Something compels me to post in this thread.
I'm going to be quaint. I work in customer service, and I meet alot of people who you'd consider 'casual gamers'. They're usually middle aged, have kids, and aren't exactly part of the core audience. Gaming is not their thing, they have 60 hour workweeks and a daughter to take care of, and while gaming used to be a favored pastime, they might be able to cram in 6 hours a week, at most. Granted, that's nowhere near their physical limit, they see gaming as a method of having fun, not a hobby.
And while I don't consider those people core gamers, and hell, some of them I have to resist to urge to call idiots. But they have one thing, at the absence of another. They have money. Lots of money. At the absence of time. And their kids, their kids have a large portion of that money presumably dedicated to them.
What I'm getting at is that the XBone will do well. Microsoft will rake in sales, just not from the gamer audience. See, core gamers, people who have any sort of semblance of passion to gaming, are the ones who dislike the new generation. Why? Quite simply, MS, at the very least MS, has given up on them. They know they will never make the core audience happy if they try to compete with the growing PC market. So they switched their target demographic.
Suddenly, it's less about the games, as it is about convincing people that they have time to play games still, and hey, if you don't, you can still use our console for everything else. And you'll buy it, because you have very little time to do research and lots of money.
That type of mentality seems flawed, until you realize that that demographic is very real, and very prominent. Every warehouse worker that considers themselves 'tech savvy' enough to own a smartphone and use it as something other than one of dem tele-phones, is going to buy an XBone. I guarantee it. Anyone, who works more than 40 hours a week, and doesn't work in any high functioning technical field, will probably own one too.
What about you and me? Well, I can't speak for you, but I won't own one. I've got other things in my budget, and am already a dedicated PC gamer. Actually, I think that most core gamers in this generation, whether they wanted to be PC-centric or not, will get into PC gaming and power using in general.
While this other demographic will happily get boned by the XBone, and regardless of whether or not they're aware of it, the majority of them will not care, and probably, like the 'core' audience in the last generation, refute PC gaming because it's 'too hard' to get into.
Hah, my ass.
As long as your PC's set up by anyone above the level of 'trained monkey' or 'corporate relations rep' and uses just baseline software, Steam will install the necessary requirements for your game, if Windows Update hasn't already.
