f13.net

Streaming from Xbox.com (http://www.xbox.com) May 21st, 10am PDT.

Time to get excited for buzzword bingo and the great videogame crash of 2015!

What 2 minutes of careless googling tells us so far:
-PC type architecture supposedly like the PS4
-Will be $499 or $299 with a 2 year Xbox Live contract (i.e. $540)
-Butts

As in "I like big..."

(http://i.imgur.com/hDZpc86.jpg)

I have a feeling our witty rejoinders in this thread will be more entertaining than whatever comes out of the press conference.

I think he actually just meant "- butts" and nothing else.

I eagerly await "The social" gaming experience of the next gen.

Every time you die, the XBox 720 will Tweet that picture of your junk stolen from your phone.

Included in the EXIF information of that photo will be your home address geo-location. This feature can not be disabled for "security reasons".

I hope the Pizza Hut app shows up. It can be generation Y's /pizza.

If it does turn out to be called Xbox Infinity can we call it Xbox oO ?

Whatever the name is, I'm guessing it'll have to be an "Xbox <word>" thing rather than a number. The WiiU's troubles with its name and brand confusion are kind of a warning not to make it too similar when you aren't going by a strict numbering scheme like the PS2-3-4.

Maybe they can use big cat breeds.

Glad to see it's at least being streamed by the source:

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/hub/reveal

Won't have to deal with a live blog.

I wish we had a real brand marketer here. I'm actually kinda interested in the psychology behind it.

That makes me curious now; what does everyone here call the Xbox 360 when they speak about it in their everyday lives?

The two I hear are just "Xbox" or "360". Most all of my friends and acquaintances call it the 360, but I hear media refer to it almost exclusively as "Xbox".

XBox Millenium. It's worked for Microsoft before.

"The Next Xbox". :P

But yeah, 4 minutes to go. Oh boy.

Beats doing actual work I guess.

link i guess plz

Found it.

I want to see what Future Shit looks like.

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/hub/reveal

They should've paid for the rights to the new Daft Punk album instead of this generic ambient crap.

already sucks

Relationships with televisions!

Don Mattrick has the charisma of a pile of dead dogs.

Seriously.

This is so bad.

Quietest crowd ever.

Everyone who had a beard in that opening montage shouldn't have one and everyone who should didn't.

Has Don gotten plastic surgery on his brows? Or is he just a goon?

xbox one

really

CLOUD POWERED

EVERYONE DRINK

wwwwwwwwwwoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

a black box

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO


THE FUTURE


WOOOOOOOOOOO

why am i watching this

Hah.

All in One in separate pieces.

get ready everyone this is about to get shitty

more excited about today's hex update

YUP. They are incapable of making just a fucking game machine.

I hope Valve murders them.

AW YEAH, LISTENING TO DUBSTEP ON MY XBOX ONE

YEA XBOX

GO HOME

YOU'RE DRUNK

YOU THINK YOU'RE A COMPUTER

WHY ARE YOU CLAPPING WE CAN WATCH TV RIGHT NOW

GOD FUCK DREW CAREY IS SKINNY

lol alt-tab

The xbox has become a shitty remote control

xbox - give me friends

xbox - pour me alcohol

xbox - im so alone

BACK TO THE MOVIE? GOATSE.

so brave

Fucking windows 8 panel shit, fuck that

wait cell phone what whats happening

CAN IT PLAY GAMES?

I wonder how many millions they spent figuring out that home screen gesture.

WOW SKYPE

FUN

NOPE

Have to justify their overpriced purchase somehow.

wow this is niche as fuck

I would use the fantasy thing if I didn't have a smart phone and tablet.

BUT DOES IT PLAY GAMES. WITH A CONTROLLER.

Political debates lol

i wonder how many people were sitting at home thinking

MAN, i very badly need fantasy shit on my home console

This tv integration shit has made sure i never get one of these

because it will fuck with google fiber

oh well

my life, what a tragedy

a haiku

microsoft spent cash
to interact with tvs
but google fiber

WHAT GAMES?

xbox take allison brie's clothes off

xbox stop posting my commands to facebook

xbox y u no play games

Did he say at the beginning that they're going to announce game stuff at E3?

Yes, my vision of the future is me yelling at my console all the time.

xbox turn into a first gen ps3 and play persona 2

oh

A BLU-RAY DRIVE

SONY WINS WE CAN ALL GO HOME

MICROSOFT IS PAYING SONY TO MAKE THIS THING

Yep, it's a PC, and they're going to literally pay Sony for BluRay. lol

So XBL is free for XB1 owners?

Also, how big is the power brick?

I already yell at my tv enough, I don't need more.

more like power dick

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39720/animated%20gifs/zmbrt.gif)

lol

NO NOT KINECT

So does this fucking thing play games or what?

WHAT FUCKING GAMEPLAY

Wow integrated battery compartment. Revolutionary!

Enitre xbox.com domain is giving me an "unavailable" error.

DYNAMIC IMPULSE

no replaceable batteries?  :uhrr:

WHY WOULD I BUY THIS :(

You will want to FUCK this controller.

the selling point thus far has been to make fantasy sports even more lazy

i dont even like sports

LOOK AT ALL THE LIVEBLOGGERS THERE

didn't my xbox do like 90% of this in 2003 with xbmc?

actually modern warfare and fifa power xbox live

lol

lol


"Xbox install steam"

Could you at least demo some of the bullet points you are reading off of?

CLOUD

EVERYONE DRINK

THE CLOUD

DRINK!

:( no one cares about achievements anymore unless they foil and full-art cards in hex

worldwide multi data input center

y u no say cloud

HOW ABOUT ONLINE DATING? DOES IT HAVE ONLINE DATING?

What fucking game.

Good lord.

guys

EA

the greatest game creators

i am so confused

they know their crowd though

(http://i.imgur.com/CKx2RWc.jpg)

I CHANGED MY MIND DON'T TELL ME ABOUT GAMES EA

I think we may not be the target anymore.

Look. Not to be an assbag, but I feel like at this point the head of EA sports should be a black dude. And not a british tart.

HERE WE GO

EA IGNITE

GET READY

FUCK YEA BONES AND SHIT AND BLOOD AND CRUSTY EYES WHOOOO

LOL schild


Do all those live bloggers know that theres a great live stream for this?

LIVING WORLDS

IN SPORTS

THE GRASS WILL GROW WHILE YOU'RE NOT PLAYING

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO turns are gonna take 45 minutes in Madden

they're gonna make blood bowl without fun

good job

THAT'S NOT EVEN ENGLISH GET OUT

Holy shit Messi looks real!

lol

this engine doesn't have enough polygons

they didn't show any game :|

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/Console_psx.jpg)

also, as what i would consider a smart dude, i'm insulted that they're saying "human intelligence" coming out of a studio that is effectively the chinese sweatshop of gaming studios

I too want to see the emotion when I punch a mans

BUZZWORD BUZZWORD BUZZWORD XBOX DOES BUZZWORD CLOUD BUZZWORD KINECT



*cheer*

XBOX exclusive FIFA?

it uh

looks worse than the fake trailers from 7 years ago

the only good thing about FIFA was the bugs that created great gifs

woo

PHIL 'THE FOREHEAD' SPENCER

GET'EM TIGER

phil spencer should've come out and done this

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39720/animated%20gifs/tumblr_mlz0r3kmDl1s373hwo1_400.gif)

If that's gameplay footage this is going to be "Uncanny Valley: The Game Generation".

why are there so many words

Not even uncanny valley

they went for style and it looks crap

Is Forza still relevant other than liveries?

Like. I've never heard anyone talk about the game. Just how sweet their Mass Effect car was.

He's driving the Batmobile?

I like that they found the announcer for Ridge Racer for it.

Math Blaster would excite me more than this crap.

CLOUD-POWERED GAMES

DRINK

i think everyone has gotten over remedy's mediocre writing at this point but ok

i'd rather have quantum theory games

WOW those graphics.

IT LOOKS SO REAL

sigh

TIME IS THE FIRE IN WHICH WE BURN

NEXT, now without Nicolas Cage.

That made no sense at all.

creepy child.

lol FMV and prerendered video

/clap?

Look, if you want to make shitty Indigo Prophecy, go ahead. But don't put the word Quantum in the title.

FIFTEEN

EXCLUSIVE

EIGHT OF WHICH ARE VIVA PINATA UNO THROUGH OCHO

"The television screen is the most important blah blah"

That would be because he has a shitty monitor

Take your fucking hand out of your pocket.

OKAY THAT'S IT FOR THE GAMES.

Heh.

You tell'em.

What does this woman have to do with games?

please show farmville, hit all the stereotypes lady

SERIOUSLY I CAN NOT STRESS HOW IMPORTANT IT IS THAT THEY ARE GETTING IN THE WAY OF GOOGLE FIBER

I hate the word immerse whenever it's uttered by a worthless PR flack

yes

i will stand around with my friends next to the xbox and talk about work

The xbox did not have a single game as immersive as the original Maniac Mansion.

Surely they know this.

y u no (http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/1vs100_9870.jpg)

what an edgy shirt

ok i actually have no reason to make fun of her clothing there's literally nothing she can say that will interest me

scope, scale and ambition, merge, synergy, innovation

looking forward to the word cloud on this.

now while you're watching hannibal the xbox will actually kill your friend and you can eat them

HALO HAS BECOME DEFIANT

defiance? i don't know

that shitty trion game

But unlike all of you here today "I'm fucking rich and this is stupid"

you tell'em spielberg

great another falling skies

:facepalm:

Is he here just to remind how much fucking cash Microsoft has to waste?

GUYS IT WON'T BE AS GOOD AS I LOVE BEES

PERIOD

btw if you haven't listened to I love Bees, you should

LEAGUE OF LEGENDS?

haha

lol i'm kidding no one cares

this is basically the ESPNBox

Full haptic suits controllable by xbox players?

GOD I MISS BILL GATES

RedZone or fuck off.

don mattrick looks like he's wearing a skinsuit

No All-22 No Point.

yea, the nfl looks for the best

I too want to humiliate my friends

only the best

Have they said how much this disaster costs yet?

I'm going to call my friends who have an xbox with skype and make fun of them for using skype on their xbox instead of picking up their phone

Of course not.

Its as if they forgot about SMS completely?

That was the single worst presentation I've ever seen for a console.

Ever.

oh my god is it actually over

no games

oh god

that was hilarious

long talk slow build up

"later this year"

Yes this is even worse than the PS4 announcement.

DUCKTALES BY CAPCOM

Isn't a reveal supposed to have games, or a price, or a picture of somebody's cock?

EA Sports, a shitty movie game thing, and Call of Duty

their audience is literally 14-18 year olds with shitty taste

Call of Duty Ghosts better just be a game chock full of terrorists

INFINITY WARD

WHERE 98% OF THE STAFF IS COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

Probably about Grand King level.

Xbox One Game.

Call of Duty: Splinter Cell 2

hehe.

NextGen engine - cue keyboard/mouse.

Traffic and Syriana were fucking awful in hindsight

lol

that's going to go over a lot of peoples heads

Heh, I'd rather get a nice computer for about 2x that with about 10x the power.

DOG!

:oh_i_see:

 no

I don't give a fuck about clippy the dog

get it

clippy

because he ignores geometry

hahahaha

microsoft office

Call of Duty: Rainbow Six

CALL OF DUTY: THIS ONE HAS A DOG

MABARI HOUNDS?

SLIDING! I'VE NEVER SEEN SLIDING IN A GAME BEFORE.

Seriously.

Slide? Lean? Smoke? AI? Shaders?

Are they just saying things from the last 10 years now?

Lean, that takes me back. You know when Rainbow Six did it literally nearly 2 decades ago

is call of duty even used for esports or is it still Counterstrike?

Call of Duty: Team Fortress Maps

Bonus points if they reference bunny-hopping.

Lol dynamic maps.

Because competitive players love inconsistent layouts.

de_dust should never have succeeded.

Technically, Donkey Kong Jr had lean.

Wasn't there a competitive FPS game that came out like 6 years ago that had less than 400 polygons per level

that had like wall running, sliding, and leaning and shit

Pores are going to help me enjoy a game

I THOUGHT THERE WAS NO DOG IN MODERN WARFARE 3

arm hair

oh thank god

i was concerned

pretty arms!!!

GunZ?

fingernail crust

welcome to the future nerds

Yea gunz!

Great game.

They love making rooms where dirt fills up half of them to make an uneven surface

Why did they make a new console to make a game that looks worse than MGS4?

That was, quite seriously, the worst water i've seen in a game in YEARS

:( looks like sub 30 fps

ok scratch that

the fire is worse than the water

and "we are what we got" makes no sense

I wouldn't even say this is a good looking Xbox 360 game.

Well that sucked.

Sigh.

Can't believe we have to sit through more shitty presentations (E3) to see what the fuck these consoles are going to play?

Xbox is basically white people being incompetent at this point.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39720/animated%20gifs/Ag7DTzC.gif)

Managed to actually not meet the incredibly low bar set by the PS4 presentation since it had no fucking games.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39720/animated%20gifs/fJBRMl2.gif)

As far as an event that was being shown on TV for the mainstream, they hit the two things they needed to - NFL and Call of Duty.

They also showed all the 'here's what this shit does!' - I hope they have actual games at E3 (lol).

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39720/animated%20gifs/MHjdrhG.gif)

THEY DON'T NEED TO SHOW CALL OF DUTY AND MADDEN

THEY ONLY NEED TO SAY IT

THAT AUDIENCE IS ALREADY SALIVATING OVER THEIR TAX RETURN BUYING THEM AN XBOX NEAR YEAR

edit: also, IT'S A FORGONE CONCLUSION THEY'LL BE ON THE XBOX DAMN

(http://i.imgur.com/PuGoP.gif)

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39720/animated%20gifs/3bglyBB.gif)

So, Sony's stock value went up during the Xbox presentation

http://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=SNE

This thread will either pay homage to the fact that we're old and out of touch, or that this XBOX will be a total clusterfuck.

And now...the waiting game.  :drill:

The xbox will sell fine.

Just not to the fake audience that doesn't exist that they're pitching it too. There is literally nothing in that show that gamers have ever clamored for. It was really fucking weird.

Oh holy shit, they actually went and did it!

dude, skype on TV is revolutionary:

(http://i.imgur.com/uAW9O.gif)

Holy fuck I look away for a bit you guys blow this thread up.

