@hailinel: When neither one of them can go out and get any new information and just regurgitate what other sites and other authors on their own site say, yea those articles are useless. I'm sure glad they wrote two articles because I didn't know Microsoft was being super confusing about their reveal. Giantbomb hitting you with the FACTS!! Giantbomb your #1 site for duplicate stories!!
@hailinel: When neither one of them can go out and get any new information and just regurgitate what other sites and other authors on their own site say, yea those articles are useless. I'm sure glad they wrote two articles because I didn't know Microsoft was being super confusing about their reveal. Giantbomb hitting you with the FACTS!! Giantbomb your #1 site for duplicate stories!!
its not duplicating. It is a conclusion. Other news site are very conflicting right now about this topic. And this is what he gets out of all of this.
The show was disappointing but it really was what I was expecting. Which is why I'm not really judging anything until E3 shows some games. But the consistent negativity and the unclear messaging since the unveil is the worst damn thing.
So Alex basically articulated what I was thinking in article form.
Pretty much this.. that MS show was all the boring parts of an E3 presentation. They could still win or loose big. To early too tell.
@fiberpay: So two people looking at the same event can't discuss their thoughts and come up to the same conclusion?
Here is a thought experiment for you: What other article should they either have done? This was clearly the biggest news of the week second only to Microsoft's follow up non-responses. Should they ignore the biggest sets of news events this week (maybe even the month) because one has a regular column the day before the other one?
ps. If Microsoft was trying to spare us from "the boring parts" they failed. If "the boring parts" are boring why invite the game press and get it on Spike TV? Here is a crazy thought: If some detail is boring to the audience, they need to change the message or change the audience where Microsoft didn't bother to do either.
However I do have a problem with the actual content of the reveal; neither the TV or sports features will be available to people (like me) who live outside the US. If things like that are the major focus of Xbox One (apart from games obviously), as the presentation made it seem, it definitely makes me lean towards getting a PS4 instead. It would feel strange getting a system where major parts of its functionality was useless to me. It's obviously too early to tell, but as things stand right now, an Xbox One would not be my first choice of console.
@recspec: Great and then once the xbox has solidly ignored it's core audience and the purchasers of the system feel completely betrayed and milked for a substandard product they can release the 'Xbox U Two ' and be relegated to irrelevance when their mainstream audience gets distracted by the next shiny thing.
@oti_xero: Excellently put. It's not that different from hype really, well except the fact that popular opinion is almost exclusively in the negative zone.
When Microsoft said that this wasn't for the video game audience, I assumed they were talking about the presentation. After the spread focus and the unclear messaging it seems more accurate to say they were talking about the machine.
I wasn't expecting games at the reveal I was expecting a games console. Before the event I thought I was probably a big part of who they were building the Xbox for, now I know I'm not. That's okay, companies I support release products I have no use for all the time, hell Apple's been doing it for five years, but Microsoft should know that when you completely change the target audience for a product from one iteration to the next, you should expect backlash. Didn't they just go through this with Windows Eight? It's a shame they weren't more prepared.
I can't wait to see what they have at E3, but I'm far more apprehensive than everyone else.
"so if you were one of those people screaming "BUT WHERE ARE THE GAMES?!?" at your screen, you likely did this for naught" – and yet, Microsoft invited a truckload of games journalists.
Not surprising at all that an hour long press conference for a broad, mainstream audience isn't well received by people who read gaming websites (which is kind of why MS told us upfront that this wasn't intended for us).
People keep pointing out this whole "its not for us" thing. That does not hold water at all. For starters it was at 10am to 1pm depending on your time zone. Effectively eliminating every demographic they were shooting for. For the casual adults they were at work and cannot watch it. And for teens they were still in school. Hell even college students on break have summer jobs they are at.
The only people who were going to watch it were the dedicated gamers due to it's incredibly awkward scheduling. I lucked out and got that Tuesday off, which I always work and got to watch it otherwise I wouldn't have even gotten to.
