...Xbox 360 Defines Today and Tomorrow Robert Gaugh DeVry University Xbox 360 Defines Today and Tomorrow In 2005 Microsoft introduced the Xbox 360 to the world of console gaming; a moment that would define today and tomorrow for the rest of our lives. Microsoft stood out by treading uncharted waters that other competitors and previous consoles failed to explore. With people in mind, innovative heads at Microsoft catered to every gamer’s needs with the release of Xbox 360. By capturing exclusive rights to five game of the year titles, improving the online gaming experience, and remaining on the forefront of cutting edge technology, the Xbox 360 defines today and tomorrow. With big names like Sony and Nintendo ready to knock the consumer right off their feet, Microsoft needed to stand out and shine in a way its competitors couldn’t. The Xbox 360 needed exclusivity, and accomplished this by grabbing the rights to Halo, Gears of War, Fable, Forza Motorsport and Mass Effect. Not only were these franchises game of the year recipients, they specifically were the answer to all the rival gaming successes. Halo was the answer to any first person shooter success on any other console along with Gears of War. Forza Motorsport delivered the simulated racing game that Gran Turismo did for Sony. Fable and Mass Effect, yet different in ways, brought new meaning to the role playing genre by bringing a different approach than what gamers were used to. Microsoft’s decisiveness with...
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...Xbox One's exterior casing consists of a two-tone "liquid black" finish; with half finished in a matte grey, and the other in a glossier black. The matte side of the top of the console consists of a large air vent. The design was intended to evoke a more entertainment-oriented and simplified look than previous iterations of the console; among other changes, the LED rings used by Xbox 360 are replaced by a glowing white Xbox logo used to communicate the system's status to the user. Unlike the Xbox 360 console, because its "airflow and venting system was optimized for this horizontal orientation", the Xbox One was made only to sit horizontally. Internals Xbox One is powered by an AMD "Jaguar" Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) with two quad-core modules totaling eight x86-64 cores clocked at 1.75 GHz, and 8 GB of DDR3 RAM with a memory bandwidth of 68.3 GB/s.The memory subsystem also features an additional 32 MB of "embedded static" RAM, or ESRAM, with a memory bandwidth of 109 GB/s. Eurogamer has been told that for simultaneous read and write operations the ESRAM is capable of a theoretical memory bandwidth of 192 GB/s and that a memory bandwidth of 133 GB/s has been achieved with operations that involved alpha transparency blending. The system includes a non-replaceable hard drive and a Blu-ray Disc optical drive.138 GB of hard drive space is used by the operating system, with the remainder available for the storage of games. Since the June 2014 software update, up to two USB...
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... sbadrina Case 1: Xbox 360 The decision to enter a highly competitive video game market presented huge demand and supply challenges to Microsoft, and from a design and manufacturing perspective, their motivations and decision to evolve their supply chain for a global launch of Xbox 360 was more beneficial than risky, even though there are a few caveats. One of the key strategic decisions that supported their evolving supply chain was establishing a market presence with the original Xbox console, and then to introduce the Xbox 360 a year before Sony would release their next generation console. To achieve this, Microsoft, which originally was not able to reduce costs on their processing and graphics chips, and overall manufacturing costs with product design, changed its strategy and contracted with chip companies to produce the Xbox 360 chips, but owned the designs of these chips, ultimately reducing costs and providing Microsoft an increased leverage with the suppliers. Not only would this give Microsoft an increased control, but also helped Microsoft achieve increased flexibility in its global supply chain, thereby allowing it to ship the products to global locations for an early launch, ultimately beating Sony's launch of their upcoming product. The second major advantage in Microsoft's evolving supply chain strategy was the synergistic confluence in bringing their manufacturers Flextronics and Wistron into optimizing their design production for the Xbox 360. The distribution...