So much snark!  Glad I didn't watch this shit.  Dear god....

Huh. So grabbing $10 of that used game sale?

That old man isn't nearly as stupid as this guy:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39720/animated%20gifs/d7lGARs.gif)

This is legit how all that extra shit on the xbox makes me feel. All I want is a game, I get:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39720/animated%20gifs/PdhZvLo.gif)

And call of fucking duty.

Yeah this is really distinguishing it from computers.  :oh_i_see:

I was secretly hoping the Hex #13 update would happen while this show was going on so everyone in this thread would leave (including myself).

(http://i.minus.com/ibe77Yt4BHJ4jQ.gif)

It's going backwards. Steam shoots a game straight to my PC, the XBOX wants us to install disks to our box.

To be fair to Microsoft, Gamestop and other retailers probably pushed pretty hard to still have games on discs be available.

As an aside, Razer just announced this awesome fucking thing:

(http://assets.razerzone.com/eeimages/products/13055/razer-athrox-carousel.png)

I mean, goddamn:



    10 tournament-grade Sanwa Denshi™ buttons
    Authentic Sanwa Denshi™ joystick with ball top
    Interchangeable top panel allows for custom artwork finishes
    Fully accessible internals and storage compartments for easy modding
    Honeycomb structure on the inside for easy screw mounting
    Storage compartments for alternative bat top joystick and more
    13 ft / 4 m detachable USB cable
    Screwdriver included for modding
    2.5mm audio jack for headset use (Xbox 360)

The whole thrust of this is "Think watching TV is too hard? Well we have the answer!"

The fuck. First using a controller was too hard, now watching TV is too hard. "Hey guys, remember how TVii for Wii U lit the world on fire? Let's base our console around that. The primary feature is switching inputs!"

Lol. Finally I can watch TV on my TV!

My email is fucking FLOODED with bullshit PR for the Xbox One now.

Fuck.

Crytek-Newsletter: Crytek’s CryENGINE® 3 Already Primed for Xbox One Development

Like, that's not even news.

I don't even remember signing up for Crytek PR.

Gaming is dead.

Long live gaming

long live hex

What's sad here is based on their last couple E3s this was super predictable but nobody wanted to believe it could be this bad.

They even said it was all about games and core gamers the other day - then they show this. It's like when MMO companies blab about how players want to be the singular hero and change the entire world through their actions, then just release a WoW clone.

Still a better console than Wii U?   :why_so_serious:

Oh fuck, they dropped Blu-ray into the new thing?  Why don't you just drive over to Sony's HQ and offer salad tossing, fuckers?

The new XBox

(https://securecdn.disqus.com/uploads/mediaembed/images/498/8118/original.jpg)

Did they mention what kind of ram was in it?
Also shouldnt the above be a picture of a Beta machine?

What else were they going to do, try to resurrect HD-DVD?   :awesome_for_real:

So are the name and box look some sort of retro style marketing plan? wtf?

That, or some other custom storage.  Or, I dunno, go back to cartridges/SSDs?

It's DDR3. Were it 5 they would have said so.

Seriously, who would buy that turd? I thought it was a joke. It looks like it belongs with the NES. Yes, the first one.

Wut

People expect their game console to be able to perform as a video player these days.  The days when it made sense to put movies on one type of media and games on another ended with the DVD.  Blu-Ray won the physical format war (and will probably be the last physical disc format before we all just move to streaming everything).

Oh I agree.  I'm just still lol'ing over the irony of MS essentially saying "we give up" and swear fealty to Sony.  I mean we're basically consolidating the consoles the same way computing has done, with Apple giving up PowerPC and switching to Intel.  The box may say "Mac", but we all know what's really inside.

So unless they're announcing that many of the XBox Gold stuff that Sony is, has, and will continue to offer for free is going free itself, why should I buy a Xbox One over a PS4?

You heard it hear first, the XBox ME!!!!!

Wait... XBox ONE? Seriously? Doesn't that make people think of the original XBox?

Why should I buy either over a PC if I already have a TV and a blueray player in my computer room?

What kind of TV service does the average american have if you need an XBox  + Kinect + Voice Recognition to make things easier?

I thought we had that thing sorted when we invented the remote control.

I don't want a microsoft controlled camera in my living room. I don't want a microsoft controlled microphone in my living room, I don't need a >500 dollar device just do do the things my tv can do just fine if i add a $99 roku box to it and better.

A bunch of the MULTIMEDIA! stuff sounds useful to me, but I don't even have a blu-ray player yet so it isn't like it would be redundant hardware for me.

You don't own a PS3?

Because that's MY blu-ray player.

That will never work. They'll never get the balance right.

Nope. Never had enough of a reason to buy one.

Lookit that heatsink.

(http://i.imgur.com/UNbs6nz.jpg)

jesus... Is that a 120mm fan?  :ye_gods:

BTW is it some sort of retro trend that made MS design the XBOX to look like an eighties VCR or have they hust given up design-wise also?

It's literally an HTPC designed with commodity parts. After the RROD thing with the 360 they were totally going to over-engineer the shit out of the Xbox One and make absolutely sure it wouldn't have similar issues.

lol

(http://www.gamerdna.com/public/images/user_image/set59/image/59938/AOSkulahmyeyes.jpg?1225157443) ?

Looks like I picked the wrong day to stop checking this thread.

(http://stream1.gifsoup.com/view/893533/sniffing-glue-o.gif)

Now we know how Schild broke 40k posts. Also, read this entire thread and learned nothing about new XBox.

 :oh_i_see:

Kinect is mandatory?  That's idiotic.

Damn that is one ugly box:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/05/our-first-up-close-look-at-the-xbox-one/

Via the Penny-Arcade thread:

I like where this is going.

The 360 was so sad it was being replaced it turned itself off.

Do not feel bad for this Xbox. It is an Xbox; It has no feelings. The new Xbox is much better.

2013 the year of fail in gaming.

I notice no mention of this, but I'll leave the equation for you all to deduce.
 * Kinects have been reverse-hacked
 * Console requires one
 * Console requires always-on connection
 * Average Tech & Security Savvy of the US

(http://i.imgur.com/YTF7bli.jpg)

A buddy on G+ is touting this as his robot jesus. I will await the crash and burn...

As usual with news reactions, those stock moves make zero sense.

LOL, the list of revealed games (http://www.ign.com/wikis/xbox-one/List_of_Xbox_One_Games) is laughable.

I don't know shit about this but the Guardian mentions it can detect your heartbeat.

I'm reading that as a step forwards with the ultimate goal of killing someone through the internet.

Actually that list tells me that my PC is going to be just fine for gaming for the foreseeable future.

Would you use this power for good or evil?

Yes they mentioned in the presentation that the new Kinect can monitor your heartrate.

Ruling the living room is such an outdated concept. As a high-level concept it just strikes me as nonsense.

These are panicking people at the top who realize there's been no real evolution of computing power in almost 5 years. They are shitting sizzle on you and not steak.

Can you shit sizzle? I'm going with it.

Summary of Call of Duty: Ghosts announcement: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9K18CGEeiI

(http://i.imgur.com/E6W0dtK.jpg)

Uh, no. Moore's Law hasn't given up the ghost just yet.

FTFY

There's literally nothing about the XBox One that I've heard so far that makes it superior or even comparable to a PC, or even superior to a 360 with Kinetic. You can already do all of these things on THIS generation of console, only cheaper.

Watched the whole video, didn't learn anything either.

Also, I've been chainposting in every single E3 reveal for like a decade.

Just like that.

But it's the new hotness...

I don't know who these people are kidding thinking this is not an "always on" system. What the hell can you do without an internet hookup for it?

My moronic gamer* brother-in-law:


* Basically any AAA shooter/action title is god and the best thing ever.

I particularly like how they've managed to combine the aesthetics of a VCR player with the dust-collecting traps of a box fan.  That box is guaranteed to never be clean.

Everything about this is shit.  Dear god.

Though I'm going to break from the pack and say I actually quite like the look of its physical design.

If by design you mean "Flat surfaces are the new shiney."

It's a rectangular prism.

Are you people insane? This thing is so awesome.

Not to own or play games or media on.

It's the new trend in amateur porn, once all that sweet always-on footage from your bedroom and sofa makes its way to russia.

Fuck yeah!

And if you want to call your stupid box 'One', put in a cable card slot, ffs.

This is funny on many levels:
(http://i.imgur.com/uunReZK.png)

So that's their pitch?  Seriously? "Watching TV is hard. Buy this!!"

Sort of.  I'm tired of all the weirdly warped plastic shit that is suppose to be the future.  I seriously think this:

(http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/xbox-one-980x653.jpeg)

Looks better than any of these:

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/30/PS3-Consoles-Set.jpg/657px-PS3-Consoles-Set.jpg)

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/03/Xbox-360-Consoles-Infobox.png/712px-Xbox-360-Consoles-Infobox.png)

But again, everything else about this is laughably bad.  Badly bad bad bad.

Watching TV is hard, I have to, like, press buttons and stuff

I don't understand the TV thing, what's different about it?  

I have network/internet on my 4 year old TV plus it takes an NTFS external HD that plays most things.  I missed being able to have lovefilm/netflix by one generation, in a couple of years everyone will start switching to OLED.

edit checked age of TV.

Well this makes the idea of hooking a PC to TV as my core gaming system more reasonable.

While I think of it, I read a good point about the new Ultra HD TV's, there's little to no content available yet but the pixel size is really going to help reading text on a TV screen.  So I can see a lot of potential for internet side bar content next to the broadcast image, I can't see the new generations of smart TV's leaving out hand gestures and voice activation if people start liking that crap.

So aside from games, in a couple of years why would anyone buy this instead of putting the money towards a new TV?

Who the hell is responsible for numbering at Microsoft?
Windows 3.1
Windows 95
Windows 98
Windows 2000
Windows 7
Windows 8

Xbox 360
Xbox 1

Kotaku: If I’m playing a single player game, do I have to be online at least once per hour or something like that? Or can I go weeks and weeks?

Harrison: I believe it’s 24 hours.

Kotaku: I’d have to connect online once every day.

Harrison: Correct.

Sky's pickin' up what I'm layin' down.

Time to start collecting Xbox Live names of actual females so I can sell them to Russian hackers for future use.

(http://i.imgur.com/KTteljF.png)

That's why I said they should go with XBox Millenium. It has a history that fits.

So. That much-discussed "additional fee" for activating second-hand games?

$60.

http://kotaku.com/you-will-be-able-to-trade-xbox-one-games-online-micros-509140825

The idea of EB and Gamestop getting their business model evaporated brings me great pleasure.

Ahahahahahahahahah


Fucking awesome.

This is going to kill Xbox if the only games you can rent or buy used is ps4.  If Sony is smart though they'll just mirror this, take the Microsoft competition and kill GameStop completely.

It's a four-day simultaneous time cube.

Actual demo of the new Kinect 2 (sorry, Gizmodo, I know):

http://gizmodo.com/kinect-2-full-video-walkthrough-the-xbox-sees-you-like-509155673

I eagerly await the next gen in dancing games.

For those that missed today's presentation here it is in a nutshell.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbWgUO-Rqcw

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10657011/extbox.png)
heh

Well, if this thing is as much a PC as it is believed, I give it a month tops before the hacking community figures out how to completely bypass the authentiaction system on it, allowing you to run some kind of "always connected" emulator that will let you install and play anything without ever having to verify it.

No easier way to get the pirate community in general to say "challenge accepted" then do something like try to completely kill used games trading.

I mean, fuck, I really hope they tie the game install to your online account and not the physical machine.  At least that way you could go to your buddies place,  log on to your account on his machine, and install the game again if you wanted to play it at his place.   The idea that I might have to physically take my system to my friends place to play my games when he has the same system is batshit stupid.

Tying it to your login would be too easily bypassed since the system only needs to authenticate once a day.

Dunno why this struck me funny, but I laughed way too hard at this.  :awesome_for_real:

Did I hear "Absolutely no backwards compatability whatso-fucking-ever" with 360?

Because, you know, that worked out GREAT with the PS3. And nothing says "replace your 360" like "None of your games will work, and also all that arcade shit you bought? GONE TOO FUCKER!".

Jesus Christ. It's like the year of shit-stupid in the games industry.

Next gen Xbox is some unholy hybrid of AppleTV and yelling at the automated complaint line, with a shitty games console tacked on as an afterthought.

If Sony is smart they won't do the always online one-console game activation thing and completely fucking eat Microsoft's lunch along with drinking their milkshake. Publishers won't abandon or ignore the PS4.

I would bet money the full games won't be on the discs which means in addition to cracking the xbox you'll need to find the game online, plus you won't be able to use XBL.  Yes it will be pirated but it's going to be pain in the ass enough that people won't bother with it.

This will be awesome for Microsoft once they figure out how to disable the customer.  Worked for Win8.

Not necessary.

I think the 'make tv easier' will be in the same realm as 'pay the subscription to access Internet'. Now you'll pay for cable and then pay again to watch it over the xbox.

And still another tech company that thinks everyone has always on broadband, heh.

Further, I can't take my copy of Madden over to my stoner buddy's house to play on the weekend? Yeah, that'll be popular.

I didn't want to jump on the negative train, I swear. But what the fuck?

I can't wait to run steam on this.

Yes, it is truly delicious. It also pretty much assures my cheap ass will not touch this fucking system with a ten foot pole. If I need a Blu-Ray player that plays games, I'll go buy a PS3. At least I won't feel the fucking I'm getting.

Or I'll just stick to my PC because it does all this, plays games at better resolution and I don't feel completely chained to some fucktard's idea of how I want to access my entertainment.

I thought it was already happening for free, in this country anyway, the modern TV remote control has an internet button.  Good point on broadband though, I switched to fibre a while back and I guess I started to take it for granted very quickly.

Edit, I guess with the BBC license fee, iplayer Sky/Virgin we are already paying extra.

The one thing I look forward to about the next Xbox:

Digital and Broadband adoption in this country aren't stellar.  Latest FCC study I could find said 65% of homes in the US use broadband.  (http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-296442A1.pdf) Which seemed way too high.  Then I read the details of what the FCC was counting as "broadband."


