The Glade 4.0

"We are designing Xbox One to enable customers to trade in and resell games," the company wrote. "We'll have more details to share later."

"The bits that are on that disc, you can give it to your friend and they can install it on an Xbox One," Microsoft VP Phil Harrison told Kotaku. "They would then have to purchase the right to play that game through Xbox Live."

It's a bummer of an answer, though Harrison hedged his bet by noting that the company was working on another solution that would somehow let gamers sell or trade titles online. Either way, this can't please GameStop, who rely on the re-selling of game discs themselves to make a profit on used sales.

In comic strips the person on the left always speaks first. - George Carlin

From Microsoft:



I forsee Gamestop becoming a partner selling stacks of activation codes with the used games.

Wait.. what? Why would the kinect need to be plugged in when I'm not using it?

Hardcore Console Gamers Don’t Want Much, Just the Impossible

By Chris Kohler
05.23.13
6:30 AM


Microsoft announced the Xbox One this week, and the reaction from hardcore gamers is that the sun is about to fall from the sky.

“Oh my God, where are the games? Can you believe they spent so much time talking about television? Who cares about sports? Shut up about Game of Thrones! Aren’t there any games besides Madden and Call of Duty? Microsoft is dead to me!”

Okay, granted, the one-note nature of the presentation made for some hilarious YouTube video moments. And there’s a lot for potential Xbox One players to be concerned about: Its lack of backward compatibility with the thousands of dollars’ worth of content currently sitting on our Xbox 360 hard drives, the uncertainty over used games, the nebulous “always-online” requirements, the fact that game developers can’t self-publish like they can on PlayStation 4 and Wii U. These are valid concerns and some of them may be issues that Microsoft is forced to address when it launches the Xbox One.

But to the dedicated gamers that wish Microsoft would stop pushing the all-in-one entertainment angle — do you really know what you’re asking for?

It’s not hard to figure out what the gaming-first crowd wants: a super-powered box that connects to the TV, has a handheld controller and has a huge library of games from the biggest-budget epics to the breakout indie hits. They don’t want a PC because they don’t want to mess with settings and deal with crashes; they want a standard platform that Just Works. It can do other things, sure, but games are the meat and everything else is somewhere between the gravy and the pepper shaker.

Hey, that sounds like an awesome product! Tuned precisely to our very needs. Say, do you know how many companies — in the entire world — currently offer such a product?

Two.

Nintendo bailed the hell out of that business in 2006 when it shipped the Wii. Nintendo had been graphically competitive, if not superior, up until then. But it saw the writing on the wall and opted out of the more-power arms race. So it’s down to just Microsoft and Sony. And as we are all now aware, Microsoft’s strategy has shifted from gaming to everything. It won’t be happy until you’re doing everything in the living room through your Xbox One, and if that means it has to take steps that impact its performance as a pure gaming machine, well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

So I rescind that comment. It’s not two corporations currently creating high-end game boxes for gaming gamers. It’s one.

How’s that working out for Sony?



Oh, right. It can’t seem to figure out a way to make any money off the PlayStation business. This chart is from a 2012 speech by game developer Ben Cousins titled “When the Consoles Die, What Comes Next?” To bring it up to speed, Sony only made about $17.2 million in operating income on the PlayStation business off revenues of $7.2 billion, a 94 percent drop from the last year’s income.

So as a general matter, Sony’s PlayStation business is not making money. And yet they’re doing everything hardcore gamers want. PlayStation 3 is a graphical powerhouse. They’re giving online gaming away for free, instead of charging 60 bucks a year like Microsoft does. They pour money into indie developers and generate critically acclaimed arthouse hits like Journey. Microsoft refuses to take risks with its software, releasing endless iterations of Halo and Forza while Sony releases out-of-the-box concepts like Heavy Rain and The Last of Us.

Surely Microsoft’s Xbox business is doing even worse, right?



Hm. Well, although Cousins points out that the division of the company that contains Xbox has, over its lifetime, lost a bunch of money, we can see a clear upward trend in recent years. And again, to bring this up to date, the Entertainment and Devices Division had an operating income of $342 million in the last quarter. Since other products (like Skype and Surface, e.g.) are lumped into that division, I can’t say whether the Xbox 360 in particular is turning a profit. But it would seem as if Microsoft is at least on the way to turning it around.

If it’s possible to create a superpowered game box, why hasn’t anyone been able to do it successfully for almost a decade? Why did Nintendo quit, why is Sony hemorrhaging cash and why is Microsoft putting all of its effort into pitching Xbox One as a TV-enhancement device? Ben Cousins thinks he’s figured it out: because the console is dead, a sentiment with which I would strongly agree.

