It felt kind of odd this past Tuesday, not writing about video games. Sure, I’ve theoretically got plenty to write about every week, what with 24, The Office and Veronica Mars, but one of those shows is in an extended rerun period and another has been replaced with a show starring L’il Kim and a bunch of Hoes (and I’m consistently being upstaged when it comes to television recaps, anyway), so I probably should keep with the video game writing. It’s lucrative.

Plus there is never any shortage of video game news that pisses me off.

The big news this week is that trusted sources have all-but-confirmed the coming announcement of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 Elite. This will obviously and reportedly be just like the regular version of the Xbox 360 (already three hundred and sixty times better than the original Xbox [Which was X times more powerful than a regular box]) except more elitist. It’s the kind of console that will scoff at you if you wear sweatpants and regularly look down on you for reading digg instead of kottke. It’s so elite that it only drinks foreign beers and feels like anyone who doesn’t drive a manual transmission should be sent to a reeducation camp. (Or just shot.)

It also does some other things.

Other Xbox 360 Elite Features

• Contains a 120GB hard drive, compared to the Xbox 360 Premium’s 20GB hard drive, and the Xbox 360 Core’s 0GB hard drive.
• Features an HDMI port, which is important to those who really want to impress people on AV forums.
• It might run cooler or quieter than current models, which sucks for those who’ve saved a shitload on their heating bills just from playing Lost Planet all winter.
• It is black.

Why the Xbox 360 Elite is a good idea

Despite my joking regarding the name — and it is, truly, a hideously bad name, reminiscent of other Microsoft naming practices that resulted in products like “Windows Vista Home Premium Edition” or “Whatever the fuck .NET was” — a new Xbox 360 model is a good idea. The Xbox 360 was one of the most fragile and inconsistent consoles ever made, with a wealth of people forced to return theirs due to issues relating to overheating. So, yeah, a redesign that addresses some of those flaws is a good idea.

In addition, cosmetic changes to a console can result in a big sales spike. Nintendo’s been proving that for years with their Gameboy Line and more recently with the massively successful DS Lite redesign. Sony struck gold both times with their slimer, quieter PSOne and PSTwo redesigns, as well. So why not Microsoft?

Why the Xbox 360 Elite is a terrible idea

engadget broke the story, so let’s hear it straight from them:

Elite will cost $479, and will be a 3rd SKU; it will be sold alongside Premium and Core packs.

Can someone explain to me what exactly it was that convinced both Microsoft and Sony that multiple SKUs — that’s Stock Keeping Unit, by the way — were a great idea? Did they miss out on the last twenty years of console sales, wherein multiple versions of the same consoles — with different specs and features — have never been accepted by consumers? And, more importantly, did they miss the fact at the core of the damn console industry that says that, hey, the reason millions more people like to play games on consoles as opposed to their computers is because consoles aren’t complicated.

Or, at least, they’re not supposed to be. The NES appealed because it was just that simple: there was an NES that was a little gray box you bought from the store and there were NES games — thousands of them — on the shelf right next to it. And all of them worked with it, no questions asked. The largest barrier gamers needed to pass when it came to NES games was occasionally having to blow into them to get them to boot. But they would eventually work, and they never didn’t work due to hardware incompatibility.

The Skew with SKUs

There are three major issues I have with multiple SKUs:

1. First, the lower-powered SKU is always vastly outsold by the more-powerful (and more expensive) SKU, even if the differences between the two are largely irrelevant (like with the PS3). People don’t want to feel like they got the ‘budget’ version of a console. Because, honestly, if budget gaming was what they were after, why wouldn’t they just buy a PS2 or something?
2. Even though #1 is universally true, the existence of the lower-priced and lower-powered SKU means that, for the most part, developers will never make really good use of most of the features included in the high-powered SKU. Because even if doing so would cut off 5% of the userbase, that’s still 5% of the userbase who won’t be able to run your games at all, or at least as well as the other 95%. Why risk it?
3. As said above, it creates confusion in the customer. I can’t stress enough how important this is. As a manufacturer, your goal should be to make the customer feel like an expert on your product, even if they really don’t know a thing. Giving them reason to ask questions — like “Which version do I want?” — is giving them reason to consider saying “I don’t want it at all.” And then the sale is gone.

My advice to Microsoft

The Xbox 360 Elite is a good idea and could really spur sales if it hits with the right software. So why make it a “limited edition”? If they really want to make a splash, they could eliminate the other two SKUs on the selves and sell only this new version. By simplifying their hardware line-up they’re almost guaranteed to sell more units to people who aren’t “in the know” when it comes to gaming. And by that I mean people who don’t read NeoGAF.

Until that happens, having three versions of the same console on the same shelf is retail suicide.