For the past seven years, we have enjoyed them immensely, but our gaming interests and habits have changed a bit, his more than my own (re: bachelor lifestyle). The rumour mill started up and we were looking at the announcement of new systems coming up pretty soon, and I found myself quite excited. May 2013 couldn't come soon enough, and when the day came, I was relatively glued to my monitor at work, watching the presentation and refreshing the live blog at the same time.
Disappointment.
The XBox One - as the name was announced that day - was something else; it was no 360, and it wasn't the natural evolution that I (and many more) were hoping for. The hour long presentation showcased how the One would take over your cable box and allow instant swapping between games, movies and live television. It talked about sports and the new Kinect. They talked about just a couple of games, with a major focus on the next Call of Duty. All of which, I had little interest in.
We quickly determined that this XBox was not meant for us, or at the very least, Microsoft has told me that I am not their primary target market anymore.
I cut cable years ago.
I avoided the Kinect and dislike motion gaming.
I don't buy sports games, or watch sports.
I don't buy or play Call of Duty (unless it's really cheap).
Fast forward a bit to the next Microsoft press conference (pre-E3 one) in the beginning of June and we get into the real juice of the next generation.
It's not good.
DRM all over. It's confusing. You have to install every game. You must keep Kinect connected at all times. Kinect is always listening. Privacy? You can't lend games - or you can, but it's restricted and complicated. You can't really buy used games - you can but you'll pay a fee. It's always online.
Everything. Has. Changed.
And it sucks.
The One was no longer a gaming console: it was an always listening mass-media consumption device that just so happened to play games, and the restrictions that were put on playing games was ridiculous (especially for us casual gamers). Always on internet connection? Seriously? The problem with it all is that it bore little relevance to myself: I rarely have internet problems, and I'm always online.
But it's the principle of it all, right? The worst offender is the Kinect, and why am I being forced to buy hardware that I don't have any interest in using. I listened to a great comment that noted that the new Kinect is an amazing piece of hardware, that eclipses the previous version. But there is no reason why this new hardware is being included, or how it's going to make our games better. We're just told it is, and we have to roll with it. If you're ever looking for an example of something being shoved down the throats of consumers, take this new Kinect as the prime. Judging by the number of titles on the shelves and the amount that people talk about the Kinect, it's safe for me to say it was a relative failure, and hasn't added much to gaming. So the bundle is going to drive up the price, which is sitting at $499.
$499 for the One, while the PS4 slides in at $399. That's just killer. Supposedly Sony removed their camera/Kinect from the bundle to get it down that low, so please Microsoft, do the same thing.
A couple of short weeks after all this nonsense, Microsoft pulled a one eighty and removed all the lending, used game and online requirements from the system. The backlash was that high, the consumer has spoken.
This is good news for everyone, but it doesn't heal the massive wound that Microsoft dealt out. It will take time for this to heal, and I'm not convinced that they are in a position to fully recover. And an important thing to note is that there is nothing to stop them from slowly rolling this stuff out over the course of the system's life.
A few people have spoken out to say that the reversal is going to deny us some neat new functionality. Like "family sharing" where you could actually share one game license to others as long as you don't play at the same time. It sounds like you will also need the disc in the tray while playing now as well. Basically it's back to where the 360 functions right now. Microsoft had some cool ideas, but didn't communicate these well: these new features may have been killer, but they didn't talk about how they would work. Instead, they left the hivemind to spin everything out of control and the internet being what it is, spun it into an abyss.
After all this time, I had much more faith that MS would do the "right" thing, and we would get a nice console that played games and had a similar controller to the 360. I just want some new graphics, really.
Sony is here to fill the void. They have been taking notes on every misstep they took with the PS3 (and there were lots) and worked to correct all of them. At least, from what we can see so far. The PS4 looks like a pure gaming machine, which is exactly what I'm looking for.
In the end, it's all white noise. I've always been of the mind to wait until the system launches and we see how things turn out. The good and bad of it, is that the system can dramatically change in a short period of time. The industry can react: sending out new firmware can open up or close down your system. When the dust settles, in time, I will own all of them. Or perhaps I'll move to PC? My 360 has lots of life in it, and there is a huge stack of games waiting to be played. After all, it's the games that matter, and the games that make or break it.
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