It was on Spike TV for another thing. Spike isn't this incredibly broad viewer base. Really who watches Spike? The only popular original stuff they have is all at night and the rest of the day is 80's action movies and 1000 Ways to Die reruns. If it was truly for the casual Madden and Call of Duty doesn't follow games players place it at like 8pm in place of one of their shitty MMA fighting reality shows.
Another if they really are trying to capture this average dude casual gamer everything they showed for them from CoD Ghosts to the new EA Sports line up its all available for the 360 or PS3 they already own. This kind of consumer does not come out en masse for a launch. They wait a couple years for a price drop or a console refresh. This is the same consumer who was playing Madden 10 and Tiger Woods on PS2 just a few years ago. They just got a new console. You're not going to sway them on a potentially $500 system when they can spend $60 for Ghosts on 360/PS3 or get Madden "25" in August like they always do instead of 3/4 of the way through the season .
@hailinel: When neither one of them can go out and get any new information and just regurgitate what other sites and other authors on their own site say, yea those articles are useless. I'm sure glad they wrote two articles because I didn't know Microsoft was being super confusing about their reveal. Giantbomb hitting you with the FACTS!! Giantbomb your #1 site for duplicate stories!!
As others have said, their articles aren't about reporting new information, it's about the conclusions that each of them individually drew. Such as how I'm drawing the conclusion at this point that your an Xbox fanboy that's furious multiple articles have been written trashing Microsoft's inability to provide a straight answer to any query that the press has lobbed at them.
Good writeup. Evidence that you can write something about the past week without having to resort to profanity or scream at a camera for 20 minutes and post it to youtube.
If indeed the XboxOne has to "phone home" once a day, then how can anyone in the military possibly purchase one? There may be times when a member has to go overseas (Afghanistan/Iraq/etc.) and they won't be able to hook a console up to the internet, but they'll still be able to play it. So Microsoft will just brick their XboxOne for however long the military person might be deployed?
@theger: The structure of the event was definitely a problem. If this was a mainstream event, a section of the audience should have had sport writers in it to throw up a column on ESPN.com about the future of sports games. There should have been writers from TV Guide and TV sites to throw up a column about the future of TV.
Let me share an example: Every time a new GT game is released, there's usually a small article in Motor Trend, a car magazine I read. Why? Because the game caters to a wider audience than only game enthusiasts. If MS wanted their messaging to be clear then Jeff should have been sharing a room with writers from other fields.
Spot on across the board. While the presentation was completely worthless for most of us people who want a gaming console, I actually thought it was smart of MS to position the console in such a way. They're not directly trying to compete against Sony, which is probably a good thing for both parties.
But yea, it was absolutely everything after the conference that was downright despicable. I've never seen a console announcement give me so many reasons not to buy one (and those reasons having nothing to do with a price tag).
Their statement on backwards compatibility says it all; it's not a console made for the players, it's a console made for MS. At least that's the impression they gave all of us last week. Sheer arrogance.
@hailinel: Yes you're right. I forgot that no one on this site could actually do any work and get a story so they just have to write how the feel or other regurgitated articles from other websites.
@hailinel: Yes you're right. I forgot that no one on this site could actually do any work and get a story so they just have to write how the feel or other regurgitated articles from other websites.
You do know what editorials and opinion pieces are, I assume? Because it sure doesn't sound like it.
I would rather read a summary/reaction article like this than another one of dozens of conflicting and speculative articles claiming to have new information when there is none to be had. Also, this is Alex's Sunday feature thing, and of course it would be able this topic after all that's been going on.
The online requirement is a no-go for me. That's just not something I'm going to buy into for a closed, single-source platform. That's essentially a lease agreement not ownership. I don't lease.
Hopefully sony offers an offline console. They didn't mention anything about required online checks so it's looking alright so far.
