XBOX one: the last nail to the coffin

I am watching the presentation of the next XBOX called XBOX one.

You must concede: PC gaming is dead.

Seriously? I have completely lost my interest in this console.

Some of the rumors afloat:
- you're going to have to pay a fee to play second hand games
- you can't play your games on more than one console (will be tied to your console and gamertag)
- there's rumors you'll always have to be online - or that the system checks your connections every 24 hrs
- no reverse compatibility with X360 games
- your Kinect (microphone) will always be on

Granted though, some of these are rumors and communication is very unclear, as sources contradict each other.

But sheesh, where oh where are the days of my NES or SNES where I could just turn it on, plug in a cartridge and start playing without having to worry about anything?
I tell ya, games these days… You don't buy a game anymore, you buy the *right* to play one. Bah. And PC games are going that way as well…

After I watched the presentation yesterday, I have zero interest in X-Box One. None at all. I have serious doubts all the bells and whistles of the TV channel searching, integration and all of that will work as advertised outside USA. In fact I doubt it'll work at all with widely different European TV channels and broadcasting companies, for example. Same goes for those voice commands, they will probably be reliable only in English (possibly only available in English). Motion controls will be hell with kids around, I fear. Exclusive deals with US sports channels, with NFL - eh, so what?! None of that will apply outside the USA, I presume. Etc. There was precious little on games and playing games on that presentation and a whole lot of "tomorrow's entertainment center" hoopla. All in all, not impressed and not interested.

Also, it looks very much like the XBO will require to be connected to the internet all the time, at least to take advantage of all those cloud services and whatnot. It is designed to be connected all the time at the very least. So, anybody in an area with less than stellar broadband connections is pretty much out of luck. Plus, they conveniently didn't say anything if the new X-Box Live will be like the current one, where you need to pay a monthly fee if you want to use it to the fullest (gold vs silver membership). I predict they'll go with a subscription model, so all you future XBO owners, say hello to a monthly fee to use the box as advertised.

Completely agree.

I'll take the PS4 any day over the XBO.

I am not sure the PS4 will prove any better. There's even less information about that console.
 
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Well, I see this is very good news for PC gaming, xbox one has DX 11.1 support and 8 GB of memory. PS4 has 8 GB of memory.

This will mean PC games 64-bit + DX 11.1 soon windows XP compability and DX 9 32-bit support will be gone.

It'll take gaming to the next generation both on PC and consoles. It'll also make possibliy for much better AI and so on, not only better graphics.
 
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I actually see friends of mine have the opposite reaction to the PS4 and XOne. The money spent on extra hardware is easily saved by having access to steam sales, GOG and similar. Having to always pay $60 for your games will quickly add up. Ten games later and the PC is not only the cheaper, it's also far more flexible.

Also, they really need to make it compatible with X360 games. I know that probably requires quite a bit of work, but it has to be done.

As for all the "nifty" features - as someone else has already mentioned, it probably won't even work outside the US, so that's really not a selling point for most consumers.
 
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After having the 360, I'm regretting not getting a PS3 instead. The new Xbox I have even less interest. I don't know about other countries, but in Australia, Xbox media content is unimpressive at best. It may be a big pull in the US, but in other countries it would add almost zero value.

Games have traditionally been the center point of consoles and it seem like the new Xbox goes as far as avoiding it all together. I don't know about anyone else, but my Xbox was for games, not this other fluff, which is done better elsewhere.

Having to be connected once a day, Kinect always required to be on and not being able to share games are just ways for Microsoft to fall on their sword. Sure, Steam is the same way, but I buy my games at a fraction of the cost. It is also becoming easier to stream your pc games to the tv as well. I wonder how that whole Steam Box thing is coming along…

At this rate, the next PS would just have to upgrade their cpus and gpus to win the this generation of the console war.
 
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Why is this called Xbox one when it is, like, the third?
 
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After I watched the presentation yesterday, I have zero interest in X-Box One. None at all. I have serious doubts all the bells and whistles of the TV channel searching, integration and all of that will work as advertised outside USA. In fact I doubt it'll work at all with widely different European TV channels and broadcasting companies, for example. Same goes for those voice commands, they will probably be reliable only in English (possibly only available in English). Motion controls will be hell with kids around, I fear. Exclusive deals with US sports channels, with NFL - eh, so what?! None of that will apply outside the USA, I presume. Etc. There was precious little on games and playing games on that presentation and a whole lot of "tomorrow's entertainment center" hoopla. All in all, not impressed and not interested.

Also, it looks very much like the XBO will require to be connected to the internet all the time, at least to take advantage of all those cloud services and whatnot. It is designed to be connected all the time at the very least. So, anybody in an area with less than stellar broadband connections is pretty much out of luck. Plus, they conveniently didn't say anything if the new X-Box Live will be like the current one, where you need to pay a monthly fee if you want to use it to the fullest (gold vs silver membership). I predict they'll go with a subscription model, so all you future XBO owners, say hello to a monthly fee to use the box as advertised.

I'll take the PS4 any day over the XBO.
I completely agree.

Wii u is allready a good example. It has extra tv functionality of which none work where I live in. The voice recognisation of current kinect doesnt work either. Totally useless features for me.

XBOX bows to north america while showing its ugly bottom to the rest of the world.
 
