Email: Words fail me

The following was stated by Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business.

 

“Every generation, as you’ve probably heard, has grown approximately 30%. So this generation is about 300 million units. Most industry experts think the next generation will get upwards of about 400 million units. That’s if it’s a game console, over the next decade.”

 

“We think you can go broader than a game console, that’s our aim, and you can go from 400 million to potentially upwards of a billion units [Update: just to clarify, he’s talking about all next gen consoles combined here]. That’s how we’re thinking of the Xbox opportunity as we go forward.”

 

At first I thought this was a joke article, its like these guys live in a completely different world to the real one.

When someone doesn’t seem rational, it is probably because we don’t understand what reasons they are saying the things they do. It is like with the Xbone gamers asking, “This console does not seem designed to be fun.” Oh, it was designed to be fun. It is fun for the third party companies. When we wonder how a bad game can be released, usually the answer is that it was fun for someone else. It was fun for the developer to make or was fun for the accounting office to ship so it fits into the quarter. It takes significant maturity to focus on the customers having fun and not yourself.

Rationality is just someone’s sense of fun. My guess is that the Microsoft VP is trying to make things fun for the investors. Investing is fun when ‘everything grows by 30% or more!’