Figure I may as well get my thoughts down for the sake of venting and it's too long for Twitter and something I don't want to put on my 'real' blog.
Don't know about you guys, but the last few years of Microsoft keynotes at E3 have left me disappointed. I wanted things to be different today, but I can't say I'm surprised at the outcome.
Elsewhere I said I expected three things from this evening:
- Dancing six-year-olds
- Dumb cable tv shit
- The Call of Duty bit
Two of three isn't bad.
If you asked me what I found liked about the Sony presser, I'd tell you that it was reassuring. Sony have identified a bunch of things they did wrong, and they're working to correct them. To top it off, everything was related to the key reason I'd consider buying that console: THE GAMES (you're probably going to hear that sentiment a lot).
As much as I value the sense of platform agnosticism I've finally managed to garner over the last few cycles, it pains me to see Microsoft dismiss Sony's effort in the interests of doubling-down on a bunch of things I couldn't care less about.
Kinect has been out for three years and I still don't want it. Now Microsoft are insistent that I'll care about it for the wrong reasons: not because I'll *want* to, but because the system apparently won't function without it plugged in. So now I'll have to deal with the space it takes up and the extra power it draws just for the sake of something I'll be doing my best to skirt around in whatever way possible.
As for the TV stuff, this has been a staple of Microsoft conference's far the past few years, and I could see it coming from a mile off. They even made a point of circling back around to it several times. Yet I still don't understand it. Why, for what's supposedly an international product, do Microsoft continue to dedicate a fair chunk of these things to lauded deals with cable companies that even be available to people outside the US?
To be fair, the instantaneous switching from game to TV and the number of ports on the back suggest that some of this stuff will be passthrough. That's kind of cool, I wouldn't mind saving an HDMI port (I have a DVD player I got in 2000 that I continue to use merely because it has a spare SCART socket on the back). But I wasn't that eager to rush out and buy a cable box anyway.
Truth is, I simply don't watch a lot of TV. Not because it's "too challenging", but because I find games more stimulating. I don't need watching TV to be "easier", because sitting there staring at a screen is as easy as it gets. Furthermore, it's not MS's responsibility to make television "more immersive", nor will they achieve that goal by mandating that I look at my phone every two minutes.
Finally, the Call of Duty bit. As predictable as the yearly sports franchises that we knew would be on this thing anyway, and yet again another substantial chunk dedicated to something I knew was coming but haven't cared about since 2009. Or the ten years before that when I bought my last FIFA game.
Sure, there was some new IP announced at this thing. But the problem is, the same developer announced a game the last time around and we didn't see it for five years. Do they really want to try that strategy again?
So, in closing, they hit the same beats that I didn't want them to. Again. And more often than not, anything new I hear about this console makes me want it less, whether it's the ambiguity of what "always on" really means or the flip-flopping over the subject of how used games will work (not because I really need to get my games cheaper, but because no one will address the problem of games going out of print after a year). Yeah, it's easy to say that conference wasn't for us, and we should just wait for the 'proper' unveil at E3, but what do we do if they haven't learned anything by then either?
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