What can Xbox one do for me?

[The White Hunter]

I love how someone asking a question has turned into a real shit storm...

... then again, I only clicked on the thread in case of the off chance no one mentioned the word "TV" this far down...

... please continue

Yeah, the demographic here can sometimes be akin to piranhas in a feeding frenzy.

OP has an XBL avatar and likes the Xbox One....therefore they are a paid Microsoft employee/unofficial spokesperson?

That's similar to the line of thinking paranoids have.

I'm assuming you're referring to UnnDunn, as OP doesn't have an avatar and was asking for opinions on ThaBone.

... If people actually went and actually looked at his previous posts, they'd see that he seems pretty neutral on the PS4 and Xbox One. It's my guess that he's probably just relatively well versed in the new gen consoles and is spreading his knowledge.

Spoiler: Conspiracy Time

OR he is a representative for the secret organization SonySoft!!! A company that pretends to be the rival corporations Microsoft and Sony in the public's eye, but in actuality are working in secret towards the same goal... total world domination...

*dons tinfoil hat*

YOU'LL NEVER GET ME, I'M A PC GAMER!!!

I keep telling you people that you don't need a tin foil hat! You need some kind of large copper faraday cage to stop them reading your thoughts!

 

[UnnDunn]

I'm assuming you're referring to UnnDunn, as OP doesn't have an avatar and was asking for opinions on ThaBone.

... If people actually went and actually looked at his previous posts, they'd see that he seems pretty neutral on the PS4 and Xbox One. It's my guess that he's probably just relatively well versed in the new gen consoles and is spreading his knowledge.

Spoiler: Conspiracy Time

OR he is a representative for the secret organization SonySoft!!! A company that pretends to be the rival corporations Microsoft and Sony in the public's eye, but in actuality are working in secret towards the same goal... total world domination...

*dons tinfoil hat*

YOU'LL NEVER GET ME, I'M A PC GAMER!!!

Thank you.

OP asked what benefits Xbox One provides. I answered.

 

[Glongpre]

The xbone is a nice money sink. Because we all know everyone has too much of that stuff, it makes life too easy.

 

[Whoracle]

Microsoft may be many things, but they're not reliable. Maybe others are even more unreliable *cough*sony*cough*PSNoutage*cough*, but the others at least try to minimize the impact their inevitable incompetence will have this time around...

Hey at least when the PSN went down you could play your games in single player.[...]

Which is exactly what I was saying

 

[The White Hunter]

Microsoft may be many things, but they're not reliable. Maybe others are even more unreliable *cough*sony*cough*PSNoutage*cough*, but the others at least try to minimize the impact their inevitable incompetence will have this time around...

Hey at least when the PSN went down you could play your games in single player.[...]

Which is exactly what I was saying

Ah, was unsure if thats what you were getting at or it was just a swift jab at the PSN. Which has otherwise been pretty much fine in my experience.

Hasn't Xbox Live been hacked 3 or 4 times now?

 

[The White Hunter]

Hasn't Xbox Live been hacked 3 or 4 times now?

If it has, then I, as a customer with payment information saved on their system, have not been informed. Which is illegal.

I remember at least 2 occurences of it being down due to external attacks for sme period of time, but those were a while ago.

And Microsoft... do something illegal?... I wonder why they'd possibly do something like that...

Actually idk if they ever break US laws (probably) but in the EU they break all kinds of laws and just get fines for it.

 

[UnnDunn]

Ah, was unsure if thats what you were getting at or it was just a swift jab at the PSN. Which has otherwise been pretty much fine in my experience.

Hasn't Xbox Live been hacked 3 or 4 times now?

No. It hasn't. It has been DDoS'd, it has gone down due to bugs, and for a while there were a spate of socially-engineered account thefts, but it was never hacked.

 

[Whoracle]

Ah, was unsure if thats what you were getting at or it was just a swift jab at the PSN. Which has otherwise been pretty much fine in my experience.

OK, in that case, let me rephrase that:
No matter what you do or who you are, every IT system has downtime. The more complex it gets, the more downtime it'll have. That's universsal.

The only thing you can do about it is to rely as little as possible on such systems, something which Sony actually did, surprisingly.
Microsoft (and all those touting into the CLOUD!!!11 horn, really), do the exact opposite of that. I'll spare you the lengthy discourse on WHY it is that way, because everyone with a passing familiarity with IT systems knows it already, at least on a basic level.

If need be, I'll elaborate later.

