Gamerscore Blog

Four years of getting a pass to CES and this year I finally get to go.  Hopefully I'll run into you, John... it's been a long time since the Gears LA event and the celeb. party. :D

I'd certainly enjoy being out there for that!  (And not just because it's in Vegas, either.  No, really!)  Looking forward to the Bill Gates keynote - An end of an era, for sure.

I don't know - Do "super swank limos" and In-N-Out mix?  We'll need photos from that, if they're allow to leave Vegas.  :-)

Off topic, but...
Have you seen all of the negative press xbox has been getting of late (1up, epileptic gaming, etc..)... continued RROD reports, xbox live acting up for the last couple of weeks, warner brothers abandoning hd-dvd in favour of blu-ray. While that lot is bad enough, an even bigger issue is the fact that I'm not looking forward to anything on xbox in 2008 in terms of exclusives. MS need to show some of their hand to get a bit of the buzz back. Act before the momentum of competitors really kicks in.

I'm here covering for Gamertag Radio so for sure I'll be stopping by to say hi. Hopefully Paladino and I can finally have our GH2/GH3 battle from the Tour in Miami.

And yes, Limos and In-&-Out do mix... Its just takes longer to go from the money window to the pick up window!

I hate all of you if you get to go to In-And-Out.... BAH!

where's Nelson?
no doubt hes interviewing Salma Hayek?

I think Nelson is too busy working on his gamerscore - looks like he's passed DirtyDiva and is now headed (albiet slowly) towards Stalalem... good chance to gain ground when they're otherwise occupied... :-)

Whoa... Salma Hayek? I'm at the wrong venue...

What I meant to say is that i'm a total jerk and I live with my mom I'm 33 fatter then the fattest guy you can imagine and I like men..I love men all of them..I'm such a tool

You guys should Overnight me one of those Burgers Btw :) I'll spit shine Tony's Limo at the next major event you attend. :P

Once again, I come by this site and see no mention of the disaster that XBox Live has become.  Instead, you're once again talking about completely meaningless trash like what Microsoft will promise at CES and then fail to deliver.

FIX XBOX LIVE.  YESTERDAY.

Man was CES a disappointment.  They didn't say anything about the 360 at all other than IPTV which was announced last year.

I wouldn't care so much, but why the heck did Major Nelson go to this thing and make a big who ha on his blog to watch the stream.   He is the 360 community Manager, the 360 was barely talked about.

I have to be up at 4am and I stayed up later than normal to watch this stream, that had absolutely nothing new to add about the 360.   My God man this stinks.   I'm not the only one disapointed either.  Check out GAF or IGN.  

Note to MS marketing team.  Don't send Larry to CES and have him hype up CES when the 360 isn't being talked about.  He is a 360 guy, not zune, not ford car phone, not touch table.  360.   When he blogs about it and tells 360 owners to watch a stream, we expect there to be news about the 360.   Not that British Telecom is the new service provider.   Whippty Dooooooo!!!!

@Shamrock - CES = Consumer Electronic Show.  The keynote focused pretty solidly on Consumer Electronics.

Also, Major isn't the community manager.

My gosh, you guys just can’t seem to catch a break

First the highly publicized problems with Xbox Live (at the absolute worst possible time of the year) and now the death of the HDDVD format?

Combined that with the faulty hardware/extended warranty issue, the resignation /dismissal (depending on your POV) of Peter Moore, the unresolved DRM debacle, Bungie demanding to go independent,  Bioware being purchased by EA and so many other negative issues about the Xbox 360 last year I pretty much lost count.

And all of this going on against the backdrop of the Xbox 360 possibly losing the lead in the console race to the Wii at any moment…

I have to say that the imminent death of the HDDVD format will now force me to purchase a PS3. I never owned a PS1 or a PS2 (I was a Sega and Nintendo gamer) and I had no intention of picking up a PS3. I had just picked up my first HDTV and I was really excited that I was going to get the Xbox 360 HDDVD drive and use it to make the jump to High Def. Lucky for me, now that I think about it in retrospect, my Xbox 360 broke down. I had purchased a two year warranty from MS when I purchased the console, so I wasn’t too upset. I contacted MS and arranged for my console to be repaired.

