Microsoft has put the Halo 3 multiplayer beta in front of a few hundred thousand people this month and it is the most effective piece of marketing anybody in this industry will run all year.
Consider what it actually achieves. Everybody in the beta is playing Halo for weeks before release, which means they are not playing anything else, which means every competing title shipping this spring is fighting for attention against a game that is not even out. The people playing are talking about it constantly. And Microsoft is getting genuine load testing on its matchmaking infrastructure at a scale no internal test can simulate, for free, from customers who paid for the privilege by buying a different game to get in.
The entry mechanism is the clever part. Access came bundled with a retail title, which turned a marketing exercise into a reason to buy something. I cannot think of another industry where you can charge people to participate in your quality assurance and have them thank you.
What it does to the competitive picture is straightforward. Sony has no answer to this. There is no PlayStation franchise with the gravitational pull to run the same play, and the machine still does not have the library to make people care about what arrives in the autumn. Europe finally got its consoles in March, four months late, into exactly the software situation I described in February.
Nintendo, meanwhile, continues to sell every Wii it can build to people who are not comparing shooters. That market keeps being treated as an aberration by everybody who covers this industry and it keeps not being one.
The part of this I find genuinely interesting is what it says about where value sits now. Microsoft’s advantage this generation has never really been the hardware, which is unreliable and loud. It is the service, the friends list, the achievements, the matchmaking that works, and the ability to put a beta in front of half a million people because they all already have accounts. That is infrastructure, and infrastructure compounds.
Sony is building the equivalent while trying to launch a console and fix a supply chain, which is the wrong order to do those things in and was not really avoidable given the position it started from.
My expectation for the autumn is that Halo 3 does numbers that get reported as an entertainment story rather than a games story, and that the interesting question is not how many copies it sells but how many consoles it sells alongside them. That number is the one Microsoft actually cares about, and the beta was designed to move it.