So yeah, if you count smartphones, woo great penetration! Wonder of X-box 1 will let you use that 4g connection.  :oh_i_see:


So instead, let's use the Wiki Article, which uses the International Telecommunications Union's report, which lists the US at 27%  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_broadband_Internet_subscriptions)   
Erk. Much less encouraging. I guess not enough poor & rural people bought consoles to matter?

Things have really improved a lot over the last few years here, after switching to fibre I had to kick the wii off my network to get full n speeds, I was on 4meg down/75kbps upload till very recently.

(http://i.imgur.com/qSW54n7.jpg)

I hate you. Best I can get here is about 2/3rds that. :(

And that was roughly 5 times what I had before.

Out of curiosity, how is the rest of the world taking the Xbox One? The radio guys this morning seemed vaguely excited by the new Kinect stuff but that's about it. (And am I the only one basically just "Fuck this" at the no backwards compatability thing? Or has that been known and I'm late to the aw crap response?)

T3 Xbox One Analysis (http://www.t3.com/news/xbox-one-analysis)


I'd be surprised if anyone in the mainstream press came right out and said it's stupid.  There'd be a backlash from fans and Microsoft for no real gain.

edit to add. In the UK, Sky ~ 10 million households  (http://corporate.sky.com/media/key_facts_and_figures), virgin ~ 4 million (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/oct/23/virgin-media-internet-subscribers-60000), BT Vision ~ 1 million, plus things like humax freesat.

I don't know much about Virgin but the Sky box has a downloadable library, movies, iplayer, itv player.  The UK market is stuffed full of TV media boxes already, I couldn't find a use for this new xbox if someone gave me one.

oh, it's meant to voice control everything. Xbox One will work with UK TV 'in a variety of ways' (http://crave.cnet.co.uk/gamesgear/xbox-one-will-work-with-uk-tv-in-a-variety-of-ways-50011289/)

From my 12 year old:


Out of the mouths of babes.

Microsoft seriously has never gave up on that settop box fantasy have they?

We knew they weren't going to stick with HD-DVD so it would be nigh impossible for it to be backwards compatible.  What would they do, add a second disc tray, try some sort of gimmick where the reading head uses two different lasers?  As soon as blu-ray won the format wars we knew the next xbox wouldn't be backwards compatible.

Best they could do is let you download old games and stick them on the hard drive, also not super likely.

But that's exactly how the new Xbox is going to work.  You'll be able to download the game off the disc onto the Xbox hard drive.  That's where the whole argument about pre-owned games and charging a fee to download the game onto a different Xbox is coming from.

Except the Xbox doesn't use a HD-DVD drive. That was an external add-on. The box itself is a basic Dual-Layer DVD Drive and has no reason not to be able to run disks on the new system.   

A more likely reason would be something processor-based but I suspect there's no real reason there, either.

The reason is so they can charge 19.99 so you can play games you already own when they "patch" them in the store.

I think I might have early onset Alzheimers or something.  I thought the 360 lauched with hd-dvd.

Wouldn't the old games have to be updated to run on the new architecture of the new system? Pretty sure that would be a large undertaking and why it wasn't done.

No, it was an add-on drive because Microsoft wasn't sure who would win the format war.

Nope. Wasn't ready in time. Everyone lolled. Sony won the HD war with zero effort.

The reason they're claiming no backwards compatibility is due to changes in architecture, from whatever nVidia GPU they had powering the 360 to whatever they have going in the One, along with other changes, like with the CPU.

I don't know how much is bullshit though, as I'm not that technically inclined.

Just assume 100%, and you'll usually be within about 10% or so.

See: The Playstation store.

Any reason they can't slowly update 360 games to run on xbox One? They would just need to put them in the store, and use the old game's DVD to verify the purchase then allow you to download the updated game to the hard drive. A bonus is they could promote the games as Store-only and allow people that never purchased the classics to pay for the updated version.

Or maybe that makes too much sense...

Isnt the 360 a power pc cpu? Wasn't it a huge headache for apple making the new intel macs emulate the old power pc based ones? Or is my memory fuzzy here.

Seems like the entire machine is aimed to the USA and no-where else in the world. Definitely no appeal at all for me in Europe.

E3 is gonna be a hoot this year.  Sony's scrambling to get their new shit together, while MS seems to be on some level of zen that permits them to do whatever they want and just not care about "gaming".

And then there's Nintendo...

(http://i.minus.com/iBzvb2JSpQNRM.gif)

Who do you think is going to do these upgrades? Microsoft? Every game company that has sold a game on the XBox? A bit impractical to expect Microsoft to update all those games. They'd have to beg the code from the original writers, pay a programmer to get familiar enough with it to port it to the new platform, etc. If you expect the game companies to port all their games for free maybe you've missed how many are hurting recently. I don't think you could make a business case for the cost vs goodwill here besides the game still works on the 360, it's not the game companies responsibility to make their game future proof.

I expect most of the popular old games to appear on the marketplace, but I'm pretty confident they'll charge for them (again).

Ya don't they reboot them as HD versions or something?

Bluray had most of the industry behind it, including the MPEG partners, they had created a licensing organization and had a roadmap for increasing the capacity and adding features without breaking compatability over the next five years.

HD-DVD had Microsoft and Panasonic, an inferior video codec as default that wasn't supported by any hardware decoder chip and no plan moving forward beyond the initial announcement. It was pretty much dead from the start. If they had included it in the 360 it might have had a fighting chance but with the XBox using DVDs it was pretty much done.

The 360 has  a 3-core IBM PowerPC processor,  ATI graphics and 512 MB GDDR3 memory. The XBox One has an AMD CPU, ATI GPU and 8 GB of GDDR3 memory. So no direct downwards compatibility they'd have to integrate an 360 into the new XBox to make that happen.

There are rumors of a redesigned 360 for $99 floating around though that supposedly has CPU, RAM and GPU on a single chip and will supposedly be announced at E3.

It could also be because they are concerned about apple making inroads on the TV and this is a preemptive maneuver. And being a proprietary system that is powered by exclusive content you don't have much of an option but to accept that their corporate goals have precedence.

Also bragging about having multiple operating systems on a console is a good indication you are doing it wrong.

They want to make app development more accessible to developers familiar with Windows who have no prior XBox os experience. Yet they need the lightweight OS for game developers already invested and trained in XBox development.

Also: The completely new feature of multitasking.

Actually, I think the pr0n industry picked HD-DVD first. But that's not something I can search for right now. :grin:

Someone else made the point that this looks like MS' challenge to any potential AppleTV set-up. I'd agree with that thinking. Now all they need is an absolute ton of licence deals to get the content needed for such a push.

I'm waiting to see what the E3 presentation says about the XBone - this presentation wasn't for the hard core gaming market. So it isn't surprising that hard core gamers weren't impressed.

If this is Microsofts potential challenge to Apple TV then its laughably embarrassing.

Seriously, why do they think this is how they should compete? Why do they keep making these similar, stupid mistakes?

And why on earth does their operating system take up 3 gig on an 8 gig machine?

That was because HD-DVD was readily available 3 months before blu-ray. By 2007 they were publishing on both platforms. By 2008 they dropped blu-ray.

Porn didn't have a horse in the race until it decided it was too expensive to support both. Besides the market penetration of cheaper blu-ray players, and the PS3, and blu-ray readers being available for PC made the decision for them. Hybrid players cost over $400 and HD-DVD readers were few and far between.

Porn didn't pick the winner, it just put the final nail in the coffin of HD-DVD (though, arguably, Microsoft did it themselves by rushing the 360 out the door without HD-DVD as the standard).

Porn would also have simply gone with the flow of popularity this time. It wasn't a VHS/Betamax situation, and porn consumers already had DVD and various online options for their "needs", especially since DVD production at that time was cheap as dirt, while either of the hi-def options would cost a fair bit more.

Also, hi-def porn is still terrifying.

(http://i.minus.com/iBzvb2JSpQNRM.gif)

Because the problem that Microsoft sees is always "Why isn't our stuff in these lucrative markets?". Which is never the problem that us consumers see.

The Xbone hasn't been created to answer the question "How can we make an awesome gaming machine?" but "How can we make a machine that taps into as many markets as possible?".

Diversify or excel. Not both.

When it comes to buying games, I've massively favoured towards the 360 over my Blu-Ray player PS3 this round, just as the PS2 won over my XBMC XBox 1 last time. This time, it looks like I won't even need to buy an Xbox 1.1. For this next wave, I'll stick with my PC, and maybe a SteamBox or possibly a PS4 if they don't also go full retard. Which means it's probably PC/Steambox.

Bloodworth from this page.

Oops, sorry! Knew I'd seen it somewhere before... :why_so_serious:

“The users consuming the content on a display device are monitored so that if the number of user-views licensed is exceeded, remedial action may be taken.” (http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/139706-microsofts-new-kinect-patent-goes-big-brother-will-spy-on-you-for-the-mpaa)  :why_so_serious:

Please tell me this should be on the Onion.  If not, shut this thread down now.  We're done here.

It's not, but as I posted on Lum's Facebook this is the "red light camera" for the FBI warnings about public showings.  The law is there and has been there forever, this is just a tool to enforce it.

My position remains it's dumb to have an always-on appliance with a camera controlled by an ever-changing TOU policy that the corp can change to "We are allowed to broadcast you naked" and brick your machine if you choose to say, "uh, no."

It's not really Onion since United States Patent Application 094444 (http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220120278904%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20120278904&RS=DN/20120278904)

edit: and this isn't really anything new (patent filed 2 years ago) but the focus of xbox one on tv makes it if not necessarily relevant then atleast somewhat interesting

Have you guys seen the patents for ads where you have to stand up and say the brand name to the TV or physically interact with the ad to proceed? Yeah.

Also the more hardcore tech sites have gotten their hands on units and nailed down specs for the PS4 and as it turns out that while they both use basically the same architecture, the PS4's choice to pick GDDR5 RAM instead of DDR3+32MB of Integrated RAM as well as marginally higher spec GPU means that the PS4 is flat out better and it will take pretty much no effort on the part of devs to use it.

Basically, even if they don't do some extra optimization to take advantage of the PS4's extra shaders and wider memory bus provided the game's framerates aren't locked the PS4 will likely always pull higher/more stable FPS. Nice.

http://www.polygon.com/2013/5/23/4358396/xbox-one-and-ps4-are-a-generation-ahead-of-the-best-pc-says-ea-cto


Well I am convinced.  :why_so_serious:

Years ahead in User suppression technologies Digital Rights management capabilites, definitely.

My company's videos have started having 30 second advertisements where you have to type in a random phrase in order to skip it.  I'ts *extremely* fucking annoying, more annoying when I'm trying to debug something.

Treating your customers as potential criminals has never gone over well. It won't in this case either.

No, the first HD porn was on HD-DVD. Even porn couldn't help it, it was that great of a fail

Why is a company that operates globally and makes most of its profits from global sales still so fucking US focused?

Most of the non-game features won't work outside of the US. The always on camera and microphone might even mean that they won't be able to sell it in some markets for legal reasons.

Their DRM breaks first sale and ownership laws in most of the EU and their camera, microphone and data collection reqs break privacy and data protection laws for example, while none of the TV and streaming features will work at launch (or if the 360 is any indication, ever).

This is a device that is essentially tailored completely to the US. The services are built for the US cable and broadcast landscape, the DRM and kinect user surveillance features are tailored to US privacy and copyright laws and nothing else.

Most of it will get shot down in other jurisdictions or simply won't be supported/work for years if ever outside the US.

I am in complete agreement with you.  However, in the Digital age corporations apparently only see customers as 1) Criminals 2) Data to be sold to other corporations.

Our purchasing power and ability to vote with our wallets is reduced at the same time we're gutting government's ability to protect our rights, too.  Plus with every company willing to pile on this bandwagon and the high cost of entry to the market, your only real choice is to not buy these things.  

We've seen how restrained the population is on that front.  I'm the retarded outlier who gets mocked for not owning a smart phone because I don't want to be a data point for Google or Apple.

Ed: Oh, I'm also against innovation and tech because I want to own a physical product or digital copy instead of just having a digital library I can access 'via the cloud.'  AKA: I have no rights of resale, access if I piss off the corporate owner, or way to be recompensated for removal of my legally-purchased product.  It's not at all that the consequences of the above are that even ownership is a less-tangible concept, subject to who has the biggest legal fund. 

With XBox One or Google glass you'll potentially be a data point for those corporation even if you don't own any of those devices. You just need to know or hang out with people who do.

Which, hey, I don't.  :awesome_for_real:

Today, yes. You might need to adjust your pool of people you hang out with in the future if those devices get popular.   :why_so_serious:

You are underestimating this. Many of these game companies are so currently tightly on margin that even a 5% sales drop would be crippling to their bottom line. There are exceptions, ATVI being one, but for EA, Sony, Squeenix, and the like? They have been losing money up until this 12 month period, and for the most part a 5% revenue shift would send them all into the red.

Considering the reaction from the non-tech public - which is who I hang with if I hang - I'm not concerned.   Most folks seem to think the GG is a very dumb looking piece of hardware that will get in the way. XB1 isn't a concern.


No, I underestimate people's willingness to educate themselves and therefore boycott bad businesses. Not that these companies are hanging-on by a razor margin that makes dumb moves like this look good.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/486603

Yep, that seals the deal. Fuck you, Microsoft. Only money you'll get from me is for Windows.

I don't even think you have to educate yourself about these decisions by MS. They are so out in the open that I don't think they can hide behind PR spin.

Ben Kuchera everybody! (http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/the-death-of-used-games-and-control-of-the-second-hand-market-could-be-the)

I'm just kidding please don't click that link. It's a bad thing that I actually read anything he wrote.

Games journalism folks.

He is what is wrong with gaming. Not the publishers, not the manufacturers, not the designers. This dipshit is feeding the stupid decisions.

Games journalism indeed:

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/05/xbox-one-gaming/

The amusing part is I told my parents-of-teenage-kids friends and they were appalled they wouldn't be able to trade-in games anymore.  They liked not having the games sitting around the house and that it gave the kids a way to recoup some of the cost of things they didn't want to play.  Almost as if there were a service being provided for a desired good.

 :awesome_for_real:

Op/ed stuff isn't really journalism in the sense that most of us mean when we bitch about games journalism being terrible, I don't think. At least not for me. I expect op/ed stuff to be stupid everywhere.

