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While Sony was planning Blu-ray compatibility as a key feature of the PlayStation 3, Microsoft had chosen to sell an external HD-DVD drive as an optional peripheral for the Xbox 360. "A bit like VHS - we think that HD-DVD is the format that consumers, film studios and publishers will embrace." "Blu-ray right now reminds us of another technology from Sony: Betamax," Microsoft's Chris Lewis said at the time. That's less the case for another of Microsoft's predictions a decade ago: that HD-DVD would win the format war against Blu-ray. Granted, while that hasn't happened yet, it could conceivably happen at some point in the future. "Since the launch of the original Xbox in 2002, there was one thing that we have consistently said: Microsoft will inevitably succeed in Japan," Sensui said.
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( Who would have thought?) But honestly, Sensui's mostly being mentioned here for one quote as impressively gutsy as it was embarrassingly wrong. Microsoft Japan's Xbox division manager Takahashi Sensui stressed that the catalog of games would more than triple by the end of the console's first year on shelves, and tried to downplay poor hardware sales by focusing on how many consumers had accessed the Xbox Live Marketplace.
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For example, after the Xbox 360 launched in Japan to a collective shrug, Microsoft doubled down on the market. That said, April also saw the company put its money on a few bets that simply wouldn't pay out. Clearly, it was making at least a few calls right. Demand for the Xbox 360 was still outstripping supply, Half-Life maker Valve committed itself to bringing multiple titles to the system, and Microsoft added to its first-party lineup with the acquisition of highly regarded studio Lionhead. Microsoft can't stop being wrongĪt the time, it seemed Microsoft was having a pretty good month in April 2006. It's time we put the Horse Armor stigma out to pasture. We've spent a decade holding up "horse armor" as an example of DLC gone wrong, all the while publishers and players alike slowly but surely converged on that model of moderately priced cosmetic upgrades as a mainstay of DLC done right.
#OBLIVION DLCS GAME OF THE YEAR UPDATE#
This was a time when the idea of a console game requiring a mandatory update to play online after a patch was cause for grave concern (not to mention worthy of an article on GI.biz), a time when players were shocked that publishers would charge extra money for content that developers had finished making prior to the game's release. These days, people spend more money on dumber stuff online all the time.īut in April of 2006, this was practically heresy. The price of 200 Microsoft Points ($2.50) isn't entirely out of line for a mostly cosmetic purchase (the armor increased the horse's health, but honestly, frail horses were not exactly a common pain point for players of Oblivion). The thing is, for all the gnashing of teeth and outrage and mockery Oblivion's Horse Armor attracted, there's fundamentally not that much different about it than the sort of DLC some companies base their entire business models around these days. Whoa, Nelly!Įven 10 years down the road, Bethesda Softworks' first DLC offering for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion remains the shorthand of choice to refer to downloadable content whose insignificance is exceeded only by the exorbitant price a publisher is asking for it. So to refresh our collective memory and perhaps offer some perspective on our field's history, will run a monthly feature highlighting happenings in gaming from exactly a decade ago. That said, even an industry so entrenched in the now can learn from its past. The games industry moves pretty fast, and there's a tendency for all involved to look constantly to what's next without so much worrying about what came before.