XBOX One First Reaction
Oh no they didn’t!
I did not just watch a next generation game console launch with a Price Is Right demo… I can’t believe my eyes…
It’s far worse than I ever could have imagined. I was joking about Sponge Bob but they did me one better, the BIG FEATURE of the XBOX ONE is that now you will easily be able to watch The Price Is Right! I forced myself to sit through the launch video because I knew I was going to be asked about it but I’ve got to say it was a teeth grinding experience. Oh my head! OW ow ow ow ow… No.. noo…. it’s sooooo wrong… Yes it’s the XBOX ONE (Clearly named by committee) for the old generation! Do you find your Apple TV remote control too difficult to operate? Tired of rummaging your couch cushions to find the damn thing? Is you’re Apple TV box so petite that it doubles as a beverage coaster? Now your problems are solved, you can buy a mammoth media box from Microsoft that let’s you enjoy all your 1950’s television programming without having to use one of those confusing one button Apple remote controls! Now you can swear and gesticulate at a Microsoft product and it will react! Want to take phone calls in the middle of your StarTrek movie while everyone is watching and NOT have the movie pause automatically during the call? XBOX ONE is the solution for you! Sick to death of playing Halo games after 5 generations? Too much effort to actually interact with a game? Microsoft’s big Halo launch for it’s next generation console is…. wait for it… a HALO TV SERIES! You’ll never be forced to play HALO with friends again! You can just sit back, swear at your TV, watch HALO video and reminisce about what a great game franchise it used to be before your arthritis set in! Fortunately it can also remotely measure your heart beat to tell if you’ve died of boredom while using it.
Microsoft Kinect, pioneering creepy UI paradigms for a new generation
“Hey, what if we take a cheap PC, turn it on it’s side and charge people $130/year to use Internet Explorer on it!” -Rex St. John
I can’t bear it. I get what Microsoft’s thinks it’s doing here but what a train wreck! All I can visualize as I watch this demo is my kids screaming at the XBOX over the TV and game audio, shouting conflicting commands and complaining to their mother about them interrupting each others games. This is a product designed for geriatric non-gamer couch potatoes that will happen to play games. At least they had the good sense to close with the Activision Call Of Duty demo, but I’m pretty sure that they must have lost every real gamer 10 minutes into the launch with the Price Is Right/Skype demo sucking the soul and enthusiasm out of every gamer alive.
I also love Microsoft’s idea of simplicity and elegance; A giant Hal (Space Odyssey 2001) like eye watching your every move and listening to everything you say to enable you to navigate a maze of media features and options. A media box the size of 4 laptops stacked on top of each other (with ONLY 8GB of RAM and a 500GB HD) with what looked like over a dozen media ports on the back to make it the central hub for the biggest tangle of media cables ever imagined! What could they possibly have put inside this thing to make it so huge? Did they get a great volume deal on vacuum tubes and transistors?
*It looks like the NY Times gave me the last word on the XBOX ONE launch, I wonder if Microsoft will let me on the beta program?
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/22/technology/xbox-one-faces-wider-range-of-competition.html
Just for fun let’s contrast two visions of simplicity and elegance;
Apple’s vision for media simplicity
Apple’s vision for a game console
Taking Skype calls in the middle of your movie on the family TV, presumably while everyone is trying to watch?
Only Microsoft could make an “All-in-One” device with THREE components
Okay, by popular demand, here’s a couple more interesting differences in consumer vision;
4 connections, arguably even the Ethernet port on this device is redundant
10 connections… what is it that I’m supposed to want to plug into this thing that can’t possibly be a wireless device?
Oh yes, yes they did! They *did* launch a console where our first on-screen demo was Price is Right! My grandmother would have felt right at home. They followed up showing a jellyfish on a Bing page in Internet Explorer, followed by an echoey Skype call with all the sound quality you’ve come to love from Skype, followed by no live game demos, only canned pre-renders. It was a horrifying, horrifying experience, and I’m not even mentioning the flat jokes, the horrible suits, the ugly sneakers, and I don’t even know how to quantify the “we want to be a the future watercooler” comment.
I think only you, Tadhg Kelly, and I are so shocked, awed, and morally outraged by the Price is Right.
3 components running 3 operating systems – what could go wrong.
yeah, I’m sure the next generation is very excited to have a bunch of old people in suits telling them how much they’re going to like Skype interrupting their movies.
Just one young or actually excited or actually good speaker on stage would have been nice. Mattrick is not a stage presence. Bonnie Ross was young and enthusiastic, but she was talking about a show about a video game, and it was blah-blah and stills. Maybe showing some actual new HD content would have helped. Given how they worked in Skype, I’m surprised they didn’t show an Excel spreadsheet or a Word document “snapping” in while you’re watching a movie.
“Here you go Apple and Valve, we don’t want the console market anymore.” -Steve Ballmer
It actually requires four components, as you need a separate set top box to provide the tv images in the first place – the only input the Xbox One has is HDMI.
So you’re saying that the problem with it is that they didn’t make it BIG ENOUGH to include a cable box?
What? Hdmi input? No cable card tuner or the like? Dear fucking god. So, it can’t do dvr duties? I thought the holy grail of the digital living room was one box to rule them all. The games better be good. Cause the rest is very meh.
