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June 30, 2005
According to the latest issue of Famitsu, Microsoft Japan will be making an announcement in July during which it will reveal new third-party publishers and game titles for the Xbox 360 aimed at the Japanese market. A representative from the company told the magazine that "there could be some major surprises" at the conference. More
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June 28, 2005
Scottish game designer David Jones (creator of the first Grand Theft Auto) has announced that All Points Bulletin (APB), (his new multiplayer online role-playing game set in "a highly volatile world filled with dramatic car chases, shootouts, busts, escapes, and arrests") will be available for Microsoft's next-gen console, the Xbox 360 in 2008, around one year after the PC version ships. "We are confident APB will take full advantage of Xbox 360's impressive capabilities," said Webzen CEO Nam Ju Kim. The game will be Webzen's second for the 360, after the postapocalyptic shooter Huxley reports GameSpot
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Speaking at a joint event with HD-DVD creator Toshiba in Tokyo, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates reaffirmed Microsoft's commitment to the HD-DVD standard and confirmed that the company is already thinking about future revisions of the Xbox 360 hardware (company may incorporate a HD-DVD drive into the console). The HD-DVD standard currently faces a battle against the competing Blu-Ray next-generation DVD standard, created by Sony reports GamesIndustry.
"The initial shipments of Xbox 360 will be based on today's DVD format," Gates explained. "We are looking at whether future versions of Xbox 360 will incorporate an additional capability of an HD DVD player or something else."
Sony's PlayStation 3 will use Blu-Ray system for both HD movie playback and game storage. Sony and Toshiba have held talks to try and establish a joint format for next-generation DVD, but these collapsed recently after Toshiba refused to accept Blu-Ray - which boasts higher capacity discs but is more expensive to manufacture - as the basis for the joint standard.
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June 27, 2005
In a continuing effort to make sure the Microsoft Xbox 360 is hit in Japan, Microsoft has reportedly signed on another Japanese developer for Xbox 360. 3rd party developer Gargoyle Mechanics is reported to be working on one new game for the system reports IGN.
Gargoyle Mechanics has had a hand in the development of a number of past titles. Members of the company worked on planning, programming and graphics for the first Shenmue on Dreamcast, programming for Zombie Revenge and also ported Capcom's Dino Crisis to the system. Most recently, the company developed Azumi for D3 Publisher.
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June 26, 2005
Microsoft is said to be considering making their next generation Xbox 360 connectable with the two rival firms' portable machines, the Sony PSP and the Nintendo DS. Based on company Statements made last week Microsoft has developed technology to allow its next-generation video game console, Xbox 360, to be connected online with portable game machines of rival firms. Users of the Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP) and the Nintendo DS will be able to connect their machines with the Xbox 360 and play Microsoft's games over the Internet, Microsoft officials said reports Tech News World.
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June 25, 2005
ATI touts the power of the Xbox 360 GPU , and reveals the Xbox 360 GPU is far more powerful than the GPU for Revolution. At the ELSPA International Games Summit, ATI's Richard Huddy said: "[The GPU will have] 256 Gigabytes per second of render bandwidth... fifty times the power of the original Xbox." Huddy went on to say that the Xbox 360 would have, "Five times more [power] than any other next generation console."
In other news ATi is also providing the GPU for Nintendo's next-generation console, Revolution.
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June 23, 2005
In an interview published in the current issue of Famitsu, Japanese Xbox boss Yoshihiro Maruyama said he expects that Japan will see a "good lineup" of titles at launch for the Xbox 360 --somewhere in the double-digit range. He added that seven or eight will be Japanese-developed games. One of the major impediments to the growth of the Xbox installed base in Japan was the low number of games geared specifically toward Japanese gamers, available at launch and during the console's ongoing life span reports GameSpot
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June 22, 2005
According to preliminary projections of a study scheduled to be released next week by Kagan Research, Microsoft's Xbox 360 is poised to take an early lead in the market of next-generation console-based video game systems, and the flood of titles for all three systems--Xbox 360, Sony's PS3, and Nintendo Revolution--will drive the U.S. market for console software to more than $8.1 billion by 2008 Reports Media Weekly .
Xbox360, Kagan projects, will capture a majority of the initial market share among the next-generation consoles, due to its early release date--the console is expected to be out late this year, with the Revolution slated for an early 2006 release and the PS3 following in Spring '06.
The study predicts that in 2006, the Xbox 360 will have a market share of 54 percent, followed by the PS3 at 27 percent and the Revolution at 19 percent. In 2007, however, the Xbox 360 will lose its lead to the PS3, dropping to a market share of 37 percent, with the PS3 capturing 45 percent.
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June 21, 2005
Speaking at the ELSPA International Games Summit in London, Microsoft corporate VP Peter Moore predicted that the early Xbox 360 start will allow the console to reach 10 million installed base "very quickly."
Asked what position he expects the Xbox 360 to be in by the time Sony's PlayStation 3 arrives on the market, Moore commented that it was "difficult to say until we know what 'Spring' means," referring to Sony Computer Entertainment boss Ken Kutaragi's stated launch window for PS3 of Spring 2006.
Peter Moore said Microsoft has a target of 10 million units, explaining that the firm believes that historically, reaching that threshold has given consoles "tremendous momentum" in the marketplace.
"I'm not in any way saying that he who gets to 10 million first wins," he continued, "but that's a target that we in Redmond believe that we can get to very quickly." Read More
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June 19, 2005
Microsoft has signed a deal with NVIDIA to license the company's technology in order to enable backwards compatibility in the Xbox 360, which uses an ATI graphics chipset that isn't natively compatible with Xbox titles. Sources close to the company indicated that a form of recompilation would be required to make Xbox games work on the 360, with the resulting patched executables being shipped on the system's hard drive for certain popular games, and patched versions of other games gradually being added over the Xbox Live network. Read More
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