Video Game Experts "The New Yorker" Come to the Aid of XBOX One

According to The New Yorker the reason the Playstation 4 is getting so much better press than the XBOX One is because whiny kids who play video games just don't understand that their whole world is about to be rocked by new way to watch TV. You can Skype while watching TV or playing a game! It's a whole new interface! You can turn it on by talking to it! It's going to be awesome in four years!

Even if this is true and even if one concedes that the future of game consoles isn't just gaming (which seems to me to be a trope that we've heard for a long, long time now), I contend that the future of gaming consoles at least has to START with video games and video gamers. And at $500 there is no way it will.

We've always been told that the way Microsoft was going to revolutionize the living room with the XBOX was to get it in living rooms as a video game system first, and THEN take over the TV. But instead they added all the new TV functionality and increased the price by $100. Getting a video gamer to spend $500 on a console is not impossible. But getting them to spend $500 when a more video game-centric console exists for $100 less might be the end of the XBOX.

All of the non-gaming stuff the XBOX One has been showing off is something I'd love to have in my Apple TV (except maybe the "always on" camera which I still think is just creepy). But the Apple TV is just $99. No one is going to spend $500 for a jacked-up Apple TV. And most gamers aren't going to spend an extra $100 to have a harder time playing video games.

The XBOX One won't "be the box you’ll want connected to your TV four years from now" if they don't sell enough of them this year.

(I'd also like to add that author Matt Buchanan calling the DRM scheme of XBOX One "groundbreaking" is just silly. Doesn't anyone remember DIVX?)

The Future of Game Consoles Isn't Just About Games [The New Yorker, posted by Matt Buchanan]

XBOX One Too Costly? Don't Take My Word For It.

Yesterday I very much voiced my displeasure at the extra $100 the XBOX One will cost, especially when you take into account all of the extra "features" Microsoft has piled on.

But I'm not the only one. Check out these headlines:

• PS4's Price And Policies Humiliate Microsoft's Xbox One At E3 [Forbes]

• PS4 takes E3 with $399 price tag [Engadget]

• Sony Outmaneuvers Microsoft in FIrst PS4-Xbox One Skirmish [San Francisco Chronicle]

• PlayStation 4 undercuts Xbox One by $100, won’t require online connection to play [Penny Arcade]

• Sony Outduels Microsoft in First PS4-Xbox One Skirmish [Bloomberg]

• PlayStation 4: Sony outmaneuvers Microsoft on price, design, and common sense [The Verge]

XBOX One $500? Indefensible.

For the record, I'm an XBOX guy and have been since 2004. And although the XBOX 360 is far from perfect (red ring of death anyone?), I've always considered it better than the Playstation 3.

But the new XBOX One always has to be connected to the Internet. The Kinect camera is always on, knows when you're in the room and is connecting itself back to a company that the NSA is fond of data mining. It's full of television/living room functionality that gamers never asked for and "regular" people don't understand.

And it's $100 more than the Playstation 4. How can I tell anyone with a straight face that they should go with XBOX over Playstation?

Oh yeah. And there's this.

Video Game Controllers Through the Years

Extreme Tech has a great rundown of historic video game controllers and why each was an important step in the evolution of gaming. It's most interesting to me to see that the controllers for the new Playstation 4 and XBOX One are just slight variations of their predecessors, a fact I'm very happy about.

Shoulder buttons of giants: The evolution of controllers leading up to the PS4 and the Xbox One | ExtremeTech.com