Day 2 - Xbox a design critique
Well after a long first day I have come into this session halfway through. But here is what I salvaged.
The discussion was about how and why Microsoft burned $3.8 Billion since 2000 on the Xbox project. Their answer was that the xbox designers were given a little bit of freedom to explore the design space. Well that is a lot of freedom I would say.
The main motivation as many of us are aware were to achieve market penetration by having a low cost for users to switch. The xbox also follows something the designers deem the razor and blade model, where the blade costs subsidize the cost of the razor upfront. So all game-players can look forward to some high priced games once Microsoft has a good control on the game market, which is not very unlikely what with the rumors and delays surrounding the PS3.
The talk then progressed to talking about game play, with questions from one of the panelists Nicole from Xeo Design. She talked about the most important game playing mechanics like
Interact with other people and socialize, etc. A positive point that came up in a show of hands from the audience was that almost all of the audience felt that the setup time for a Xbox was less than 5 minutes to less than 20 minutes. It was humorous for Nicole to have taken more than 90 minutes to setup her xbox. I could feel many fervent gamers in the audience think that well after all games is serious men's business. but guess what, Nicole was not talking only about the setup, which she felt was a great OOB experience, it took her more than 90 minutes to finish reading her EULA's!
An interesting question that came from Maxime a game designer from Ubisoft was why did they not use either a Qwerty keyboard or some other input mechanism for text input as against the current a,b,c,d.. keyboard they have right now. Their answer was that they did not have sufficient time to test completely how a broad audience would react to newer forms of text input whereas for qwerty their tests concluded that speed and accuracy with the qwerty keyboard layout were less than the one they went with. Very surprising.