I'm happy to see Sony coming hard with the ps4. $100 to many is going to be the deal breaker.
Specs overall look better on the ps4, faster ram, better video card. Just the fear of DRM will sway some people. Lots will boil down to the used game market and what really happens. And major props to Sony for making the console region free. And no internet check in required..Just out off principal I'm all for that.
I'm currently an owner of both a ps3 and a 360. I play all my multiplayer games on the 360, I play most single player games on the 360. I use the ps3 for blu Ray, for Netflix and for home streaming. I like the simplified ps3 menu much better. Without a doubt, I love the 360 controller better.
Ahhh.... It stops being a dealbreaker to me.
The Xbox One includes a better gaming platform, a SUPERIOR Kinect sensor than the first gen included which will actually enabled game developers to utilize that than before when it wasn't included, and Windows Azure cloud computing.
In a handful of years down the road when current console graphics are being somewhat limited, the question will again rise of will there be new console hardware? This whole debacle again. But that will be limited to Playstations, because the Xbox One is future proofed for a few generations with the Azure cloud service and providing the potential of THREE Xbox Ones in terms of graphical computing. Where the PS 4 on paper sounds like a better gaming rig, that will only last for so long whereas the One has cloud offloading to make the console last a good genuine eight years at least without being a tired system.
The Kinect sensor is what makes the deal better, because the Xbox also has TV capabilities of which will be perfect to use voice commands for to switch from TV to a game on the fly. Since it is now included in ALL systems, game developers have a better incentive to use it than they did before where it was just an addon accessory. So things like sports games can become MUCH more interactive and FPS games can become more interactive as well through hand gesturing as well as speech features.
And since obviously it has been known that more hours have been logged for the first time ever with consoles outside of gaming (video playback), it makes perfect sense to adapt the console for such. The Xbox One does this MUCH better. It's a multi-entertainment system, not just a simple console. It's almost like a HTPC.
This is one of the most short sighted and asinine things I've heard. It's because of consumers like you who lap this stuff up that MS is even attempting to do this.
You claim people who are concerned with Kinect are wearing tinfoil hats, even after all this news about PRISM and the NSA? Do you think that the Xbox One will be somehow immune to National Security Letters? This is like crack to a crack head. Better yet, you even paid to install this in your living room and paying for the bandwidth to upload it into MS servers so they can do the wizbang magic so MS can say there is no "direct" access by the government to their servers.
24 hour check-in? Oh yeah, lovely. As a former submariner, I suspect there are a lot of happy sailors on subs and ships and soldiers in Afghanistan. My Xbox 360 is permanently offline. I went out of my way to make it so because I was sick of looking at advertisements plastered all over the place. Sometimes, I just want to get lost in a game and roam the worlds of Oblivion and Fallout without concern regarding my connection. It is a added layer of complexity that is most definitely consumer hostile.
MS absolutely infuriated me with their arrogance and they need a huge serving of humble pie. Now I need to follow some kind of flow chart before I can lend someone a game and vice versa? Are you kidding me?
What happens when the servers go offline? MS can now dictate the end of the Xbox One generation at their discretion when the time for Xbox 2 comes around. Transfer games? How did that work out with the Xbox Live games that were purchased?
30,000 servers? LMAO, the power of the "cloud". Voodoo magic here. In a console war where the difference in bandwidth between DDR3 and GDDR5 is a huge difference, where the physical distance between RAM and CPU is an impediment, you are going to offload things to a server miles away? I also highly doubt there are 30k physical servers. More than likely it will be some sort of scalable server that can create virtual ones and thus 30k servers. This is pure conjecture on my part but whatever. Regardless, it is tiresome hearing "but 30k servers" as the answer to everything.
I don't know if you've noticed but the response has been extremely negative and they are absolutely being trounced right now in the press and rightly so. I hope they fall and fall hard.
I couldn't care less about license agreements and the legal voodoo that software makers feel like is their birthright. The value of books is in their content. The same with music and movies. They do not degrade after using them once. Yet, there is a second hand market for them. I can sell my movies on ebay, watch it today or 30 years from now, give it away, or throw it away. All without obtaining permission from anyone. I worked for my money. I spent my hard earned money on your product.
Customs can be stronger than law. My first system was a NES. I owned it. I owned the cartridges. Games were $60-$80 a pop in 1980s dollars. Did I trade games? Damn right I did and it was glorious. The success rate of convincing parents to drop that kind of dough for games was extremely low. Each and every cartridge was a treasure. Mozying on over to a friends house with Super Mario Bros 3 while we all gathered round to watch someone play, maybe even let them hold on to it for a few days. That is console gaming to me. I'm not worried about my license to use the game. That is my expectation and experience thus far.
If MS is successful with this, then consumer rights will have even further eroded. Once this ground has been given up, it will be almost impossible for consumers to regain it. We won't ever be able to own a game again.
Basically, you will be leasing your console and games from MS and that very company will have the kill switch.
Tinfoil hat? Yeah, whatever. Try playing Halo 2. I doubt Xbox One will be around 20 years from now. Why would I play old games? Some games are like old friends. I still play FFVII every now and again for the nostalgia, Kingdom Hearts is timeless, and maybe I want to share it with my kid in the future? Who knows? Regardless, it's not a matter of "why should I want to" as seems to be the gut response of the proponents of the Xbox One. The question is "why shouldn't I be able to".
Rant over.
I would like to thank you for your contribution to the further erosion of gamer and consumer rights. MS and the publishers thank you.