Did they ever manage to crack the ps3 or is that still not possible to pirate games on?

The PS3 has been cracked so wide open Sony literally can never close it for all devices manufactured in the entire lifetime of the system. All models. Chinese hackers got ahold of what is basically the universal content code, and another group released it publicly to prevent them from being the only people with it.

http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/10/25/sony-ps3-hacked-for-good-master-keys-revealed/

Thus why they had to give up their awesome-o core processor that was supposed to be future proof for the next, what, 20-30 years or some shit?   :why_so_serious:

It did take a while to crack, though. Sony is very experienced with this sort of stuff.

Those 2 issues are not related.

I think Gabe Newell has already solved the problem of piracy. He gives demonstrations at least twice a year. And has DRM everyone likes (well, except sinij).

In the new grimdark present, any digital content you buy is not your sole property.  You're only renting it until you either try to 1) sell it, 2) share it, or 3) gift it as a legacy once you're dead.   I think this is honestly the case.  It's why I still buy physical books.

That Patent application is scary stuff.

I should patent putting a Post-It note over the sensor.

The whole box won't work if Kinect is disabled. So you either accept that MS will see you through the camera or you have a non-functioning console (or you simply won't buy such crap)

DING DING DING DING! WE HAVE A WINNAR LADIES AND GENTS!

Fuck this shit. From the Wii U to the PS4 to this fucking piece of shit can go fuck itself in the Kinect-hole. It's almost like Microsoft wants me to go buy a PC for games.  :why_so_serious:

Well, you won't be buying a PC for Microsoft's games (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/05/23/surprise-msoft-not-keen-on-porting-xbox-one-exclusives/).  :awesome_for_real:

I envision splicing in some extra cable and parking the Kinect out in my chicken coop.  I wonder what it would make of that?

Or just put a cap over the fucking lens.

I am literally heartbroken.  :heartbreak:

So what's to stop me from taking a pic of my living room with me in it from my TV, hanging it in front of the camera like a carrot on a stick, and calling it a day?

Hell, we could manufacture the devices here on F13 and make millions.

Kinect 2 can distinguish between living things and inanimate objects. Seriously.

Welp, fuck that system then. It's getting none of my money.

I really wanted a console this time.  :x

I wasn't being glib.

Microsoft has stated that the XBox One wil not work without Kinect. Certain people of the press have asked MS employees at the event if the Kinect camera can be disconnected or disabled and MS spokepersons have told them that the XBox One requires Kinect and simply will not be usable without.

It doesn't matter if you put a cap on the lens or a post-it or something else. You want an XBox One? You better like having a camera and microphone pointed at you at all times or you won't even be able to play games.

Ridiculous? Yes. Alas it's true.

Don't have a living room large enough or uncluttered enough for Kinect to work? Tough luck, you should probably work more to be able to afford a bigger house then.

That this will essentially hamper sales is just the ironic cherry on top of that fail cake.

This essentially decides if I should buy an XBox One. Even if I wasn't bothered by the always on console with hi-def camera and mic I wouldn't be able to use the new XBox.

My living room isn't large enough for the old or new Kinect to work at all. So I would buy a console that would just refuse to work at all.

It's ridiculous because there's absolutely no reason whatsoever why you shouldn't be able to use the new XBox without Kinect but I probably won't buy a bigger apartment just so that I will be able to use a certain kind of game console.

They've said the Kinect 2 will work in small rooms like bedrooms. So you can "authenticate" on it fine if it's not in a living room, you just might have trouble using it as a motion controller.

yes... when the "high-end" of ports to PC is a mobile game you know they actively want to avoid games on windows. Other than those which drive their agenda of turning it into a tablet OS.

It somewhat flies in the face of more cross-platform games now that libraries and middle-ware are more mature and they need the widest possible market to deal with escalating development costs for the big name titles. But I guess microsoft figures they are the ones wielding the whip and writing the contracts if you want it on the platform.

What Microsoft US considers small might not be a small room in other parts of the world. Kinect 1 requires (according to the instruction manual) an 8 by 8 foot space in front of the console to accomodate two players and a 6 by 6 foot space for a single player.

Thats 1,8m by 1,8m of obstacle free space in front of the TV for a single player or 2,4m by 2,4m for a two player setup. This might be a medium sized room in the US. I don't know anybody over here who has rented or owns a house or apartment and has rooms that are large enough to accomodate a 2 by 2 m space in front of the TV that doesn't have any furniture in it. My whole living room is not much larger than what KInect requires as free uncluttered space.

A room large enough to accomodate for 8 by 8 feet of unencumbered space would be a fucking large room anywhere in the EU and would be a prohibitively expensive room in Japan etc.

They'd have to reduce the requirements by quite a margin to make it usable anywhere else than just US suburbia.

To give you an impression, in Germany apartments/houses have on average 65 m^2 of space, thats 700 square feet. If I assume a five room arrangement (2 bedrooms, kitchen bath, living room) then the 64 sq ft. required by Kinect is more than half the area of a single room. It's ridiculous.

They'd have to reduce it to 2 by 2 or maybe 4 by 4 feet to have any chance of it working in many if not most EU households or probably anywhere where population density is high and you don't have a whole fucking continent for just 300 million people.

But that's just a single detail in a grander picture.

I simply don't get Microsofts approach to the new XBox. The whole TV angle is US only basically. Hell nearly all of the non-gaming features presented at the event are US-only or only make sense in the US.

How can this be for a device that heavily relies on global sales and global reach to have any chance to be successful?

It's probably great that I can update my fantasy football team while watching ESPN if somebody explained to me what a fantasy football team or ESPN was and why I should care. It's probably great for Americans that the XBox will work with cable boxes but over here we don't really use dedicated receiver boxes any more. My cable and satellite reception is built into my TV and has been for maybe ten years now because we use standards that all TV providers use.

I can plug an external hard drive into my TV and DVR the shit out of my programmes so why do I need an XBox for something my current and previous TVs already did?

It's great that I can use voice commands or gestures to operate my TV if it had worked anywhere at all ever oh and also if most TVs over here wouldn't already support that.

It seems to me that MS has solved a problem that even US citizens aren't having anymore and that would have been great ten or fifteen years ago. But today? With the internet and phones and tablets chewing off more and more of the viewing market and internet streaming services now being shipped on fucking everything including refrigerators and toasters who really cares anymore if a game console can somehow also display traditional TV?

What's the angle? The XBox is all 'traditional media, yo motherfuckers' long after the general public has already moved on or cared about any of that shit.

Everything about that thing is so nineties, including Skype. Hey the XBox can now video chat. If MS is that desperate that they have to include their failed purchase of Skype as main feature of a new console launch then what? Touting a feature that hasn't been new for a decade and even at its heyday wasn't that popular to begin with smells of 'we can't really think of anything sensational either'

Oh they've also fucked Indie developers again. Indie developers will only be able to publish on XBox live arcade as it was on the 360. Any other sales channel requires a publisher or has to go through Microsoft games.

At least that was something Sony has down with Vita and PS3/4 in that they opened up their system for small dev houses and indie developers which has the chance of giving them a real edge next cycle.

If you enjoy small indie games like Fez, Journey and so on you should probably buy a PS4.

So can anybody that's smarter than me explain MS's strategy to me? Is there any or is MS so mired in their own failed policies (like the conecept of a set top box) that corporate policy trumps actual product development and they just cram every failed technology or service in there as some sort of hail mary pass?

(beaten, but I agree.)

There's already articles confirming numerous features won't exist in Australia, and they haven't even got to releasing the details yet. Outside of the US it becomes much more just a game platform and I would hope the games do not mandate kinect control. Of course it also becomes a quite expensive games platform due to the extra crap you might well not want.

Another article stated they do have a house with rooms for what they consider "asian" and "euro" living rooms so I assume that means they at least consider it. But their focus is almost certainly the traditional large house, US style, living room.
 

Wonder what would happen if you put Vaseline on the lens or hung gauze over it. Just to muddy the reception a bit.

It should work if your TV has an HDMI out. You would plug the output of your TV into the Xbox One and then plug the output of the Xbox One back into your TV and then you will get all the fancy Xbox One overlays you can't use on your TV. Though of course if you need to, like, change channels, you can't do it through the Xbox One, cause it's not really Media Center device like a PC with a TV tuner hooked up to it is.

BTW this is what Google TV does (pass through overlays) and it failed miserably.

This is why I still hate Microsoft and mock those who tear up and put on the white armor whenever they see the dreaded M$. Microsoft has such a good thing going with their operating system business but they are willing to shit all over their customers to try to leverage themselves into a completely different market. Suck it up XBox owners it's what PC gamers have been living with for years. I just hope they can't bribe enough companies that might make games I want to play to make them XBox exclusive because MS themselves have pretty well ruined every game publisher they have bought to the point where I haven't purchased a MS branded game in over 10 years.

Why should any TV have HDMI out? Its whole purpose is to display things that are coming in over several inputs. Why should my TV output its signal over HDMI just so that the XBox can process it and then input it again over another HDMI port?

We heard you like TV so we put TV into your TV so that you can TV while you TV maybe?

That's a good question. I know there are high-end AV receivers that can matrix between multiple HDMI video inputs but looking at some of the higher end TVs I don't see any that have HDMI out for video. So I guess that won't work. So for somebody like you it's just a game/media console with no TV, which is probably for the best.

Time Warner, one of the biggest cable providers here, requires a set-top cable box for Digital Cable channels, regardless of your TVs capabilities.  So.. yeah, American problem.

That's not true, you can use a CableCARD with Time Warner Cable service.

I use a CableCARD with my Comcast service to record digital channels on my PC.

What's cable card? Is that some kind of interface card for PC?

How it usually works in the EU: Digital broadcasting is standardized and uses DVB (digital video broadcast) for cable, satellite and terrestrial distribution. The content encryption is also standardized. So while some cable TV providers still require you to buy their own boxes (for inexplicable reasons) most give you the option of just getting the chip card handling the decryption for their service.

You can then just use any TV or receiver that supports encrypted programming and simply put the smart card in there. Most mid to high end TVs come with built in support for digital and HD programming for cable, satellite and terrestrial and also support content encryption. Programming guides are also standard since its a feature of the DVB standard and so broadcasters can and do stream program guide info with their programming.

My TV supports:

Tuners for cable, satellite and terrestrial TV both analogue and digital and HD
Dual tuner setup so that you can record one program while you watch another
support for encrypted programming
Program guide feature
DVR feature if you plug in an USB flash drive or hard disc
internet connected via ethernet or wifi with youtube support
Can be remote controlled over WIFI or LAN with a smartphone app.

It will also work with any cable provider or TV subscription service anywhere in the EU. Thats a market including 22 different countries.

That TV is not even high end, it cost maybe $800 to $900 when I bought it two years ago.

So what problem is the XBox One actually solving for me?

No, it's a standard here in the US for viewing and recording digital cable (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CableCARD) programming. Normally you would plug the card into a TV that supports one so you can watch cable without needing a set top box. I have this card (http://cetoncorp.com/products/infinitv-4-pcie/) for my PC so I plug the CableCARD in there and can watch and record digital cable programming through Windows Media Center.

Fantasy football overlays, duh!

Don't worry, Jeff, it isn't just the Euros that don't need the XBone. Most of us Americans don't need that shit either.

I think the initial sales of the box by the non-gaming nerd public will probably still be decent. But I forsee a TON of returns because of the whole Kinect etc shit being unfeasible for people. Queue "refurbished XboxONE!" sales on Newegg etc within a month of the release date.

I know, man! I just try to make sense of the whole presentation.

Sony got ( somewhat justified) called out for not showing hardware but what they presented was solid. Switch to off the shelf hardware to make for easier development. Explicitely stating that it's a game console first but no media center or set top box. Offering the best performance setup for games. Focusing on indie developers, tighter integration with PS Vita etc.

The focus is to offer the best gaming experience and to open up the platform to as many potential developers as possible. Also to set up eventual download or internet distribution of games with preloading, downloading and background downloading built in.

One might disagree with Sony's focus or how well it will sell but at least it seems like they have a strategy and that they are comitted to it. A big improvement from the PS3 days.

They were even able to announce more games than MS and developers seem to like the capabilities of the PS4.

I still don't get what MS wants to achieve with the Xone. It feels like it was designed by commitee as if every department of Microsoft had the opportunity to integrate its pet project into the new device.

Kinect is an abject failure? Doesn't matter, make it mandatory for the next console and people have to love and use it.
We don't know what do do with Skype so let's make it the default audio and voice chat etc.

It's like MS bundled all of the unloved tech into a single device just so that people have to use them when they want to game.

The XBox One has achived critical mass by integrating all of the second rate Microsoft technologies nobodiy loved. It's the suckolarity.

Ah, cable card is basically a proprietary US only version of a conditional access module with common interface.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_access_module)

Then why does the XBox not simply add a cable tuner and cable card slot and act as a a cable box? Any third rate assembled-in-china receiver I can buy over here in the German equivalent of best buy for $50 has a common interface slot that can accept any kind of conditional access module.

Shouldn't be a problem for MS if they so desperately want to add TV capabilities. The best thing? Would probably work in most other parts of the world as well.

The Xbone is going to fail and fail hard, for all the reasons stated. Plus, ipad and casual games have been eating the fuck out of console marketshares for the last few years with no end in sight.

I feel like microsoft has really lost it's way, and they're trying to force a product on an indifferent market. I'm sure there will be plenty of buzz at release, and you'll get the standard lines of people waiting outside to grab one, but I expect things to turn sour very quickly.

Where does that leave us though?

PC gaming is essentially dead even considering Steam and suffers from rampant piracy.
The Wii U bombed hard.
Handheld gaming has essentially always been Nintendo only.
AAA titles need a potentially large number of sales to be profitable and can't reliably attract those kinds of sales even on the current gen with a combined installed base of probably 120 million.

The two remaining next gen offerings potentially bomb as hard as the Wii U but at least need years to get to any sort of installed base current AAA titles need.
There are no triple A titles on iPad/iPhone or Android.

So what's next? If even titles selling 4 million+ copies are considered failures because costs have exploded this generation how can any studio justify the risk of going for the next gen with a vastly smaller installed base?

MS sold 70 million xboxes over its 8 year cycle and you now need to motivate 8% to 10% of that installed base to buy your game to turn a profit. With development costs for the next gen probably being higher how will a studio be sble to recoup those costs?

