This September, your spare time, your quality time with families, your down time (basically every aspect of your life that falls without your professional obligations) will haemorrhage. Xbox One is coming to China, responding to the Call of Duty: to rage war on our living rooms.
As stated in the original article, roughly a third of the country’s population are “playing games” (not sure what that encompasses) which is more than the entire population of North America. The gaming industry generated more than $13 billion in 2013, an increase of 38% in the last year alone.
We’ll leave you to read the details of the partnership brokered with BesTV New Media Co., which will see the console enter the market legitimately for the first time. Instead, we’ll focus on the implications for music and possible downfalls of the launch.
Xbox One has been a relative hit, further legitimising Microsoft’s foray into gaming. According to an earlier press release, with Xbox One and Xbox 360 combined, the Xbox platform sold more hardware than any other home console platform and held 43 percent of the home console market share in the U.S.
We all know about the impact gaming has had on the music industry. In the past large premiums were paid by the gaming industry to attract synchronisations with popular mainstream artists. However, the curation of soundtracks and incidental audio content for gaming provides an essential route to market for breaking artists. Throughout the 00’s the power shifted, repositioning game developers as valuable gate-keepers. But beyond in-game audio content, the imperative to dominate the living room has necessitated diversification away from “pure” gaming, and into other media. Today’s consoles are well and truly a part of the paradigm of convergent media, providing holistic entertainment solutions.
For those of you not in the know, Xbox Music Pass is an all-in-one, multi-platform music streaming service. Think of it as ‘Xpotify’. Take this service, couple it with third-party APP integration and social networking (albeit through a dedicated platform) and you get a comprehensive ecosystem which enables music discovery through, and alongside gaming. The only missing element is the link between online entertainment and offline live entertainment.
With all this functionality in mind, what can we expect from this partnership? Who knows. We can make a safe bet Xbox will look to activate the console at all sorts of offline music events. They’ll integrate native applications from the Chinese market, and presumably need to broker partnerships with domestic music services. That is, unless they are able to broker direct deals with labels to extend catalogue access from their pre-existing Xbox Music Pass service to China.
Of course the launch has been met with some doubt. American McGee – a veteran game developer based in Shanghai – believes that Xbox One will fail for numerous reasons, including:
1 – Next gen consoles are already available in the territory (the ban is totally ineffective). Taobao provides many purchasing options.
2 – Most streaming content is consumed on mobile devices or PCs, defeating the object of selling set-top boxes. Furthermore, the set-top box market is already saturated and dominated by local players including Xiaomi.
3 – Piracy will pretty much undermine the Xbox subscription model.
4 – The only people with the time to play computer games consoles can’t afford them. As McGee points out, there is a clear cultural / audience disconnect.
5 – Censorship and restrictions on content will result in a sub-standard level of entertainment as far as legitimate models go.
To read McGee’s full response to the launch you can read his original Facebook post, or refer to this article which goes into more depth. We’d certainly trust his judgement given his background, and the fact he is immersed in the market. Let’s see how Xbox work around the potential pitfalls of the launch.