What do you guys think about the Xbox One?
I really think that Microsoft has screwed up their chances for next-gen.
I mean, used games restrictions, mandatory Kinect, online DRM etc etc.
Their press conference was about TV not games.
And the Kinect is always on. After seeing Microsoft's involvement in PRISM, it's probably not a good idea to let them have an always listening and watching camera in your house.
EDIT: Also region-locking, so no Japanese games.
EDIT 2: lol and no backwards compatibility.
Here's a petition against it:
http://www.xboxshun.com/

It would SEEM they have really screwed up, but we still need to see how sony will handle things on the PS4, its still a bit early.
It's entirely possible that sony will implement similar restrictions, in which case the xbox once again becomes a viable option for anyone who wants to play console games.

Sony has already said that they will leave DRM up to the publishers. It's highly unlikely they would give away the momentum they've gotten from the One reveal by announcing used games restrictions etc.
Though if they do, then you are right, Xbox becomes a viable alternative.
Edit: And this petition (if it becomes popular) even if Microsoft takes no notice, could still be seen by Sony.

They said that their first press event was not going to be about games. They said E3 was going to be about the games, so at least wait 2 days before completely complaining about it.

Anyway, most of the things that suck can change if MS wants it to. Me, I'll be waiting till after E3 before forming some real opinions on it. In the end, games matter much more then the DRM, TV or anything else, and they have yet to even talk about games.

Yes, but one thing I'm worried about is the fact that they were the first corporation to be involved in PRISM, and now they want to put an always on HD camera in your house.
No thanks :p
I will wait until E3 to form opinions about the games, but currently I assume most of these 15 exclusives they're talking about are kinect games.
I'm not a Sony fanboy, I have an Xbox 360 and not a PS3, but Microsoft has gone too far with these policies and even if they have amazing games I will buy it at the end of this console cycle when it's on the cheap and I can buy games for it cheaply, even if they're not used.

M$ as a company is self imploding right now, the only good thing they had going for them was their entertainment division (mobile is still a big unknown at this point) and they managed to screw that up royally with their Xbox One presentation. They were unprepared/undecided on mayor issues and questions people had, they gave everyone a gimmick nobody wanted (who the ***** cares about TV from their cable box fed into Xbox??) and they insulted gamers by the whole "not a game console" attitude.

Kids will get excited by games at E3 but the reality is that there will be even less meaningful exclusives on this generation, since it's just not practical from economic standpoint. Most of them will be timed exclusives and will come to the other platform and PC anyway.
The games themselves will suck monkey balls since all publishers aim for current and next gen releases so expect half assed ports that will look somewhere in between previous generation and this one. So no new revolutional gameplay, no astonishing graphics we'd already seen on mediocre PCs. By the time we'll see a proper next gen game the PC will again be years ahead.

In my opinion Sony isn't better they just didn't show their cards yet since they see how everything seems to blow up in M$ face. I believe both companies missed the point of what the people want (I'm supposed to get excited about share button? are you mental?) and they force feed marketing BS to everyone in hopes nobody will notice. But they will notice especially on their bottom line, shareholders will be ***** pissed when these consoles flop compared to previous gen.

I think everyone's best option is to forget about next gen and buy a decent HTPC, it'll be more powerful (I got 7870 Ghz edition for peanuts and it rapes PS4 card by a good 30%), you can do meaningful things on it, you'll have to put up with less crap (Ads on Xbox Live anyone? So maybe spying on your living room?) and get your games for less (Steam sales, no stupid resale permission from M$ or their publishers). If you want to play on your couch just buy the new Xbox One controller and connect it to your PC, you'll get the true next gen experience you deserve.

Unless they blow everything away at E3 I'm either getting a PS4 or just building a computer. MS has been pissing me off for a long time now and I don't think I'm going to support their business practices anymore.

thurd Wrote:M$ as a company is self imploding right now, the only good thing they had going for them was their entertainment division

That's simply not true, by any stretch of the imagination. 6 Billion profit in the last quarter, up 19 percent from last year. Their entertainment division makes up for 13% (as of June 2012) of their revenue, and is far from the only thing good going for them.

I think the Xbox one will sell really well in the U.S., which is clearly the target market. It's not for me though, too many restrictions, and none of the TV things apply to me. Once the PS4 is like a PS3+ I'll be getting that, if not PC gaming it is.

rahsoul Wrote:That's simply not true, by any stretch of the imagination. 6 Billion profit in the last quarter, up 19 percent from last year. Their entertainment division makes up for 13% (as of June 2012) of their revenue, and is far from the only thing good going for them.

Oh I'm well aware they make really good money selling their products but the implosion I was referring to, are their future prospects or precisely what they've done with them.

Office makes most of M$ pie but its facing though times recently and it will only look more bleak. Lots of goverments already push for alternatives or open formats that would enable them to choose from more options. This is something M$ is not used to see, competition. Their feeble attempts at going for "the cloud" just show you how incompetent and detached from the market they really are. They charge hefty sums for Exchange and Sharepoint, products that are hard to deploy, maintain and still can't offer the most important and basic functionalities I can get from my private Google Drive (it's ironic millions spent by my company can't provide the same level of service and abilities I get for free).

