have what they have, and not have what they don't.

Consumer feedback might change some things policy and hardware and the like.    It will almost certainly change some of the focus and some of the message over the next few months, but there is a real world reality to deal with in all of this beyond what we each might want or need or appreciate.

In the end, all that counts as sales versus your rivals, regardless if that is on a horizontal or vertical.     Or actually, both.

Just like a carrot on a stick.