New Series - 40 days of Microsoft gaming improvements

Today marks the beginning of Lent, and instead of pretending that I meaningfully celebrate this pre-holiday period, I have instead decided to give up my recent writing laziness and take this opportunity to start a 40-day series of thoughts about improvements that I feel Microsoft needs to make to its hardware, services, games, and other aspects of its gaming division in order to stay relevant in 2008 and improve the Xbox 360 experience.

Here is some background on this long-planned and much ignored new series. As an Xbox fan, I am feeling pretty queasy as 2008 slowly gets going. I look at magazine articles that list dozens of hot games for 2008 - and the vast majority of them are multi-platform releases. Sony has LittleBigPlanet, MGS 4, their virtual-world Home initiative, and cheaper and better PS3 hardware happening this year. Plus all the multi-platform hot games that the Xbox gets. You've got Sony finally making some money on the PS3, saying they will soon outsell the 360, and even EA saying the same. HD DVD is pretty much dead, and Sony has the winning next-gen high-def movie disc format in Blu-ray.

At the same time, so far Microsoft has only announced exclusives like Fable 2 and Halo Wars for 2008. The Xbox 360 has to compete with Apple's numerous studio agreements in the downloadable movie rental segment. Microsoft doesn't have a next-gen optical storage format. The current hardware SKUs are getting stale. Xbox Live had almost a month of issues over the holidays - something that angered many paying customers. On the downloadable side, developers are still running into arbitrary size limits that Sony doesn't impose. Some indie developers are moving their projects to platforms like the Wii.

It does look rather bleak for Xbox fans, and really only because Microsoft seems to be losing the momentum it gained after the launch of the Xbox 360. We finally seem to be somewhat past the red-ring PR nightmare, so things really should be looking better and more exciting this point.

That's why I am going to go over a number of (40, since it's Lent) large and small aspects of gaming that I wish Microsoft would fix or improve this year.