The amount of misinformation and just pure confusion on the part of Microsoft over this is just absolutely baffling. They have had months since the PS4 reveal, giving them the perfect opportunity to turn everything into a fine oiled machine, built for the purpose of countering Sony. Instead, it felt like they had just decided what was going on the day before, and everyone was still trying to remember the details. It was sloppy, and for no acceptable reason.
@hailinel: I sure do, they are cheap fluff with no effort put into them.
Sorry, but no.
You can keep going down this road and ensure that no one on this site takes you seriously, or you can wise up and maybe stop rushing to the defense of what was an unquestionably poor performance on the part of Microsoft's PR.
The amount of misinformation and just pure confusion on the part of Microsoft over this is just absolutely baffling. They have had months since the PS4 reveal, giving them the perfect opportunity to turn everything into a fine oiled machine, built for the purpose of countering Sony. Instead, it felt like they had just decided what was going on the day before, and everyone was still trying to remember the details. It was sloppy, and for no acceptable reason.
That was definitely the strangest thing. They had a complete advantage here to counter all the rumors and competition, but they gave a conference that was that seemed completely oblivious to everything that's happened these last few months.
I would almost say that they planned this event and their statements long before Sony's event, and decided to not change it at all (though they did delay the event, and one can only wonder for what reasons).
@hailinel: Actually it is quite questionable. It was a good performance if you ask me. They showed what the box could do for the casual audience and announced a bunch of games to be shown at E3. That's better than Sony saying jack shit about their services.
The lack of games at the reveal wasn't the turn-off for me as I don't particularly enjoy Microsoft Game Studio's homegrown games. Much more off-putting, from both the reveal and the statements afterwards, was the fact that MS seems to want to sell me all of the disadvantages of an online console and a digital library, wrapped up in a lot of gimmicky functionality built around a pastime that I don't indulge in, while showing no real forward movement as a games platform.
I am also deeply unconvinced by "the potential of the cloud." Their plans for distributed computing in a gaming context seem completely unfeasible in the near future (the WSJ article's suggestion that the cloud could render environments while the console focuses on characters is a total nonsense, for example) so it seems very much like marketing fluff designed to counter reports of the Playstation's power advantage.
You make some very good points in this article Alex but I want to argue about one of them. Saying the conference was for the mainstream (whatever that is) makes no sense when the reveal was at 10 in the morning which is a time when nobody outside of those interested in the game industry would be paying attention. The whole thing struck me as MS not knowing who their audience is and trying to push against trends that consumers have already established. As consumers we have decided we like to look at our phone or tablet when watching something in the background, but MS seems to think we want to shrink the size of the main thing on the TV so we can multitask on there. Who asked for this? (except MS of course)
this definitely ... because we are the ones who tuned in to se this clusterfuck ... and please the show itself with all the bullshit pr words cant be good in anyway.
@hailinel: Actually it is quite questionable. It was a good performance if you ask me. They showed what the box could do for the casual audience and announced a bunch of games to be shown at E3. That's better than Sony saying jack shit about their services.
At this point, you're doing the equivalent of putting fingers in your ears and singing the Star-Spangled Banner at the top of your lungs. How do you explain Microsoft's responses to basic questions like online requirements or requirements to play a used game? Microsoft representatives have made multiple completely contradictory statements on both in the past week. Further, the press conference itself boiled down to three things:
TV
Sports
Call of Duty
Yes, I'm sure that all three of those points are relevant to someone, but the press invited to the event do not, by and large, cater to the casual dudebro crowd of Madden/Call of Duty players that will play both of those games regardless of what anyone in the press says about them. They are not the sort that are easily charmed by the technological wizardry of putting a dog in a motion-capture suit. Of the technical specs of the console itself, Microsoft has said very little that's actually meaningful. Saying that it has five billion transistors may be a statistical fact but is otherwise completely meaningless. Further, while it has Kintect in every box and the Kinect hardware is now apparently a developer requirement, their stage demo did nothing to actually indicate how much better the hardware is. Those hand gestures and voice commands on stage? Those could all have been easily part of some choreographed demo with someone pushing buttons behind a curtain. And it does nothing to solve the basic fact that a lot of people either don't want to have Kinect forced upon them, or don't have a living environment that's suitable for it.
