It's amazing how simply taking advantage of your competitors faultering can do so much for a company. Finished watching the Sony E3 press conference and all they did was keep the status quo on used games and playing offline and it got the biggest applause of the night. Every ball Microsoft dropped Sony kicked out of the park.
Between the used game capabilities, what they're doing with DRM, the launch price and new Kingdom Hearts + Final Fantasy games it's safe to say that Sony is poised to win this generation and it hasn't even started yet. Granted, Sony seems to be going for more of a gaming console than Microsoft is, but still. They killed it at their press conference.
That launch price is the biggest deal - the people (rightfully) complaining about the XB1 policies are in the minority when it comes to the whole consumer base, there are a lot of people who don't really participate in this discussion who are going to buy it for the next Halo or CoD. But, those same people will notice that price difference, and that will really give Sony an edge here. Especially fitting because that's one of the things that really hurt them last cycle.
Xbox One lost me at "Kinect is always on is a FEATURE". Sorry, I don't want a camera and microphone in my living room. I told people this weeks ago when they first released the details on the Xbox One, some of my friends snickered and said I'm paranoid. Then what happened the following week? Oh, a massive program revealed the government is spying on American citizens and collecting and saving their data! Just what I totally want to trust now, a giant corporation operating a camera and mic in my home... MS did back peddle and now says the kinect feature can be turned completely off. But I'm already not interested. They fished so much shit out there I'm not a fan of. DRM, phoning home requirement, the kinect thing, the sharing thing, and PS4 is gonna be $100 cheaper and have Kingdom Hearts 3 boyyyy. Xbox One is gonna struggle this generation. It's going to be like PS2 all over again, and I think Sony is going to dominate. I'm not a fanboy of either personally, I just buy whatever makes the most sense.
I don't suppose someone can explain this situation to me? I know Microsoft supposedly royally screwed up the XBOX ONE, but how? And why? It seems incomprehensible to me that a company like Microsoft would shoot itself in the foot that bad. I almost want to say it's been blown out of proportion, but I simply don't know enough about video games and the industry in general.
basically, Xbox ONE will adopt a lot of Steam-like policies, you can buy a game on disc or download but it will be tied to your account (one difference here being other people can also play it if they have an account on the same Xbox). If you want to sell the game or trade it in, you can only do it at retailers participating in whatever system Microsoft has in place for it - that's bad news for smaller used game shops (like anything besides Gamestop in the US). If you want to share a game with a friend, you can only transfer the license to someone who has been on your Xbox friends list for 30 days - and once it's transferred, it's there forever, can't be regifted. Compared to right now, where you can just hand off a disc and it's playable without any work, it's kind of a shit deal for players. Also, the new Xbox will check-in to Microsoft servers every 24 hours - presumably that means your single player games won't work for more than a day without internet. The new system restricts gamers in a lot of ways without really adding any benefit for us. We put up with a lot of the bad stuff about Steam because they provide nice services in return, but Xbox seems to have taken all the bad parts about Steam and none of the good stuff. here's the official word from Microsoft on how game licensing will work.
Yep, I highly doubt MSFT is going to be putting on sales that even touch a candle to Steam Sales. The other part is that offline mode for Steam works for something like 30 days before you need to connect again, I've heard it can be buggy but that's still better than Xbox One.
Good for Sony for capitalizing on this. MSFT has this habit of shooting themselves in the foot lately. I think Ballmer is just a masochist and likes this sort of stuff. Here we see though MSFT risking one of their last robust profit centers.