Is it really a great idea to focus on consoles if Samsung and Apple sell more potential gaming devices per year than MS sold in nearly a decade?

What's next in gaming?

Microsoft would have been better off simply upgrading the 360, keeping the setup compatable enough to port the libraries of 360 stuff, and selling better integration of netflix and hulu with a smarter, better kinect control system. Basically not gone for "game changing" and more "Xbox 360 2.0". Keep the console market, keep the price cheaper, don't rock the boat.

The better, smarter Kinect that wasn't so goddamn intrusive and without the 'always on' big brother vibe, with an Xbox marketed as a console with a bunch of "And we've really taken steps to make Neflix, HBO and everyone else that wants in work even better!" and just let game makers and stuff decide what to tie in and how, and they'd have had a lower price point and fewer pissed off potential buyers.

They're not going to get the TV market or the social media users -- they're gonna see "game console" and ignore it. And the gamers are seeing a lot more price for a bunch of new shit that just pisses them off.


As for cablecards -- Time Warner doesn't like to advertise those (or at least didn't) and the only reason they -- or any other cable company -- offers them in the US is because Federal law requires it. Don't remember when, but I think it was either an FTC ruling or a Congressional law passed 15 or so years ago, around when DVR's started showing up.

Cable companies were trying to throw their weight around, make DVR's accessible only through their own hardware. (IE: If you had cable, you used the cable company's shitty DVR, not Tivo or whatever).

It will fail or succeed like all other consoles. On how much "must have" content microsoft can buy or pressure into being console exclusive. They just take that for granted. And with microsoft having huge amounts of cash from their desktop monopoly, the big game companies like EA being terrified of open competition on the PC and a lot of gaming consumers buying what they are told they probably are not to worried. And then once you've bought the box they can convince you to subscribe to all their services and discard other smart-TV boxes.

A lot of it is going to depend on how good and how exclusive the game releases announcements are.

Of course it would amuse me infinitely if the removal of the discount represented by used games (not to mention pirates), a smaller and less keen installed base and massively increasing costs cause them to bleed money. Especially since they're going to have to pay to fight for TV content. But it's always risky to over-estimate the sophistication of the average console gamer.

Not really, there's quite a lot of energy on the steam side, it's growing new IP rather than focusing on glossier retreads and steam has proven that reasonable prices and convenient DRM is very viable and diminishes piracy. Consoles self-destructing would be very positive boost, as would a steam-box making buying a gaming PC for the living room much simpler. Even if much of the growth is on mobile those games can easily cross over to PC.

But big retail, microsoft, and the big game companies really don't want this. So they'll do all they can to retard it. I mean that's basically the essence of this machine.

Whether or not the insane budgets of triple-A titles can continue to grow is certainly an interesting question, and that will be decided on this box, but really I'm not sure I'd be sad about that.

How well is microsofts tablet doing?

MS is simply no longer in the position to get significant amounts of exclusive content.

Mostly because traditional media is also struggling and can no longer afford to limit its visibility or accessibility by getting into exclusive deals.

They can no longer afford to not be on all major platforms especially when the platforms they'd lose attract vastly more potential customers than the one they'd sign an exclusivity deal for.

MS would need to pay serious money to offset even the potential sales on PS3/4 let alone iOS/Android.

Take Tomb Raider or Dead Space for example, those games had been released for 360, PS 3 and PC and even that wasn't sufficient to attract enough sales.

Content providers and game devs basically need every set of eyeballs they can get to offset the loss from their crashing traditional business model.

Also MS is bleeding insane amounts of cash because the PC sector is going under and is severely affecting sales of Windows licenses, the only business unit apart from office that makes MS any kind of serious money.

This will preclude most kinds of exclusive deals so the XBone will have to succeed by its own merits.

Incredibly badly apparently, though they'll never release numbers to confirm that.

No one in this thread is buying this piece crap. Why are we still talking about it?

They may offer one as an add-on. Unfortunately setting up a CableCARD can be somewhat painful. Normally a cable company technician has to set it up. I did it myself on my PC but I had to spend a bunch of time on the phone with tech support cause it wouldn't initialize properly. MS may be wary of those kinds of issues and they probably prefer to just use an existing (working) cable connection rather than try to setup a new one through the Xbox One even though you would get much better functionality.

I just guessing here, so if this if ridiculous, I'm sure somebody will pounce on me.

If you look at the Win 8 interface and at XB-One's Kinect reliance, I think they are trying to create a 'Minority Report' style interface for the living room.   If the TV part works and is accepted, then boost it out with more PC integration (stream your PC media, e-mail, etc.) Didn't they make a really big deal out of web-surfing and Skype?

They're scared of the rise of tablets and smartphones (neither of which they've gotten any traction with).  The crowd here skews heavily to owning a computer for work and play, but how many folks do you know who only turn on their home PC once a week (?month?) now that they're really comfortable with their tablet?  This is the market they're shooting for.  Buy your kids a console, use it as a future-cool TV remote, and then let folks know that they can answer their gmail on it (with keyboard peripheral!), and it will look consumer-awesome.

Sony won the Blu-ray/HD-DVD format war by getting the Blu-ray into the living room in a console.  Maybe MS is trying to get MS-Home rolled out the same way?

 

They don't need it, because people already have their tablet to do that. It's also much more convenient if someone else in the room is already watching TV or doing something else. They're trying to bring in an inferior product. You can do every social media thing they're trying to integrate, and do it better already - on an iPad.

Hell, most people already do it better with just their phones.

Personally, I think that way would have lain death for the Xbox. There would still be the outcry, but more that MS wasn't innovating and why should people upgrade? Plus if AppleTV+Siri (or similar) does launch, it leaves the 'only good for games' consoles a long way behind.

I'm not saying the direction they went was great - and I still want to see the E3 information to get a fuller picture about what is actually on offer - but more of the same isn't generally a great strategy in fields that can move as rapidly as tech-based entertainment.


Valve seems to be the only company who truly benefits from PC gaming (well, Mojang and its ilk too, but I mean from a publisher / distributor position). Controlling the platform that others sell through and taking a cut of every sale is a winning strategy (see: Apple). I'm interested to see how the rumoured Steambox actually does, also the attempt to make Linux a gaming platform.

There's a very good chance that tablet / mobile / social gaming ends up hacking the gaming industry into small pieces with low cost, short play session / procedurally generated titles. It becomes very hard to make a decent income out of being a game developer unless you are in the top 5% and, with a few exceptions, the industry ends up dominated by enthusiast developers who are happy to sell a few thousand units. Free gaming becomes so ubiquitous that games are expected to be free.

Someone else has mentioned they see gaming going down the path of the P'n'P RPG market, where lots of people are creating things, the quality is good but only the very few (often riding on established IPs) are making money. Same with the music industry - with it being easier than ever to get something out, there's lots of artists out there trying to capture an audience that is used to paying no more than $1 a song plus know they can get it for free any time they want, leading to the majority of artists making paying-the-mortgage money having established careers and / or corporate backing. The number of working musicians in the US has reputedly halved in the past 10 years (http://thetrichordist.com/2013/05/21/45-fewer-professional-working-musicians-since-2002/).

So I can see a future where there are more games than ever, but the majority of game creators are ever worse off if they want a financial return off their work.

Lots of producers gain from steam. It's not too hard to find games that have carved themselves nice little markets due to the market access steam enables. Would killing floor, magica or recettear have got shelf space in EB? hell no, not ever. Nor does valve really own the channel that much since they don't mandate channel exclusives. They are doing well because they've shown there was un-serviced demand.

I suspect mobile / tablet gaming has killed (with EA's help) a lot of the casual desktop games. So things like the popcap games and facebook games are aimed at people who probably are moving to tablet, mobile or smart TV. But I don't think that's the gaming market most of us care about.

Linux is a hedging strategy. It's existence forces microsoft to at least pretend to support windows gaming because it's a possible alternative. And that's even before the steam box exists.

The games market will change. I could see the increased access of something like steam, a lessening of interest in overly expensive and restricted consoles, a more diverse range of hardware platforms and ever increasing development costs becoming unsustainable. But I'm not entirely sure that's a bad thing. A more diverse market is a more interesting market.

The UK knows what's up (http://mynintendonews.com/2013/05/24/wii-u-sales-rank-on-amazon-uk-jumps-875-percent-after-xbox-one-reveal/).

I can't get over how bad that box looks.  It's clear they didn't want it to look like a console but even in comparison to pvr/dvd/cable boxes it looks terrible.  It would be an eyesore in anyone's living room.

I basically only get my video game news from here, are other websites and groups also stunned at how bad this device is?

The trainwrecks always generate more comments than the hits.  That's why we're still jawing on.

Well, this is.........different. (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-05-24-this-is-how-xbox-one-game-trade-ins-will-work-apparently)

"Update: You, the shopper, won't have to pay the activation fee for a used Xbox One game - the shop will. Therefore, the price you see on a second-hand Xbox One game in a shop is the price you'll pay to be able to play it."

You buy a used game and it's somehow guaranteed to be activated? Is it somehow in the TOS or something that the shops can't sell games that are not (re)activated?  :psyduck:

That update makes no sense. All of the costs of a second hand sale will of course be paid for by the customers of gamestop and co. Either because the one trading in a game gets less money for the trade in or because the buyer of the used games has to pay more. EB/Gamestop won't reduce its own margins if they don't absolutely have to.

Also try and explain the process of trading in or buying a used XBone game to the usual Gamestop customer. It sounds pretty convoluted

And this is......something (http://bit.ly/18o5fNj), I'm lost for words.

This is the device that keeps on giving. It's like a hater's paradise for Microsoft. The fact some PR dipshit actually came up with the phrase, "Television viewing tends to be a passive experience for a viewer, without many opportunities for the viewer to engage or have interactive experiences with the presented content."

Um, TV viewing is supposed to be passive. That's the point of it. I want to be entertained, not grinding foozles with my eyeballs you fucking hacks.

Only 3 more ad clicks and you enable the mute function, Paelos. Why quit now?!

Don't. Give. Them. Ideas.

So TV is becoming an ACTUAL Skinner Box. How delightful.

As for the trade-in, ummm, thing... yeah, I find this piece interesting:

How do they know who's account to wipe? Maybe I am misunderstanding this line, but if I take a game into one of these cesspool shops, how do they know to wipe my account rather than someone else who owns the game? Or is there going to be some pre-voodoo you have to do before you take your shit to a shop to turn in? Jesus... this is such a convoluted chaotic maw, I am not sure how it will even be functional. Of course, that might be the goal.

Because then they would have to pay licensing fees with our shittastic cable providers, who ALSO want to keep a piece of the set top box market that is utterly unnecessary other than as an excuse to charge a $5 per month fee for the box.

You really don't get how fucked up our telecommunications/Internet/cellphone/entertainment delivery/cable/broadcast system is. It's a goddamn nightmare, mostly because of monopolistic companies making it harder for competitors to come in and do things better for cheaper.

See Windows 8. This is Microsoft's new corporate strategy. You WILL like what we give you, goddamnit.

I think this will be the first console generation I completely skip since... forever? I can't remember ever being so uninterested in console gaming.

Each disc will most likely be digitally keyed.  So when you put a game in the drive it takes that key and registers it to yoru XBL account.  This has been 99% confirmed, the only real confusion is where that key is (is it a cd-key type of thing or is it digitally on the disc).

So when you bring the disc to a used game retailer, they will use that key to make it so your XBL account no longer has access to that game.  That's also why you can't lend games to friends without them paying an activation fee.

From what I've heard, every game you play on the Bone requires you to install it to the hard drive, which being connected to the Internet, is activated for your XBox Live account. Your copy is then uniquely associated with your Live account. When you trade it in, the used seller scans the disc and it disables the activation on your Live account which disables the ability for you to play it locally since the Bone has to phone home to the Internet once every 24 hours. This is why they want an "always-on" Internet connection.

Does that mean if you trade in a game with your Bone disabled from the Internet that you can contain to play the single-player on your hard drive without the disc? Don't know. Maybe they still require you to have the disc in the drive when you play.

God, the more I discuss this thing, the more infuriatingly stupid it all sounds. It's like Microsoft took all the paranoid nerdrage fantasies from the last 15 years and made a console based on them.

The best part about piracy concerns is that they have all these estimates on how much they lose to piracy, yet no estimate data that these pirates would convert themselves to customers, or how many customers they lose by treating paying people like criminals.

It's the classic Darth Vader fallacy. The harder you squeeze, the more customers slip through your fingers.

I think two scenarios would play out.  1) You can still play for 24 more hours if you left your xbone unplugged before you went and traded it in.  After the 24 hours is up, I would assume you will have to re-sync your console with the Live Servers.  2) As soon as the retailer flags your account, it also flags your xbone to re-sync thus forcing you to get onto Live.  Either way, it's stupid.

I am more concerned with Gamefly as I only actually buy a few titles a year.  For some reason I can see another "subscription" service becoming an option for people who play used games.

Also note that combined with your Xbox profile, Kinect always scanning for the # of people in a room and new TV achieves this lets them more effectively target ads at you. They now know you're an 38 year old father of 2 into action games, Sherlock and reruns of Seinfeld.  Here's a product aimed RIGHT AT YOU!  It's a fucking consumer data goldmine if people actually buy it.

Which makes it even funnier.  You pay for the privilege of MS harvesting your data and selling it, a double add to their bottom line.

Even if Microsoft were literally Satan, typing M$ would still be fucking stupid.

Microsatan

So I gather it goes by the physical disc's serial number tied to your console - because no way in hell I would give anyone at a Gamestop or the like my account information, Xbox or otherwise. That would make me nervous.

No you wouldn't have to give your account information to anyone, that'd be a huge security concern obviously.  From what I was reading there are digital keys that are either installed on your console or attached to your gamertag when you first play the game.

The more I think about Scenario 2 I laid out, it wouldn't work because they are saying you are able to take games you own to a friends house, log into your account, and play with them with no fee.  So there's someway that digital game key is being attached to your gamertag.

Which means the friend who has it on their hard drive and activates it is getting a new digital key assigned to their hardware while the key from the disc stays with the original account.

It also means: More Marketing DATA!

Yes, I am a one-note bastard on this.

Just a note: Just because a company patents something, it doesn't mean they plan to use it. It just means they want to lock down the concept in case they want to use it, and so they can charge anyone who does.

