Xbox One

[Jazzrat]

Originally Posted by Vallen Chaos Valiant

Here is a tinfoil hat theory: what if MS decided to tell the US government they would have to subsidise every kinect sold? After all, they are getting a spying device globally, they should pay MS for the expenses. Get it out of the PRISM budget, and MS would be able to sell Xbox1 at $399...

Too far fetched?

Reality can be weirder than fiction though i find that highly unlikely, easier to pay Google to spy on every street around the world than wait for Xbox to penetrate every household in the US.

It's going to boil down to whether MS is going to eat it and suffer profit loss on unit sold or really get more functionality onto the box to make it worth the additional cost for gamers. The corporation itself is big and healthy enough to eat that profit loss but considering the tone and the PR they have shown... I highly doubt it. They seem to think that gamers are loyal enough to their platform to buy it and repeating the same mistake Sony had when PS3 was introduced.

[GDB]

Originally Posted by Jazzrat

Reality can be weirder than fiction though i find that highly unlikely, easier to pay Google to spy on every street around the world than wait for Xbox to penetrate every household in the US.

It's not like Google has super powerful satelittes. It uses a car with a camera. One photographed instant from the street every what, 2 weeks or 2 months or however long they take to update? That's hardly similar to having a big brother in the house with infrared.

[risingstar3110]

Originally Posted by Vallen Chaos Valiant

I hope I don't sound like a troll, but I am going through the options of MS pulling through, and I can't get around the issue of price.

Here is a tinfoil hat theory: what if MS decided to tell the US government they would have to subsidise every kinect sold? After all, they are getting a spying device globally, they should pay MS for the expenses. Get it out of the PRISM budget, and MS would be able to sell Xbox1 at $399...

Too far fetched?

What kind of terrorists, criminal mastermind will buy Xbox one at this rate through...?

[Jazzrat]

Originally Posted by GDB

It's not like Google has super powerful satelittes. It uses a car with a camera. One photographed instant from the street every what, 2 weeks or 2 months or however long they take to update? That's hardly similar to having a big brother in the house with infrared.

Then you should be more worried about your smartphone than gaming consoles, it's has camera, speaker, gps, always online via internet or standard phone signal, always with you wherever you go.

Sure the Xbox would gives a nice living room view, probably nice to bust up some drug peddlers just gaming it up in their safehouse but it's just too small of a population coverage to be worth anything special compare to smart phones or tv.

If I'm gonna write a conspiracy fiction, it would be the smart phones that's the most likely culprit for a big brother device. It's hard to even find a phone these days that doesn't come with a camera.

[RobotCat]

Originally Posted by KleenexGhost

That's a huge risk. Like you said they have every right to do so regardless of what we think. Sales are gonna be the deciding factor. Someone from Microsoft said this console race was a marathon not a sprint. Well they've already shot themselves in the foot. Only time will tell how bad the infection gets down the line.

This generation is going to be very different from the previous generations in that having mass market numbers isn't going to be the sole indicator of success. The first big difference is that the consoles are both using x86 architecture, and are close enough in specs that a lot of devs are just developing on the PC and porting to both systems. This means 'porting' is going to be fairly low cost so even if the XB1 ends up with a much smaller player base it'd still be lucrative for most third party publishers to publish their games on both systems.

There's also the whole DLC/subscription based profit system where a small group of more dedicated players with more disposable income can generate large amounts of additional profit with very little effort. In that case a smaller player base who is more tied into the online ecosystem would also be profitable for both the console makers who control the online ecosystem as well as the publishers.

Anyways, it's too early to really tell how this console race is going to go this time around, but MS does need to lower the price though.

[Vexx]

Originally Posted by killer3000ad

Microsoft Don Mattrick: “We have a product for people who aren't able to get some form of connectivity; it's called Xbox 360.”



http://au.ign.com/articles/2013/06/1...says-microsoft

Those are the words of someone who lives in a little bubble where multi-megabit connections to every cubicle and office are standard and doesn't realize over half his potential customer base in the US lacks broadband (several days per patch speeds). Microsoft doesn't need enemies the way it shoots itself so often, heh!

[Folenfant]

The current Microsoft PR line reminds me a lot of Sony's when they first launched the PS3 (if slightly more douchey) and everyone was giving them grief for it yet they managed to turn it around before lone. Anyone remember the whole, "if gamers want a PS3 they can get another job" line? I think Microsoft is betting long on this one and that the bad PR will blow over by the time of the consoles release, but it's not only the price that's working against them like it was with the PS3 that is the problem, it's just about everything and not to mention the fact that the PS3 ultimately proved to be the more reliable system in the end for how poorly things started compare to the red ring.

