E3 2008: Microsoft Press Conference

These are my impressions based on Chris Kohler's Live Blog of the event.

Convergence
It looks like Microsoft is making good progress in this area. NBC, Universal, and Netflix now all have deals to provide content. They made it sound like Netflix subscribers will be able to download anything they could download on the PC to their 360 instead. This must be why their clearancing 20GB units to replace them with 60GB ones. 20GB don't hold much movies.

Casual
Microsoft has copied Nintendo Miis. Apparently you can have them stand around, chat, and share photos. Since Nintendo is scared to death of child predators, Microsoft may be able to do a lot more with Miis than they were. They may actually show up in 3rd party games, for example.

They announce "Xbox Live Primetime", where people can play game shows for real prizes. There's also a Scene It (movie trivia) game.

There's an Eye Toy like app called "You're In The Movies" where you can use the Xbox Vision Cam to put you and your friends into ridiculous situations and make silly movies of it.

And Banjo-Kazooie cart building and Viva Piñata 2 round out the family friendly offerings.

There's also all the music games (Rock Band, Guitar Hero, and the new karaoke game Lips).

I must say, Microsoft certainly appears to be making a better effort in this space. I don't think this will help them catch up with Wii, but it may be enough to help them regain the lead over the PS3 in the US and maybe catch up somewhat in Europe.

Game News
Resident Evil 5 will have online co-op. That's pretty awesome.

Final Fantasy XIII will be simultaneously released on the 360. That's huge. Well, it would have been huge if Final Fantasy fans hadn't already bought PS3s in preparation. Still, losing exclusivity on Final Fantasy is a big enough deal to actually weaken the PlayStation brand. I wonder how much it cost them?

Price
Microsoft didn't talk about price, but as I alluded to earlier, they're clearancing 20GB units at $300. Once those are gone, it'll be $350 to get an Xbox worth owning again. (Of course, with the red ring problems of the older units, I personally don't consider the clearanced units worth owning either.) Since both MS and Sony are losing money on their games businesses, we may not see price drops for a while. And neither one is at the price point that allows for mass market adoption. This is gonna be a long console cycle.

Update 14 July 2008 16:44 PST
Giant Bomb mentions that you will now be able to install 360 games to the hard drive. You need the DVD in the drive to verify you still have the game, but after that the whine of the DVD drive should be gone, and load times will be far quicker. Does that also mean less pop-in for GTA IV? How many bugs can we expect from this? This'll be interesting.