Moore: We dropped Xbox 1 because the hard drive “killed us”

Sarge · Last edited by Sarge on Wed Sep 17, 2008 5:40 pm, edited 4 times in total.

Peter Moore’s revealed that Xbox’s hard drive cost $70 per unit, and was the main reason the machine was prematurely dropped in favour of Xbox 360.

“Not having a hard drive in every Xbox 360 was a hard decision, but we wanted to get price under control,” he said. “The hard drive in every Xbox killed us; we we’re still selling it at $199 and the hard drive was like $70. That’s why we prematurely left the original Xbox, because the more we were selling – there was still great demand – it was killing us, and there was no way to bring the price down.

“So in the end we determined at around the 25 million unit mark that we just needed to slow this thing down and just not sell any more, and move to the 360 as quickly as we possibly could. And to this day people still believe we left the Xbox too early but it was purely for financial purposes.”

Moore made the comments in the third part of an ongoing Guardian interview. Which you’d be daft not to read.

clicky

The hard drive in the Xbox was a feature ahead of it's time in a console and wasn't utilised by game developers.
There wasn't the downloadable content available to fill it up.
Wasn't Halo one of the few games to write data to it to speed loading up?

So Peter killed off the Xbox aswell as the Dreamcast, is he the grim reaper of gaming or something? actually, he is from Liverpool so who knows...

$70 for a 8GB hard drive. I think not :roll:

Whats with Moore coming out with all this info, sega and microsoft cannot be too pleased!

consolegaming wrote:Whats with Moore coming out with all this info, sega and microsoft cannot be too pleased!

I actually think it's quite refreshing to see guys like Moore coming out in interviews and speaking their mind rather than peddling the company line like we see so often. Whether you agree with or believe what he says is another question of course.

Although the Xbox was obviously uneconomical, MS should be praised for releasing it itself. All too often companies ditch R&D and risk-taking just to pacify external shareholders; note Boeing as an example of how things should not be done.

At least now we've got three hardware providers; meaning we've got more choice and more competition; on both games and prices. A good thing all round.

FirstSecond wrote:So Peter killed off the Xbox aswell as the Dreamcast, is he the grim reaper of gaming or something? actually, he is from Liverpool so who knows...

Didn't know that, he sounded american when ive seen him talk

And what did you mean 'he is from Liverpool so who knows'?

Then we went off, and I spent a lot of time in the Midlands with Rare, trying to work on stuff that would give us a little bit more balance. And so a few years ago we started working on Viva Pinata, and again we wanted to do it differently because we knew we couldn't just launch piñata at the same time as we were focusing on efficient killing. And so we did a deal with Saturday morning TV who launched a cartoon series which is still very popular to get the piñata characters up and running. So we used Viva Pinata as a broader play into the more casual market to attract younger consumers, female consumers and to take a little bit of the edge off the box.

I thought ultimately it would be very successful – and you know, Microsoft, we'd had a tough time getting Rare back – Perfect Dark Zero was a launch title and didn't do as well as Perfect Dark… but we were trying all kinds of classic Rare stuff and unfortunately I think the industry had past Rare by – it's a strong statement but what they were good at, new consumers didn't care about anymore, and it was tough because they were trying very hard - Chris and Tim Stamper were still there – to try and recreate the glory years of Rare, which is the reason Microsoft paid a lot of money for them and I spent a lot of time getting on a train to Twycross to meet them. Great people. But their skillsets were from a different time and a different place and were not applicable in today's market.

Ouch

I think Rare know that too hence Banjo taking a new direction to the series.

Beans wrote:$70 for a 8GB hard drive. I think not

Manufacturing is a complicated business. I'm not sure I totally follow it, but as I understand it, older tech like hard drives lose the volume of scale as they get older and the price starts to climb a bit, to the point that the units have to be made INSTEAD of items which need to be produced in a larger volume.

Rik wrote:
Then we went off, and I spent a lot of time in the Midlands with Rare, trying to work on stuff that would give us a little bit more balance. And so a few years ago we started working on Viva Pinata, and again we wanted to do it differently because we knew we couldn't just launch piñata at the same time as we were focusing on efficient killing. And so we did a deal with Saturday morning TV who launched a cartoon series which is still very popular to get the piñata characters up and running. So we used Viva Pinata as a broader play into the more casual market to attract younger consumers, female consumers and to take a little bit of the edge off the box.

I thought ultimately it would be very successful – and you know, Microsoft, we'd had a tough time getting Rare back – Perfect Dark Zero was a launch title and didn't do as well as Perfect Dark… but we were trying all kinds of classic Rare stuff and unfortunately I think the industry had past Rare by – it's a strong statement but what they were good at, new consumers didn't care about anymore, and it was tough because they were trying very hard - Chris and Tim Stamper were still there – to try and recreate the glory years of Rare, which is the reason Microsoft paid a lot of money for them and I spent a lot of time getting on a train to Twycross to meet them. Great people. But their skillsets were from a different time and a different place and were not applicable in today's market.

Ouch

One of the problems with Rare was that they could be notoriously slow getting games out and I suppose if they came up with a couple of less than stellar titles it got people thinking they were past their sell by date.
They also experienced a big turn around in staff and that takes time to settle down.
The Rare deal has been pretty poor value for money for Microsoft.

TheTurnipKing wrote:
Beans wrote:$70 for a 8GB hard drive. I think not

Manufacturing is a complicated business. I'm not sure I totally follow it, but as I understand it, older tech like hard drives lose the volume of scale as they get older and the price starts to climb a bit, to the point that the units have to be made INSTEAD of items which need to be produced in a larger volume.

Last time I checked harddrives were still current technology.

When was the last time you encountered an 8GB model?

SC wrote:All too often companies ditch R&D and risk-taking just to pacify external shareholders; note Boeing as an example of how things should not be done.

boeing? who's newest plane is 80% composite? thats a hell of a lot of R&D right there. As for risk taking, in the aeronautical industry, its the airlines that design the specification for airliners and all they want is an aircraft that carries x amount of people x amount of miles and uses less fuel and gives off less pollution and makes less noise than their current planes. The airlines actually place the orders for the aircraft before the main design phase ever begins, and the 787 has become one of the fastest selling airliners in history.
sorry to chew you out on that, it was just a poor example.

TheTurnipKing wrote:When was the last time you encountered an 8GB model?

If that model becomes more exspensive than larger ones just switch it out for a cheaper model. It's not like the machine is only going to function with one particular model of harddrive, is it?

TheTurnipKing wrote:When was the last time you encountered an 8GB model?

Their rarity only serves to make them more expensive, as they become a special order item.

Regarding Rare; hardware transitions are very hard on developers, and every generational shift some are killed trying to make the switch. Over the space of 4 years, Rare went from N64 to Gamecube to Xbox to Xbox 360, and had key senior staff leave, and had a change of ownership. It's a miracle that anything of any quality survived.

Tineash wrote:Regarding Rare; hardware transitions are very hard on developers, and every generational shift some are killed trying to make the switch. Over the space of 4 years, Rare went from N64 to Gamecube to Xbox to Xbox 360, and had key senior staff leave, and had a change of ownership. It's a miracle that anything of any quality survived.

The Rare thread is thataway, my friend.

I'm surprised they didn't drop it because it was too heavy.

Moore: We dropped Xbox 1 because the hard drive “killed us”

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