I don't think it's as over for the Xbox One as people think, but boy does Sony look to have a huge head start going into the competition.

[GDB]

Difference there is that it took massive price cuts of over 50% before the PS3 really picked its steam back up. Microsoft is a combination of bad pricing AND bad policies. Time can fix the pricing, but it cannot fix policies. The policies are keeping many gamers from even considering it.

(Which, after typing, I realize you address, but it's buried in the middle there so I'm going to post this reply anyway.)

[synaesthetic]

Originally Posted by Triple_R

Microsoft has decided that they're going to abandon certain potential customers when it comes to the XBox One. It sucks, but they have every right to do it.

The gaming industry at large has been engaging in this behavior recently.

The abandoned customers are us... oldschool, long-time gamers, the ones in our thirties, forties and fifties. The ones who expect games to be good, to be labors of love by their developers who forsook higher-paying jobs in the business or application software market to work on sweet, sweet games.

Those of us who remember floppy diskettes, who remember the screeching sound a modem made when connecting to the internet over a phone line, who remember the dot-com bubble and DOOM and Wolfenstein 3D and The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall.

We grew up in a gaming environment in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s, before gaming was really mainstream, when it was almost entirely about love of the craft. We got used to big boxes and new games costing $49.95 at launch, and maybe if the game was really popular we'd see an expansion pack or two for 20-30 bucks. We've got high standards and low tolerance for failure--if a game sucks, we say it sucks and we don't buy it. We scratch our heads and wonder what on earth they were thinking when they tack multiplayer XBL modes onto every game imaginable (even if multiplayer makes no sense).

We remember the good ol' days of subscription-based MMOs like Ultima Online, EverQuest and Final Fantasy XI. We remember the keepers of our favorite games engaging us, busting their ass trying to win our loyalty. We made our favorites and stuck with them for years and years, a mutually-beneficial relationship.

We're being abandoned in favor of the new generation of "gimme kids" who whine and whine about wanting to have everything now, now, NOW, and will happily fork out dollar after dollar for DLC, cash shop microtransactions on top of $60 game prices.

We're being abandoned in favor of the gullible, easy-to-please, easy-to-fleece "F2P kiddie" who would gladly play a broken, horribly imbalanced pile of shit that the developers rarely touch or even patch for bugfixes than pay a subscription fee... despite the fact that they spend more in the fucking cash shop than they ever would on years of subscribing!

We're being abandoned in favor of the new generation of gamers, the "fast food gamers" who, in their innocent naivete, accept the lubeless ass-reaming the video game industry administers unto them and beg for more.

And these are the kinds of people who will be buying the xbone.

[RobotCat]

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

The gaming industry at large has been engaging in this behavior recently.

The abandoned customers are us... oldschool, long-time gamers, the ones in our thirties, forties and fifties. The ones who expect games to be good, to be labors of love by their developers who forsook higher-paying jobs in the business or application software market to work on sweet, sweet games.

Those of us who remember floppy diskettes, who remember the screeching sound a modem made when connecting to the internet over a phone line, who remember the dot-com bubble and DOOM and Wolfenstein 3D and The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall.

We grew up in a gaming environment in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s, before gaming was really mainstream, when it was almost entirely about love of the craft. We got used to big boxes and new games costing $49.95 at launch, and maybe if the game was really popular we'd see an expansion pack or two for 20-30 bucks. We've got high standards and low tolerance for failure--if a game sucks, we say it sucks and we don't buy it. We scratch our heads and wonder what on earth they were thinking when they tack multiplayer XBL modes onto every game imaginable (even if multiplayer makes no sense).

We remember the good ol' days of subscription-based MMOs like Ultima Online, EverQuest and Final Fantasy XI. We remember the keepers of our favorite games engaging us, busting their ass trying to win our loyalty. We made our favorites and stuck with them for years and years, a mutually-beneficial relationship.

We're being abandoned in favor of the new generation of "gimme kids" who whine and whine about wanting to have everything now, now, NOW, and will happily fork out dollar after dollar for DLC, cash shop microtransactions on top of $60 game prices.

We're being abandoned in favor of the gullible, easy-to-please, easy-to-fleece "F2P kiddie" who would gladly play a broken, horribly imbalanced pile of shit that the developers rarely touch or even patch for bugfixes than pay a subscription fee... despite the fact that they spend more in the fucking cash shop than they ever would on years of subscribing!

We're being abandoned in favor of the new generation of gamers, the "fast food gamers" who, in their innocent naivete, accept the lubeless ass-reaming the video game industry administers unto them and beg for more.

And these are the kinds of people who will be buying the xbone.

