Xbox 2 & The Industry's Biggest Lie?

CES itself might not have been overflowing with Xbox 2 details but that did not stop Bill Gates discussing the machine elsewhere. New details, plus something else.

Before E3 supplanted it, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was the place to see new hardware and play upcoming games. Game companies have started creeping back to Las Vegas for CES over the past few years. Before this year's show began, most gamers would have pointed to Microsoft founder Bill Gates' keynote speech as the main event; Gates was supposed to come on stage and blow everyone away with the announcement of the successor to the Xbox. He didn't.

Instead, Gates spent just a fraction of his two-hour address on games; stopping just long enough to mention Halo 2's sales figures (6.3 million and counting) and to demo a faulty version of Forza Motorsport - Microsoft's run at the driving simulation crown.

The majority of Gates' talk circled the living room and Microsoft's continual strategy of getting in there to smoothen the experience, whether by improving the usability of digital cameras or by enhancing televisions. But the CES keynote outline didn't stop Gates from discussing Xbox 2 elsewhere.

Asked by News.com what some of the primary goals are for Xbox 2, Gates asserted, "broadening the market, having media capabilities that when there's a PC, we connect up to that... that simple Media Center menu that's just got TV, photos, music right there - those are common elements we're bringing to all the home devices."

The fact that Microsoft has told potentially one of the most significant white lies in the history of the entertainment industry seems to be scarcely acknowledged these days. Before, executives said time and time again that Xbox, as a product and a business model, would be purely about games (one example on Kikizo is from an interview with J Allard conducted back in September 2002, "my team is a hundred per cent focussed on gaming"). In fact, it is pretty obvious that it was always the plan to have a "media delivery box" and answer to the demands of this "digital entertainment lifestyle", something the company's Xbox boss Robbie Bach discussed as a focal point of his E3 2004 presentation.

Gates confirmed in the new interview, "We didn't do Xbox just to do a video game; we did it to be part of our vision of the digital lifestyle, and with the next generation, we really get to go there... as we go into this next generation, it's much broader... for a broader set of people, more communications, more media, more connectivity. And at the same time, we move up to things like high-definition graphics and wireless that the chip breakthroughs allow us to get to."

And just to make sure, the website pushed, "It's a full entertainment center, basically", to which Gates replied, "That's right".

If you want to describe the Xbox's cunning "Trojan horse" strategy for entertainment market penetration as a "lie" (which we certainly do) then one must admit it has been a hugely effective one so far. The company always knew where the real potential of Xbox might wind up - and where the best possible entry point for a definitive footing in the entertainment industry was. The implications for both the company and the entertainment industry cannot be overstated.

More definitive Xbox 2 details are now expected at March's Games Developers Conference in San Francisco, before the full-power unveiling at May's E3 show. Kikizo will be there every step of the way. Amusingly, everyone said the same thing about last year's GDC, when the company instead teased with its XNA development announcement.

Kikizo Staff
Who hasn't told a little white lie before?