I'm taking the past few days into account. 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 the negativity surrounding, uh, everything. 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 (highly unimpressive) pre-rendered 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. This has been addressed by a Corporate Vice President, General Manager, multiple reps, official support account on Twitter, Director of Programming and President of Interactive Business. Not only do we still not fucking know, they're surprised by what the others are saying. 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, we're still thinking about it, the whole console is designed around the new age of fast internet, but the internet isn't stable enough for OnLive or Gaikai, yet the cloud makes Xbox One 40x more powerful. So a console that isn't always online...offloads calculations to the cloud...once every 24 hours...making it 40x more powerful? What. Did I mention the large disregard for indie games, forced Kinect and installations? How will games activate when they eventually shut down the servers? How will infinite cloud power-enhanced games scale back for those with no internet connection? How does it work in the first place? What are some concrete examples? Why aren't game "journalists" asking these questions?
I just don't understand how they can be surprised by any of this. They have been asked most of these questions since February and said "Microsoft does not comment on rumour or speculation". Well, here we are at Microsoft's official event. Does Microsoft comment on features announced by their own staff at their own unveiling? "We still don't know. We'll let you know when we feel like it." 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. 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.
Xbox One / 10