Xbox 360: optimization not innovation

The Xbox 360, which hits stores next week, is being billed as "the next generation in entertainment." It's got a bunch of media center features baked in, so you can look at photos, connect with your PC, etc., through the device. But the main feature is gaming, and as one Microsoft exec says "Xbox 360 will deliver mind-blowing experiences across multiple genres, no matter what your personal gaming preferences are."

That may be. I've been following 360 news for a couple of months now and, as far as I can tell, Xbox 360 is a really good example of the difference between optimization and innovation. In a nutshell, the 360 is more of the same (but better), not something new.

This is how Scott Hirsch breaks down the difference between optimization and innovation (these points are from his CanUX talk this fall):

Xbox 360 consists of several incremental increases in computing power, predictable bundling of features (like the media center), and a list of relatively safe launch titles that cover the major genres. Xbox Live has been improved. And there are a couple of interesting features, notably matchmaking on Xbox Live and HD support (I think this will be great). But these are refinements, not innovations. Xbox 360 will be the third generation console where game genres and mechanics have not fundamentally changed (The first two were Playstation and Playstation 2/Xbox).

Now there's nothing wrong with more of the same. More of the same can make you a lot of money. And there's an increasingly mature gaming market out there that knows what it likes (and will pay for incremental improvements).

The Xbox 360 is directed squarely at this group, and their marketing materials, straight out of the Car and Driver School of Copywriting, give it away:

We all know that Xbox 360 blows the doors off today's consoles in the power department. But just how much power does Xbox 360 have, and why do developers and gamers agree that it's the system to beat?...

The custom-designed Xbox 360 central processing unit (CPU) runs at a breakneck speed, thanks to its three separate core processors that clock in at 3.2 GHz each.

Xbox 360 boasts a custom ATI graphics processor that clocks in at a blistering 500 MHz. If you want to get even more technical (and who doesn't?) Xbox 360 can take advantage of more than four times as many polygons as the original Xbox console, and more than four times (seeing a pattern here?) the number of pixels per second.

Get the impression most Xbox players clock in as men?

When the next next-generation consoles hit the market in 2008-09, polygons and pixel per second will be less of a selling feature simply because it is increasingly difficult to make significant leaps forward in graphics. Once you've achieved photorealism, well that's about it. And genre maturation--the fact that people get tired of playing the same games--is another factor that limits growth. (Though arguably Xbox Live increases the playability and lifespan of games.)

So in that context, it's interesting to see Nintendo eschewing HD support and introducing a radical new controller for its next console, Revolution. It's too early to know the whether Revolution will be a success, but it's clear that Nintendo is attempting to innovate in gameplay. DS titles like Nintendogs and Brain Training prove this out.

In the bigger picture, there's case to be made that Microsoft is largely an optimization company. Windows, Word, Excel and now Xbox have all been improvements on existing application genres. Much of their work over the past 10 years has been related to optimizing their platform (OS & Office). Innovation, when it's happened, has largely come from elsewhere. So innovative games may emerge on Xbox 360, but it will be because of the game devlopers. Microsoft has done a lot to make the 360 developer friendly, to their credit, but there's no evidence yet they're pushing beyond the extant gaming market or genres.

So if you've gotten this far you might ask "why does this rambling on Xbox 360 matter?" Well, first, it's a concrete and timely example of the difference between optimization and innovation, and the business press is all hopped up on innovation these days. I'm also a casual gamer and I play games with my kids (I own a Gamecube), so I'd very much like them to have great games to play. Making a powerful console with lots of polygons and pixel shading does not necessarily lead to great games (e.g., my kids love Wario Ware).

And then, we are all watching Microsoft trying to reinvent itself to respond to competitive pressures from Google and others. When I wrote about the Ray Ozzie memo I suggested there was a shift in Microsoft toward design and away from engineering, toward what they call "seamless experiences." The question that emerged from that memo, and the Live announcements, was "can Microsoft really do this?" We can look at Xbox 360/Xbox Live as the first products that deliver on that vision (even though they were in the pipe long before the Ozzie memo), and they show that it's possible to deliver a seamless experience across solo play, networked play and a media centre and still, y'know, not have innovative games. So even if the 360 looks like a pillar of Microsoft's current and future business, there's still lots of room for disruption.