August 11, 2009 Xbox 360 Dashboard Update

Well just got done looking at the new dashboard update to the 360 and about the only things that interest me currently are the following…

1. User Ratings
   It’s nice that people can rate the games and other content on the Marketplace and you can get an idea if the game (especially Indy Games, formerly known as Community Games) is worth spending money on.
2. Games on Demand
   This could be a really nice feature if the games are priced right … more on that in a bit.
3. Avatar Marketplace
   This is kind of interesting especially the ability you can get avatar items by playing games.

When I head of games on demand I had high hopes that there would be a significant discount on buying online.  Unfortunately it looks like the price in the Marketplace is exactly the same as you can buy retail online, quite often with free shipping.  The physical game has some major advantages over the download version … the main ones being.

1. You can loan a game to a friend to play.
   Supposedly if you log into a friend's console with your Xbox Live account you can download it there, after which he can play it until it’s deleted. So maybe it’s not such a big issue, but I curious how it works out in practice.
2. You can resell a game once you are done
   Once you are done playing a game you can take it to GameStop and trade it in for another game.  I won’t get into how much publisher dislike the used game business, lets just say the would be happy for it to disappear.
3. Xbox Storage costs too much
   The 120GB hard drive costs $140 or $1.17 a gigabyte.  Your average 500GB Laptop SATA hard drive only costs $85 or about $0.17 per gigabyte.  With your average game running 6GB or so you can only store 3 games on a 20GB model and even a 60GB model you will only get 8 or so.
   

So to summarize things, the new update provides some nice features, but if Microsoft wants the Marketplace to take off they need to increase the size of the hard drives available and make some very significant cuts in storage price cuts to encourage people to buy content online.