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Comment by arockwell | Hacker News Reader

Xbox Live is the only truly innovative product I can think of that MS has put out in quite a long time. And even Xbox Live is getting pretty old.

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I think the zune is a truly innovative product. It seems that everyone always immediately writes it off as an iPod ripoff, but the zune experience is actually really unique.

I think I read somewhere that these days the 360 is more profitable than their OS or any of their software. I liked Live, but never really thought it was worth it since a majority of the games that included a multiplayer feature either hit or miss, while most missed. i.e. Halo (anyone of them) all hit. Star Wars BattleFront (anyone of them), all missed.

It's really the social aspect of Live that is the most innovative. While most people were still playing with server lists and friends lists, MS had a way for you to log in and instantly jump into a game that your friend is playing. You could even tell what they were doing inside each game (e.g. "Tom is on rescuing the princess in Some Game.")

And the fact that they completely overhauled their interface, added new features (like Netflix streaming), all while being still ahead of the pack, is extremely un-Microsoft-like. Usually I expect to see MS innovate only when they've been soundly beaten by the competition. It's a breath of fresh air.

Very true, although I don't own a 360 I have plenty of friends that do, and one feature I thought was interesting was how easy it was for my friend (who is as ignorant about computers and networking as anyone else in the masses) to manage his home network and files (which was on windows inevitably) through his 360, which he never knew how or cared about before owning a 360. Another thing that caught my attention was the content Microsoft made readily available to 360 users, (as you pointed out, steaming Netflix) from entire games, free demos, other user profiles, and game stats.

The only thing that comes close to giving MS a run for its money is, surprisingly, Steam. I've been playing some Left 4 Dead lately, and the social features in that game are very compelling, and it stretches over to other Valve games like Team Fortress 2, and even some third-party titles.

Too bad PC gaming is a bit of a dying industry :(

> Too bad PC gaming is a bit of a dying industry :(

This is a good thing for a number of reasons. One is that there's no need to have Windows around anymore, meaning that home users can switch to something more usable, stable, and secure. The other is that game companies will only have to test two configurations (Sony and Microsoft), instead of the thousands that they do on PC games. Less QA grunt work == more features, or faster releases.

I'll concede that FPSes suck on consoles, but considering they all have USB, there's no reason why you can't connect a keyboard and mouse to them.

I think Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2 have been great examples of why console multiplayer is still substandard. Both games came out, sold massive numbers of copies, and naturally some balance problems were discovered.

Valve patched the PC versions almost immediately, and in fact have even added content to the game in subsequent updates. All of these updates just hit the 360 version days ago. MS is allergic to fast-turnaround updates, and also allergic to free content updates (it sets a bad precedent for devs who want to charge for more content).

I use XBox Live, but I don't find it innovative at all. I pay Microsoft to play on the internet, which I can do free on other systems. I'm not a pro gamer, I don't care about achievements or rankings. Downloading demos is nice, but not innovative.

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