Hell Status: Frozen Over

Wow Microsoft, just wow. The new Xbox conference just ended, and I’m kind of in shock. APPARENTLY the future of gaming does not lie with games, but rather with “Interactive Entertainment Experiences”. To this end, they are offering a “Dynamic Home Screen” that allows you to switch between web browser, Skype, live TV, games, movies, music, toaster, washing machine, and a live webcam feed of puppies very easily. This is supposed to create a “Seamless Entertainment Experience” that will make the “Xbox One” the new centerpiece in living rooms around the world. The only problem here, of course, is that I, and everyone else, ALREADY HAS A DEVICE THAT DOES THAT:

Seriously Microsoft, you spent how many years, and how many dollars to solve a problem that television manufacturers solved decades ago? When you have a TV with multiple things connected to it, you don’t have to unplug and plug in things every time because the television has multiple inputs. “Oh” I hear you say, you Xbox fanboy in my imagination, “but the Xbox One allows you to do multiple things at once, by offering multiple windows”. Really. That’s the best you can come up with? News flash, televisions have had that feature as well since 1983. I’m just going to go ahead and list all of the big, glaring, obvious problems with the system as it has been shown so far:

1. Stop focusing on what the console “can” do and start telling us what it “will” do.

All of these features are nice, no one will ever use them, but I suppose they are nice to have. The problem is that if you don’t use them, then what does this console offer? Let’s say I don’t give a damn about using Facebook or Skype on my Xbox One, and I just want to play games, what drives me to pay the premium for this brand new console that I can’t get anywhere else? The WiiU offers unique control styles, and the Playstation 4, while it also has a case of the “features” at least has some of those features tailored to gaming like live streaming and content sharing. According to this reveal, all the Xbox One offers to people who actually play games is better graphics and more processing power, which leads me to my next point.

2. It really doesn't look that good.

I can’t be alone here. When they were showing the new and old Call of Duty games side-by-side I really didn’t see that much of an improvement. Sure the images looked better, but that’s because the “old” screenshots were flat, in-game angles that you see all the time during gameplay, while the “new” shots were dynamic angles used for the trailer. Even if those images were rendered using the in game engine, they aren’t gameplay, and it isn’t running in real time. If you compare the CoD: Ghosts trailer to the CoD: MW3 debut trailer, they look pretty darn similar. Whenever a new console comes out, you can’t judge its power on the launch games, just look at Perfect Dark Zero vs. Halo 4, it’s like night and day, but this definitely doesn’t make me want to jump up and spend half a grand on a new console.

3. It's not backwards compatible.

To be fair, nether is the Playsation 4, but seriously, this is such an obvious thing to include. This, mystifyingly includes Xbox Live Arcade games, so not even your downloadable titles will work. If the console’s purpose is to connect all of the devices in your house into one box, then why can’t we play as many games as possible on it?

4. You’ll have to pay a fee to play used games.

Remember when I made a whole big post about how it would make no sense to have games that require physical discs anyway to have additional DRM on top of that? Well, I have egg on my face because apparently I underestimated just how incompetent Microsoft is. Let me get this straight: The console requires the installation of every game to the hard drive, but the game disc doesn't have to be in the drive in order to play it. Instead of requiring the disc, the game will be locked to your account, and if anyone else tries to play it, they will have to pay a fee. The problem here, of course, is that if the fee is less than the cost of the game, people will just pass discs around instead of buying it at full price, because you never actually need the disc in order to play, and if the price is the same or higher than the actual price then the used games market is literally dead for the console, which will cripple its market share. If it is the full price of the game, Microsoft will also have to keep up with all sale prices everywhere, otherwise the entire market falls apart due to conflicting values. Huh, sounds reasonable.

5. It requires the Kinect to function.

I keep trying to type something informative here, but I can’t stop laughing long enough to get words out.

I could keep going forever, but by far the most telling this is that over the course of the presentation, Sony’s stock prices shot up almost nine percent.

That’s ominous.