 

[The White Hunter]

Ah, was unsure if thats what you were getting at or it was just a swift jab at the PSN. Which has otherwise been pretty much fine in my experience.

OK, in that case, let me rephrase that:
No matter what you do or who you are, every IT system has downtime. The more complex it gets, the more downtime it'll have. That's universsal.

The only thing you can do about it is to rely as little as possible on such systems, something which Sony actually did, surprisingly.
Microsoft (and all those touting into the CLOUD!!!11 horn, really), do the exact opposite of that. I'll spare you the lengthy discourse on WHY it is that way, because everyone with a passing familiarity with IT systems knows it already, at least on a basic level.

If need be, I'll elaborate later.

Yeah I know, the cloud dependancy is a massive liability for the Xbox One and could seriously bite it in the arse. I'm also aware that "the cloud" is anything not confined to your closed local network, and it's nothing more than a fluffy marketing term,.

 

[Vivi22]

The Xbox One game licensing system benefits you in a number of ways. The biggest is that it frees you from discs. You buy a game disc, install it, and you put it back in the box and never have to worry about it again. If you want to play that game, you have immediate access to it, no matter where you are or whose Xbox One you are using. The shared library feature means you can give up to 10 friends access to your games, without passing discs around. If you have that one friend who always scratches your discs when you lend him your games, that will no longer be a problem. Simply put him on your shared library list, and he can download your game and play it without ever touching your discs. You don't have to ever worry about the dog chewing up your discs, or a burglar stealing them, or getting them scratched or dirty, or devoting space to storing them near your console.

They could have easily solved this by offering all games for purchase as digital copies at the same time retail copies are released. The idea that the licensing of physical copies as well and mandatory installs somehow frees people from being reliant on discs is bullshit. People buying at retail don't care, and those that don't buy at retail would be fine with digital purchases, making retail copies for them redundant anyway. It's a false solution to a made up problem, that also screws over those who don't want to be subject to whatever licensing restrictions a publisher decides to enforce.

Even worse, with a 500GB hard drive that can't be replaced, forcing everyone to install all of their games means that thing is going to get full pretty quickly. Especially several years down the road. Have fun deleting things when space is low and reinstalling them when you want to play them again because Microsoft didn't want to let you just buy a 1-2 TB hard drive and not have to worry about it.

Making Kinect mandatory gives developers the confidence that every Xbox One owner has a Kinect, which means they are going to build Kinect functionality into every game they make. This doesn't just mean having you flail your arms around. It also means voice chat and voice command and gameplay based on facial emotions. PS4 developers will not be sure that every PS4 owner has a PS Camera, so they will be less likely to build similar functionality. Basically, PS4 games will pretty much be PS3 games with better graphics, while Xbox One games will incorporate voice, gesture and emotion, giving you gameplay that Xbox 360 could never do. That's a big benefit.

It might be a big benefit if any company had actually demonstrated some ability to make Kinect games that don't suck. What's the real benefit of having a Kinect? Every Xbone will come packaged with an overpriced webcam and microphone so you can make video calls from the comfort of your couch and pre-teen kids can more easily swear at you in the new COD. Have fun with that.

allowing you to resell any game at any time through any retailer

Unless I'm mistaken, this is already out since only certain places will be able to delicense games from your account so they can be resold. Which would basically mean that if you want to buy or sell them on Ebay, at a flea market, or whatever else other than a big box retail store, you're shit out of luck.

 

[Anathrax]

It's the next watercooler[footnote]Watercooling not promised
[/footnote]

Erm... Well... Uuuh... It... gives you access to exclusives such as... Project Spark! (Oh wait that's on Windows 8 as well.) and... Titanfall!(PC)

...I have no clue. At all. I guess the Kinect sensor would be a nice yet overpriced gizmo to do some Yoga or exercise. It also has the controllers which look nice and would probably work well with the PC, probably better than a 360 controller.

Capacha: She sells
...PS4s.

 

[Austin Manning]

We don't know yet. However, the first product Microsoft did any sort of online DRM for was Office XP, which was released in 2001 (12 years ago). While the product has been discontinued, the Product Activation servers for it still work. I'd say that's a pretty good track record.

Have you heard of the original Xbox? Are it's multiplayer servers still running? No? Well I think we have our precedent then. I wouldn't trust Microsoft to not do the same to the Xbone whenever they attempt to launch a successor console.