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...1.0 Introduction Microsoft Xbox 360 Kinect Microsoft is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products related to computing through its product division. Microsoft Studios (formerly Microsoft Game Studios) is a brand owned by Microsoft to represent the company as a developer and publisher of video games. Founded in 2002, Microsoft Game Studios to coincide with the release of the Xbox, it develops and publishes exclusively for Xbox, Xbox 360, Games for Windows and Windows 7 platforms. Launched in November 2010, the Xbox 360 Kinect is a great new concept in which the user does not need a controller at all. The camera recognizes human movements, gestures and voices and then performs actions on the screen. It may look funny to see a person playing on the Kinect, but it is an exhilarating new experience that few other devices can match (Buzzle, 2007). 1.1 Market The Kinect, which is Microsoft’s “most ambitious, risky and innovative move in years,” is the company’s attempt to appeal to a broader audience, and get casual and non-gamers to purchase the Xbox 360 (The New York Times Online, 2010). Most of the software titles that use the Kinect are family-friendly or party games, much like the games consumers purchase along with the Nintendo Wii. Significantly, industry observers are calling the Kinect a “game-changer”, with technology that is clearly ahead of that of its...
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...Jim Zeltner MKT 333 Packaging The product whose packaging I’m going to be writing about is the package of the Xbox One video games which is very different in a good way compared to what the Xbox 360 game cases looked like. The communication aspect of the Xbox One case compared to the Xbox 360 is pretty much the same in that in front it’s the game title and in the back it’s the features of the game. The difference is that the Xbox 360 cases has decent size game manuals along with some advertisements of other products where the Xbox One game cause only has a small game manual with only a few pages and that’s it. The Xbox one game case compared to the Xbox 360 game case is more functional in that it is a much smaller box with the same size disk so the goal there is that it takes up less room when putting it away and maybe costs less because it is less material being used. The perceptual benefits compared to the old game cases is that it is obviously smaller in size and also they made the cover art of the games stand out by being very shiny/holographic compared to just nothing fancy about the cover. The package is a valuable part of the product in that it tells you what the product is and holds the actual product (the disk) inside of it. The package is an effective marketing tool because it does stand out with it being smaller than what all the video game cases have been like. It also contributes to differentiation in the same way because it is unique in that the game case is...
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...The total sales for the Xbox One as of November 2015 in the U.S. were 8,503,910, with a total of 15,078,055 sales worldwide (Keating, 2015). In 2016, Microsoft’s Xbox One was responsible for $9.1 billion and a 26% share of the total console hardware market (Takahashi, 2017). The three main competitors in the gaming industry are Xbox, Nintendo and Sony. Xbox uses a variety of different methods to compose their market strategy. Their marketing strategy is aimed to attract more customers, increase market shares and ultimately become the center of the user’s entertainment. To promote more customers they use three strong marketing strategies (Rokk, 2013). First, they provide limited editions of their consoles. Second, they offer special deals and...
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...Xbox One review – The right choice? New, Powerful, Controversial. All you need is in one box, Xbox One. Introduction When Microsoft first announced their next-gen console at E3 2013 current console hardware was becoming obsolete, which was made clear as newer games were pushing performance to the limit. Rumors were high that the next generation of consoles were going to be something completely different, and the Xbox One in its grand announcement at E3 met that criteria, different - not in a good way. Microsoft presented an Xbox not designed for gaming alone but for entertainment as a whole, this meant a complete reorder of priorities of the console. Gaming had to give way to TV, apps, internet, films, streaming and overall entertainment connectivity, your all in one multimedia box. Certainly innovative but with a slight problem of under-looking the core feature, gaming. Of course the onslaught that Microsoft faced after this announcement quickly made them change their ways, but the damage had been done and can still be seen with the disproportionate sales of the PS4 to Xbox One. The Xbox One out now however is a completely different case. With the realization that the Xbox user base is in the majority gamers, Microsoft quickly restructured their vision of the Xbox One. Always online requirement was scrapped, as was idea of disc-less gaming and a constantly working and watchful Kinect complied with its own system checks. In many ways the original concept was a huge leap into...
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...Promotion for the Microsoft Xbox One The target customers for Microsoft’s Xbox One were chosen carefully following a major loss in the market share among hard core gamers to the Sony PlayStation 4. This segment of gamers are essential in establishing the success of the previous generation consoles from Microsoft, so it is imperative that Microsoft re-capture these customers with the Xbox One. Because of this Microsoft has put billions on the line to promote the Xbox One. The message Microsoft is pushing out is one that focuses on the system’s performance as a gaming system in terms of graphics output and real time data processing rather than an all-encompassing multimedia system. This message is guided by the idea that the Xbox One is the primary tool for traditional and hard core gamers to connect with the gaming community. It is important that Microsoft did this because of the focus Sony had put on marketing the hardware of the PlayStation 4. While some believe hardware is key, performance is what the gamers demand in the end. Because the Xbox One is branded as a multimedia device as well as a gaming console there has been many different types of media used in positioning successful advertising. These advertising messages were channeled through video game conferences such as E3 as well as 30-45 second television ads. Social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook have been heavily used and still relying primarily on video formats and bundle ads. Feature stories concerning...