And you're saying Sony talked jack shit about their services? Let me reiterate; despite repeated questioning, there is still no clear answer to the basic question of what the Xbox One's online requirements are or if I can even let a friend borrow my game disc without his having to pay out of pocket for the ability to play it on his own console and account.
The only thing the Xbox One reveal and Microsoft's subsequent handling of the press has accomplished is make me decide to switch to Playstation this generation.
It is totally possible that the Xbox One is fine. But we don't know, because they've done such a poor job of managing their information. I'd rather just not bother than be unpleasantly surprised later on.
Now who's putting their fingers in their ears and saying blah blah blah. Sony showed nothing but games that are coming out on existing consoles and told us nothing about their system services.
I think Microsoft was trying to address everyone in this first conference. "It's a lot of laying the foundation, and then just a couple weeks later we go to E3, and E3 is all about the games. It's going to be tons of exclusives [and] world premieres." It's a different approach to how Sony chose to divide up its presentations. As far as the actual presentation itself, I think they did exactly what they said they would. They showed the physical console, the controller, and the new Kinect. They showed the UI and some usage scenarios, they showed some TV stuff, they showed some games. You can't go into this type of press conference expecting questions to all your answers, especially this far out from release when things are in fluctuation. You're certainly not going to hear anyone talk about something potentially controversial, like used game restrictions, online requirements, or what features will require an Xbox Live subscription, unless they know that they have good news ("Hey everyone, Xbox Live is now free!" for example.)
All in all I think the presentation itself was fine, if not a little predictable. It's the stuff that surrounded it that really undermined the whole thing. I bet Microsoft was really happy that they could show the actual hardware where Sony could not, but nobody on the Internet cares in comparison to everything else going on.
Now who's putting their fingers in their ears and saying blah blah blah. Sony showed nothing but games that are coming out on existing consoles and told us nothing about their system services.
I don't remember all of the games they showed at the Sony event, but I do know that Infamous: Second Son is a PS4 game. (Were you paying attention?) And while Sony didn't say much regarding system services, they also didn't constantly throw conflicting answers at the press. It's better to say "No comment" or "Wait until E3" than to say something inaccurate if you honestly don't know what the answer is.
@hailinel: So they showed one PS4 game at the PS4 reveal and told us none of their services........wow another home run Sony.
Actually I would rather know a little bit about the services than just have Sony say "ummm yea we got used games". Thanks Sony that tells me alot. I'm on board with the PS4 so much information!!!
@hailinel: So they showed one PS4 game at the PS4 reveal and told us none of their services........wow another home run Sony.
Actually I would rather know a little bit about the services than just have Sony say "ummm yea we got used games". Thanks Sony that tells me alot. I'm on board with the PS4 so much information!!!
Allow me to reiterate again, using simple sentences and small words:
Sony did not state many specifics, but neither did they misinform the press and public with contradictory statements. They have left the press and public wondering what they will reveal at E3.
Microsoft did not state many specifics, but when pressed, gave multiple contradictory answers regarding key points people had been wondering about for months, resulting in confusion and anger.
I'm sorry. Some of those words may have been too large for you. Regardless, I'm done here. Talk to you later.
Who cares about all this crap? If Microsoft does not give you the answers you are looking for then don't buy their product. Its that simple. What is complaining about it going to do? I never understand why people complain about stuff that Microsoft and EA do. Don't give them your money if you don't like it! Big corporations like Microsoft and EA do not care about what people think, that's why they do what they do and yapping about it is not going to change anything. Hit them in the pocket book and then you will start to see a different response
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