Xbox One: True or False?
I don’t hate the Xbox One or Microsoft. I want to get that out of the way before someone accuses me of being such a ‘fan girl’ of Sony. Anyway, I found this funny the first time I read this but I don’t think it’s necessarily true. The Xbox One does have new features and it is capable of playing video games using ‘next-gen’ technology. However, I do get the point that they stripped off most of their major features and the Xbox One might not be as innovative by doing so. The Kinect will always be required though. I don’t think that will ever change.
Funny or cheap humor?
[via DigitalPimpOnline]
I think it’s a pretty cheap shot. They come out with a vision of a always on console, when everyone voices their displeasure they fix it to make everyone happy now they’re killing them for taking away features and flip flopping. I honestly don’t know what they were supposed to do. They have made a huge investment in Kinect, with all the improvements they’ve made to it it looks like what everyone was hoping it would be originally. If they don’t pack it in with every console it will die and go down in the long line of failed video game console attachments. With every console with Kinect it has a legitimate install base and gives developers more incentive to use it and try new things.
It’s both. SNES was just a stronger NES, PS2 was just an upgraded PS1, and PS3 was essentially an Xbox 360 with blu-ray, to name a few examples of consoles that weren’t swimming in new features and innovations, but were still great. But at the same time, Microsoft really shit the bed by making most of the new features of the Xbox One exploitative of the consumer (if not spectacularly anti-consumer) while charging them $100 more than their competitor for the privilege.
I don’t care about Kinect. Name one must-play Kinect title (protip- you can’t). I don’t want to be forced to pay through the nose for a feature I don’t want, particularly when that feature’s primary fuunction is spying on my family so they can sell any info they get on me to third parties. And this is coming from an Xbox faithful, so I can hardly fault anyone for taking Microsoft to task on their poor decision making.
People are terrified of change. Even the most jaded Sony “fanboi” has to notice the stories creeping in under the radar that Sony had many of the same “features” planned for their console–DRM, digital sharing controls, and so on–that they scrapped immediately when they saw the bad press for MS after the reveal. MS stuck it out and made a business case for each that spoke to serious innovation, some of the first TRUE, non-gimmick changes to the industry (they basically wanted to make “STEAM, the Console”), and geek rage killed it, or at least delayed its inception. I see this comic twofold: it’s either a shot on what’s left now that they’ve stripped a lot of the new stuff from the console, as Benny appears to believe with his pre-apology, or it’s a shot at the feckless, anti-progress consumers who would rather pay $500 for a 360 with a blu ray player or $400 for a PS3 that they now have to pay to play online than to have something actually value added and new on their shelf.
Basically don’t fix what ain’t broke.