Apparently it is as hard to recognise that the Xbox 360 is moving beyond its gaming roots as it is to accept that the metaphor about slow-boiling a frog is false. That seems to be the message of the opening two paragraphs of a pre-E3 blog from Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President, Corporate Communications, Frank Shaw.
Microsoft are trying to arrive at the goal of placing a games console at the heart of family home entertainment from the opposite direction that Sony tried with the PS3. With their need to get as many Blu-ray players installed in homes as they could, Sony began by selling the PS3 as a full-featured, and expensive, home entertainment hub.
Whereas Microsoft started with a gaming console and have grown its value proposition as a home entertainment device by taking advantage of the increasingly widespread and capable network infrastructure.
While much of the blog post is, unsurprisingly, what you might call ‘PR fluff’, there are a few statements that might be interesting from our gamer’s viewpoint. Let’s start with the line ‘abbreviated’ to provide the headline above:
While people are still playing a ton of video games, 40 percent of all Xbox activity now is non-game.
He says the average Xbox 360 is now used for “video consumption” for around 30 hours a month. No indication is given about whether those are U.S.-only figures or exactly what that video consumption is. If that’s video content purchased or subscribed to via the Xbox LIVE Marketplace or the services like Sky and ESPN those are good figures, which are apparently “growing fast”. If, however, it also somehow includes activities such as people streaming DVD rips from their PC to big-screen TV it is perhaps less impressive.
What that also tells us though is that the average Xbox 360, among whatever population the data is gathered from, is being used for around 75 hours a month. That is more than one tenth of a month and hence, on average, around 2.5 hours per day, every day.
Let’s look at some more numbers from the blog:
…we’ve sold more than 53 million Xbox 360 consoles, and Xbox has been the top-selling console in the last year.
Compound statements like that start the mental alarm bells ringing because for both halves of the statement to be true the numbers have to come from different datasets. You might have noticed our recent post that reported the latest sales data for the consoles.
The “more than 53 million Xbox 360 consoles” is clearly a reference back to Microsoft’s latest quarterly data which records worldwide sales of 53.6m. From that same post of ours you can also see that worldwide sales of the PS3 topped those of the Xbox 360 by 1 million over the last four quarters, 14.3m vs. 13.3m.
Therefore the second half of Shaw’s statement “Xbox has been the top-selling console in the last year” is almost certainly referring only to the U.S. video games market. Funny how he makes no mention of that.
The general message that Shaw is pushing out there with the blog is that Microsoft are going to be heavily promoting the home entertainment aspects of the Xbox 360, particularly when paired with Kinect, throughout this year’s E3.
Such a focus and reinvigorated sales drive from Microsoft may well lend added credence to the $100-off Xbox 360 and Kinect bundle that adverts were spotted for recently. A welcome-to-Microsoft side effect of announcing that bundle may be that, should the NGP/Vita launch at the rumoured PS3-like price of $299 then Microsoft’s offering will look like spectacular value compared to what Sony is bringing to the table.
Not that the NGP is going to have an easy time of it regardless, unless Sony can achieve some kind of pricing miracle as in Japan survey respondents are citing the high price of Nintendo’s 3DS as the single biggest reason they have not yet bought one. It is hard to believe the NGP will be any cheaper.
Back to the Microsoft blog in question though. The broader home entertainment push is something that is, of course, likely to rankle somewhat with the more gaming-focused Xbox 360 owners. An oft-mentioned complaint from Xbox 360 gamers of late has been the relative lack of disc-based exclusives.
In the blog Shaw states
The vision for Xbox is straightforward: All of the entertainment you want.
Turning that into some questions, we would like to ask those of you who are Xbox 360 owners, is it giving you all the entertainment you want? Are you happy with the exclusive titles we know about? Will you be happy if the Xbox 360 becomes more and more about home entertainment and less games-focused?
KillFelix
On my PS3 my time is spend around 70%/30% – Other/Games.
Other includes Bluray/Internet/iPlayer/PlayTV
Foxhound_Solid
Agreed.
The Mysterious Phantom Bear
In terms of entertainment capacity my 360 usage is 100% games usage because it has a terrible rickety DVD drive that sounds like it’s on old castanets.
The PS3 has Blu-ray and a near silent drive, that in conjunction with its upscaling ability means my 360 only gets used for games.
Maybe Microsoft want to change the perception of the device and branch out but to me the hardware limitation precents me from using it.
