As much as I hate Microsoft for bringing tiered products to the console market and having a base model with no hard drive, thereby screwing developers by not having a uniform platform to develop for, £130 is nothing to sniff at for people still on the fence or without the disposable income.
I have friends who like plenty of current-gen games but can't afford to justify buying a system who might be tempted to pick up the Arcade at least.
I don't think the lack of a hard drive really does screw developers. Additionally with the name and marketing direction of the "Arcade" Xbox 360 it's safe to assume that a great deal of people owning the lowest priced, most casual SKU in the Xbox 360 line-up are probably not going to give a monkeys about a hard-disk requiring MMORPG. And if they really see it as a problem? They'll just release for the PS3 instead.
It's safe to say that the Premium will hit £160 as some retailers pretty soon, and if it does stay at the full, new price then it'll surely get some worth while bundle deals. People buying the Arcade are either broke, dare I say stupid, or just casual gamers.
Quite a few people I know are inexplicably ditching their Xbox 360s for PS3s now- Microsoft can drop their prices all they want, but unless they stop spouting the "We're making a games console" horse shit and pander to the people who want a well rounded multimedia device it's not going to gain them much ground. That said, anyone buying a PS3 for the Blu-ray player and media capabilities isn't going to be buying a lot of games. Microsoft don't want those sort!
And therein lies the trouble. I can cry about the functionality I want in the Xbox 360 for the rest of my life, but at the end of the day Microsoft are selling games, not a games console, so they don't give a monkeys about any functionality you might want that doesn't directly relate to you buying something from them.
Not being able to guarantee that the platform you're developing for has any form of storage at all, save for a paltry few megs on a memory card, has I'm sure affected many developers. That is a fairly big resource they can now not rely on.
I personally think 'Arcade' is a terrible name for the base SKU, as it implies the user might be using the console to purchase and download the cheaper and simpler Live Arcade titles instead of 60 bucks for a normal game, but are then hit with the fact that if they want to download more than a couple of games, they'll have to think about shelling out for a larger memory card. I get that the 'Arcade' name refers to the fact the base console is geared towards games rather than a media player, but still.
Also, I'm not going to get into a war about why people should or should not get a certain console over another. Its been done.
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As much as I hate Microsoft for bringing tiered products to the console market and having a base model with no hard drive, thereby screwing developers by not having a uniform platform to develop for, £130 is nothing to sniff at for people still on the fence or without the disposable income.
I have friends who like plenty of current-gen games but can't afford to justify buying a system who might be tempted to pick up the Arcade at least.
I don't think the lack of a hard drive really does screw developers. Additionally with the name and marketing direction of the "Arcade" Xbox 360 it's safe to assume that a great deal of people owning the lowest priced, most casual SKU in the Xbox 360 line-up are probably not going to give a monkeys about a hard-disk requiring MMORPG. And if they really see it as a problem? They'll just release for the PS3 instead.
It's safe to say that the Premium will hit £160 as some retailers pretty soon, and if it does stay at the full, new price then it'll surely get some worth while bundle deals. People buying the Arcade are either broke, dare I say stupid, or just casual gamers.
Quite a few people I know are inexplicably ditching their Xbox 360s for PS3s now- Microsoft can drop their prices all they want, but unless they stop spouting the "We're making a games console" horse shit and pander to the people who want a well rounded multimedia device it's not going to gain them much ground. That said, anyone buying a PS3 for the Blu-ray player and media capabilities isn't going to be buying a lot of games. Microsoft don't want those sort!
And therein lies the trouble. I can cry about the functionality I want in the Xbox 360 for the rest of my life, but at the end of the day Microsoft are selling games, not a games console, so they don't give a monkeys about any functionality you might want that doesn't directly relate to you buying something from them.
Anyway! Topically wavering rant over.
Not being able to guarantee that the platform you're developing for has any form of storage at all, save for a paltry few megs on a memory card, has I'm sure affected many developers. That is a fairly big resource they can now not rely on.
I personally think 'Arcade' is a terrible name for the base SKU, as it implies the user might be using the console to purchase and download the cheaper and simpler Live Arcade titles instead of 60 bucks for a normal game, but are then hit with the fact that if they want to download more than a couple of games, they'll have to think about shelling out for a larger memory card. I get that the 'Arcade' name refers to the fact the base console is geared towards games rather than a media player, but still.
Also, I'm not going to get into a war about why people should or should not get a certain console over another. Its been done.