Today, Microsoft announced that they will continue to move forward with their plans to directly compete with the Wii. Larry “Major Nelson” Hyrb has stated “Well, our Avatars have proven to be a huge success.  People are spending a LOT of Spacebucks on avatar upgrades such as hats, watches, socks, and keychains. The profit margin on avatars and upgrades are greater than any other item on the Marketplace leading us to recognize their importance ensuring we will strive to release new content on an hourly basis from this week forward.”

Major continued with “Also, now that we’ve completely emulated the Mii experience, including the music, our next step is to cease all Hard Drive manufacturing, and to release consoles with ONLY 256MB of memory. We’ve seen that Wii users continue to put up with frustration as more and more people have to ‘clean the fridge,’ and we see this as an opportunity to change our hardware configuration in a way that allows Microsoft to make an even bigger profit.”

“Plans down the road include a completely motion-based control scheme that will require users to not only buy new controllers (that come in 4 separate pieces,) but a completely new revision of the console as well. The new console will not include an ethernet port, as we want to offer our customers a variety of options for Xbox LIVE connectivity. A special optimized 360USB port has been created.  Both wired and wireless adapters that with with the 360USB port will be made available for $125 each. By using the newly created 360USB specification, we can guarantee that the only adapters available will be from Microsoft, ensuring industry-wide compatibility… ensuring that compatibility will initially be reflected in the price, but we hope to have it down to a more reasonable $99 as manufacturing costs decrease.”

When asked about XBOX Live and its pricing structure, Nelson commented “well, now that we have a brand new interface, we have decided to raise the price of XBOX Live Gold by $5 a month, and will be eliminating XBOX Live Silver accounts. If you don’t have Gold, your XBOX 360 will only be playable from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. daily.  We will be allowing people to play multiplayer games with a Silver account, but only against people in timezones that vary by at least four hours from your own timezone.”

Nelson continued “We will also be introducing XBOX Live Platinum, which will be the only way to play games from the Gears of War and Halo franchises online. The subscription will be an additional $10 per month, but users will come with perks like additional weapons in other online games that Gold members won’t have access to.  Live Platinum will also be the only plan to support voice chat which is being removed from the Gold subscribers’ plan.”

Shane Kim also commented on these changes, “We know that these changes seem pretty radical, but it’s obvious that gamers will still pay for these services, so why wouldn’t we do this?  Also, not to give anything away… but I’ve heard the fifth major installment of a prominent survival horror franchise might be making its way to the 360 in the future… but you didn’t hear that from me.”

Tweet This Post