Mi¢ro$atan

Hade$oft.

Except that there's a PR dude talking about how rad TV achievements are.

I think they are saying the only people who can move a game off of your xbox account to another are registered retailers.

This is going to get stuck in the courts in europe for months.

Some countries over here, right of first sale is still an actual thing.

That seems entirely logical. The key to own the game is largely disconnected from the physical media. They're fine with you letting your friend install from the media but he'll be buying his own license (at full price) or you can sell your license and media to a reseller with microsoft getting their cut / making it less rewarding. It also means the reseller and consumer won't have to deal with "has this key been activated" and the payment to microsoft will be hidden since it will just be a part of the shop price.

They can also make the addition of a new key to your system a trigger for the box needing to call home.

Win for everyone... well, as long as you are microsoft or a big game company, and that's all that matters.

Incidentally it was this sort of activity that earned them the moniker micro$oft a long time ago. They are a terrible tech company but really good at cutting deals where they get a healthy slice of the trade.

Bare in mind they did also say that you would be able to trade games digitally online somehow (even if you bought them on a disc), something that has been tried before, albeit unsuccessfully, with other media.

Microsoft has all the pieces. The license for the game is tied to your account. Your account is tied to your other games, your xbox and possibly even your biometrics (thanks to the kinect) so you won't want to transfer. Like an MMO the install media means nothing, it's whether or not it has a valid activation key attached to it that gives it value.

I would think online transfer of the license would be trivial, especially if it's microsoft running the online shop. And apparently even gamestop will have to process re-sales (and maybe even sales) through microsofts services, so they never risk losing control of the license.

On further thought I think this is inevitable. How are the producers going to support huge budgets for glossy, but often short, triple-A games? This is a large part of the answer. And Sony will toe the line or face loss of access to big name titles. In theory it might even allow for the price of games to be re-considered or sales extended, though in practice I expect them to just leave it as is and take the profit.

Probably just make region-blocked content, so something enabled for europe would conform to EU law.

How do you keep that armor so shiny and white?

You know, that's an interesting point.  Right now right of first sale doesn't hurt software because the key is largely detached from the physical media (usually on a piece of paper you get with the media).

However, a lot of reports indicate that the key could be on the media itself (embedded digitally or rfid type of system) and if that's the case, then does that bring right of first stale back as a legitimate argument?

I'm much more reasonable than Samwise, so I'll just point out that you're being a cock.

I appreciate that. It just baffles me the need to leap to the defence of a multi-billion dollar company.

I wouldn't think so. Mostly because they argue the software is a license and not a product already. But also because I doubt the "right to play" will be integrated in the disk itself. The only thing the disk needs to do is securely communicate it's identity to microsoft so they can see it's state in their database.

Who is defending Microsoft? I only see people telling other posters to stop being a juvenile cock.

Making fun of people typing M$ is in no way defending the company in the slightest.  Its making fun of people typing out one of the most incredibly overplayed, juvenile, nails down chalk board cringingly bad 'insults' on the internet.  Even if I was running a Mac fan site I'd make typing that a ban offence.

I did find the trying to double down with a white knight claim pretty funny though.

Do you put it in your coffee?

They're leaping to the defense of the English language. (Speaking of which, your second sentence could use a little work.)

No one is leaping to Microsoft's defense. They just feel the use of dollar signs for the S looks really fucking stupid and juvenile. Like screaming "SELLOUT!" while wearing clothes bought at Old Navy.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/868747/Grammar_Police_by_Rysis.jpg)

Does the used games market even exist if they stop selling crap on disks?

Because I see that market as dying anyway as we go digital download only. The key at that point will be how stupid they are about DRM on their own box.

Yes, the poor and rural shouldn't play video games.

You're thinking today. I'm saying what if we look 5-10 years down the road in terms of broadband adoption? Where is the market then?

The same as today.

Just like 5-10 years ago when people were expecting broadband to have more than a 29% adoption rate today.

ed: Hell, if anything the adoption of 4g and smartphones/ tablets eating the PC market alive means there will probably be even less wired broadband penetration in 5 years. 

So your point is we're still using console disks in 10 years?

Not much better than today. Because broadband in the US is basically being strangled at the root level. The providers are TV, phone, and cable people --- all of whom want to give you the slowest possible speed at the most they can squeeze out of your ass, and all of them drooling over Netflix, Google, and YouTube, all basically feeling they SHOULD be able to dip their wick in those revenues.

I forget how big a chunk of those who actually CAN get broadband have only one provider. I've got two here in Houston -- I can go with Comcast or ATT. Not exactly highly competitive. (In fact, until ATT got U-verse up and running, Comcast's internet was right up there with Comcast's pre-U-verse cable -- shitty fucking overpriced service on crappy hardware that died every six months).

Some sort of physical medium, yes.   Unless:
1) There's a TVA-like federal push to get broadband in to rural locations
2) There's a revolution in the wireless market so you're not paying-per-bit
3) You're choosing to ignore the poor and rural US markets

While 3 is the most likely of the scenarios to happen, digital-only content also fucks places that are not the US. Australia, for one, has a data cap on even wired connections. I'm sure they're thrilled at the idea of a console patching when it feels like it in addition to only being able to download their games.

To pile onto that point, the broadband market is SO strangled right now in the US, it's dying in its crib. And the ones killing it are the assholes who stand to make the most out of it long-term if it grows but can't see past the short term benefits of their monopoly positions as to allow it to happen. They are too concerned about next quarter to bother spending money to upgrade their infrastructure, but then want to bitch at the government for not spending government money to upgrade the infrastructure (or pay them to do it). Comcast, ATT, Time-Warner Cable, Cox, all the big players are killing their own markets and ignoring the places where it's difficult to run a line.

Discs? Doubtful. Optical is dead. Long live flash memory.

The new macs dumped optical drives, I panicked for all of 3 seconds after opening the first one. Then I just used disc images for all the optical media and the last few things I bought came on flash drives.

And I live in a place with acceptable broadband and I can afford it. But I remember not having access to broadband at all and being homeless. So it puts a certain perspective on these kinds of discussions. Not to mention one of my primary job functions it to serve people without access to broadband or computers.

edit to counterpoint Haemmy for a sec: In fairness to Time Warner (the fuck did I just say), they're starting to make a serious push into the rural areas around here. My mother finally got cable last year for the first time, after they swore up and down for years that it wasn't feasible to do so.

The used game market is living on borrowed time mostly because the producers  and platforms want that money.

They might keep disks around for a bit as an alternative to download for those who are bandwidth starved, but you'll still need internet to actually register and be able to play it.

They aren't the target market though. They probably don't even have iPads.

You remembered us!  :heart:

From what everyone is saying here it sounds like Microsoft have created a console purely for the American market but that it needs a European level of broadband infrastructure to run.

Seems like a good idea?

Well there is another issue. Just as game publishers want the used game market to disappear (or at least to get all of the money made by used game sales) broadband providers want a huge piece of the revenue Google and Co. make with their broadband infrastructure.

So they intentionally limit your bandwidth or put a data cap on your connection so that they then can sell you additional bandwidth or force you or the internet companies to pay for managed services (additional fee so that certain services don't come off your data allowance)

Germany's biggest broadband provider for example just introduced a 75 GB data cap on all broadband connections. Go over and your internet gets either throttled to 384 kBit/s or you have to pay an additional fee for a few gigabytes more. Since it's the largest IP doing that most of the others will surely follow eventually.

This will become more common because all providers are envious of the money Google, Amazon and Co. make and they want a piece of the action.

If this gets more common than even a great internet connection (I have a 50/10 MBit/s connection for example) will not automatically mean that you can download games. The 75 GB cap is probably just a single Blu Ray game before my monthly allowance is up.

No, if you want to sell games even in broadband country, there will probably need to be discs or flash storage of some kind involved for the foreseeable future.

Most broadband contracts around the world already include caps as part of the fine print even if they are not enforced right now. It may just be a passage like "we reserve the right to throttle you if you excessively use your internet connection" but I'm positive that even some of you who think they have unlimited internet have such a clause hiding somewhere in your contract.

The equipment with which IPs could enforce bandwidth caps across the board has been available for some time now and it sells like hot cakes. IPs don't want to just be "dumb pipes" and in their quest to either extort more money out of Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon and Co. or their customers (pay a fee and XBox live will not be deducted off of your monthly data allowance e.g.) shit like this will become more common, even in places where you nominally have great internet.

If I were Sony or MS I wouldn't bet on discs vanishing any time soon.

[edit: typos and grammar]

It's a bit like a cable provider saying you have a limit on the number of shows you can watch a month. Imagine if someone tried that, the outrage that would cause. Why is internet usage any different ?

Because it made sense when bandwith was costly due to limited pipes and having to ship across copper cable phone lines.  Now it's seen as the standard so nobody questions it.

In the UK at least, broadband is split into 3 main categories (excluding shit fly by night borderline scam artists):

Mainstream telcos with large legacy market share - generally have fair use provisions combining limits and throttling.

Media firms bundling TV and broadband - offer unlimited for cheap because their TV offering demands it, but because your circuit is shared with other people who use it for TV, contention fucks you in the rear, especially in prime time.

Smaller old school ISPs offering limited or unlimited. But you pay 30%-50% extra for unlimited.

Also, most people don't have a solid grasp on data caps and what they mean..

German Telekom markets it as a fairness measure. Those who "use" more should pay more. Many customers believe that. Many comments were along the lines of "great, now all of the leechers and downloaders of pirated content finally have to pay their fair share".

That's because no one really knows that a 75 GB cap will affect the majority of customers because otherwise the Telekoms wouldn't have set the limit there. If you use the internet for more than just email and facebook you'll probably end up above the 75 GB limit regularly.

Most people don't see that though because bandwidth is too much of an abstract concept.

It also has a precedent in mobile internet use. All smartphone contracts have a data cap and the providers make a lot of money with people who go over (send a text to this number to buy an additional GB of Data for the low price of $7.99)

So most people think it won't affect them and they've also been conditioned by their phone contracts that this is how it usually works.

75 GB will only affect normal people if they use it for TV.

If consoles move to downloads they'll be an issue too, but still probably not as much as the TV guys who are getting through over 2GB an hour.

I think you might underestimate the amount of traffic even normal webbrowsing now generates. Reloading facebook or HuffPost HP is 10 to 12 mb per pop.

I might agree if you really don't use any streaming service. So just mail + web. rowsing. Also the 75 GB is for both up- and downstream.

wut

I am staying with my sister at the moment, who is sick. I am tethering my phone for internet. I have used 2.5GB this month, the majority of which was from downloading games on Steam (unlike my internet at home, my phone's data plan does not include Steam content for free).

I also use my phone's data for work, as well, and 95% of my job involves doing things on the internet (mostly with SaS).


I don't know how "regular browsing" would go anywhere NEAR a 75GB cap.

Look at all the scripts that are not on that domain.

After the discussion about data caps got serious I started measuring my landline internet traffic.

The home pages of major news sites or portals are serious bandwidth hogs. Why do you suppose they offer a bandwidth optimized mobile sites in the first place?

With normal internet usage which for me means normal video and audio streaming use, regular software and app updates, mail, chat and web browsing online gaming and the occasional video or game download (legal sources) meant that I was always way above the 75 GB limit. I don't even use my internet to pirate stuff just legal usage.

I won't argue that there will be a significant number of people that won't run over the limit today. That limit won't change though two or five years down the line if mobile internet is any indication.

Current gen PS3 bluray titles already use dual layer discs that's 45 GB of data you'd need to download, a full 22 episode HD series runs at 25 to 30 GB and so on.

You can't really compare it to mobile use because sites optimize for mobile clients and people adapt their online usage for the limitations.

lastly, that limit is per contract, not per user. Are you married and maybe have children? Then you share that limit with other people.

It will become a problem and our telecom companies expect that they can blackmail companies like Google or Apple to sign deals that will give them ome of the profits. If that fails they will surcharge their customers by offering online gaming pscks or audio streaming packs or video packs for additional monthly fees.

It might not be a problem for many people today but since more and more services require internet and download or streaming access plus cloud services are on the cusp of replacing more and more traditional services it will become a problem sooner rather than later.

Just look at the "not everybody has great internet, even in the US" discussion the XBox event started off

Horray for COD pushing the next gen technology (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMYso30L9zI)  :awesome_for_real:

I actually have no clue how much those sites take to load, but Facebook from cursory glance takes less than 1MB on load. Of course, I use well over 1TB a month, so the idea of a bandwidth cap makes me want to get stabby.

That said, I'm getting Google Fiber next year so.... yea.

I remember guffawing when I heard that statement during the conference. And the fact that, because the new COD is being released on 360/PS3, all their talk of being next-gen is a complete fallacy.

This is a secondary issue. The xbox model of having the rights being outside of the media means they can provide more ways of copying the game. Installing from a friends disk, install disks being distributed cheaply for those who don't have the internet grunt, or even using external storage to transfer if the box allows that.

At one point WoW had a box of install media at a lot of album and electronics shops, 2$ a copy and a 14 day trial, which they can do because owning the disk doesn't give you access to the game. That's a product of what permissions your account has, just like this system will be,

If you were always way above a 75 GB limit, you were either reading something incorrectly, had something incorrectly configured, or your computer was compromised and being used as a bot. Hell, just look at what you said. You'd need to be downloading more than 2-3 hd tv series per day to hit those kinds of numbers.

Best guess? You're misconstruing the difference between GB and Gb. Even then, you'd have to be streaming a shit ton of stuff to go over that.

http://www.polygon.com/2013/5/24/4362680/xbox-one-games-will-require-regular-authentication-checks-used-games

So a friend of mine was chatting about this article, and I have to ask about this part:


So you will NEED a physical disc to authenticate - how does that work if your buddy shares with you the disc on your machine and you really like the game and want to purchase it right there...will I have to wait to get a physical disc if my buddy takes his home and puts it back on his machine? or am I reading this wrong?  :uhrr:

Gigabyte of course. Upper Case B is always Byte if you adhere to SI Units or to be even more accurate GiB. Measured on my router box so overhead is included (since it will also count against the cap)

One one-hour HD episode on iTunes is 4 Gigabyte. 5 if you also download the sd version. So one season of Lost and you are well over the 75 Gigabyte PER MONTH (if that wasn't clear already) limit.

