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More XBLA deals with Microsoft Publisher Sale
14 years ago

More XBLA deals with Microsoft Publisher Sale

Now that the Arcade Next promotion is over, and Minecraft and Trials Evolution are breaking records all over the place, Microsoft seem to celebrating with a huge sale. If …
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Deal of the Week: Kinect Special
14 years ago

Deal of the Week: Kinect Special

This week’s Deal of the Week comes with a Kinect flavour. From 15-May to 21-May, you can chop, dance, balance or strike a pose till your hearts content with …
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Gotham City Impostors checked into Arkham Asylum
14 years ago

Gotham City Impostors checked into Arkham Asylum

It’s official: those psychotic bats and jokers are clinically insane. Gotham City Impostors will soon be receiving a new map based in Arkham Asylum, free of charge. The new map brings …
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Awesomenauts Fully Awesome Guide
14 years ago

Awesomenauts Fully Awesome Guide

Your one stop shop for Awesomenauts know-how both for new comers and seasoned players alike!
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Robbie Bach partially credits Sony mistakes for Xbox’s success
14 years ago

Robbie Bach partially credits Sony mistakes for Xbox’s success

By  •  News

When the Xbox 360 launched in November of 2005, the console wars were largely viewed as a two-horse race. Nintendo’s Wii was an afterthought in the minds of most industry analysts and executives — a belief that would be proven correct in terms of relevance among the traditional gamer audience, but so very wrong on the sales front, as it marched on to over 95 million units sold worldwide as of March. Rather, both popular and informed opinion said the battle would be fought between Sony and Microsoft.

Sony had spent the past 10 years decimating Nintendo and Sega’s positions as dominant forces in the industry by appealing to an older consumer and making the PlayStation 2 the best-selling home console of all time with more than 150 million consoles sold as of the end of last year. After having replaced the name “Nintendo” with “PlayStation” as a synonym for video games, the Tokyo, Japan-based electronics empire was feeling as invincible as Superman. With Nintendo having done its damnedest to torpedo its relationships with third-party developers and the software behemoth in Washington looking like the proverbial babe in the woods when it came the console biz, Sony could see no kryptonite in sight. Of course, few outsiders did either at the time.

Had it not allowed the pride that success brought to convince it that sinking so much of its PS and PS2 profits into the foolhardy enterprise of out-muscling the Xbox 360 with the PlayStation 3, however, it might have foreseen that it was on a path to learn the same hard and humbling lesson it had itself taught Nintendo. Instead, it produced an expensively priced machine that arrived a year late to the party and quickly built a reputation, fair or not, of being notoriously difficult to develop for. Geekwire reports that when he spoke to the Northwest Entrepreneur Network last week, Robbie Bach, former president of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division, highlighted how Sony’s miscalculations and mismanaged generational shift opened the door for the 360 to become the hugely profitable success that it is today.

“When you’re doing a startup, you need friends. It’s just the way life works,” Bach said. “It turned out we were able to convince retailers and publishers like Activision, Electronic Arts and others, that it was a good thing for Microsoft to be successful, because if we were not successful, the only game in town was Sony. Being dependent on somebody else was bad for them, and so they supported us disproportionately to what they should have, mathematically.”

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Data says Xbox is go-to device for Web video

By  •  News

More people watch Web video via their Xbox 360s than on any other non-PC device, according to newly released data from online video ad company Freewheel. According to the …
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Minecraft sells over one million copies in less than a week
14 years ago

Minecraft sells over one million copies in less than a week

By  •  News

Trials Evolution, RedLynx‘s wonderfully infuriating sequel, broke records a few weeks ago. After a day, Mojang‘s build-em-up Minecraft looked set to beat that record. Microsoft has now confirmed Minecraft Xbox 360 Edition has eclipsed previous XBLA …
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Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown brawling on June 6 for 1200 MSP
14 years ago

Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown brawling on June 6 for 1200 MSP

After a showing at PAX East, we knew the release of Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown was on the horizon of summer. Now we have a confirmed release date …
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Weekly Roundup: May 13
14 years ago

Weekly Roundup: May 13

Weekly Roundup compiles all the biggest news stories, reviews, and releases from the week into one handy post on the weekends.

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