Game Stooge

Xbox 360: What Will Tomorrow Hold?

• Scribbled on November 29th, 2007 by Derrick Schommer
• Filed in Editorial Content, Microsoft Xbox 360, Xbox Live Arcade, Xbox Live Marketplace

Microsoft has shown us “a few” hot titles this year for their console, many exclusive and a few non-exclusives have shown the brightest of all on their system. It’s been a long time since a video game manufacturer can sit back and say “wow, that was a great year” in the gaming industry, unless you count Nintendo’s recent success stories but nobody is buying games for it. This year the Xbox 360 console had games like Bioshock, which broke review scores around the world and Blue Dragon which managed to move a few Japanese Xbox 360 consoles.

They’ve brought over successful ports of popular PC games such as the Orange Box collection from Valve and broke entertainment records with Halo 3 going further beyond any sales we could have predicted from Bungies creation. We feast our eyes on Forza Motorsport 2 and realize racing simulators are closer to real life than ever before with unmatched graphics and speed.

This list doesn’t even include Assassin’s Creed, Rock Band, Project Gotham Racing 4, Mass Effect and many others that arrived just in time for the holiday season. The selection of games is so large that gamers are willing to pay extra for service contracts in the likely case they’ll have a dead console due to hardware failure and rings of light. Imagine that, you’re console has been known in the industry to be so unstable people need to consider extended warranties to carry them through the next few years… but it still sells units.

Their latest press release, speaking to their awesome 2007 year states, “from the end of summer to the festive period, Xbox 360 boasts over 60 new releases contributing to a portfolio of over 300 high-definition titles”

The question we have to ask, what will they do to beat this record next year? Remember when you received your first A grade and you found out your parents now expect to see A’s on every report card? You’ve raised the bar and now must be consistent about your new level of acomplishment throughout the coming years and Microsoft is no exception to the rule. They’ve raised the bar for the industry in general, breaking all time records with Halo 3, can you beat expectations again next year?

Or, have we seen all there is from Microsoft Xbox 360? We’ve seen companies drop from the spotlight for resting on their laurels or making bad decisions in the market and Microsoft has great momentum to shoot themselves into 2008 as a leader in the game industry, something many of us never thought we would say. We’ve been rocking our house down with the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises and many of us will be giving Viva Pinata another go at it with their Party Animals launch. But much of that is all in the past and we’ll be looking for new downloadable content to extend the life of our current products as well as continued franchise releases and new inventive games…perhaps even a few more casual game titles on Xbox LIVE Arcade.

Looking towards the future, one thing is for certain, Microsoft understands network multiplayer gaming better than their competition. We want an easy and intuative, fully integrated, gaming solution and Microsoft is willing to show us how it’s supposed to be done. We don’t want stupid Wii friends codes or a half-integrated PlayStation 3 system which is free but isn’t as good and doesn’t have the same huge pool of gamers (yet).

What about the upcoming titles? For now, we’d be happy to see some of the delayed titles which missed the holiday season such as Grand Theft Auto IV which won’t be around until the March time-frame. There are also some great PC ports for games like Supreme Commander and World in Conflict but will any game scheduled for 2008 show up BioShock’s single-player experience, beat the graphics of Assassin’s Creed or the sales record of a the third Halo title?

It seems Microsoft is going to have a huge hill to climb to meet or exceed our expectations in the coming year when all these prior hot titles are written into the history books. Sony PlayStation 3 has dropped their pricing, Wii may actually put out some games and both are having record sales figures so Microsoft is going to have to write 2007 off as a huge year and look towards the future aggressively and with purpose.

What will the future hold for the Xbox 360? Have we seen it all or can they pull off another record breaking year?