All indications are that the math is not working out on this deal anymore, and has not for a long time. It’s looking more and more likely that what the gaming-only crowd wants is, as a financial matter, simply impossible. There may be no way to make money selling a bleeding-edge $500 games-only box with $60 games anymore. The expense of producing it all may be well out of whack with what players are willing to spend to get it.

By broadening the functionality of the Xbox 360, Microsoft hoped to attract more users (and dollars) from outside the core. By positioning the Xbox One as an everything device right at launch, it’s hoping to widen that circle even more. I’m not saying it will necessarily prove to be a successful strategy. But neither is it the obvious misstep that people think it is. Maybe my household is just another cliche, but we’ve been using our Xbox 360 at home to binge-watch Game of Thrones, and the HBO GO app on the 360 is an infinitely more appealing experience than navigating Comcast’s On Demand menu. And yes, I have heard a lot of people do like sports.

Having games as just one part of a broad entertainment device with multiple, diverse revenue streams might not just be Microsoft’s (and Apple’s and Google’s) preferred outcome. It might be the only way that high-end game machines survive at all.

I was asking if the kinect can be unplugged/turned off when the system is off/idle/not being used.

Some folks seemed to be concerned that the camera or mic might be hacked to 'spy' on you....

In comic strips the person on the left always speaks first. - George Carlin

Kinect can only be unplugged if you plan on not using your system. When the system is off, the Kinect is still turned on and listening for you to command it by saying "Xbox..."

People make up privacy concerns when they hear this because they don't recognize the difference between listening and recording. At no point does Kinect send any data back to MS or anyone else unless you opt in to their customer feedback option, just like now.

Obviously not a scientific poll, but an interesting quick bead on initial reactions to the Xbox One. Out of 76,000 people, 75% weren't impressed.

Facism is not a school of thought, it is a racial slur.

Worldwide sales figures
Wii – 99.84 million as of 31 March 2013
PlayStation 3 – 70 million as of 4 November 2012 (IDC January 2013 estimate: "about 77 million")
Xbox 360 – 74.94 million as of 31 December 2012

Japan sales figures
Wii – 12.71 million as of 31 March 2013[8]
PlayStation 3 – 6.3 million as of 1 April 2011[58]
Xbox 360 – 1.6 million

Europe sales figures
Wii – 49.37 million as of 31 March 2013
PlayStation 3 – 24.23 million as of December 2010
Xbox 360 – 23.73 million as of December 2010

United States sales figures
Wii – 47.75 million as of 10 August 2010
PlayStation 3 - 39.6 million as of 14 April 2010
Xbox 360 – 39.4 million as of 31 December 2009

Eh. Likely pass. Probably just getting a PS4 this time around. I've stopped using my 360 long ago, and the Wii U is laughable.

But Sony’s and Nintendo’s respective wake-up calls haven’t seemed to change things with Xbox 360. With Microsoft’s console about to turn eight years old in November, everyone is expecting the announcement of a successor console very soon. If it doesn’t change its old ways with regard to how it approaches indie developers, the next Xbox might miss out on the games that will define the next generation.

PC versions of bigger titles “could” happen, but that sounds like it’ll be the exception – not the rule. And that certainly stings, but it’s not terribly different from Microsoft’s approach to PC during Xbox 360′s lengthy reign. Second verse, same as the first, only they’ve given the song a new name.

Yesterday’s Xbox One reveal may have prompted long sighs and tweets of derision from everyone not also watching ESPN and drinking beer from a hat at that very moment, but one portion of it at least sounded pretty impressive.

Facism is not a school of thought, it is a racial slur.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/05/22/xbox-ones-reveal-the-opposite-of-what-igns-audience-wanted

If you look at the article on the poll, people apparently wanted "More game release stuff, tech specs, and more processorz for better grafx."

Calm yo tits chillunz. You'll get that at E3.

Facism is not a school of thought, it is a racial slur.

More game release stuff, sure? The tech specs are here and processing power is an issue. Silicon junkies have little faith in AMD's embedded solutions, and as an AMD embedded solution is driving both the PS4 and the XBox One according to some sources, it may be legit.

The people that lambasted the 360/ps3 for offering nothing new over more powerful hardware are now the same people ***** that they are trying to give a better user and game experience through other avenues. You can't make people happy when they can't even decide what they want.

Both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 have adopted electronics and an integrated systems-on-a -chip (soc) architecture that unleashes magnitudes more compute and graphics power than the current generation of consoles. These architectures are a generation ahead of the highest end PC on the market and their unique design of the hardware, the underlying operating system and the live service layer create one of the most compelling platforms to reimagine game mechanics.

Hooray, context!