J Allard: Marketing Personified

This whole hard drive thing, and Microsoft’s attitude about it is really irking me. It was a stupid idea to make the hard drive optional. That’s all there is to it. So, Edge Magazine posted some interview responses and I’d like to take a moment to comment on them.

When asked if it’s possible that developers had been let down by making the hard drive optional, Homey J Allard replied with:

I don’t know who we’ve let down. There isn’t a game on 360 that you can’t play without a hard drive, so I think that’s a good thing for consumers. We’ve made a commitment to broadening the audience, and while I think most of our energy here at X05 is about the hardcore, over time we’re really setting the stage for making this a bigger category for everybody. So from the developer point of view you have the best tools and the commitment of the most well-resourced company in the world going worldwide with this product and saying that we want to grow the audience. So that seems like a win for developers – I’m not sure who’s supposed to be disappointed.

Okay, there’s a TON of marketing weasel speak in here (Homey J Allard’s primary language apparently), so let’s break this down and see if we can make sense of it…

I don’t know who we’ve let down.

My main man J Daddy is implying that no one is really disappointed by the lack of hard drive support. Fine.

There isn’t a game on 360 that you can’t play without a hard drive, so I think that’s a good thing for consumers.

Translation: It’s a good thing for consumers that we’re offering an add-on that YOU IN NO WAY NEED IN ORDER TO PLAY ANY XBOX 360 GAME.

We’ve made a commitment to broadening the audience, and while I think most of our energy here at X05 is about the hardcore, over time we’re really setting the stage for making this a bigger category for everybody.

J Diddy should be in politics. He’s using a very common political tactic. Hold a big media event that is targeted at one set of consumers, and then promise to deliver big things for some other constituency. This happened at the MTV Xbox 360 marketing-gasm. It was directed squarely at casual gamers. On the side was J Allard spouting stuff like, “Dude, this Xbox 360 has so many megahurts. It is l33t and it’s going to r0x0r your hardcore b0x0rs.

In the case of X05, it’s kind of like J Allard is taking you aside and whispering, “Hey, look, man. We’re giving a lot of lip service to the hardcore here, but don’t worry, man. We’re going to be doing big things for the casual gamer.” In essence, they talk like they’re “ALL HARD CORE” but then say that dropping universal hard drive support is there to make the game industry better for the more casual market.

So from the developer point of view you have the best tools and the commitment of the most well-resourced company in the world going worldwide with this product and saying that we want to grow the audience.

This means that Microsoft is committed to the developer because they’re providing the BEST TOOLS and THE MOST WELL-RESOURCED COMPANY, and by golly THEY WANT TO GROW THE MARKET. Heh… not well-resourced enough to include a hard drive as a standard option on every single console. Not committed enough to ensure that the developer will have the best tools (aka hard drives) available as a standard feature.

So that seems like a win for developers – I’m not sure who’s supposed to be disappointed.

Which means, no one is really disappointed, because look how COMMITTED we are. AND WE MEAN IT!

When J Allard was confronted with the fact that Volition, an Xbox 360 developer, was having frustrations because of the lack of hard drive support, he responded with:

Sometimes doing the right thing means doing the hard thing.

Yeah, that’s it. Removing the hard drive was a MORAL CHOICE.

Are there developers who are disappointed? Yeah, sure.

Wait. I thought this was a win-win scenario for developers and consumers… because look how committed you are!

I wish there was a hard drive and I wish there were four terabytes of memory; I wish it were free to consumers and I wish we could put one in every TV set

This is a not so subtle way of saying, “Look, you can’t have everything. I want to win the lottery, but that likely won’t happen.” He’s basically belittling the notion that a hard drive is a desired part of a good video game console. There’s just one problem there, J Man. A TWENTY GIG HARD DRIVE IS A HELL OF A LOT CHEAPER THAN FOUR TERABYTES OF MEMORY! You had to make sure that the Xbox 360 had 3 cores so that you could make stupid charts about how the Xbox 360 is THREE TIMES MORE POWERFUL THAN WIMPY PS3 WITH IT’S SINGLE CORE! But the most well-resourced and most committed company in the world can’t figure out how to include a twenty gigabyte hard drive? Color me unimpressed.

J Allard continued his explanation with:

I was the biggest fan of the hard drive and its potential, but the problem is that we sold 22million Xbox consoles and 5million, maybe 10million just don’t care about it. But we paid for it. So who pays for it this time? We can either ask the gamer to pay for it, pay for it ourselves, or prove that there’s enough value in it and have the gamer say ‘I want to pay for it’ – I think that’s the right model.

Whoa. Let me re-read that…

Yep, he just plainly and simply told us, “We don’t care about the 12 to 17 million Xbox gamers that really liked having a hard drive. We’d rather make them pay for the hard drive and make our games suck more and pander to the small percentage of gamers by giving them a watered down version of the Xbox 360.”

There you have it. The latest word from my homey J Allard. He is so ereet.

Oh, wait… no he’s not.

Behold: J Allard. The embodiment of marketing.