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...The Dominance of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 The video game market has slowly and steadily created a larger presence for itself in the entertainment industry. The largest part of the market’s recent growth (from 2005 to the present) is undeniably due in part to the video game console created by Microsoft called the Xbox 360. Microsoft was the first company to release what is called the “current generation” console, and successfully beat Sony out of the gate. Prior to the release of the Xbox 360, Sony had dominated the market with their console, the PlayStation 2. It is because of Microsoft’s ongoing innovations to enhance player interactivity and large game catalogue (especially those with record breaking sales) is why they are the dominant company in the industry. As of 2011, “there [is] an estimated 211.5 million gamers in the U.S. that play video games of some type,”(Miller, 172) Ninety five million of which are hard core gamers who play online against friends over a specialized online service. Hard core gamers are the fanatics and hobbyists that use a dedicated machine for gaming. Casual gamers are people who play small and simple games, like Angry Birds on a smart phone or Farmville on Facebook. The majority of all sales in the gaming industry come from hardcore gamers. Money brought into the entertainment industry in 2011 was a whopping $16.6 billion. (Miller, 173). To fully understand the full extent of Microsoft’s influence on the current market, it is important to understand...
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...XBOX vs. PlayStation Kathryn Davis COM 170 August 7, 2013 Alfred Chavez Xbox vs. PlayStation There is an age old debate about which gaming system is the better one, Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. It all depends on one’s preference. There are advantages and disadvantages to each gaming console. If any gamer was to be asked which gaming console, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 or Sony’s PlayStation 3, they prefer, there is likely to be a heated debate without any clear answer and mostly fans loyal to their brand. Both the XBOX 360 and PlayStation 3 have extraordinary media capabilities. Netflix and HULU Plus are just some of the apps that are available on the Xbox and PlayStation. Not only are both systems able to instantly stream and watch movies and TV shows, they can browse the internet and watch videos on YouTube, as long as they are connected to the internet. Although both gaming systems were made to primarily play video games both are able to transform into DVD and CD players. Like most media devices today, both the XBOX 360 and PlayStation 3 play movies and games in High Definition as long there is an HDMI cable available and a High Definition TV. High Definition is what makes the games and movies seem real and so appealing to people other than gamers. Sony and Microsoft have a loyal, hardcore fan base and both companies are always trying to please their fans and come up with the next best thing. After the Nintendo’s Wii came out, Microsoft and Sony pulled out the big guns to compete...
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...Introduction A new generation of video game consoles will be premiering shortly. The video gaming world is calling it “The Console Wars”. Although the battle of video game system superiority has been going on for a while now, this year promises to be on a larger scale than the previous wars. Sony, the maker of PlayStation, and Microsoft, the maker of Xbox, are expected to release their next-generation systems in November. This report will be a comparative analysis of the soon-to-be-released Xbox One and PS4. The purpose of this report is to compare both systems on their specific features. The goal is to find out which system is the best when comparing both capabilities and value. This comparative analysis is intended to help customers decide which system is better suited for their needs. This report covers: * The general description of each product * Accessories * Specifications * Exclusive games for each individual system After extensive research, I found that both systems are fairly comparable from a technical standpoint. However, I recommend the PS4 over the Xbox One based on value and services. General Description of Products PS4 Mark Cerny, lead architect of the PS4, said the development of the eighth-generation console began in 2008 (“PlayStation 4”). The PS4 is developed and created by Sony Computer Entertainment (“PlayStation 4”). On February 20, 2013, Sony announced that the PS4 would be the successor of the PlayStation 3 during a press...
