Brockyman said:
I welcome thoughts and comments. Please keep it mature. I respect the opinions of everyone (with a brain).
You seem to be very defensive of something that is widely being cited throughout the industry as a major blunder. Ostensibly a dedicated gaming machine revealed with only miniscule emphasis on games? Open mouth, insert foot. "Wait for E3!" is
not an acceptable excuse, because the primary function of the machine, and the primary reason to buy the machine, is video games. Showing that they don't really value that core market enough to target the presentation to them is a pretty bad sign. It's nothing to do with elitism, entitlement or hating on The Dirty Casuals. It has everything to do with a product which is being marketed towards a demographic yet doesn't actually consider what that demographic wants from their product.
The presence of Kinect is another negative. Because it is there, developers are going to feel obliged - or, worst case scenario, be directly pressured - to integrate it into games where the inclusion is only going to be detrimental. People don't want that. We want a console we can just play games on, like a normal person, without having to wave our arms or have a conversation with the device. You're right, there are going to be people who like the idea. In which case it should be an optional extra for them as it was this current generation rather than insisting on Kinect integration for
every machine and jacking up the price for the entire range to absorb the cost. The burger/dog turd analogy earlier mentioned is actually quite a good one: some people might like a dog turd on their burger, and if that's their bag, more power to them. I don't want a dog turd on my burger, and I resent having to pay extra for one that I don't have the option to remove.
I don't even think I want to understand the logic behind the pay-to-play preowned business. I was discussing it with a couple of gamer friends yesterday, and it turned out that the last games we actually bought brand-new were, respectively, two Skyrim and a Mass Effect 3. Now this had nothing to do with the lack of games we wanted to play, and
everything to do with the fact that we're all (as are many of the console's target demographic) reasonably young middle income earners. We buy preowned because we can
afford preowned, whereas the exorbitant price of brand-new games restricts us to just a few titles a year since we also have to pay rent, bills, eat etc. The conversation at Microsoft HQ apparently went;
"Consumers are buying intelligently and giving preference to cheaper second-hand games during this time of economic woe."
"Huh. You think maybe we price people out of buying our products?"
"No, that's silly. They're probably just evil pirates, out to destroy our business."
"Oh, yeah, I guess you're right. How about we make them pay equivalent money every time they borrow, rent or buy a pre-owned game?"
"BRILLIANT! That's sure to conjure up money they don't actually have from the aether and into our bank accounts!"
All told, I genuinely thought my brand loyalty to Xbox was going to get me through this console generation, but after this flop it's looking seriously doubtful. I don't think they're going to re-tool the device entirely before launch, so I'm stuck with either the crappy, crappy Playstation controller (and the many other problems of the PS4), upgrading a (urgh) PC to play games on, or just skipping the generation entirely.
