The Good-Enough Strategy🎁🧲
🎮Xbox officially announced a cheaper version of its upcoming console that will compete with the top-of-line on and 🍎Apple makes some concessions with its AppStore rules
The Service, The Hardware and the Content
The news of the week in gaming last week was Xbox confirming that, like Sony, they will also have a two-console strategy come this holiday season. Both the high and low-end devices will launch on November 10th, the former at a $499 price point while the Series S will require you part with 299 of your hard-earned dollars.
The newly announced version will allow gamers to have a completely digital gaming experience at up to 1440p in resolution at 120 frames per second with raytracing capabilities on a super-fast SSD. While the media streaming experience will run at a 4K resolution, games will need to be upscaled via software in order to achieve this resolution, but, if you ask me, having that option at this price point is ay-okay. This Series S package makes the Series X line look over-engineered and beyond the needs of most consumers at the moment. If this turns out to be the case, a lot of shoppers will opt for the good-enough product this November, so it should come as no surprise if the S oversells the X.
So what are you getting if you decide to go for the big brother, the Series X? First of all, almost surely, a bigger SSD. With a lot of games pushing the 100GB limit these days, the Series S will only be enough for four of these games being installed locally at any given time. Secondly, native 4K in both games and media. Thirdly, an optical drive; if that’s what floats your boat. The thing is, a big slice of potential buyers still have non-4K displays —even disconsidering the upscaling tech here—, play less than four games at a time on a console, and actually prefer not having an optical drive since they only buy content digitally. If you combine all of these factors with the price point, $299, or $25/mo via Xbox All Access, this is a very, very good deal on the face of it, I’d even go as far as calling it affordable. I imagine a lot of nephews getting this as a Christmas present this year.
All Access looks like an installment-style payment system, not that different from what we see at cellular carriers right now, that allows consumers to get the hardware with no up-front payment in return to committing to a 2-year contract that also includes the Game Pass Ultimate service from Xbox. Some back-of-the-napkin math says this will save you around $60 with the Series S, a good deal for those who want said Game Pass in their lives, which wasn’t a must-have for most. That was until last week, when Microsoft announced that this service will also include more than 60 games from EA, plus the capability of playing them on any device supported by xCloud. This transforms the Xbox deal into a fantastic deal when it comes to pricing.
Microsoft did a stellar job of merging elements that gamers cherish in the value network of the existing status quo with aspects they think we will care for in the future, all while taking care not to go over a sensible price point. The result appears to be an xCloud+GamePass machine that will perform well in streaming gameplay from the cloud in the future, but, at the same time, it’ll also be easy for players to see value in the device the moment they buy it in a few months. In a previous letter, I mentioned that Microsoft is willing to throw the current console battle if it means winning the wars of the future, but this looks more like a strategy that will ensure both turn out in their favor.
If you’ve been reading my things either here over on Medium, you already know what’s coming. I couldn’t end this without speaking about Microsoft’s lack of exclusive gaming content. While backward compatibility will help Xbox, with this gaping hole in their solution and considering all the delays regarding already announced games —e.g. Halo and Forza— in contrast to Sony’s strong position in this regard, the Japanese company doesn’t need to match Microsoft’s prices. Heck, they don’t even need to get close. If the above-mentioned nephew or niece wants to play Horizon Forbidden West, they can only do so on a PlayStation and all the other hardware stats will be irrelevant.
One more thing…the Dieter Rams-looking industrial design really does it for me, from this perspective alone I’d rather buy this than the Series X ❤️
Giving Us an Inch
With the upcoming virtual conference on Sept. 15th and in anticipation of the congressional commission’s report regarding anti-trust matters, Apple is making some pretty heavy changes to its services to appease the powers at be.
The most impactful news relates to the newly-added ability for developers to have game streaming in the AppStore, with a catch. Each game needs to be a separate APP in the store and, while you can have a different APP that aggregates multiple items similar to a library of some sort each item in the library needs to point towards these separate APPs. Wow! If someone said they were expecting this measure to come out of Apple, I’d very much like to shake their hand.
There’s no doubt that for services like Stadia or xCloud/GamePass submitting hundreds of APPs to the store wouldn’t be easy right now but this could be made economically viable. A development pipeline with a template-like solution could be sorted out where all of these new APPs share +95% of what makes the wrapper of an iOS APP while the individual game that gets streamed to the end consumer is just a link to a server. Eventually, the process could be automatized to a degree that a completely technically illiterate person in a marketing department at Xbox will be able to do 99% of the job of creating new APPs for games coming out in the future. The path to creating the now-cliche Netflix for Games just became a lot more costly and time-consuming, but impossible it is not.
Also notable, if quite vague, are the relaxed restrictions on which APPs should use APple’s IAP system and which shouldn’t. Online classes products that bring together two consumers no longer need to use Apple’s payments system and neither do free email APPs —like Hey or Wordpress— as long as they don’t present a ‘Buy’ button inside the APP. So what if you have an application that allows for online classes between more than two parties? Well, bad luck, you’ll need to integrate Apple’s system for payments. If you think this messy, you’re not alone. It looks like Apple is making some general rules here that would apply in most cases, but not all, and then, for the situation they’ve traditionally had trouble resolving, going on a case-by-case basis. This doesn’t really sound like ‘equal conditions for all developers’ to me…
Finally, the last of the interesting news fro mApple this year was the announcement of a new feature that will enable developers to issue subscription offer codes to their consumers in the iOS14. APP developers could use these codes to reactivate old users by offering them a discount on future subscriptions or in the acquisition of new users. While this model has been the norm in the past few years regarding industries like eCommerce, this is a big step when we’re talking about Apple for whom giving an inch at the moment might be interpreted in various different ways by governments, consumers, and partners alike.
With just a week to go until the deadline on September 20th, TikTok is trying to avoid a ‘complete’ sale of the US business. The recent bans on exporting AI coming from the Chinese government definitely made this deal more difficult and, while a complete sale is not completely out of the question, a partnership with US company Oracle, one of few tech allies of the existing White House administration, looks a lot more probable right now as Microsoft’s bid was reportedly rejected by ByteDance🧍🏽♂️🤝🧍♀️
Amazon is pushing their way out of the home with Alexa and into the wild, after the ‘Halo’ announcement a few weeks ago, you can now use the assistant to buy gasoline at Exxon&Mobil stations in the US. Pretty useful in the times of COVID if you have an Alexa device with you in the car and also another data point for the ever-hungry Amazon data-gathering machine. Next step: Alexa materializes next to your car and pumps your gas 🤖⛽
The friends at GameRefinery put together a summary of the 2nd quarter results in mobile gaming and there are a lot of interesting takes in there. Roblox Corp. is the most improved company in both market share and returns but CoD and Coin Master keep performing at a high level while Supercell games are finally starting to lose traction, a decade at the top was a mighty run considering back we considered it an achievement if a game topped the charts for more than 6 months 📱📈
The solution to slow down the transmission of COVID? Shut up. Yep, really. The only small, possible side-effect I can foresee is the end of civilized society as we know it🤐🤐
All cards will be on the table come Wednesday, let’s see what everyone’s holding🃏
The wait was completely worth it, Villeneuve has another winner on his hands and Herbert’s book jumped to #4 over last week📚📈
Hard indeed, I respect Arnie’s hustle from back in the day🙌🙌
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