You can really only find what you're looking for on the PC now, especially with the whole kickstarter craze giving those old timer devs a chance to push out the games they want to make without being tied down by the quagmire of publishing/distribution that plagues the consoles.

Consoles are a for profit system controlled by large corporations who answer to their shareholders. That means their only goal is to make money off of the mass market and the market has already spoken.

[synaesthetic]

And that's why I'm a PC gamer.

[Westlo]

Even when talking about consoles Syn still finds a way to shit on F2P MMOs /facepalm

We get it, all that was missing was the part about how we're about to have another videogame recession like in the 80s.

[Folenfant]

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

The gaming industry at large has been engaging in this behavior recently.

The abandoned customers are us... oldschool, long-time gamers, the ones in our thirties, forties and fifties. The ones who expect games to be good, to be labors of love by their developers who forsook higher-paying jobs in the business or application software market to work on sweet, sweet games.

Those of us who remember floppy diskettes, who remember the screeching sound a modem made when connecting to the internet over a phone line, who remember the dot-com bubble and DOOM and Wolfenstein 3D and The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall.

We grew up in a gaming environment in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s, before gaming was really mainstream, when it was almost entirely about love of the craft. We got used to big boxes and new games costing $49.95 at launch, and maybe if the game was really popular we'd see an expansion pack or two for 20-30 bucks. We've got high standards and low tolerance for failure--if a game sucks, we say it sucks and we don't buy it. We scratch our heads and wonder what on earth they were thinking when they tack multiplayer XBL modes onto every game imaginable (even if multiplayer makes no sense).

We remember the good ol' days of subscription-based MMOs like Ultima Online, EverQuest and Final Fantasy XI. We remember the keepers of our favorite games engaging us, busting their ass trying to win our loyalty. We made our favorites and stuck with them for years and years, a mutually-beneficial relationship.

We're being abandoned in favor of the new generation of "gimme kids" who whine and whine about wanting to have everything now, now, NOW, and will happily fork out dollar after dollar for DLC, cash shop microtransactions on top of $60 game prices.

We're being abandoned in favor of the gullible, easy-to-please, easy-to-fleece "F2P kiddie" who would gladly play a broken, horribly imbalanced pile of shit that the developers rarely touch or even patch for bugfixes than pay a subscription fee... despite the fact that they spend more in the fucking cash shop than they ever would on years of subscribing!

We're being abandoned in favor of the new generation of gamers, the "fast food gamers" who, in their innocent naivete, accept the lubeless ass-reaming the video game industry administers unto them and beg for more.

And these are the kinds of people who will be buying the xbone.

A lot of this is a little nostalgia glasses tinted as some of those things you mentioned back then still happen now and vice versa. The main thing I've noticed that's changed now is a lot of Western publishing has become centralized and there's a mad rush towards trying to create Triple A gaming experiences and towards controlling how people play games that to me just shows a typical corporate American lack of foresight. Get as much money and control as you possibly can right now and worry about everything else like sustainability later. Games with short life cycles of a year before the next reiteration is out or the EA model as it were are also a major issue I have with games.What is the point of a game that is only good for a year or until the servers shutdown I ask,? There's no chance of really having a timeless classic that way.

Also despite what Microsoft says about being in a marathon versus a sprint their model looks set up for a short sprint. That's another problem.

[KleenexGhost]

I cannot tell a lie, Killer Instinct has peaked my interest. Hopefully MS lowers the price and changes their policies. Or they port it to PS4

[Endless Soul]

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

~SNIP~

I so wish I could + you for this.

Endless "Oldschool" Soul

[Vallen Chaos Valiant]

Originally Posted by Folenfant

The current Microsoft PR line reminds me a lot of Sony's when they first launched the PS3 (if slightly more douchey) and everyone was giving them grief for it yet they managed to turn it around before lone. Anyone remember the whole, "if gamers want a PS3 they can get another job" line? I think Microsoft is betting long on this one and that the bad PR will blow over by the time of the consoles release, but it's not only the price that's working against them like it was with the PS3 that is the problem, it's just about everything and not to mention the fact that the PS3 ultimately proved to be the more reliable system in the end for how poorly things started compare to the red ring.

I don't think it's as over for the Xbox One as people think, but boy does Sony look to have a huge head start going into the competition.

Here is a different issues: Here is a map:
]

This is the map, showing where Microsoft has the server access to authenticate the Xbox1.

That's right, anyone who doesn't live in the green areas, can't use an Xbox1 period. This includes the entirety of SE Asia, including Japan.
Forget about importing, until MS set up the network, the grey nations would have nothing but doorstops as Xbox1.