When I received my console back a couple of weeks ago, my attitude about the HDDVD drive had changed. I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to purchase a piece of add-on hardware at a substantial price and then start accumulating HDDVD movies, because my entire investment in HDDVD hardware and HDDVD movies would be  dependent on the now questionable reliability of my repaired Xbox 360 console. Not to mention the nasty little format war going on between HDDVD and BluRay.

Now, thankfully, just a couple of weeks later the format war has been decided. I can’t believe I was really that close to being stuck with this generations Beta Max.

Because both low-end stand alone BluRay players and the PS3 go for $399, the PS3 seems like a better purchase for me because I will get more utility out of a dual purpose machine.

Does my purchase of a PS3 mean I will like my Xbox 360 any less? Absolutely not. Does the purchase mean all my Xbox 360 games will explode in their cases and I will never fire up my Xbox 360 again? No way.

All it means is I will have less discretionary income to spend on Xbox 360 and Xbox Live products and services.

And of course with the PS3 acting as a BlueRay player connected to my HDTV via an HDMI cable (sadly a benefit my Xbox 360 “premium“ console lacks) I will be far less likely to purchase any HD content from Xbox Live Marketplace. It really is no contest; I won’t have to wait for my TV shows or movies to download, I won’t have to deal with the DRM issue, I won’t have to manage my hard drive space (delete games or other items to make room for content I want to buy because of limited storage space, which I only have to download again later) and while there are no storage issues for BluRay discs, the only Xbox 360 storage upgrade options I have available  involve purchasing overpriced proprietary hard drives.

I really hope this is all a bad dream and I wake up tomorrow to the news that MS will release an Xbox 360 BluRay add on ( its all about choice, right? ) or come up with some rabbit out of the hat to save the day for HD DVD although that seems like a really tall order at this point..

Oh I know what to do… okay here it is… how much was the “financial consideration” paid to Paramount to support HDDVD? $100 million? (Peanuts for MS, Major Nelson’s gadget budget for the month!) Time to get together with Toshiba and flood the market with inexpensive HDDVD drives.

A great way to start is to have a limited offer, one only per console HDDVD add-on sale for Xbox 360 owners sold directly through Xbox Live marketplace. That way, MS doesn’t have to worry about the offer being exploited by the wrong client base (non-Xbox 360 owners) and because the sale is not being offered in stores but only to existing Xbox 360 owners, it would be viewed as a product upgrade and the low price would not require stand alone Toshiba HD DVD players to drop in price to match.

Of course the price would have to be heavily subsidized from the current levels by MS and Toshiba in the wake of the Warner Bros decision to abandon the format. Because the unit is an add-on with a substantial investment required to use it ( an Xbox 360) and MS has its own retail channel to get the product directly to the client base (Xbox Live) MS and Toshiba has a lot of flexibility if they want to try and use the Xbox 360 base as a Trojan horse for the HDDVD drive again. They already tried it once, but at the wrong price point.

Lower the price of the HDDVD add on to $50 or say the price of a new Xbox 360 game, and flood the market with new HDDVD owners. Oh yeah and these would be Xbox 360 HDDVD owners (we don’t have the highest attach rate for nothing and HD DVD movies are less expensive than video games)

I doubt Sony or any of the companies making BluRay players have much flexibility in pricing at this point or would be able to do anything more than watch as thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of new HDDVD owners hit the streets almost overnight. Sure, it will probably take some time (weeks or even months) to fill all the orders, just like when the Xbox 360 was released, but it would definitely have an impact.

Come on MS, leverage all those resources, subsidize the HDDVD drive, and start playing hard ball..

CES has been going on for years and years and if you just realized that the focus wasn't on the 360, you need to do your homework.

Major Nelson is NOT the community manager (I don't know where you get  your facts from.) and this was the last Keynote speech by Bill Gates before he steps down as an FTE and is a huge event for Microsoft...the company...NOT the 360.

http://onten.net/blogs/nic/Bill-Gates--CES-2008/Default.aspx

That is why he hyped up the stream on his blog and twitter.