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...Characterize the competitive environment faced by Microsoft when it launched the original Xbox? Console video game industry at the time placed game sales as the primary profit driver: the devices were usually sold at cost or at a loss, with their development and production costs subsidized with royalties from game publishers or sales of games designed in-house. Because of that model, gaining market share was one of the primary goals of console manufacturer: getting consumer acceptance was important in making a system appealing for game publishers to invest into. Competitive Rivalry within the industry (High): According to the case, the original Xbox was introduced as a player in the second generation of consoles. The second gen was started by Sega with Dreamcast in 1999, but it was unsuccessful after introduction of PS2 by Sony. Sony dominated the market with a very successful playstation 2: not only was PS2 essentially the only second generation console available for about a year after its introduction, allowing it to gain a huge library of software, it was a direct successor to a very popular PS1, backwards compatible with its software as well. All that made PS2 an obvious choice for PS1 owners and a very appealing option for everyone else in the market. Bargaining Power of Hardware Suppliers (Medium): There were several capable EMS firms. Two major options for both CPU and GPU, in addition to the possibility of designing either one in house by employing...
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...Have you ever heard of the Xbox and PS3 controversy? I have been an Xbox player for about five years now. I have found out that people have mixed feelings about Xbox and PS3. I like Xbox better because of the game variety and cool features. People argue anywhere from which company is better to the controllers. This controversy has been going on ever since the PS3 was released. The biggest arguement is about the online play. Even though Playstation is free, it has some disadvantages compared to Xbox. According to IGN, Playstation has a smaller game variety compared to Xbox. PS3 also gets downloadable content later than Xbox. For a year of Xbox live it is sixty dollars. I think it is worth paying for online because Xbox has more features. One key thing that Xbox has is party chat. Party Chat allows you to talk to all your friends while they are playing different games. On PS3 there is still messaging friends but in order to talk to them both of you have to be playing the same game. As I mentioned earlier the PS3 has a less game variety than Xbox. A couple of key games that Xbox has that PS3 does not is Halo, Gears of War, and Fable. Halo is one of the best selling games of all time. Gears of War and Fable have also been really popular. Although Xbox has more games, According to IGN, most people would pick the Playstations graphics over Xbox.PS3 also has a few games that Xbox does not have including MLB The Show which makes sports gamers mad. There are also a number of accessories...
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...XBOX 360 Marketing Plan Marketing February 20th, 2010 Mark Lundberg Table of Contents: Part 1: Executive Summary Part 2: Company Description * I: History of the Company * II: Current Objectives Part 3: Situation Analysis * Internal Analysis * Environmental Analysis * Customer Analysis * Competitive analysis Part 4: SWOT Analysis * SWOT Analysis * Porter’s Five Forces Model Part 5: Marketing Objectives & Strategies Part 6: Marketing Strategies * Primary target market & Marketing Mix * Secondary markets Part 7: Marketing Implementation Part 8: Summary & Conclusions Part 1: Executive Summary: The Xbox 360 is a gaming console made by Microsoft, Inc. It is in the middle of its product life, being 4 ½ years old at the time of this marketing plan. The success of the original Xbox made the Xbox 360 a likely success for Microsoft, and it has paid off. With millions of units sold around the world, it has become a huge success. This marketing plan will go over where Microsoft currently is in its marketing efforts with the Xbox 360, and what they plan to do to conquer new markets, reach out to new customers, and expand their product line. Part 2: Company Description I: Brief history of the Company Microsoft was founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. They started off with selling BASIC, which was one of the first computer language programs. Their first customer was MITS Computer. From there...
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...PS3 vs. Xbox 360 These two gaming platforms have been going at it for years now. It’s time to settle which one is the better system. The Sony PlayStation franchise was the first to release in 1994. Microsoft finally released their Xbox in 2001. However I’m not comparing the first Xbox to the first PlayStation I will be comparing the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Starting with features they both have, the ps3 and 360 have, of course, exclusive games that can only be played on that specific system. For example halo is for the 360 and god of war is for ps3. They both have an internet browser and apps; they are Wi-Fi enabled meaning they can detect wireless internet. Through Xbox live and PlayStation network, they allow you to play with friends and meet people all over the world (the name tells what system has what). Now the PS3 and the Xbox 360 are generally made for the same they can do different things that set them apart. The ps3 has a Xross media Bar (XMB) which allows you to chat with friends while pausing the action in-game. This comes in handy when people message you while you’re in a good game and do not want to interrupt it. While playing users can earn trophies which so how bad ass you are. The trophies are ranked as follows: Bronze, silver, gold and platinum which can only be attain when you achieve all other trophies for the game. Keep in mind that some trophies are easier to get than others. While in-game the XMB can be used to invite players to your gaming session...
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