Enter Factor X
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Author's note: I originally wrote this back in April last year, so anything that looks stupid in hindsight wasn't that dumb then. Honest.
With the Dreamcast not exactly a runaway success, and the Nintendo Dolphin nothing more than a codename in the far distance, you could be forgiven for thinking that Sony has the console market all sewn up. Despite a few uncharacteristic hiccups, the Playstation 2 is busy conquering the Japanese console market, and shows every sign of repeating the trend over here.
But there's a fly in the ointment; another firm with the console market firmly in their sites. Enter, stage left: Microsoft.
So what is it?
The videogames market is worth a fortune and only 35% of it is PC based. Microsoft wants some of that money and they're prepared to go some lengths to get it. The X-Box is their entry into the console market.
Basically, it's a stripped down-PC in a fancy case. It has a standard PC processor and RAM, and extremely fancy graphics card from nVidia, the company who make the biggest and best PC graphics cards available. It also has a fairly sizeable hard drive, although Microsoft have stated that this is not for installing games on; in order to simplify the system, games must run straight from the DVD, just like any other console. More on this later.
The X-Box has already secured a large amount to industry support because its PC-like nature makes it very easy to write games for. Compare this with the Playstation 2, which is very powerful, but insanely difficult to write for, and you can see why the developers like it. Porting a game from PC to X-Box is an afternoon's work for the work experience kid, rather than a twenty man-year project to port it to PS2. Also, Microsoft is clearly hoping that by using industry standard components, they'll be able to keep the price down.
Also intriguing is the presence of an Ethernet networking port. It remains to be seen if you can buy an X-Box, wire it up to a PC, and have a two-player game of Unreal Tournament but the possibility is tantalising. The sound specifications are equally impressive, offering Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound for the DVD-playing home cinema fans.
It can't be that good, can it?
Naturally, there are problems on the horizon. For a start, it may be easy to convert PC games to the X-Box, but PC games are fundamentally different from console games and are designed to appeal to different audiences. Whether console owners will get on with the likes of Unreal Tournament or F1GP3 remains to be seen. Additionally, the mighty PS2 with it's strong brand name will be available a year before the X-Box - quite a head start.
Price could also be a sticking point, though it seems likely the console itself will be sold at a loss and Microsoft will rake back money from licensing. Consider the fact that the console's joypads plug in through standard USB ports - except that the plug has been re-designed to be "more rugged". Result? Not a single existing USB device will work with the X-Box, so you're going to have to buy special joypads, on which Microsoft naturally take a percentage.
Furthermore, the X-Box demonstrates the continuing convergence of PC and console hardware. The PC market is incredibly fluid and fast moving, and as a games platform the PC has a massive boost in capabilities every six months or so. Consoles, however, can only reinvent themselves every few years. PCs will be able to do what the X-Box does by this Christmas, and if all the console owners buy Playstation 2s, there's not much of a market left.
Why should I care?
Because it's going to be an incredibly powerful games machine that might just break Sony's near-monopoly. But also, because it's not just a games machine.
Sony and Microsoft both have visions of a "wired" future where we are surrounded by web-enabled devices. They want to own that future, and to do so they need a central machine to hang their brand on.
Enter the Playstation 2 and X-Box. At the moment, they're marketed as games machines because neither company wants to cloud the issue or confuse consumers. Once broadband internet takes off, however, expect to see an about face as some of the $100 million Sony is spending on non-games applications for the PS2 takes effect.
The X-Box is Microsoft's reaction to this, and is designed to not only capture the games market but also defend its internet access home turf. After all, a hell of a lot of Windows PCs bought these days are for internet access, and if Sony release a more reliable device for a quarter of the cost, that's a lot of unsold PCs with unsold copies of Windows on them. This is perhaps why the X-Box has a hard drive - to give it the edge in non-games applications over the PS2.
With the release of this preliminary information about the X-Box at the time of the Japanese release of the PS2, Microsoft are effectively firing a warning shot across Sony's bows. So, we have the Playstation 2 - strong brand name and a year-long headstart - versus the X-Box - huge amounts of raw power and tons of games. Throw in two of the largest companies in the world, both with reputations for uncompromising attitudes and vicious marketing tactics, and you get one hell of a battle.
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Those X-Box specs in full
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