For The n00basaurus, The XBox One (And Next Gen) Forecast is Cloudy
With the announcement of Xbox One, we finally have a look at the future of console gaming.
It’s the Wii U vs Ps4 vs Xbox One as the lineup for holiday spending in 2013 and 2014. My first impression is rather grim, to be honest.
Starting with the Wii, my hopes for the then named “Nintendo Revolution” (a so much better name than “Wii”) were dashed as soon as they decided to drop hard core games and just focus on the casual gaming crowd. The application and promise for some amazing gaming experience were simply cut out of the business model all together. There were one or two decent Zelda games, but other than that, there was nothing really that interesting for me to sink my teeth into. The Wii U seems to be narrowing even that field by focusing almost exclusively on these casual smartphone games. I understand there’s a market for them, but I (as well as most, if not all, of my gaming friends) are not a part of that market.
The Ps4 is also dragging its feet with the PS3. There were a handful of games that I enjoyed on the PS3 (inFamous being one of them), but as the Sony company refuses to modernize its business model for a focus on the future of gaming, Sony based games keep falling by the wayside for more power hungry competitors. What is strange is that the problems with the PS3 are always due to their business model and rarely have anything to do with the console itself. It’s a pretty beefcake machine and the PS4 seems to be even more of a monster… But for the PS3’s price, poor customer service, heavy hitting DRM (Digital Rights Management), and being always a step behind upcoming gaming technology, the PS4 has a distance it has to go to be able to keep competing. For the PS4, what comes out on/for it, and how Sony treats its player base is what is going to shape the future of the system. There have also been hints that the new PS4 system will not be backwards compatible. However, the Sony company has been rather quiet about the system’s overall functionality.
And now we get to Xbox One. Ever since the shaky start of Microsoft getting in between the fight between Sega, Sony, and Nintendo, the Xbox has always had one thing it promoted: HARD CORE GAMES. Well, enough of them to really compete with the big three, and quite successfully, to boot. Spec wise, it’s shaping up to really be a grudge match against the PS4. Both machine’s overall specs look rather impressive (both have 8gb ram and hex-core processors). What worries me about Xbox One, is how it was introduced today. It was unveiled with all of these extra functionalities and not a single real visceral hard core game in sight. Television, Internet Explorer, Skype, Sports, FPS. As well as a horrifying notion: It’s a cloud based system.
Why would a cloud based system be bad? Well for one thing, saves. The whole point for a console to have a block of solid memory are for your game saves. Waiting to sync with the cloud whenever you want to use or save a game takes time. Updates are generally not instant, and could cause major losses of data between the time you stop playing and whenever their cloud decides to sync. Bandwidth can get costly if you live in a place like I do where ISP’s charge per usage. Also, your game will only be valid as long as they find that it is worth their time to keep it up. Even if it is a single player game. As soon as they decide to reallocate that server space elsewhere, you are out of luck on the game you paid good money for. So yeah, cloud might be a bad idea for gaming, but they are sure going to try.
The thing that most bothers me is what Xbox One is going to do with “used games”. The fact that they are designing a system to allow you to trade in games online is fine. My problem is when you have a physical copy of a game, and try to give it to a friend to play. Apparently it will charge your friend a fee (as BBC World Service reports, It may even be at full price). This has 2 rather grim implications. The first being that a player can no longer share his personal property and experiences with friends as he no longer owns the product for which he has paid for.
The second is that when they said that the console will “always be on”, apparently they meant “to play games, the console always needs to be online” as they track who owns what by Xbox live. It’s one thing to have a solo single player game always have to be connected to online servers, but for a physical console with a physical game disk? It leaves a question of “What happens if some one purchases an Xbox One and they don’t have internet? Can they not play the games they paid for? Also, how will this design affect game play? On the release, they promised “seamless entertainment experiences . Will it still be seamless if the authentication servers are down or busy? Will it still be seamless if servers for solo single player play lag or have internet interruptions? This design has a risk of alienating a good chunk of the gaming consumer base.
All in all, none of the 3 major consoles look like they are doing anything for the people that got them where they are today. Instead they are focusing on casual players, money making models, and advertisement junk. It looks like gone are the days when a gaming console was purchased to just focus games.
Here’s a thought: Since the major players are shying away from the hard core audience (and for some, gaming completely) .. Maybe the Steam console will be able to “bridge the gap” and steal away those of us that are being left behind by the “major competitors”…