 

[rob_simple]

Even worse, with a 500GB hard drive that can't be replaced, forcing everyone to install all of their games means that thing is going to get full pretty quickly. Especially several years down the road. Have fun deleting things when space is low and reinstalling them when you want to play them again because Microsoft didn't want to let you just buy a 1-2 TB hard drive and not have to worry about it.

Wait, you can't replace it? Why the hell not? My PS3 has a 140GB hard drive and I can only install half the games I own, I'm constantly having to delete old games to make space for new ones; I'm assuming with all the next-gen graphical polish 500GB is going to disappear in no time.

Any word on if the PS4 is going down the same road?

 

[Something Amyss]

Wait, you can't replace it? Why the hell not? My PS3 has a 140GB hard drive and I can only install half the games I own, I'm constantly having to delete old games to make space for new ones; I'm assuming with all the next-gen graphical polish 500GB is going to disappear in no time.

Any word on if the PS4 is going down the same road?

I'm moving half speed today, so apologies if this has been answered already.

Microsoft is either really stupid when it comes to storage or just thinks it's a trivial issue. The 360 still tops out at 250 GB for a price higher than it costs to buy your average 1 TB drive. The question of "why" has always seemed to be answered with "because shut up."

The Sony model for the PS4 is the same as the PS3, according to what they said. You can drop in a larger HDD of the appropriate size (I'm not sure if they said which size SATA drive it'd be, but I'd assume 2.5"). You're safe there, too.

Microsoft's answer to the fixed HDD is that you can use USB storage. However, for the 360 that tops out at 2X 16 GB. I don't know what we'll be able to use, but they're not filling me with confidence.

No. It hasn't. It has been DDoS'd, it has gone down due to bugs, and for a while there were a spate of socially-engineered account thefts, but it was never hacked.

To be fair, most people don't know the difference between a DDOS and hacking. This is really the only way 95% of what Anonymous does sounds impressive.

Herein lies the problem. Assuming we don't all just off ourselves one day before Microsoft goes bankrupt over something some day, Microsoft WILL shut down. Maybe not for many years, but at the very least, eventually. And then your 'digital' sales are useless, as the server you get them and play them on are gone.

The real problem is that the technology might stop being used here before it ever goes down.

The idea of Microsoft as a company going down in any even remote future is pretty laughable. It's probably going to outlive the actual hardware of the Xbone. However, Microsoft and other companies HAVE pulled the plug before, regardless of whether the tech is still viable.

In short, it's pointless to say "Azure isn't going anywhere."

 

[Chappy0]

Wait, you can't replace it? Why the hell not? My PS3 has a 140GB hard drive and I can only install half the games I own, I'm constantly having to delete old games to make space for new ones; I'm assuming with all the next-gen graphical polish 500GB is going to disappear in no time.

Any word on if the PS4 is going down the same road?

The PS4's hard drive is confirmed as removable and upgradable.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/06/11/e3-2013-playstation-4-hard-drive-is-removable-upgradable

 

[___________________]

It can watch you sleep.

 

[Hero of Lime]

What can Xbox One do for me? Halo, literally just Halo, that's about all I'm interested in as far as the next generation of Xbox is concerned. WAIT! I just realized I really need a nice new door stop.

I hate to be mean to Microsoft considering how much I love the 360, but Xbox One is such a turn off to me at the moment so I can't help it.

 

[faefrost]

The Xbox One game licensing system benefits you in a number of ways. The biggest is that it frees you from discs. You buy a game disc, install it, and you put it back in the box and never have to worry about it again. If you want to play that game, you have immediate access to it, no matter where you are or whose Xbox One you are using. The shared library feature means you can give up to 10 friends access to your games, without passing discs around. If you have that one friend who always scratches your discs when you lend him your games, that will no longer be a problem. Simply put him on your shared library list, and he can download your game and play it without ever touching your discs. You don't have to ever worry about the dog chewing up your discs, or a burglar stealing them, or getting them scratched or dirty, or devoting space to storing them near your console.

Making Kinect mandatory gives developers the confidence that every Xbox One owner has a Kinect, which means they are going to build Kinect functionality into every game they make. This doesn't just mean having you flail your arms around. It also means voice chat and voice command and gameplay based on facial emotions. PS4 developers will not be sure that every PS4 owner has a PS Camera, so they will be less likely to build similar functionality. Basically, PS4 games will pretty much be PS3 games with better graphics, while Xbox One games will incorporate voice, gesture and emotion, giving you gameplay that Xbox 360 could never do. That's a big benefit.

