Everybody makes mistakes | 10 Years Ago This Month

gamesindustry.biz:

The games industry moves pretty fast, and there's a tendency for all involved to look constantly to what's next without so much worrying about what came before. That said, even an industry so entrenched in the now can learn from its past. So to refresh our collective memory and perhaps offer some perspective on our field's history, GamesIndustry.biz runs this monthly feature highlighting happenings in gaming from exactly a decade ago.

This column has plenty of recurring themes, but one of the most obvious ones is big companies and renowned developers saying things and placing bets that would turn out to be disastrously ill-advised.

Sometimes it's because these companies are run by fools and these big names are in fact Pagliacci-level clowns. But sometimes it's because even people who know what they're doing are just wrong a whole lot, about a bunch of things. October of 2013 gave us plenty of examples of these points, and I'll do my diplomatic best to avoid saying which ones belong in which category.

Let's start with the console warriors, as Microsoft and Sony were both ramping up the launch push for their new consoles, the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4, and touting what they saw as differentiating factors between their similar-seeming capabilities.

For Microsoft, that meant Xbox Live lead program manager John Bruno was doing the rounds promoting Xbox Live Compute and the power of the cloud, the much-touted idea of having remote Microsoft servers doing some of the CPU heavy lifting to allow the actual console in the user's home to punch above its weight.

"We believe that there's going to be higher fidelity experiences over time, because of having that ability to offload those tasks that they often have to trade