Servers will take a hit any way you slice it, with ARM server deployments and Open Source alternatives getting the market. They've built that foothold thanks to mutual agreement with Intel but now that the giant faces a paradigm shift (I predict PC will be dead completely in 15 years) it's not hard to imagine tough times ahead.

Last and least is their Windows division and we all know how good that panned out with Windows 8 (and Blue for that matter), whether its declining PC sales or M$ providing most ridiculous and under-performing piece of software since Windows ME, the hard fact is Windows on PC is a dead man walking, people just don't know it yet. Even such insignificant and unrelated events like Valve providing Steam for Linux will be hitting hard when the time comes. Android as a desktop system? Just give me a good phone, a docking station and I can practically do the same things I require from my PC, it's just that some software isn't there.... yet.

But you don't have to believe me its all going to crap, just listen to the fat man (Ballmer) preaching about reorganization, services etc. They know they're sick, I just don't think they're capable of creating a cure.

Well that's super doom and gloom. lol Smile!

As somebody that used to be a super hardcode gamer... I can't be bothered any more and am happy just playing casual tablet games.

5 years ago I would have never thought I would say that but it is basically the culmination of a number of things:

1. I actually have use for a tablet outside of gaming.
2. DRM.
3. Games/Apps are so much cheaper than console games.
4. Portable.
5. Did the whole dedicate your life to a guild thing. Now I'm happy being a stinky casual.
6. I don't care about gimmicks like kinnect. Also the inaccuracy of the technology makes me cringe.
7. I like the whole idea behind indie games; the creativity that comes from them plus not needing a huge game studio and loads of money. Even if the marketplaces aren't perfect, hopefully they will improve over time.

Microsoft just disabled my legitimate (student) copy of Office a couple of weeks ago, saying I installed it too many times or something. The box with the serial and everything is back in England and I don't fancy making an international phone call over it, so I just switched to free alternatives. I don't see myself purchasing anything from them again in the near future if they're going to pull licensing crap like this.

There really is no need to be spending $100+ if one just needs a basic document and spreadsheet editor anyway.

^Ouch! I never bought an office copy to begin with

People kept on buying the XBox360 despite having RROD, logical choices aren't always taken! And don't forget that they aren't idiots to do things that will directly and greatly damage their sales.

Edit: I'm afraid they'll play their cards on the casual ignorant people.

About M$, they went very bad on their Desktop OS route too. I didn't upgrade since XP because of their bad Vista and now Windows 8. And now I've been using Ubuntu at home for about 5 months, awesome stuff! I get a great OS with a huge library of free programs in the store and constant updates for FREE! I can take the terminal use between now and then, since I don't depend on it for general tasks, because I'm lazy learning some basic commands.

Even though I won't be able to fork out money for a new gaming console any time soon I'll still be very interested in seeing what we'll learn during E3. I liked Xbox for the online system and I've been playing the Halo games since the first one (since I was about 11 years old), but it seems that all is going down the drain now.

Especially since I've got into Japanese games lately, although it's still not confirmed whether or not the PS4 will be region free, is it?

TwoMoreCharacters Wrote:Especially since I've got into Japanese games lately, although it's still not confirmed whether or not the PS4 will be region free, is it?

This will be the big kicker for me, as I've got games that run on my PS3 from America, Europe and Japan.

The whole concept of region locking seems a total nonsense to me, and even more so going forward as (supposedly) the future is digital download for everything.

It's ridiculous. The xbox will only even be using discs to install the games anyway. I don't know what the issues are, probably differences between how countries price the games and such.

I had zero plans on buying it until...Killer Instinct!

TwoMoreCharacters Wrote:Especially since I've got into Japanese games lately, although it's still not confirmed whether or not the PS4 will be region free, is it?

The PS4 is region free.

Sony has basically claimed the console wars for at least the first year or two after the launch.

Woodgar Wrote:This will be the big kicker for me, as I've got games that run on my PS3 from America, Europe and Japan.

The PS4 is not backwards compatible btw.

The PS4 seems to be dominating everything but the few strong exclusives the Xbox gets. No forced internet connection or licensing DRM stuff.

Although I'm a little put off by how they managed to softly sneak in that you need to pay for the PSN Plus membership to play online multiplayer.

Oh man the PS4 is region free like you stated. That means we can buy all the Japanese games we want. This makes the choice between the Xbox One and PS4 easy for me.

The PS4 has already won, 100 dollars cheaper, no restrictions on used games, no DRM and no region-locking?
Really, at this point, the only thing the One has going for it are its, admittedly interesting looking, exclusives.

Hirakana Wrote:EDIT: Also region-locking, so no Japanese games.

PAL regions have been "locked out" of games which have been released in Japan and North America for years. *sigh* You'd think more video game publishers would realise Australia exists, given how stupidly high video games cost over here, combined with the fact that people still willingly walk into brick and mortar retailers and hand over between 70 to 100+ dollars, daily, for the same games which sale for 40 to 60 in North America (which is more than games cost in NA, after the exchange rate, and has been so for a LONG time).


