Rumorama: Third Party Xbox 360 Consoles?
1Up gives us a crazy rumour, telling us that Microsoft may be planning to open up and license the Xbox 360 platform to third party manufacturers:
We'll tell you what's up with Microsoft: new hardware options. It may sound totally insane -- trust us, we did a double-take the first time Qmann whispered it in our ears -- but word has it that Microsoft may begin allowing third-party manufacturers to create Xbox 360 hardware. And we're not talking about peripherals, people; we mean hardware that runs 360 game discs created by someone other than Microsoft. It's a novel way of dealing with that red ring issue, don't you think?
It's common knowledge that the console hardware doesn't make the game companies money (in fact, they usually loose money on the sale, the notable exception being the Nintendo Wii) so perhaps this would be a novel way for Microsoft to offload some of their hardware costs to third parties, while simultaneously getting more Xbox 360 capable hardware out to the world.
What do you folks think? Would this be awesome, or just plain stupid?
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Den Den Boy
Posted to Hot Stuff, In Your House on 26 June 2008
· Comments (3)
Other stuff like this: Microsoft, rumor, rumour, Xbox 360
Within one hour of its unboxing, The One became the undisputed ruler of Tiny's entire home. Buy this or despair.
It failed miserably for 3DO, but they were an upstart in a cutthroat market. I don't know how well the Panasonic Q did, but I know it was a desirable high-end import while it lasted.
Strategically, this way would fit better with how Microsoft made the billions that it's been pouring into the XBox division: they provide the high-margin software and technology licenses while other companies make the actual product at little profit and under Microsoft's terms, coming and going like the tides because they actually have to compete in a free market. Of course, if that setup worked in the consumer electronics space, Microsoft wouldn't have amputated PlaysForSure just to replace that failure with the current Zune.
There are a lot of things that might be nice about commoditized 360 hardware. You could shop for a 360 console that doesn't sound like a leaf blower when it's running. You could buy from a company honorable enough to pay out if their machine destroys your discs. Maybe you could even upgrade the hard drive for less than $180. And with multiple variants out there, one will certainly be easier to mod, rip, homebrew, and all-around breach than the others, which is always nice.
I don't see how this would work financially.
Microsoft loses money on the 360 hardware but makes up the loss on game prices.
If the company manufacturing the console doesn't get a cut of the game sales (and why would they), then the console would have to be much more expensive.
Then again, maybe thats what will come out of all this - premium, high-end 360 hardware.
Actually Jason, when they say that they lose money, it's mostly lost in R&D, the parts to make make th 360 aren't nearly as expensive as a 360 itself is, so lets say Samsung wanted to make a Blu-Ray playing standard HDD using, quiet running XBox 360, then they could for a still relatively small price.