Generally speaking you'll have 1 Gigabyte per hour of HD video (depends on quality setting and codec of course). Call of Duty MW 3 would be 24 Gigabyte, Diablo 3 or WoW around 12 etc.

75 Gigabyte would be 75 hours worth of HD programming on Netflix or at the average 4 hours a day Americans watch TV close to 20 days, that is if you don't do anything else.

With my 50 MBit/s down 10 MBit/s  up VDSL connection I could theoretically burn through that 75 Gigabyte in 12 Minutes and would then be on 384 kBit/s for the remaining 99.97% of the month.

A dual layer BluRay holds 50 GB so a sophisticated XBox One Game as download would eat up two-thirds of your monthly allowance in a space of just ten minutes.

To get to Flickr's new storage limit of 1TB for example would take me 10 months.

Updating Windows plus all of your iOS apps will eat 5  GB per month. Then there is dropbox, gmail, all of the cloud or Software as Service stuff, the data used for online gaming, podcasts flickr or instagram etc.

That's the kind of user that our IT giants create with their cloud strategies and streaming services. and if usage caps get more common then all of those steategies will fail.

If I had to bet my success on my next gen console offering I wouldn't dare to assume that all potential 75 million potential customers have access to fast, reliable and unadulterated internet.

Sony doesn't at least.

Nevermind then. When you said 'today' I figured you were talking daily.

I think the article is just confused. Microsoft will have worked out the details in depth, because it will have to have been integrated into the hardware, but they might not be keen on giving too much information. DRM is not really a selling point.

I would be amazingly surprised if it is anything other than an encrypted serial number on the disk. The process of recovering that identifier, communicating it to microsoft and installing a authorization key on the box (which is re-confirmed every so often) will be the focus. The actual "rights" to play the game will ultimately be determined by the permissions on your xbox account which microsoft stores and secures.

So given that all the other stories are possible. Because how you sell the system is much more flexible, and probably partly up to the distributor.

I'm 100% sure that the disc is just there so that not everybody needs to download every game. I expect it to be like steam. There will be some kind of key, either in the box, on the disc or delivered by other means (email e.g.) that actually unlocks the encrypted image.

I think the confusion stems from MS talking about physical discs but I'd be pretty astonished if they weren't just so you won't have to download >50 GB for every game.

I seriously hope, now that capacity is no longer an issue, that they'll

a. offer the box eith decent storage
b always deliver the original language track like on the ps3.
c don't require proprietary discs.

If I'd buy one (not saying that I will just if) I'd probably swap the HD with an SSD if possible.

(http://i.minus.com/iGpVCeVzdBTUf.gif)

I'm still a little shocked that it's only 8gb and reserves 3gb for the OS. 3gb? That's a crazy amount.

I'm pretty sure that you'll be able to buy an unlock key from the Xbox Live store.

I'm pretty sure they confirmed that the Xbox One will come with a non-user upgradeable 500GB HDD. Which sounds ludicrous imo, the PS3 is current gen and Sony let you put any HDD in there so how does it make sense to limit your options in the next-gen. The only counter argument they gave is that you could expand it with USB 3.0 external drive but that will never be as fast as even just having an internal 1TB traditional HDD.

Not shipping every X360 with a HDD was a mistake on M$s part but this seems like 2 steps forward, one step back. Source (http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/21/xbox-one-hard-drive/)

Even with the redesigned 360, MS has their own propetry HDD system. They don't want us to buy a HDD/SSD of the shelf. They want us to buy their massively-marked-up MS-(re)branded ones.
...
Not to deride pissing on a shit console. But I'm finding much of this conversation amusing but moot. I mean, who of us is likely to buy this steaming piece of shit and put it inside our house?

Probably not many of us. Don't underestimate the influence said console may have, even on gamers who buy other systems.

With consoles selling significantly more copies of games than PC and dev houses needing to develop for all popular systems to recoup costs how the XBox turns out may have a huge influence on your gaming experience even if you don't buy it.

The 360 is the lead dev platform this gen and it influences everything from which genre you see most of to how levels are designed to how games and services are sold and marketed.

If the One is popular enough you might need to buy a kinect for your PC to play popular titles for example.

As it stands I think that Sony has an edge eith next gen if they don't screw up their launch.

Maybe I'm totally underestimating the importance of the set top aspect though and the XBox kills with the TV features and such.

So, used games aside, how would GameFly/RedBox rentals work?   :grin:

Xbone will be region locked (http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/microsoft-answers-the-question-of-xbox-one-region-locks/).
So no game imports, and anyone who moves between countries, e.g. armed forces personnel, won't be able to buy games locally. I don't remember ever seeing such a constant stream of negative publicity over a console before.


See what you've done Phred? Now the newbies think this shit is clever.  :oh_i_see:

Did anyone expect it *not* to be region locked?

Nope. This is already well into "show us your papers" territory.

Doubtful they will still exist.

I think the most notable thing about xboxone and ps4 is how incredibly similar they both are, architecturally, to modern mid-power PCs.  Though they're going with a few more less powerful cores, it all mostly works out in the wash.  The line is blurrier than it's ever been before between console and PC gaming as this generation of high end consoles are pretty much just smaller, more integrated, more cost optimized stock PC platforms.  A lot of opportunity for disruption here, say from Valve and the PC OEMs who are looking for new markets to enter.


I cannot imagine the kinect having anywhere near the impact on PC games that game controllers have had in the past on console to PC ports.  It's gimmicky and I'm pretty doubtful that you're going to see any significant number of titles revolving around it.  


Depends if people can't get their TV fix from cable or any of the many competing services and devices.

If anything, Microsoft doubling down on their bro-tacular "TV, TV, Call of Duty, TV, Sports, TV, Halo!" content approach and indications that they're backing off rather than expanding their support for smaller / indie titles makes me think that xboxone is far from an obvious success.

Not, mind you, that I have a ton of faith in Sony turning things around.  Mostly that I think the big guys are no longer building hardware that's significantly differentiating from platforms anybody can build with commodity parts, but they're still relying on previous era platform-lockin to control things.

Who knows, might give steam box the window it needs.

We can dream.

No, that seems like a great idea. Obviously we get so much free cloud storage that we'll never need more than 500gb over the lifetime of the console. No way Microsoft will come out with a terabyte version two years later and a 4 tb version two years after that and expect everyone to buy a new console!

It is a brilliant idea. They're in fact taking a page out of Apple's book whereby only a qualified Apple technician can do simple things like upgrade the HDD of your computer otherwise you void your warranty. Genius. At least it makes sense when space is at a premium and making parts modular/user accessible would be a hindrance to the form factor, but the Xbox One looks huge.

That's priceless.

Requiring your own hardware and your own stupid transfer cable bullshit was bad enough -- but at least you could add extra space later. Not having an upgradeable hard drive is fucking stupid, especially with their move to a digital model.

Unless, of course, they're expecting to sell you cloud storage and lots of it.

In all fairness IBM pioneered that back in the 1960's and 1970's, same with AT&T "owning" the equipment for your phone that you just rented from them for $14.99/month.  Nothing really is new...

That would be the inspiration for a Redmond road trip stabby fun time vacation.

As much as I thought the Kinect was a waste (my roommate bought one for his 360 and I played it for a few days), I must admit that the technology in the new kinect is pretty sweet (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/05/video-watch-us-flail-in-front-of-the-xbox-ones-new-kinect).

Kinect is bad and is going to stay bad for the foreseeable future. It has so many problems on so many different levels from conceptual to technical. No cross-platform games are going to use it for more than 5 voice commands or wave your arm to throw grenade, so the impact on PC gaming will be minimal.

Apparently microsoft believes the magic cloud (http://www.oxm.co.uk/54748/xbox-one-specs-are-boosted-by-the-equivalent-of-three-xbox-ones-in-the-cloud/) will triple the power of the xbox1. Which is either self-delusion, advertising based on the public having no real idea of what it means or a good justification for the console needing a beefy internet connection.

"We're provisioning for developers for every physical Xbox One we build, we're provisioning the CPU and storage equivalent of three Xbox Ones on the cloud," he said. "We're doing that flat out so that any game developer can assume that there's roughly three times the resources immediately available to their game, so they can build bigger, persistent levels that are more inclusive for players. They can do that out of the gate."

I also look forward to seeing if quantum break is a modern re-discovery of the FMV game... it sounds suspiciously like it.

It will be much easier for Microsoft to provision processor cycles and RAM in their Azure cloud for XBox One games than it will be for them to sell more than a small amount of the consoles (comparative to the Xbox and XBox360 platforms).

I used to believe you couldn't get worse than touchscreens for horrible lack-of-tactile-feedback input devices.  Then they built Kinect.  I'm not sure the problem of fine manipulation without any tactile feedback is solveable, but if it is, there's still much work to be done..

Voice is interesting in some cases (say good enough hotword recognition for simple squadmate commands), but for most cases it's going to augment, not replace other input, and it can be accomplished with a standard mic or headset on a PC either way.

The idea that cloud computing is going to magically improve local gaming is pretty absurd.  There just isn't that much processing that makes sense offloading to the cloud where latencies are utterly enormous (even over a fast internet connection -- something not everyone has) compared to latencies to other cores on the same box.  Software developers have enough problems making effective use of local multiprocessing resources (where capabilities are symmetric, bandwidth is high, and latency is low)...

What are you talking about?  It worked fine for SimCity...

Why do companies still insist to push control schemes on us that are awkward or don't work most of the time?

Voice commands have never worked for anything more complex than turn on or turn off.

Siri and Google voice were  marketed as breakthough technologies and both are basically just punchlines now, the Kinect demo managed to control and switch off the XBoxes of people at home watching.

The whole Kinect presentation on stage was faked to not fuck up any demos (the presenter used a clicker device hidden in a suit pocket) and we don't even know if the new Kinect actually works as advertised until people had a chance to get their hands on one at E3 or after.

Even if it works it will probably be awkward to use and people will stop using it after the novelty factor has worn off or adter they have gotten annoyed by how crappy it functions. Just like they did with Siri, Google voice, the Wii and everything else.

I expect the new XBox One Kinect + Voice control scheme to work as crappy and awkwardly as previous incarnations with the added benefit of not being able to deactivate it. Expect legions of animated gifs and tumblr blogs making fun of it for the next years.

So why keep pushing those technologies on the public?

Executives like magic.

Because the current thought is that this is the way innovation lies.  "Freeing-up" people from having to learn new tools/ interface modes for something more natural.  Human instinct is to touch something or talk to it to interact, not to use a secondary tool and interact in an abstracted fashion.

Tactile screens get marked-up and smudged as any tablet user can tell you, which becomes an annoyance in itself, so the next school of thought was motion control. Of course, motion control ignores the fact that you have no tactile feedback, which is why you want to touch it in the first place.

As to why they keep pushing it: You never know what the public will want.  We don't even know most of the time, so you push a new idea, see how it's adopted and go from there.  The problem we're in a hyper-consumer-economic-slump society. We're distracted by a ton of gadgets but have little disposable income to try something kitschy and see how it catches-on. So big companies have to make these gambits on big products instead of little ones, hoping the public will swallow it as 'innovation' instead of rejecting it entirely.

*shrug*

I have heard good feedback about the voice commands in mass effect 3 from people who use them on a regular basis.  Mostly that it helps the flow of the game so you don't have to constantly pause to issue commands. 

Word is that MS PR is claiming today that the One "can" be turned off all the way (you know, short of unplugging the bitch), the kinect sensor can be disabled, and you can modify a lot of privacy settings.  Details are still forthcoming  :oh_i_see:

When you say shit like this it really throws into question whether anything you're saying has any merit at all. Google Voice is incredibly useful.

Perhaps you mean Voice Search, and not Google Voice, but Voice Search works extremely well for me at least.

Damn, I meant the voice command and voice recognition features not the voice over ip and telephony thing, forgot for a minute that Google Voice was an entirely different app.

Sorry but since Google Voice is - and probably never will be - available in my country I forgot that it even is a thing.

Yeah Google Voice would be incredibly useful if they ever decided to launch it outside the US. I meant the voice recognition, voice command and similar features which work all the time 60% of the time.

BTW just to proactively prevent further comments, technically Google Voice is already available in Germany but only with a small subset of the features available for US users.

Google Now voice search is incredibly useful for me, esp for scheduling appointments and checking stuff out. However, my friend in Louisiana can't use it because it has no clue what she is saying half the time. Accents don't really work out too well...right Chekov?  :why_so_serious:

Google Voice I used to use for free texting. Loved the use on either the smartphone app or the browser on my desktop. However, it was rather restricted. No MMS and the calling was rather spotty.

Voice has incoming MMS support now.  The photo/vid gets sent to your Gmail inbox  :grin:

Next Generation (http://hypercritical.co/2013/05/28/next-generation)

Whaaaat?  When did that happen?

Yep. I use it several times a day, and my estimate of its success rate at understanding me is around 95% or so. It really is quite rare for it to choke on something I say to it. I do have to turn the radio down (oh no) if I'm talking to it in the car.

Voice recognition technology is a great thing if it can catch up to the speed of human speech consistently. It's getting a lot closer. It will revolutionize the way we interact with text/interfaces instead of typing.

That still can't replace the touch aspect, or control from a sensory pad. The idea of Kinect is still foreign to me because I don't want to flail around like a moron to game.

Sometime in the last few months.  On my phone right now....too lazy to find the news post about it.

Maybe it's a cultural thing as well. Are any of you comfortable with talking to your device in public or while other people are present? In Germany for example people are still weirded out by people talking on the phone in public.

The biggest concern I've heard from people (well apart from the 'this probably won't work anyway') is that they don't want to talk to their phones especially in public because "that's just weird".

Also since it's being developed by US companies maybe speech recognition works best with english.

I'm not getting a 95% success rate with any technology when I'm talking to my iPhone or Android device in German, most of my friends and acquaintances don't either and we're mostly talking in 'proper German'. I can't even imagine how this would work with a person talking in a German dialect or accent.

Not even die hard technophiles I know use voice recog. any more because it just rarely works as advertised.
YMMV obviously but after a decade of 'now voice recognition works, promise' claims and the state it's still in, people remain skeptical.

I've remained a fan of the Star Trek TNG like 'computer, earl grey hot' Interface and I'd be happy if it actually works this time. I'm skeptical though since even five digit professional voice command suites as e.g. used by phone hotlines still mostly tell you that they are sorry but they couldn't understand what you just said.