The majority of 360 users I speak to who own both use their PS3 more for non-game activity due to the features I’ve mentioned and Lovefilm subscriptions. The majority of 360 users for whom it is their sole console use it for the occasional ripped DVD and streaming dodgy PC content.
I am not saying that my experience is absolutem, but it has been my experience.
JesseDeya
Likewise.
I’ve done back to back comparisons of DVD and streamed playback with my PS3 and 360 and the PS3is just ‘better’ in every way. It’s faster to stream, IQ is higher, better sound, even the menu overlays during playback are significantly better on PS3.
In Australia, Xbox has access to Foxtel (pay tv) with a subscription, but you can’t record anything and the channel selection is very limited. Most of the people I know who tried it ended up cancelling. By contrast, the doesn’t have Foxtel but it has PlayTV, Video Store, Mubi and Vidzone.
When I’m in the US, the PS3 offers Netflix, MLB.TV, NHL.TV, Video Store and Vidzone. AFAIK the 360 only has EPSN, Zune and Netflix.
Photos and Music are much better handled on the PS3, there are at least two separate photo apps and the interaction with Facebook and Picasa/Google is excellent.
It’s not that the 360 is bad at this media stuff, but it’s pretty ‘average’. Given a choice it’s PS3 hands down for me, and that’s before we even factor in Bluray.
JesseDeya
Sorry, I should mention ESPN on Xbox is ESPN3, an otherwise completely free service. If it were all the ESPN channels it might actually be pretty cool. It’s not.
BrainDiver
Same here. In my case it’s because of the lack of a blu ray drive, that and the ps3 does the best upscaling I’ve thus far encountered. Oh, and also because I love the earth visualiser when I play music from it, it’s just so classy :)
The Mysterious Phantom Bear
Prevents* and Absolute*
Sausage fingers. Apologies.
Kevatron400
A mate of mine watches a lot of football on sky player, but then that does also require a sky subscriptions, so maybe that’s more of a win for Sky than for Microsoft.
Tuffcub
The “non gaming” claim is just hot air. Switching on an Xbox and just leaving it is technically “non gaming”.
nofi
Wonder what you’d call the PS3 when it’s crawling through title updates?
Tuffcub
Oh I’m sorry did Sony just release menaingless “non gaming” statistics? Wait.. no they didnt.
Please call back when you have a better argument.
*beep*
ruinereraser
KO :)
jayjay119
Technically yeah, but why would anyone do that? The last 360 I had ended up as a glorified DVD player so the claims aren’t that hard to believe.
DirtyHabit
Funnily enough my PS3 is becoming a glorified Blu-ray player / DVR. But even that is loosing steam as my Play TV appears to be up the shoot now too…..
tom_lord
Uh-oh, you know what this PR waffle really means……………..relatively little on the game front come E3…!
Watchful
That’s my concern. I’d guess less than 60% of MS’ 90 E3 minutes will be about games.
DrNate86
That was my thought as well. Doesn’t look good for the hardcore market.
DirtyHabit
I use Last.FM quite a bit,(maybe 3-4 hrs p/w) theres some suprisingly good content on there….
The Lone Steven
I thought most xbox gamers used their xbox as a games console. I thought MS were trying to sell this as a console and not an entertainment hub. I need to keep up to date with these things. This is a bit worrying if they are focusing in PR stuff as that could mean they have a lack of games this year for E3. I hope they prove me wrong. Plus the NuTSAck crew would have little to talk about if i’m right.
Darksidesystems
My 360 only ever gets switched on when I need to scratch a Gears of War itch. The rest of the time it’s just too noisy and I resent buying live to use any of the “free” services like Sky player or Last FM. I has A PS3 slim now. It gives me a happy face! :)
Watchful
Mine’s slowly becoming a Gears and Forza machine as far as disc-based titles go. The likes of Shadow Complex and Trials HD mean it still gets some XBLA action though.
colmshan1990
I thought the 360 has a built-in DVD player?
Why are people streaming DVDs from their PC? Video files, I’d understand, but DVDs? Surely it’d be better quality if the data was being read from the disc, rather than being broken down, compressed, and reassembled on the other end by a games console?
Watchful
That’s just my guess at a possible use.
They might be streaming DVD rips because they’ve ‘backed up’ their DVDs to create an awesome digital media library. Or maybe, if they’re really naughty, they don’t own the actual DVDs. But no one would do that would they? :)