Thank you.

@ Chris

I understand you guys talking about CES as you guys cover more than just 360.  You do GFWL, zune, etc...


I don't really care what Majors official title is, but call him what you want he is still the community manager for 360.  Calling a fish by a different name doesn't make it a different fish.  Calling him director of programming is just a lie, he doesn't have anything to do with any programming or games on the 360.  He is a community manager.  Nothing more, nothing less.

The bottom line was he used his position and his fans to pitch a sale of MS products unrelated to the 360.   It's no different if he blogged about a special show all week and then we download a podcast to find he has a Executive from Ford on the show talking about Ford Synch.


You don't do that to people   You don't hype up the 360 community to watch a live stream of CES and neglect to mention that the 360 will be talked about for 15 seconds and no new information will be given.

What he should of done was said "I am covering CES this year, there won't be much about the 360, but we will have a lot of things about other MS products".   Instead he played it off (to the 360 COMMUNITY) that this was 360 related for the sole purpose of suckering us in to follow the conference.

like i said before I see more people complaining about xbox service that i do people talkin about the CES 2008. Could we please get a topic on xbox live lag issues and marketplace ripoffs. dont do it for me do it for the gamers that pay your salary and cant even sign online for weeks.

The video re: Bill Gates last day at the office during the keynote was very entertaining.  It was hard to tell if he was enjoying himself or just embarrassed - Maybe a little bit of both.  :-)

Nice to see the Video Marketplace getting some more love.

Are you guys doin anything to fix the xbox live problems are just talkin about the CES 2008. I would really like to be able to play on the service i payed for. And I dont like arcades so thats a cheap pay off.

Wish I was there!  Can't wait for the comedy on vid.

why do you erase the good post and keep the bad post? tHATS NOT cool. I read this site alot and i see lots of post disapear and you keep the meaningless ones I like to hear what people have to say everybody has diffrent opinions so please stop deleting the post

get use to erasing messages im telling all my friends to tell there opinion of xbox live

@XBOX Gamer

It's was interesting reading your post but I think many of your problems have fixes for them.

I've heard that IF the hi-def "war" ends with Blu-Ray on top, the XBOX 360 has the ability to expand to a Blu-Ray external drive much like the HD-DVD one.

I think it's rubbish that you say:

"All it means is I will have less discretionary income to spend on Xbox 360 and Xbox Live products and services. "

...but apparently have enough "discretionary income" to drop $400+ on a PS3?

As for available storage space, why not just get a 120gb hard drive and sell the 20gb one on eBay if it's that big of a deal?

I admit I'm disappointed to see the hi-def DVD war take this turn, I wanted to buy the HD-DVD add-on but now I probably won't.

I'll also probably get a PS3 just to see what all the hype is about (I can get it one for free http://paramountprizes.com/freeps3.html), but I'll always stay true to my 360.

@Free

I am sorry if I was not clear. I will try to be brief..

I only have a finite amount of discretionary income to spend per month.

If I purchase a PS3, the amount of my discretionary income I will have available for Xbox 360 and Xbox Live products and services would be less than if I had not purchased a PS3.

I hope that is clear to you.

And yes… you are correct to point out the PS3 costs about $400.00 I think I mentioned that in my original post as well. It is also safe to assume I would probably also have to pick up accessories like additional controllers, memory cards, and of course PS3 games. The amount of money I will probably have to spend on PS3 products would far exceed $400.. Which would just be less money I would have available to spend on Xbox 360 products…


Oh and thank you for suggesting that I purchase a hard drive upgrade. I believe I mentioned I was aware that MS offers proprietary hard drives for sale. Unfortunately in my opinion the current price per GB is outrageous. I just don’t see the value proposition of a 120 GB hard drive for $179.00


As I said in my original post I had no intention of purchasing a PS3, I was going with the HD DVD add on like you… Sadly the dramatic turn in the high def format war will force me to get a PS3... It’s seems you agree because at the end of your post you say you will probably get a PS3 as well.

I am glad we could agree on something.