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Why is this called Xbox one when it is, like, the third?
One box to control everything. Like the ring. MS propably wants to take over the world with their 150000 cloud servers around the world.

Its a bit paranoid but funny to think that people are willingly buying these precision kinect cameras that are so good they can read your heart beating and installing them into their homes and leaving them on for 24/7.

In comparison some people put tape on the cameras of their laptops because they are afraid that someone is spying. Actually cases like that have happened. One just recently in the news, he had access to hundreds of laptop cameras.
 
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One box to control everything. Like the ring. MS propably wants to take over the world with the 150000 live servers around the world.
Well that is Microsoft's goal and is the truth. They want to be the steam of consoles. It's all about being a service and control not the games.

Funny they even mention market research is behind how the system was developed? This is apparently what people want.
 
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M$'s aim is to make people illiterate with computers and PCs with their 'touch' operating systems. So in few years time, using the PC with its mouse and keyboard will be out of fashion/too difficult for the new generation. XBO will be the ideal for this new generation of computer illiterates who can only handle touch screens (mobile devices) and game pads.
 
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SpoonFULL said:
M$'s aim is to make people illiterate with computers and PCs with their 'touch' operating systems.

Will fail as long as PCs continue to dominate the workplace and places of study. Unless they are happy with a clientele composed of the unemployed.
 
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I think I'm gonna have to switch back to laptop gaming in time. I'll wait till Haswell and the update to Win 8 comes out before getting anything tho. Right now I can't stand Metro but hopefully the update will make it tolerable. Its to bad MS will still get some of my money as I don't like to reward companies that annoy me but I don't have much choice really. I'll pick up a Ouya for sure at least and keep my 360 for a good while I'm sure. This Xbox One isn't at all what I want a game console to be.
 
And guess what - PC gaming is where INNOVATION is happening. Consoles - XBOX in particular - are just churning out eye-candy sequels that cost too much and deliver the same game year after year.

My son and his friends (high school age) have kind of given up on their XBoxes. They still play from time-to-time but I heard them discussing how all the new games were just like the old game the other day...
 
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Windows 95: Where do you wan't to go today?
XB1: A thing to rule you all.
 
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Looks like they've killed the Media Center Extender function which means I'm not going to be interested. Their 'Live TV' is a joke too. Pass through didn't work for GoogleTV, its not going to work for XBox either.
 
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Ya know, one of the things that I do enjoy with my PS3 is never ever being forced to be online. They take THAT away from a console, it totally loses any and all appeal for me, immediately.



-Carn
 
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PC Gaming dying? Yeah, we've never heard that one before. :roll:

Well, the new XBOX certainly caused a lot of mixed reactions. I'm not impressed although the TV integration was interesting.

However, I'm seriously doubting the veracity of the voice recognition "demo" - several times the presenter prefaced his commands with "XBOX" (e.g. "XBOX TV" and other times he didn't ("TV").

There was a poll on the reception of the reveal on NeoGAF which has a lot of gamers and very rabid fanboys from every camp. Results are not positive I'm afraid
Rating---Votes----Percentage
10/10----60-------2.16%
9/10-----21-------0.76%
8/10-----52-------1.88%
7/10-----82-------2.96%
6/10-----92-------3.32%
5/10-----152------5.48%
4/10-----211------7.61%
3/10-----376------13.56%
2/10-----421------15.18%
1/10-----1,306----47.10%
83% of the votes are rated 4/10 and lower.. Ouch!

Here's a hilarious abridged take on the reveal event :D

 
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The significant performance-related update to this architecture compared to previous consoles is the AMD APU (GPU+CPU on die with low latency direct memory access for each and the ability to hand off memory pointers). That's also going to be coming to PC (I would not be suprised to see an nVidia+intel partnership competing with it) in the near future.

http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/Pages/consumer-desktops.aspx#1

The "trinitiy" described in that link is currently availible and makes for an excellent entry level, compact, and low-power gaming machine (most expensive version can be had for under 130 dollars). That is it is able to play skyrim, metro: last light, crysis 3, and other current games smoothly albiet not at the upper quality settings. A much broader range of products is planned to be released using this technology, including offerings for the mid-range and high-end gaming market. This means that mid-range gaming machines and the new consoles will have architectures and performance-at-launch more similar than they have ever had before. Microsoft has also announced it will be releasing the new kinect for PC.

Seems like all this stuff is just going to make creating a 3 platform release less clunky and less expensive than it is now. Assuming the same chip fabs can be used to pump out Xbox, PS4, and desktop versions of these chips I wonder if we will also see the desktop releases benefiting from economies of scale and dropping in price even more quickly than high end PC components normally do. If nothing else, GDDR3 and GDDR5 certainly will become a more common commodity and unless there are shortages and both sony and ms seem fairly certain that production capacity will be able to exceed demand - lest this turn out to be a story of the death of console gaming due to unprofitable build costs and part price spikes.

PC Gaming dead? Probably not, even just going on PC gaming sales it seems unlikely that companies would set aside those sales given potentially lower costs of cross-platform support/development. Given the markets in Europe and Asia (outside of Japan) which have some of the fastest growing regions for game sales (steam's fastest growing market is Russia) and tend overwhelmingly toward PC gaming in those regions, it seems to be an absurdly premature inference to make. May be the death of nVidia, at least in certain areas of the gaming market, if they don't introduce a successful competitor for what this will evolve into down the line.
 
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