No, I will not be getting myself an Xbox One. Or at least not as long as it is as it appears. As someone else said, what happens when the day finally comes when the Xbox One's servers get shut down? Is it rendered unusable and the games unplayable?
I mean that goes beyond just insulting your customer base and enters the region of destroying gaming's credibility as an art form, because even if Xbox One has some truly great exclusive titles, games that are smart, emotional, beautiful and that define our generation what does it matter? If the new Halo games finally overcome my concerns and they turn out amazingly and whole new IP that are even better, hell what if we finally create games that begin to break the gender barrier and are more welcoming to a female audience and more diverse audiences in general while we're at it... what will it all amount to if say ten years later the console is an inoperable brick and all those games might as well have never existed because no future generations can play them.
One of the defining features of any art form is preservation, movies and books and plays that are still able to be watched, read and performed decades maybe even centuries after they were made. The always online feature however pretty much spits in the face of that because it is as Jim Sterling said a product of this 'live in the moment who cares if the industry crashes we're making money now' mindset that Microsoft seems to have.
Imagine if all copies of To Kill a Mockingbird had all the text simply vanish after ten years leaving nothing but blank pages. Imagine if the digital coding on DVDs deleted itself after a few years rendering all movies unwatchable. In my eyes, if Always Online works the way I'm fearing it does then I'm worried about the future of video games as an art form and how it will play out in the long run and as Jim Stirling also said, it's really sad that we the consumer are worried about this instead of the people actually running things. What the Xbone tells me is that artistic expression and the ability to create compelling stories and characters and innovative gameplay and more importantly for these games made with love and care and effort to be still available for younger generations to play just like Books, plays and films and even television programs before them is now secondary to quick profits and control over your user base. This soulless black machine may have just killed any credibility of video games as an art.
Maybe I'm worrying too much, maybe it won't work out that way but still the fact that this concern wasn't even raised, let alone talked about suggests that in addition to being kind of arseholes, Microsoft have much to be desired in regards to forward thinking. As for whether I'll get a PS4, eh maybe. I might honestly just hurry to get Xbox Live again so I can reconnect with old Escapist Live chums and get Psychonauts installed on my console again ASAP before getting all my beloved games together so that I'll always have them and get ready to weather the coming storm of this console generation and bracing myself for the possiblity of the industry crashing.
If that does happen though, at least I know what I'll be listening to:
P.S Hello everyone who still remembers me, been a while I know. I've been neglecting the sit for several months and I just felt like posting.
