Upon completion of that last post, I have realised that I’ve not addressed the Xbox One on here yet.
I can kinda see where they are coming from with the extra functions and all, but I think they have misunderstood it. Nowadays people can get games on devices that can also do loads of other things, but never have I come close to having the level of control on a phone as I have with a controller. Never have I seen the sheer spectacle of an intricate, marvellous world on a tablet screen compared to a television screen. I guess they are just trying to keep people rooted to their own device for as long as possible rather than another companies device, regardless of whether they are playing videogames or not. I don’t have to use these extra functions, but I’m sure some of them will make their way into my routine, just as some of the apps on the Xbox 360 have. And bear in mind, these apps didn’t even exist when the Xbox 360 first came out.
All in all, it looks good. New Halo, new Dead Rising (I still need to play the two Dead Rising side-games and Dead Rising 2 to be honest), new Assassin’s Creed (erm… I still need to play 1, 2, Revelations, Brotherhood and 3), Watch Dogs, Crimson Dragon, Sunset Overdrive, Peggle 2, Titanfall… I know it’s not the longest of lists, but that’s more launch window games than I liked the look of on the original Xbox (Halo, Jet Set Radio Future and Gun Valkyrie), and the Xbox 360 (erm… I don’t think any launch games grabbed me). The Controller looks nice and updated, having rumble in the triggers sounds interesting.
While having the Xbox communicate with Xbox Live every 24 hours to make sure I still own all the games I say I own (or should that be “licenses that I say I own”?), isn’t a problem in itself, that failure to perform this step renders the console inert as a videogame console is a big issue. When I’m at home, my Xbox 360 is connected to Live 100% of the time. Even with a wireless connection, there are rarely connection problems. But that is not the issue. Sometimes my 360 goes places. Relatives houses. Friends houses for LAN parties. This would cause problems. While having to connect to the internet once a day to ensure the authenticity of your software would kill piracy stone dead, it is also going to kill the pre-owned market, both things that the industry have been looking to “solve” for a long time. While piracy is wrong, using old games as a currency to buy new games is not wrong, in my eyes, at least. I work in a shop which accepts trade-ins, and from my experience (and bear in mind, it’s not the most highbrow of establishments), most customers would rather walk out with nothing than pay full price for the latest generic army shooter. So it’s not like every time someone chooses to not buy a new, fully priced game it is because they bought a cheaper, second-hand one. Sometimes games are too expensive. But at the same time, sometimes they are not.
As an intermediary step between owning a fully functional game on a disc and a piece of authentication code on your console, it could have been handled better in terms of Microsoft’s PR, and could have been transitioned a little slower. Phase out disc based games by making downloads cheaper, and available sooner than the physical versions. It’s what Steam does on PC, many a time I stumble upon PC gamers bemoaning that they have a billion games to play because they just bought another half million games for £3.29. I’m not at all against the digital revolution, in fact, I would welcome it. I just want it to be a smooth transition. As it is, locking a game disc to just one user is up to the publishers of the games on Xbox One, and I honestly can’t see a publisher flicking that switch on just yet. It’ll take a brave publisher to make the first move, but once one publisher does it, they all will. I hope by that point digital is rightfully in place as the distribution method of choice.
While I am still not happy about subsidising Kinect, and know full well that a large portion of the motion sensing will be wasted (our room is in no way big enough to play a proper Kinect game), I’m 100% sure it won’t be used to monitor us via streaming technology, and Microsoft HQ won’t resemble the room with all those TV screens from The Matrix. As Grumpy put it on the forum:
I can’t help but think that MS spying on its customers would create one of the biggest consumer relations stinks imaginable. If you don’t trust MS, trust their fear in a massive public backlash.
