Unit 6 Assessment: Critical approaches to creative media productions
Name of company -Microsoft
Target audience – In my opinion the Microsoft consoles especially the Xbox One are targeting more of a family audience. The Xbox 360 started out mainly as a gaming platform so it appealed to the gamers more than other audiences, then as time passed things like Bing, YouTube, Twitch and music were added which made it more diverse and it appealed to more audience groups and not just the gamers. The Xbox One on the other hand has started out as the multi-media “all in one” entertainment system which appeals to a much larger audience than the 360 did.
Marketing Tactics – The Xbox 360 marketing strategy introduced the “direct-to-consumer” approach putting in its target markets view 4 days before its competitors during a pre-taped MTV broadcast which gave them the advantage. Microsoft unveiling the Xbox 360 4 days before Sony and Nintendo was a ploy to get an advantage from the games foothold it got with their first console in 2001.
The Xbox 360 specs are:
Custom IBM power-PC Based CPU
*Three symmetrical cores running at 3.2 GHz each
*Two hardware threads per core; six total
*VMX-128 vector unit per core; three total
*128 VMX-128 registers per hardware thread
*1 MB L2 cache
CPU game math performance
*9 billion dot product operations per second
Custom ATI Graphics Processor
*500MHz processor
*10 MB of embedded DRAM
*48-way parallel floating-point dynamically scheduled shader pipelines
*Unified shader architecture
Polygon performance
*500 million triangles per second
Pixel fill rate
*16 gigasamples per second fill rate using 4xMSAA
Shader performance
*48 billion shader operations per second
Memory
*512 MB of GDDR3 RAM
*700 MHz of DDR
*Unified memory architecture
Memory bandwidth
*22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth
The Xbox One’s advertising campaign was a lot broader than the Xbox 360’s with its original content targeting 18-24 year old males. Microsoft were also covering matters such as the ability to watch TV, stream music, watch and broadcast games on Twitch, use Skype, YouTube, “snap” 2 apps so you can play a game and watch your favourite TV programs, a heavy emphasis on the new Xbox One Kinect and user security. One TV advert showed normal people doing normal things e.g. Rise Son of Rome, a man walking down a street and a mass of roman soldiers run down past him, one soldier stops and prompts the man to join them. Another advert shows a man giving a conference and titan from TitanFall crashes through the sealing behind him, knocks on the window and offers him the piloting role. These adverts are showing that no matter whom you are or what you do, in these games you can be whoever you want.
Other Xbox One advert showcases the Xbox One’s Kinect voice command ability, man is playing a game and gives the command “Xbox snap TV”, for Skype the man says “Xbox answer”, another Kinect advert shows a woman using hand motions to scroll through her film collection.
Xbox One specs:
Optical Drive
*Blu-ray/DVD
Ram
*8GB DDR3 clock 2133MHz bandwidth: 68.26 GB/s
Flash memory
*8GB flash memory
CPU
* 8 Core AMD custom CPU Frequency: 1.75 GHz
GPU
* Clock Speed: 853 MHz (originally 800 MHz) Shader Cores: 768 Peak Throughput: 1.31 TFLOPS
Storage* 500 GB Hard Drive non-replaceable, External Hard Drive support available
Motion control
*Kinect
USB
* USB 3.0 x3
Networking
* Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi (A/B/G/N dual-band at 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz) includes WiFi Direct support
A/V Hookups
* HDMI input and output (4K support)
API
* DirectX 11.2
Mouse and keyboard support
*Yes
References
Xbox target audience
Marketing strategies
http://www.123helpme.com/xbox-marketing-strategy-view.asp?id=163455
http://whatisplaystation4.com/should-i-buy-a-ps4-or-xbox-one/
Xbox 360 specs
http://xbox.about.com/od/xbox2/a/xbox360specs.htm
Xbox One specs
http://uk.ign.com/wikis/xbox-one/Xbox_One_Hardware_Specs
Sony
Sony premiered their first TV commercial for the PlayStation 4 during an NBA finals game, and like all PS4 marketing to date the creative portrays the PS4 in stark contrast with its biggest competitor the Xbox One.
The main difference between the PS4 and the XB1 is the hardware; the Xbox One is more focused on multi-media so the gaming aspect suffers, the PS4 puts all its power into the gaming side of things which is reinforced with their slogan “This is for the players”.
The PlayStation 4 has secured its self a number of exclusive titles, the majority of which are single player only games and being on the PlayStation 4 the performance will be great. Since the PlayStation 3 technology has improved a lot, graphics has improved as well as frame rate. The extra power allows for larger worlds and vastly more detail.
Sony have been quick on the trigger to grab themselves exclusives over Microsoft to better their sales. A lot of Sony’s success came from Microsoft’s colossal failure during their marketing campaign, saying that thy did correct their mistakes but failed to meet the demand of the public possibly to make their console look moor popular, Sony however made more than enough so the resulting situation was Microsoft saying “oh no we don’t have any consoles left” Sony sees this and says “we see you want a next-gen console and we have plenty, you want one”. The PlayStation cost less than the Xbox One which ultimately lead to their success over Microsoft.
http://adage.com/article/digital/playstation-4-marketing-focuses-gamers-unlike-xbox/242056/
jpinnington 