Publishers continue to screw over Europe and Australia/New Zealand. If the Xbone Oneteen Eighty Four managed to become a retail success then good. It's about time the rest of the world got a taste of what it's like to be bent over and [insert expletive].

Either way, there is at least another 5 to 10 years worth of gaming on the PS2 and PS3 alone, in Japanese games I haven't enjoyed properly, to care too much about this generation of consoles. That said, I've been waiting for the next console SMT, Persona, and Final Fantasy Versus (for many years now, you bastards at the video gaes brand of SQUEENIX- don't screw up Young-Gangan any more, please). At the moment those three possible titles are the only thing which would manage to make me forfeit food for a while in order to buy a new console.

uisukii Wrote:That said, I've been waiting for the next console SMT, Persona, and Final Fantasy Versus

Final Fantasy Versus has been turned into Final Fantasy XV, it was announced yesterday at Sony's E3 conference.
Source

TwoMoreCharacters Wrote:Although I'm a little put off by how they managed to softly sneak in that you need to pay for the PSN Plus membership to play online multiplayer.

I feel this has become pretty required. It solves a big problem that games have faced in recent years where in some people don't need multiplayer and some do. Plus the fact that publishers often find their hands tied in game pricing and with maintaining servers. Running a server costs money, no way to ignore that, unless you are doing P2P and thats rife with problems. Having multiplayer be tied to a subscription fee will allow companies to either a) get money from Sony for servers or b) hand the problem to Sony to deal with via cloud computing. Your game's multiplayer might now last longer and avoid being killed when development/publishers are looking for things to cut on the books.

uisukii Wrote:PAL regions have been "locked out" of games which have been released in Japan and North America for years. *sigh* You'd think more video game publishers would realise Australia exists, given how stupidly high video games cost over here, combined with the fact that people still willingly walk into brick and mortar retailers and hand over between 70 to 100+ dollars, daily, for the same games which sale for 40 to 60 in North America (which is more than games cost in NA, after the exchange rate, and has been so for a LONG time).

Publishers continue to screw over Europe and Australia/New Zealand. If the Xbone Oneteen Eighty Four managed to become a retail success then good. It's about time the rest of the world got a taste of what it's like to be bent over and [insert expletive].

I've always assumed that the reason why stuff costed more in Australia and in Europe is because you guys use VAT. The US doesn't.

I also can't tell if you are trying to make it sound like being PAL is some sort of "region lock." Because the PS3 at least isn't hampered by NTSC/PAL. The PS3 is region free. An NTSC game will work on a PAL PS3 and vice versa. So I have no idea what your are trying to get at there. I have no idea about the 360, but I assume its probably similar, although some games are region locked on the 360.

vix86 Wrote:

uisukii Wrote:PAL regions have been "locked out" of games which have been released in Japan and North America for years. *sigh* You'd think more video game publishers would realise Australia exists, given how stupidly high video games cost over here, combined with the fact that people still willingly walk into brick and mortar retailers and hand over between 70 to 100+ dollars, daily, for the same games which sale for 40 to 60 in North America (which is more than games cost in NA, after the exchange rate, and has been so for a LONG time).

Publishers continue to screw over Europe and Australia/New Zealand. If the Xbone Oneteen Eighty Four managed to become a retail success then good. It's about time the rest of the world got a taste of what it's like to be bent over and [insert expletive].

I've always assumed that the reason why stuff costed more in Australia and in Europe is because you guys use VAT. The US doesn't.

The reason is because a while back the price was semi-set during a period when a new generation of consoles hit the market and the strength of the AU$ was nothing like it is now. This also applied to the Euro, only worse for them. A lot of the time- even for digital sales- the price is set at USD price, only changed to Euro. 60UDS is not even remotely 60 Euro. It's price gouging, and for years publishers have been able to get away with it.

There is a trade agreement between the US and Australian in which electronic goods fall under, which are not taxed. That means shipping isn't even an issue, yet publishers still pretend it costs more to produce games and bring them over hear (even digitally, somehow) all the while reaping the profit margin. It is even worse in New Zealand.

Quote:I also can't tell if you are trying to make it sound like being PAL is some sort of "region lock." Because the PS3 at least isn't hampered by NTSC/PAL. The PS3 is region free. An NTSC game will work on a PAL PS3 and vice versa. So I have no idea what your are trying to get at there. I have no idea about the 360, but I assume its probably similar, although some games are region locked on the 360.

Try the PS2 on for size, then. Or the PS1. Take a look at the games which came out of Japan and see how many of them came to Australia. But that is really an aside. Without importing, these games wouldn't be available in Australia. Yes, it is all fair and well to say that "well, you can import them; what the problem?", but for younger gamers, unless the parents are tech savvy (as in, not the majority), these people miss out entirely on these games, purely for being in Australia.

There are a lot of artificial restrictions for this region, and businesses take advantage of this in order to heighten their profit margin.