What an awful interview (not Sessler's fault). It's staggering, really. Look, most of us hate the TV-centric approach the conference went with. But this goes beyond that. The first rumours broke, what, at the start of February? Sony's conference was a week later. Since then new rumours about the console have come out almost every week. There was the Adam Orth fiasco. They've had 3 months to see how negatively they were received. They've had 3 months to look at Sony's approach – being entirely candid about the shortcomings of PS3, highly informative presentation, focus on games – and the response that garnered. And they still seem clueless. We give Nintendo shit for not seeming to know what they're doing, but Jesus Christ, this is another level altogether.
Watch Cerny's portion of the Sony conference and just how much he told us, then compare it with the vapid nothingness presented by Mattrick et al. Not a single negative rumour was addressed and what they did give us was vague at best. "Here's one box to control the living room", they said. Except it'll only be available in North America at launch, doesn't replace your cable box, can't interface with DVR and uses HDMI-CEC to control channel switching which only the newest boxes support. "We have exclusive FIFA Ultimate Team content." What is it? With how focused the whole presentation was on the US surely now is as good a time as any to rope in some of Europe. "Here are some of the games, running on Xbox One, that are only possible because of Xbox One." Where? Those are trailers. Are you guys even ready for this?
So then they decided to address all the negative shit after the conference. You'd think with 3 months they'd have some good answers for us. Nope. Every representative seemed to contradict the last. There's a used game fee, but there's no fee, but it'll be a small fee, now the fee is the full price of the game, but there's a paywall, then it's tied to your installation, then your profile, then your family can use the game on your profile, GameStop didn't know about it, but now they know how it'll work. Get your shit straight. "You have permission to play your game." Fuck off. Then as soon as it was revealed that PS4 was (supposedly) a good deal more powerful the new company line was that Xbox One would "leverage" (I wish PR people would stop using this as a verb) the infinite powah of the cloud. Oh, so it's always online? No it isn't, but it is, it checks every 24 hours, Harrison is wrong, now he's right, but we're still thinking about it, but the whole console is designed around the new age of fast internet. Which is it?
How can any of these questions surprise them? They've clearly decided that they want to take this console in a direction that makes a closed platform even more closed by adopting the most anti-consumer policies gaming has ever seen, so yeah, people are probably going to ask how it works. "We'll tell you about it later" isn't good enough when there is this much negativity. Why put any faith in them when their entire gaming division has appeared this incompetent?
So every negative rumour came true (sometimes worse), even the implied ones about them being 6 months behind in development, and we're even more confused now than before the conference. Good job, Microsoft.