Voice integration with phones is one of the hardest adoption things imo, simply because there are so many times where you want to text so other people don't know what you're saying. Also, if you're going to the trouble of talking to the phone, why not just use the call function.  :uhrr:

The answer is Google Glass, obviously.

I've had great success lately with voice search.

A huge YMMV though.

That article indicates one of my biggest peeves about XB1 which is why would I slide in a distraction onto my beautiful 16:9 1080p screen to look up an actor when I can do that on my phone, using less commands and less movement.  It seriously makes no sense.

Isn't this thread about the XBox one?  Being wierded out by giving voice commands to your phone in public (which I am a part of) is completely different than giving voice commands to a device in your living room. 

I don't really want to talk to my TV. I'm crazy enough yelling during football and baseball games. I'm sure it wouldn't know how to go fuck itself.

Eleven.

Maybe you can configure it to go on Twitter and say mean things about Ed Hochuli?

It'll be pretty interesting to see if this kind of technology can start to consistently recognise accents beyond "middle America". "English" really runs a gamut of regional accents within a single nation like the US, let alone the UK and Ireland, or adding in us Aussies, Kiwis, South Africans or people who speak English as a second language with an Asian or European accent...

Voice interfaces: Useful if people can be trained to do it subvocally. Otherwise? Never gonna catch on.

I work in a cubicle. The LAST thing anyone wants is everyone talking to their damn computers. (And that's assuming your computer is smart enough to ignore any voice that isn't yours). Hello to slow, loud, distracting interfaces for everyone!

Gesture based stuff? That's got possibilities. But people are still social. We're not all living alone in pods. We gather in groups, and your primary interface is never going to be vocal. Because it interrupts everyone else.

If there's voice interfaces, I can't work while talking on the phone.  That's a killer right there. No more productive time during conference calls, where I always hear at least 2 other folks typing away as well.

Because some catch on and become the standard. I remember all the bitching around controllers moving away from d-pads and to dual analogue sticks right up to the point people got familiar with analogue sticks.

Down with Analogue sticks!

Seriously, one of the above posts just made me realize enough to ask this question:  does this thing have no DVR type functions?  Can it record or even pause a broadcast?  If not, then it cannot succeed at what they want it to accomplish.

Pretty sure they said no DVR functions.

It would need a bigger hard drive for that.

The obvious rhetorical question is then "who they hell do they expect to use this thing?"  Actual gamers are going to be pissed and IMO, gravitate towards Sony this time around.  Non-gamers simply won't buy it.  This isn't the Wii, where they will pull in people who were never gamers, because it provides zero incentive for them to do so.

I have never been so turned off by a console release.  I am a huge graphics nerd who always gets a boner over next gen consoles, but not this one.  Because as pretty as the COD demos might turn out to be (I have no idea, I haven't seen one) you can be damn sure that the PS4 is going to share most of the same library, and might even be more powerful anyway.  Besides, I tend to think the Sony exclusives are much better than the xbox exclusives.  PS4 for me.

I'm sure ya'll will chase them off soon enough.

The key difference is that analogue controls aren't awkward, and actually work.

It would have been plastered all over if there was one.

I think the only people who would see a reason to buy this are the marketing executives and business projection consultants who put together the feature list for it. There is literally nothing about what the consumer wants in this box AT ALL. These are the same fuckheads who think "it's got SOCIALS in it, they'll eat it up!"

So, I've read a bunch of articles on the Xbone. I feel like the most important part is that cities with Google Fiber don't want to shove an Xbox between their google box and the router. Which they'd have to do. Which is stupid. Mind you, not everyone has Google Fiber. But in the next 5 years, I assume many cities will. Given they announced Austin and then, almost immediately, Provo - it would seem like they're speeding things up.

I mean, hell, they GIVE you a Nexus 7 with Fiber.

Which I'll use for Hex.

har

I would go so far as to say that current console kids are twitchy for the next gen item, regardless of what it actually is. They see next gen and immediately have to have. I have a couple of guys on my G+ circle who are completely enamored by this upcoming gaming PC and strike back at everything I find frightening or just lacking about this system. These are the same people who also grab up every piece of new tech on the market when it comes out even if they just bought the last iteration a few months ago. Case in point, a buddy who grabbed up a Note II just last Fall and is already basically standing in line for the Note III. This is also a guy with a Nexus 7 and Samsung Chromebook purchased day of release. To these people, new tech is some kinda of real life achievement score. That is what these consumers want...

Xbox One is using HDMI passthrough to do its overlays. It's not taking in a raw cable signal, manipulating it, and sending it to a TV. Hence the lack of DVR functionality. There are rumors there will be a TV tuner add-on but unless that happens the TV functionality is actually quite limited, despite spending most of the presentation touting it, since it's not controlling your TV or cable box directly.

I'd assumed that they'll be using an IR blaster to control TVs/cable receivers, which is pretty meh, but the only workable solution for the tons of devices that can't accept commands through HDMI.

Cable box -> Xbox -> TV?

Really, other than clownshoe fanboys, are people really going to buy this shit? 

Nope.

As an European, I find it incredibly funny that most of the features of the Xbone don't work in Europe. Hell, even Kinect voice commands are disabled by edict.

Yes.
 

How come it can't capture the input then?

Voice commands should also be disabled in the southern US since the fucking thing can't understand me.

Cause the HDMI output coming from the cable box is using HDCP and can't be copied (recorded) without bypassing the HDCP which is illegal for MS to do.

To record the video the cable coax has to be plugged into a CableCARD that is connected to the Xbox One. The CableCARD is then "authorized" to decrypt and record whatever programming the user is authorized for.

So in other words using the Bone for any TV features other than useless fucking overlays and social media is impossible without paying either the cable company or Microsoft or BOTH for a dongley dongle thingy?

Based on my understanding of how the Xbox One works, that's correct. It's possible Microsoft has something arranged with the major cable providers that hasn't been announced that would reduce or eliminate this cost. E.g. if you have an Xbox Live Gold subscription or if you agree to have even *more* ads displayed it'll cost you less or nothing. Also note that my example above only works with cable TV signals. AT&T U-Verse and satellite TV have their own technologies for doing this crap so assuming MS is going to provide some sort of DVR capability I'm not sure it'll work with those other technologies.

No, voice commands should always be forced on in the south, just as punishment.

It does depend on the games to some degree but the combination of hardware, policies and priorities is fucking dire.

And given that all those companies also want control of your ability to record and watch television, I can't imagine why they'd want to give the Bone control.

For instance I know my Sky box locks my recordings if I unsubscribe from the channel they were recorded from. Some movies get auto deleted when rights expire. I don't for one moment believe that Sky would willingly allow someone else to be in charge of fucking over my timeshifting capability.



Oh I don't doubt that there are still millions of people desperate to play bad FPSes and EA sports titles with new roster data.

What sort of exclusives does the Xbox even have anymore? The latest Gears game wasn't anything special, and I'm not sure Halo has a big draw these days either since Bungie isn't on it. Aside from Kinect stuff, that leaves what, Forza? I guess some people might buy it out of shear brand loyalty/fanboi-ism, but I don't see any reason why you'd buy an XBone instead of a PS4.

That is fucking diabolical.

Because you want a console, and you want it from a company with a clean security record?

I'm not likely to buy either console in an overall sense, but I'm more likely to buy a new Xbox than a PS4 because I don't trust Sony from an IT perspective.

You know Sky basically the UK arm of Fox, right?

Don't buy either.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/85841906/Naamloos-2_bewerkt-1.png)

Isn't it time you joined the Glorious PC Gaming Master Race?

Probably no. I'd consider it, if PC gaming worked more like console gaming.

I like the 'slouching on the couch while playing games on a huge TV' model too much.

After what everyone has presented so far maybe Valve has the right idea with the rumored steam box?

I just bought a gaming PC with the sole purpose of couch gaming on my TV.

PUNISHMENT FOR WHAT

I was thinking today of how my grandmother would rhyme "peaches" with "britches".

Dell x51 (http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/print_summary_details_popup.aspx?~lt=print&c=us&cs=19&fb=1&l=en&model_id=alienware-x51&oc=dpcwxy2&s=dhs&vw=icon&leadtime=6/6/2013&showleadtime=True)

If people from the south would learn to speak English, everything would work better.

My mom spent many years of my youth explaining to Northerners she needed a PIN to write with after they gave her odd looks to the request without the explanation.

Go ta heyll Yankee Devil  :grin:

I wonder how noisy the next one up (with the GTX660 instead of the really low-spec GTX645) is.  Unless there are some really amazing games for PS4, I think something like this may end up being a lot more appealing to me for living room gaming.

I play everything I can on my PC, but certain game genres (like JRPGs) only come out on consoles.

Has there actually been a good JRPG in the last 4 years?

Somewhat off-topic, but I glanced over that X51 and something stuck out at me: 250 watt power supply. Isn't that a bit low for pretty much any system nowadays, or am I missing something?

Yes it is. A Digital Storm Bolt or a Falcon Northwest Tiki are better choices.

A lot of the PC components have much lower power requirements these days. And if it has few drives or an SSD, mid range graphics card and chip (or SOC) 250 is possibly enough. Though dell do have a bit of a reputation for being parsimonious.

There are pretty much only two things a console can do that a PC can't be made to do. Be very cheap due to single-spec integrated design and economies of scale (which is what steam box is aiming at) and run platform exclusives. And if most of the JRPG's are going to come out on the PS4, and it's basically a PC, there's a better chance than before of getting a PC port.

Three things, the third is "just work" without having to install drivers or muck around in the BIOS :)

That's basically a side effect of having a single and stable spec and being conservative with vetting new drivers. It's not like these things won't be running similar drivers to PC's.

If you bought the alien-ware you'd probably get about the same reliability, though I don't like them much... I like being able to spec my own and upgrade bits when I want.

The "just work" part has become less of an issue in recent years.  My gaming PC running Win7 + Steam + NVIDIA drivers pretty much just works.  As did the previous iteration using WinXP + Steam + NVIDIA drivers.  Nowadays the update process for my PS3 is usually more annoying than for my PC -- and definitely slower and involves more reboots.  I can leave my PC suspended and it wakes up in a second, gets on the network in another couple seconds and I can play games.  The PS3 is not terribly fast to boot and the update process is slow and clunky.

I haven't bought a PC game on physical media for years, and Steam beats the pants off of PSN store for painless install and play.  And I can log into my steam account on a PC at a friend's place and play any game I own completely painlessly.  The diversity of small shop and indie titles for PC just keeps growing.  None of the major console vendors have figured out how to be anywhere nearly as open as Steam (which is not perfect), and of course on a PC I can install games directly from a developer's website if their stuff isn't on Steam.

Really the only likely draw of a PS4 would be if there were some exclusive titles that were really compelling.  I found this to be less true of PS3 than PS2 and wonder if PS4 might finally be the Sony console I don't bother buying.  There's never been an xbox-centric title sufficiently interesting for me to buy any generation of xbox so far, and the last Nintendo console I owned was the Gamecube and I only played 3-4 games on that thing.

Only on iOS/Android.

Pretty much. I haven't had mess with drivers much in the past few years. I haven't had to mess with BIOS since I built this computer. Meanwhile with my "just working" consoles, I've had a PS3 and a 360 outright die. I was trying to watch Arrested Development on Netflix on my PS3 the other night and PSN was disconnecting every 10 minutes. Meanwhile on my computer and iphone it was working fine. And lets not forget that 24 day PSN outage a couple years back. You've got long installations and day 1 patches just like on the PC. My dad and my sister have both had 360's brick in the middle of updates that required looking up extremely non-intuitive steps to fix. It's been a long time now since this shit "just worked".

Tales of Graces and Xenoblade just from last year. I'm also enough of a weeaboo that I can get a lot of fun out of a mediocre JRPG. YMMV.
What good JRPGs are there for Android? I need things to play on my tablet.

Chaos Rings series, Zenonia series, Chrono Trigger and various Final Fantasy remakes. There's also some The World Ends With You thing.

On the non-jrpg front you should get Waking Mars. It's like whoah.

:oh_i_see: Since 2003, bitch.

As far as the south's dialects: I'm the only family member north of the Mason-Dixon that can understand my Aunt Hazel from Mississippi. Her accent is so awesome, but I feel bad for people without an ear for it. Sometimes I annoy my mother by calling her and talking like Aunt Hazel (SHE'S LOUD, TOO). She makes great pickles. Her mom never wore shoes.

Oh, the XBone. Besides rabid fanboys, the clueless masses will also probably buy it in droves. As much as it needs to fail, it's doubtful it will. Tough to turn a battleship.

Mentioned this to my boss, who's kid owns consoles. His comment about the XBone?

"Sounds like it's cool. I've only heard good things from the people that know about this stuff."

 :facepalm:

So yeah, this will set sales records.

I am fucking disappointing in humans. I take an entry level pc essentials style class that I can't test out of on Wednesday nights. There is 20 people in the class not including me. Every single one of them including an aging IT instructor were going apeshit over wanting an XBoxone right now. Every single one of them is going to be waiting in line to purchase them as soon as they drop. I was fucking disgusted.

XBone will win in America because it's basically the Console of America. But like I said before it's astonishingly useless elsewhere, IMO almost ensuring Sony victory.

But....I don't get it.  What is it about the thing that they just have to have?  

My prediction (and honestly, it depends a huge amount on what Sony ultimately ends up putting out there) is that it will have massive initial adoption, because apparently there are just gazillions of idiots out there...and then a nosedive unlike anything we have ever seen in the console market.  Once people realize how much of a giant cockstab this whole thing is.

No shit, the shit they talked about in the presentation excited them. They liked the idea of the box acting as your cable box and controlling the TV.

I just struggle to imagine a scenario where someone would routinely do that.  You will already have a machine in your living room that does a far better job at controlling the TV without any silly extra costs, dongles or anything else...plus with the ability to record. 

Maybe I am getting too old for this shit, but I can't help but believe that the only thing the market really wants is a kick ass next generation gaming machine at the end of the day.  Some of the bells and whistles are fine (e.g. Netflix and similar), but we're well beyond the line here.  I am really hoping Sony eats their lunch. 

I used to love all of them, but then something broke inside me and now I find fault with everything :(