It has been well over a year since the first and funny enough last edition of First Byte. Originally starting out as a reoccurring demo impressions article, it is time to evolve First Byte. It is hard to keep demo impressions coming at a steady pace when you do not play many demos. Now First Byte will be a first impressions article. No need to wait for demos, it will cover my first impressions on a game, console or anything video game related. What a better way to kick off the new direction of First Byte by giving my first impressions on the recently revealed Xbox One, Microsoft’s next generation gaming machine. There has been a full week of news about the Xbox One so everybody and their mother has an opinion on the third Xbox console. Without any further ado, let us get down to business.
To get right to the point, Microsoft has not made many happy with the reveal of the Xbox One, this writer included. The reveal was an absolute mess, but the news that has come out over the past week has not given many a positive outlook over the system. This negative buzz surrounding the Xbox One has come from Microsoft’s plans for online, new games and used games (three things Microsoft conviently did not touch on during the Xbox One reveal). First, the Xbox One will not require you to be connected to the Internet at all times. The one exception being that you have to connect to the Internet at least once a day. If you do not have an Internet connection whatsoever or your Internet goes down for a day, you cannot use the Xbox One at all. So Microsoft stays away from the negative connotations of the "Always On" buzz word, but still finds to screw the consumer. Not everybody has access to or the money to afford the Internet, but they may be able to buy a game system. While Microsoft has found a way around repeating the same always-online disasters that were Diablo III and SimCity, they are extremely limiting the appeal of the Xbox One with this strategy for online. Second, new games will require a one-time activation and mandatory installation to the hard drive. Once the activation has been used, you must buy another activation to use the game on another Xbox One. No longer can you share games with your friends or use game rental services such as GameFly with the Xbox One. What a great way to undermine one of the many reasons that people buy home consoles and destroy the camaraderie and free advertisement built from sharing games with others. Right now, you may be thinking that this activation with new games will kill used games on the Xbox One. Well that thought leads right into the last point. Microsoft is working with certain retailers to create a new used game market. You will be able to trade in used games at the retailers that Microsoft specifies at a later date. Microsoft and the publishers will be getting a cut of the used sales from these retailers. The whole debate surrounding the used game market has been well documented. Personally, I believe that the sharing of new and used revenue between publishers and companies such as Gamestop should have happened years ago. While this partnership is a step in the right direction, it will be interesting to see how it will impact the amount of trade-in credit a customer receives or the price of used Xbox One games.
Microsoft can put in all the cool multimedia features, push Kinect as an integral part of the system and create an all-in-one entertainment suite, but the fact of the matter is the Xbox One is first and foremost a video game console. People do not want all these other features; they just want to play games without any interruption or unnecessary badgering from the manufacturers and publishers. The Xbox One is the culmination of Microsoft's new direction. This new direction may seem like an excellent idea in Microsoft's world. In actuality, it is the complete and utter opposite. At this point in time, Xbox One looks to be a major step in the wrong direction for the industry. Instead of finding a happy medium between pleasing both the game publishers and consumers, Microsoft looks to be creating a machine that completely alienates their consumers in favour of appeasing the giant third-party publishers such as Activision, EA and Ubisoft. It is hard to tell if the Xbox One will be Microsoft's downfall only a week after the reveal, but this system will definitely have an uphill battle in the months and years ahead.
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