The Xbox One was revealed today, and I've been enraged about it all day. It was designed from the ground up as an all-around entertainment device, not a game console. It's got online-only features that encourage always-online games, and reports are mixed and confrustrating on whether or not used games (or borrowed from a friend games) will be playable without purchase. The theme of the reveal was magic and science, but all I see is black magic and dark alchemy.
Let's start with the wide focus of the system. The Xbox 360 began as a gamer's console and a strong launch title in Oblivion. It evolved into an everything console, with services like Netflix and Hulu offering another form of entertainment when you didn't feel like taking on another persona and charging into battle as Master Chief/Modern Soldier/The Dovakin. However, this time around, it's a flipped scenario. The One is to be for TV and fantasy football, Skype and Comcast, with games on the backburner. Yes, it's great to have more options and more experiences, but when those take the primary role of the console (I'm making that assumption based on the dominance TV watching took during the reveal), the games side suffers. That's what I'm most worried about on this front - that the one will be a powerful thing, but not a game console.
Secondly, always-online requirements are always wrong (okay, not always: MMOs by their nature require you to be online, as do Facebook games). It's a cool concept to empower the system to live forever by adding cloud computing, but by encouraging it so heavily, Microsoft worries me and leads me to believe that we have yet another veiled attempt at always online DRM. Worse yet, what if you have to subscribe to Live to be able to play a single player game? What if the servers get shut down? This is scary and bad stuff.
Finally, we have the major threat tothe used games market. As a developer, it would seem I'm fighting for the wrong side, but I like game stores, and I imagine without used sales, we'll see a lot of closings. With fewer stores, will games sales suffer? More importantly, what about letting a friend borrow a game or taking a game over to a friend's house? These are key experiences to gaming that I don't want to go away.
The Xbox One scares me. Given what I've seen today, I honest am hoping for one of two scenarios: Either Microsoft changes it's tune at E3 and we have a game console that allows for borrowing/trading/used games, or the whole system is such a tremendous flop that no company will ever consider this route ever again. I hope it will be the former. Only time will tell.
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