Should MS have ditched the 360?

[charlesr]

From what I remember, when the 360 arrived, the Xbox was essentially put in a cupboard by MS, pubs and devs.

Should they have done the same for the XB1?

[MisterBubbles]

I'd say no seeing they have a huge install base of 76 million, that's a lot of people, some or most possibly gold members but if not still buying games and DLC, so making MS money,

[CMcK]

The Xbox was costing MS some serious money as a result of paying nVidia for their chips. Dropping a loss making system was not a surprise. I'm sure the 360 will continue to enjoy good software sales for a few years yet.

[DANGEROUS-3]

The downside for XB1 owners are the watered down cross gen titles.

[VR46]

Hard to write off such a user base in one go, would be a terrible way to alienate your customers - I bet most won't even consider getting an XBone for another six months or so.

Can see the 360 being supported longer than the PS3 for sure. Think Sony would abandon the PS3 first.

Interested to see the Titanfall comparisons when someone is brave enough to post some 360 videos of it running online.

[CMcK]

The downside for XB1 owners are the watered down cross gen titles.

Happens at the start of every new generation though. The DC really suffered from loads of PlayStation ports early on.

[wakka]

Echoing the posters above, I don't think there is really any reason to. The system could continue to be profitable years into the future. As time goes on I would hope to see a ?99 pack that includes a year of Gold, if only to unlock features like Netflix.

It's also a good marketing tool for the Bone, with plenty of promotion of the newer system and its games via the dashboard and reminders to people that they can continue to use their Gold sub on the new system. If parents in particular like the system (and there's no reason why they shouldn't), then if the time comes for them to look at a newer console, they will be more likely to stick with Xbox than defect to the relative unknown of the PS4. Statistics show (I can't be bothered to find them haha) that if you own one product from a company you are more likely to buy a second, if you own two the likelihood of you buying a third increases again, and so on.

If they pull their finger out and actually release some games that cost more than 2p to buy second hand on Games With Gold (i.e. not Assassin's Creed 2 and Crackdown) then I think it will provide good value to parents with young children as a streaming and games box.

[charlesr]

I think Games with Gold is a red herring and should be ditched, or they should go the same "rental" route as PS+ (i.e. you have to keep your Gold membership to continue using the games you've downloaded). Giving away games permanently is always going to result in cheap choices in comparison - and that's all gamers are doing at the moment: comparing to PS+ and seeing that it's rubbish.

[Neon Ignition]

I expect 360 to get dropped faster than PS3, globally PS3 is outpacing 360 and Japanese releases should give it some local shelf life which 360 won't benefit from. After this Xmas's multiformat releases I expect 360 to mostly shrivel up.

MS took so much flak for decaptitating XB1 that they've done the right thing letting 360 run its own course. It's beej clear for years they've pulled their own support for the most part anyway so it can't be a big drain on their own resources.

[Duncan James Waugh]

If the 360 was dropped that would see me switch over to the Wii-U 100%, none of my friends show any interest in moving on from the 360 either - all of our multiplayer is together is done over Live and shutting that down wouldn't go down well.

[Lebowski]

I think Games with Gold is a red herring and should be ditched, or they should go the same "rental" route as PS+ (i.e. you have to keep your Gold membership to continue using the games you've downloaded). Giving away games permanently is always going to result in cheap choices in comparison - and that's all gamers are doing at the moment: comparing to PS+ and seeing that it's rubbish.

i totally agree I'm not interested in keeping halo 3 or Assassin creed two, ive pretty much completely ignored games for gold and written it off as a poor mans PlayStation+ Microsoft really need to try harder or not bother at all.

Its not as if they don't have access to there own studio stuff, it wouldn't hurt to put up a more recent Halo(maybe the remake would be nice), Forza Horizon, would make sense too.

Looking though there list of Microsoft's owned IP its sad to see things like Blast Corps, Wizards and Warriors, Rallisport Challenge, and Jet Force Gemini completely abandoned to the halls of time, while there in house devs, Rare seem to be squandered on yet another kinect experiment.

[smouty]

I would hope to see it continue in some form for a while.
There was something mentioned on the XB1 launch regarding 'something really interesting' for the 360 but I don't know if it has been disclosed yet.
I've only just stopped using my Xbox with XBMC on it after 10 years.

[nakamura]

Happens at the start of every new generation though. The DC really suffered from loads of PlayStation ports early on.

Really?

I don't remember this happening from 16-32bit.

PS2/Xbox/GC all had new software and not last gen ports.

[Team Andromeda]

Really?

I don't remember this happening from 16-32bit.

PS2/Xbox/GC all had new software and not last gen ports.

With the Saturn games like Shining Wisdom , Thor 2 started life out has Mega Drive projects . Games like Need For Speed, Road Rash, Total Eclipse , Star Fighter, Earth Worm Jim, Worms were ported over to the Saturn and PS,

[nakamura]

Indeed but the machines were released with plenty of original content like VF, Daytona, Clockwork Knight, Wipeout, Ridge etc.

Road Rash, NFS and co were from other 32bit consoles.