Nat Brown Says Xbox's Last Five Years Have Been "Stupid"

Back in 1999, Nat Brown was a Microsoft engineer working on the original Xbox. Since his passing however, he has called the company's work with the 360 a complete disaster. This is mostly because the Xbox brand has chosen to focus on media partnerships with companies like Netflix rather than the games that are the life blood of the console. Furthermore he says the only reason the 360 did well is because both Sony and Nintendo offered up massive failures for consoles.

There's a lot to cover in that short blip but I'll try to address all of it if I can. As far as media partnerships go, I think they're slowly becoming a more important part of the business. Games can only keep you busy with a console for so long, which is what makes more casual uses like Netflix so crucial. It makes sure your video game machine is on even when release schedules are slow. If you look at the 360 library though, you'll see that for the most part that hasn't happened. In fact, in most cases it seems the 360 is a favorite for third-parties, which is far from what Brown originally said in his post. There is still a focus on games for Xbox considering we never see any Wii-style droughts on 360.

With regards to Kinect, maybe it was simply the fact that gamers aren't all that into camera technology for games. The Eyetoy never did well either, so I'm not surprised the Kinect was sort of lukewarm. The 360 crowd is a very hardcore bunch which means controllers have become their input of choice. It becomes very hard to change that when you release a massive expensive peripheral more than half way through the system's life cycle. The industry really wants us to use cameras, but so far we haven't moved on. Oh and as for Sony and Nintendo, they have both sold more than the 360 with their systems according to my knowledge so it's a bit much to call them failures. To me it sounds like someone's bitter to have changed jobs.

Speaking of Nintendo, the company held a Direct presentation last week with a whole bunch of games. My thoughts are a click away!

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