MS doesn't even tell us when Japan would get access. They say it is planned, but we don't know when.

So beyond having internet, you also need to live in the right country.

Source:
http://www.joystiq.com/2013/06/12/xb...ies-at-launch/

At launch, Xbox1 would be usable in 21 countries on the planet. Out of 196.
PS4 works in all 196.

[blakstealth]

The Asian market won't get them until late 2014.

[Vallen Chaos Valiant]

Originally Posted by blakstealth

The Asian market won't get them until late 2014.

The point is you can't even import them. Silly isn't it; you would have thought that the INTERNET would allow a console to log in anywhere on the planet. But no; MS is making the most region locked console in history. Cross to another country, and your console bricks itself.

[Triple_R]

Originally Posted by KleenexGhost

That's a huge risk. Like you said they have every right to do so regardless of what we think. Sales are gonna be the deciding factor. Someone from Microsoft said this console race was a marathon not a sprint. Well they've already shot themselves in the foot. Only time will tell how bad the infection gets down the line.

Agreed. The main reason I made my last post on this thread is that I don't want people to get their hopes up (only to be crushed later). This isn't like bad government policy, where enough backlash will usually force the government to change the policy, at least somewhat. This is a company that will do whatever it thinks is most profitable for it, and that's it. And I think its already made the gamble that RobotCat referred to. Hopefully their gamble will backfire, but only time will tell.

Originally Posted by Vallen Chaos Valiant

I hope I don't sound like a troll, but I am going through the options of MS pulling through, and I can't get around the issue of price.

Here is a tinfoil hat theory: what if MS decided to tell the US government they would have to subsidise every kinect sold? After all, they are getting a spying device globally, they should pay MS for the expenses. Get it out of the PRISM budget, and MS would be able to sell Xbox1 at $399...

Too far fetched?

If the price drops to $399 between now and November, your idea is something I'll at least consider.

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

The gaming industry at large has been engaging in this behavior recently.

The abandoned customers are us... oldschool, long-time gamers, the ones in our thirties, forties and fifties. The ones who expect games to be good, to be labors of love by their developers who forsook higher-paying jobs in the business or application software market to work on sweet, sweet games.

Those of us who remember floppy diskettes, who remember the screeching sound a modem made when connecting to the internet over a phone line, who remember the dot-com bubble and DOOM and Wolfenstein 3D and The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall.

We grew up in a gaming environment in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s, before gaming was really mainstream, when it was almost entirely about love of the craft. We got used to big boxes and new games costing $49.95 at launch, and maybe if the game was really popular we'd see an expansion pack or two for 20-30 bucks. We've got high standards and low tolerance for failure--if a game sucks, we say it sucks and we don't buy it. We scratch our heads and wonder what on earth they were thinking when they tack multiplayer XBL modes onto every game imaginable (even if multiplayer makes no sense).

We remember the good ol' days of subscription-based MMOs like Ultima Online, EverQuest and Final Fantasy XI. We remember the keepers of our favorite games engaging us, busting their ass trying to win our loyalty. We made our favorites and stuck with them for years and years, a mutually-beneficial relationship.

We're being abandoned in favor of the new generation of "gimme kids" who whine and whine about wanting to have everything now, now, NOW, and will happily fork out dollar after dollar for DLC, cash shop microtransactions on top of $60 game prices.

Good post. I identify with a lot of this. The only MMOs I've played are WoW and City of Heroes, though, so I'm not going to get too much into the f2p discussion.

However, I have to admit I long for the simpler days when buying a game meant you owned a copy of that full game. Period. End of story.

You paid a good, fair price for a copy of a game, a game that was crafted to please customers rather than to please shareholders, and then it was yours. None of this cloak and dagger stuff where there's hidden costs and added DLC/DRM behind every corner, even for games where you'd least expect it. None of this ridiculous strings-attached "you only own a license" nonsense.

You're right, I think, that very short-term thinking and too much focus on instant gratification (on the part of some gamers) has enabled Microsoft and some 3rd party publishers to sort of shepherd gamers to where we are now. Between your post, and one I read by 4Tran a few days ago, I'm reminded of the old boiling frog analogy - If you boil a frog slowly, it won't jump out, because it keeps getting used to more and more heat... until its too late. If you gradually nickle-and-dime gamers, and slowly erode their consumer rights, through preying on their desire for instant gratification, the logical end-point is the XBone. Are gamers like the frog that's too far gone, or will they jump out? This generation will determine a lot, I think.

[Dr. Casey]

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

The abandoned customers are us... oldschool, long-time gamers, the ones in our thirties, forties and fifties.

"Our"? But you're not in any of those decades. /nitpick