It remains to be seen how the game resale situation on Xbox One will play out. It's possible publishers will keep the current status quo, allowing you to resell any game at any time through any retailer, free of charge. Or they could do something completely off-the-wall. Who knows.

Well spoken and some great arguments in favor of the XBone. There are some counter points to them.

1. The game licensing system and the not needing disks. Yes this is a perfectly valid point. And it is one that Steam, iTunes and SONY PSN have all used and benefited from. But at least in those platforms the use of it is a choice. You can either take full ownership of the product in the form of the physical media or you can choose to go digital for the convenience and accept the risks and the limited ownership. MS has stripped out one of the choices. The one they left was already there. This new change really doesn't offer anything to the consumer that they did not already have as an option. So the entirety of the benefit is the producers not the consumers. The consumer simply lost an option and gained nothing in return.

2. The Kinect. Yeah it sounds good on paper. But some of it's features are just really really creepy. I don't want my games reading my facial expressions while I game. I certainly don't want them broadcasting my facial expressions or heart rate or whatever out to online strangers. And it watches me in the dark? It hears my heartbeat and measures metabolic and biometric data based on skin tones? This is like inviting the creepy sparkly vampire dude from Twilight into your house. As far as developers making use of it? As someone above pointed out, the big money really is in multi platform games. Most game developers tend to shy away from single console gimmicks. This is why 3rd party developers tend to avoid Nintendo consoles, and certainly why they aren't messing much with the WiiU. This turns the whole thing into a self fulfilling downward spiral much as we saw with all of the motion gaming fad.

 

[ObsidianJones_v1legacy]

Do we know what happens yet to your ability to keep playing these games when the console's servers are taken down in how ever many years?

It is a long long way off, that's true, but it will come around one day, and I imagine people would not be very happy to find their entire library worthless 10-13 years down the road.

We don't know yet. However, the first product Microsoft did any sort of online DRM for was Office XP, which was released in 2001 (12 years ago). While the product has been discontinued, the Product Activation servers for it still work. I'd say that's a pretty good track record.

Hi, we haven't met yet. I'm Escapist Microsoft Detractor #4367, if the trends around here are to be believed. My special power is that I talk about the Zune HD, and when Microsoft bailed on that product, they made it impossible to reload or change the videos that you bought legally from their website onto your zune, stopped your ability to communicate with your friends or contact list, and took away the ability to load apps onto your zune product [http://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-closing-some-zune-music-features-after-friday]. All things you paid money for and expected to you via the Zune. No reason to take some of these things away, like apps since they have to be loaded on your computer to actually be loaded onto your Zune. They just figured they should do that to us.

Well, my special power is all used up. Since I bought a Zune myself, I'm very skeptical and wary to put down money for a product that the company feels it has the right to take away functions that really doesn't involve them any more randomly. But I do hope other people have more luck than we Zune owners, and I mean that.

 

[rob_simple]

Wait, you can't replace it? Why the hell not? My PS3 has a 140GB hard drive and I can only install half the games I own, I'm constantly having to delete old games to make space for new ones; I'm assuming with all the next-gen graphical polish 500GB is going to disappear in no time.

Any word on if the PS4 is going down the same road?

I'm moving half speed today, so apologies if this has been answered already.

Microsoft is either really stupid when it comes to storage or just thinks it's a trivial issue. The 360 still tops out at 250 GB for a price higher than it costs to buy your average 1 TB drive. The question of "why" has always seemed to be answered with "because shut up."

The Sony model for the PS4 is the same as the PS3, according to what they said. You can drop in a larger HDD of the appropriate size (I'm not sure if they said which size SATA drive it'd be, but I'd assume 2.5"). You're safe there, too.

Microsoft's answer to the fixed HDD is that you can use USB storage. However, for the 360 that tops out at 2X 16 GB. I don't know what we'll be able to use, but they're not filling me with confidence.

Thanks for the information, I've already suffered at the hands of Microsoft's custom HDD's when I bought my 4GB new model to replace my original RRoD'd model and was delighted to discover the spare 320GB HDD I had for my PS3 wouldn't fit in it.

Obviously the old gigantic HDD for the original 360 was no use, until I took matters into my own hands:

Spoiler

Still, it's good to know I'm safe with Sony --yet another reason for me to stick with them next gen-- as opposed to Microsoft's revolutionary idea to essentially bring back the memory card system from the late 90's (because who doesn't have fond memories of trying to remember which card had which games on it.)