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May 26th, 2008 @ 11:43
Xbox’s director of product management, Aaron Greenberg, has issued another stinging assault on Sony, claiming the company has a history of not delivering on promises made to gaming to the gaming public and that the games trade has a responsibility to be “straight” with consumers.
Greenberg made headlines web-wide on May 9 after giving an interview in which he battered Sony over its PlayStation 3 business to date.
“I was basically expressing my frustration at a lot of specific things that they had promised over time,” he said, speaking in the latest Major Nelson podcast.
“I think Sony has had a history of over-promising and under-delivering. [I was] just using actual facts of all the things that they had promised. I think I talked to some folks about this afterwards, but I think as an industry, we owe it to our customers to be straight with them. I think that some of the stuff we’ve talked about, while the reaction may not always be positive, we’re going to tell you… People just want you to be straight with them. We know titles slip, we know things happen, and there’s little we can do to control that, but if we promise something - I think as an industry - we need to start living up to our promises. As an organisation, i think Xbox has a pretty good track record of doing that.”
Listen to the full thing through the link. Aaron just can’t help himself.
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May 26th, 2008 at 11:50 am
“Our hardware is well within the industry standard failure rates”
… yeah, MS are totally straight with their customers. LOL.
May 26th, 2008 at 11:55 am
To be fair, they did spend a billion dollars trying to put that right
But yeah, he’s green to the bone.
May 26th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Over-promising and under-delivering? Toy Story-like graphics anyone?
May 26th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Crikey! What’s up at MS? They’re on the offensive at the moment.
May 26th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
Ignoring the fairly major issue of hardware faults he’s spot on and this is the biggest thing Sony have to learn this generation.
May 26th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
Sony certainly need to stop talking and start showing. Home is a perfect example of Sony struggling to match the promise with the product, although I’d rather they delay it and bring out a solid product, than rush it.
I’d like more surprises in gaming. I can’t remember the last time a game came out of the blue and wowed everyone. It seems publishers and developers are forced to hype everything to insurmountable proportions, for fear of not getting noticed at all.
May 26th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
There has been plenty of times Microsoft has not lived up to its pomises, wheres Xbox live anywhere. What about.. Vista will make pc games run faster and more efficiently.
We will sell 10 million Xbox 360’s before the comptition releases there consoles, when they sold about 7.5 million before there release and fludded the retail chain with excess stock and saying we meant sales to retail not to consumers.
Telling everyone that the failure rate for the 360 was very low and within industry standards, when they knew from day one that it went on sale, that the systems had and still may have a design flaw that caused a very high number of systems to fail. Yes, they did change there warenty coverage to 3 years for the Red Ring failure problem only, but that was nearly a year and half after it being released and them knowing about the problem. In my oppinion they should have done a recall, because it is a design flaw, and replaced everyones system with a redesigned system that did not have a very high risk of failure.
An Ex Xbox 360 Fanboy.
May 26th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Really… With these kind of message it sounds more like he is afraid xbox 360 loses out on something. Sony and MS have been known to be over-promising and under-delivering they shouldn’t bite somewhere when they have the same problems. If it’s game wise or console wise as long if they deliver a good game in the end it wouldn’t really matter if something got postponed. Otherwise a company shouldn’t give a exact date anymore thay way at least nobody has expectations.
May 26th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
3-5%
May 26th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
Anyone else sick of this MS vs Sony ranting? Just leave us alone and let us get on with playing some games.
Maybe it’s to distract us from the fact that they have so few AAA titles this year compared to last. The guy just comes across as the worst kind of American. Maybe as you guys have said elsewhere, this plays really well at home, it doesn’t go down too well over here.
May 26th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
Most games I’m excited about are available on both consoles. I couldn’t careless about MS vs Sony rantathon its just tiresome. I would be much happier if both company’s got together and just made a unified console so I would only need one console to play all the games.
May 27th, 2008 at 8:55 am
Mouthing off has a new home.
May 28th, 2008 at 5:18 am
I am really tired of Mr. Greenberg’s rants. Maybe he’s upset because he’s seen the IDC 2008 projection for console sales which puts the 360 at a distant third to the Wii and PS3 in the 2010 - 2012 time frame. (For the record, I have a late-model 360 and I’m happy with it.)
I think his churlishness can be more easily explained, however, by the following two attributes:
1. First name: “Aaron”
2. Second name: “Greenberg”