The BBC have a really good interview here which is well worth watching. And I must admit that the more I read and think about this, the more impressed I am.
The Wiimote will now be seen as interim technology, a side story on the road to the whole body interface. Having face (and emotion) recognition in Natal is a big step forward with huge gaming potential. Allied to the whole body scanning and voice recognition we have something that is of groundbreaking importance.
Natal has immense possibilities way beyond recreational gaming. Sports coaching, medical rehabilitation and military training spring immediately to mind. In fact any human activity where you have to build neuromuscular facilitation.
The limitations put on the human imagination by previous gaming interfaces have all been swept away. A lot of clever and creative people are going to do a lot of clever and creative things with Natal.
The Microsoft E3 press conference was so full of big announcements and celebrities that they couldn’t fit everything in. So it was left to a press luncheon for one of the most important announcements.
Games on Demand will allow games to be bought, using credit cards, from the Xbox Live service for direct download onto the hard drive. Starting in August with 30 games with more added on a regular basis. They are talking about titles like Crackdown, Mass Effect, Call of Duty 2, Assassin’s Creed, Oblivion and BioShock. There is no reason why they shouldn’t make the entire catalogue of Xbox games available for purchase this way.
Of course Microsoft are, for once, behind Sony in going down this route.
The whole concept of high street retail and physical stock for digital distribution is looking decidedly archaic now, we are only holding onto it by habit. Getting rid of bricks and mortar is brilliant for publishers who can launch a game simultaneously worldwide without having to carry any inventory and without having to give massive margin away to the distribution chain.
I have been going on for ages about the convergence between gaming and social networking. Now Microsoft have made this a greater reality by integrating both Twitter and Facebook with Xbox Live. This is a massive announcement that will significantly change how people play and how they network socially. It enhances Live hugely to distance it even further ahead of anything else out there.
In 2002 Sony brought us the Eyetoy peripheral but failed to capitalise on its potential. At the 2005 Tokyo Game Show Nintendo revealed their Wii gesture interface that was probably the biggest ever single step change in video gaming. Now Microsoft, after a long gestation, have taken both these ideas and developed them several steps further for the Xbox 360, adding voice control whilst they were at it.
If this works as well as portrayed in the video above then it will be little short of revolutionary, the imagination of game designers can take flight in limitless ways. Removing all control input limitations means gaming can go places we would never have dreamed of.
From a hardware point of view the change in abilities that this brings the Xbox 360 are so great that it is almost like they had launched a new console. But the upcoming Xbox 720 will still be on schedule, Moore’s Law and competitive pressure will make this inevitable.
And competitively, if Natal works as advertised, the Wii will be in severe trouble with its main party trick trumped. And the Playstation 3 is looking distinctly old generation with no gesture interface. All this could change over the next 48 hours as Nintendo and Sony make their E3 announcements. We live in interesting times.
Using Sky on Xbox will be better than the existing Sky service because you will be able to use all the Live community features at the same time. So you can watch a live football match whilst chatting about it to your friends all over the country.
Nobody can deny that Microsoft have done it. They have become a success in only the second generation of their console product. And against embedded competition.
Xbox is now a license to print money. And if they manage it right it will become a bigger cash cow than their PC software ever was.
Microsoft’s genius was that they saw beyond the box and they saw beyond the packaged games. They realised that the future of gaming was an online service. An online service that will ultimately work with several different boxes. And an online service that is growing to be independent of packaged games. Xbox Live is that service, the biggest game portal in the world and by far the most valuable property in the history of video gaming.
Eventually you will be able to access Live from your television, from your phone and from the seatback screen when you are flying. It will be all things to all people. What we have seen thus far is only the beginning.
The internet is awash with rumours of a revised PS3 to be announced at E3, so it must be true. Nicknamed PS3 slim, the new unit is said to be considerably smaller than the original. This makes eminent sense. Firstly the insides of a console constantly evolve during its life to use use less and more modern components, so why not shrink the outsides to reflect that and save money? It is something Sony have done before. Secondly a significant percentage of the cost of a console is shipping, warehousing and other inventory costs, halve the size of the boxed machine and you nearly halve these costs.
What is for sure is that Sony are coming third and last in this generation of home consoles, a long way down from having won the two previous generations. PS3 has cost them many billions in losses and the only way to recover the situation is to get more machines out there. The most effective mechanism they have to do that is price. So the PS3 slim could be the start of the Sony fightback.