For someone who is so focused on modeling customer acquisition, I’m surprised you’ve got such a negative take… The single biggest barrier to my buying additional content on the Xbox 360 is the fact that it isn’t always on and that I’ve got to go through mundane chores like switching TV inputs. Routing live TV through the Xbox completely removes that barrier whenever the TV is on, and would seem likely to increase the attach rate significantly. Sure, hardcore game players may not have been wowed, but presumably that’s what E3 is for.
a single HDMI-in, a single HDMI-out — for me that’s not going to clean up all of my inputs and switching tasks very well. will it for you?
That’s fair Keith. If you read my earlier post you’ll see that my view it isn’t completely negative, but there will be plenty of people spouting the praises for the XBOX ONE. The point I’m trying to make is that media geeks like you and I who think wiring the ultimate living room experience is THE BOMB are not the majority of consumers. If I were making a “Next generation” game console with a 5-7 year lifespan I’d be highly focused on delivering something that 12-17 year old boys will line up outside BestBuy for THIS Chistmas and worry about all that other “shit” in a couple years as THEY grow into their media preferences. I assert that most of the rest of us “old folks” are comfortable with what we’ve got and aren’t EXCITED to adopt a Microsoft cacophony of media features this year. My Apple TV works GREAT, but I haven’t seen any new console games that I’m excited about lately. My 14 year old is completely addicted to Minecraft and plays the PC and XBOX version constantly.. giving HIM an even better experience of that is what will make him an XBOX ONE customer. If he doesn’t demand one this Christmas, I don’t know why I will feel compelled to buy one. His XBOX and PC are in his room next to each other, the last thing I want is to have to compete with him for access to the 72″ TV in the living room.
I’m a 45 year old gamer, my mom is 63 year old “I can’t figure out how to use the remote or the computer” gal. I had her sit and watch this with me. She was thrilled about the no remote system. All I could hear her say the whole time was “I need to get me one of these”. I put my head in my hands, as I agreed with all you have stated above. Yeah it is great if I want to watch a movie and surf for data, I can do that on my surface, but sure it is nice to do it on any of my machines including XBox One. However, you have a great point in that I would not want video or audio interactions with XBox buddies while watching a movie with my family. I can only imagine my wife and kids response when a pal pops up a connection to me and says “Dude, I just rocked your a$$ in COD Ghost acheivments, now you can suck my —-“. Granted, I do game on the family TV, but I usually do it after the family has gone to bed.
What about all that chatter regarding the improved controllers? Oh it has 40 upgrades, but no one understood one word about what was improved.
They moved the wired controller ports to the back of the machine, no more hidden ports on the front. Even worse, the number of wired ports looks a lot less than 4, but then again, not even 360 had 4 ports for the wired controller.
With all these features where are the 4 or 5 or 6 player games for a fella with a family to sit down and game together? Is the life of split screening going away? Really you mean I am going to have to buy an xbox for each member of the family? Oh, wait, I already did just so I could have the full screen to myself.
It would still be nice to see a mass multiplayer for the entire family on a single box with a single screen. I have a great idea, how about 1 box with multiple HDMI ports for multiple screens. This way, 1 xbox with 4 players can have their own screens. NOW THAT would be an improvement.
Again they razzle dazzle with the beauty of a great interactive world in the games, but how about some quality gaming. Constantly running and gunning gets extremely boring, why can’t we have a room full of people playing the campaign mode as a group of squads? We can defeat the game campaign by killing the AI bad guys instead of each other. At least this way, we know there won’t be any cheating or glitching from the AI’s. The heck with caring about a soldier that is going to die in a game, that is what the game is about, surviving and not dying. How about some real campaign fun. I am tired of getting games that don’t allow full campaign interaction with your buddies. Something to work for together.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t even have my Kinnect connected to my xbox. I only use it to chat with family members that live in other states. Who needs it? People don’t excersize in real life, if they are not the type, so why bother with a virtual one that stares at you? Oh yeah, who wants to have the world staring at you while your working out? “Dude check out those jelly rolls diving for the excersize ball!”
What is with the customized toaster look? This thing looks like a yuppy toaster, where is the fun, the zing, the pizazz in it’s appeal? 360 came out with appeal for the gay, One comes out with appeal for the socially sophisticated, bung that, it’s fun, entertaining, come on, who is your target audience Donald Trump? Even he likes his toys to look playful.
What is with the sport pounding? I think if I see another EA Sports package pushing an XBox release, I am going to join Play Station world. Yeah the graphics were cool, always the case with XBox releases, but seriously, is that the best you could do, apply it to a sports game? Try Final Fantasy, my guess is that based on their last release, you could really dazzle the world with your graphics power.
Who thinks this crap up? Did they get their degree at Harvard? What does a Harvard student know about gaming? Geeze.
Agreed with you on so many levels, ESPECIALLY the idea of co-op campaign. I can’t stand the same head-to-head multiplayer all the time, so many negative and nasty people. They did not start this on a good footing, and they’ll have to really make up for it at E3. They did the big bad, and alienated gamers to appeal to the multimedia side. It’s a gaming console, not a media center… this could hurt them.
“Microsoft will maintain its current strategy with indie developers, meaning indies won’t be able to self-publish their games on Xbox One, as they can on PS3, Vita, Wii U, Steam, and eventually, the PS4.”
Wow… They are really not seeing the trend right now. What in the world do they have to gain by keeping devs away from their system… Haven’t they learned anything from mobile app phenomenon… MS’s main strength was always in the good relationship they had with developers. They are screwing up on that front big time on consoles though.
http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=9ekOtn7L1N0&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D9ekOtn7L1N0
I see five connections on the Apple TV.
And nine on the Xbox…
I will defer the advanced counting to your supererior eyesight.