It took me several tries to succinctly write down my thoughts on this subject. I finally did so satisfactorily in a comment on Reddit, which this Blog post is based on...
Like many (though by no means all) other video game fans, I was pretty disappointed by Microsoft's Xbox One reveal. Aside from a name which gets stupider the more you hear it, and is even worse when abbreviated (XONE), the Xbox One strategy is such a non-response to the problems in the gaming industry at the moment. And there are many. Not least of which is how expensive the kinds of games we buy on discs for home consoles are, both to buy and to produce.
Microsoft have made one concession, I suppose, in the form of switching to x86 processors to make porting between console and PC easier (a concession which only really matters because Sony independently picked the same architecture).
That doesn't help all that much though, because the cost of producing assets is going spike significantly, as it has already been doing, with relatively little improvement in gameplay terms to show for it. These triple-a games are still going to be too expensive to produce more than a few a year, sell for too high an MSRP for consumers, and Microsoft (though not Sony) is making life difficult for independent developers by requiring games to have a publisher, at a time when independent developers are the ones producing all the more innovative and exciting games (which, not coincidentally, are also generally the games which don't need next gen horsepower to delight us). Nintendo and Sony are, by stark contrast, actively courting indies.
Similarly, the Xbox One was rolled out with very few games to show, and the ones they did show are just the same old yearly franchises rehashed, and another high-minded effort to conflate games and movies or high-end TV shows which will be hyped to shit and inevitably flop like that idea does every generation. Microsoft may rectify it at E3, but arguably that's too late. They get to make one first impression, to tell us what their new box is about. And it's not about games, let alone new experiences in gaming.
It's about all the other forms of entertainment - the cheaper ones which actually do not NEED a $400 box and a monthly LIVE Gold subscription fee to be enjoyed on the TV because AppleTV and Roku have been around for YEARS already and cost under $100. And on the gaming side, it promised another five to seven years of EA shoving out a very slightly tweaked Fifa or Madden every year and Activision developing a new CoD engine now and churning out glorified expansion packs based on the game that launched it until the cows come home.
That really isn't going to keep working. This business model is unsustainable, so Nintendo are trying new things. So is Sony to some extent - though their box is likely to be just as too expensive as Microsoft's and I doubt the third parties will do much more than continue as they are on Sony's hardware either, so it'll be up to SCE to produce the innovative games. Microsoft surveyed a changed media landscape and a video game market in desparate need of disruption and said "let's stay the course".
For the time being, the only next-gen console I can see myself definitely buying is the Wii U, because it's cheap, it does some novel things to keep things interesting and it will let me play some of my favourite games, like Mario Kart, in HD for the first time. Beyond that, it's Sony's vision with the PS4 that I find most convincing. Nevertheless, the likely cost will prevent me from seriously considering investing in their platform until...Gosh, probably after E3 2015 at the earliest. The Seventh generation may have been too long, but in many ways I really don't see the world being ready for these new, expensive beasts.
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