E3 has gone by, and (of course) talk was dominated by the new consoles… As everybody knows, Sony won E3, and Microsoft fumbled along, screwing up massively… but more on this later…
First, the most interesting things I’ve seen from this E3 (that I didn’t see in previous events):
Quantic Dreams had a tech demo that ran on PS4 in realtime that was quite impressive… and this tech demo is actually quite funny… Although I don’t appreciate David Cage and his self-appointed mission as the messiah of gaming, I got to hand it to the man, he knows how to write… 
Anyway, pretty impressive stuff on next-gen (although I shiver thinking about the actual cost of doing something like this).
Project Spark is Microsoft’s answer to Little Big Planet, but on steroids… and it looks very interesting…
I’m in love with the concept of teaching “programing” to the masses, specially young kids, and I’m sure that if I had the resources/money/time, I’d really invest on something like this… But this one is exceptionally well made, and although I’m not a tinkerer by nature (which in my opinion is the target of this one), I couldn’t help but get excited…
The Division is some sort of MMORPG taking place inside a Tom Clancy universe… so, conspiracy theories, paramilitary secret organizations, the works… It seems like it’s a new take on MMORPGs, which might be a breath of fresh hair the MMORPG market needs (I’ve finally quit WoW, so I might need something to keep me occupied in that space)… I’m not sure if this is exactly a MMORPG, but it definitely has MMORPG-elements in it…
Finally, the XBox One debacle… Well, everybody knows what’s up on that… First Microsoft imposes an always-on device that requires an internet connection every 24-hours and draconian DRM, stopping used-games and effectively curbing consumer rights without getting anything in return…
After, it goes 180 degrees and reverts those policies (pressured by Sony’s absence of those measures), while sounding very sour-grapes about it…
I’ll start by saying that I don’t intend to buy a XBox-One, at least not at launch… I’ll probably go for the PS4 (it looks more powerful and doesn’t piss me off that much)…
The the funny thing about this whole debacle is the way people created the battleground… Specially the defenders of Microsoft policies, which don’t seem to grasp the problem, hiding behind the shield of innovation as it excused every bad decisions Microsoft made on this, and using pure conjecture of what the future might be to justify it, while ignoring the pure facts:
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Microsoft decided that I’m not the owner of anything I purchase, they are… On the physical games (which I still buy: don’t forget special editions are still a highly profitable market for the developers and publishers), I still have to be connected… my question is: why?! They have the physical medium, verify that… If they want to disregard the medium, yes, by all means, require an online connection for that, but if there’s a physical medium, there’s no excuse for it… ok, they want to block the fact that I can install the game on my console and use my online connection while somebody else plays my game on offline mode using the DVD… Oh no! A pirate! What’s the benefit for the consumer here? Of course, this was reverted, but in a begrudging way which didn’t set them apart from Sony, instead of trying to work in both modes…
Besides, trusting this system as a gateway for my games is actually believing that the service won’t have any down time… So, if Live has a problem for more than 24 hours, I can’t play, that’s great! Even yesterday, Live was down for 2 hours… and now it’s not supporting the (mandatory) logins of millions of players… It’s supporting about 100k players… When that number scales up at least two orders of magnitude, will it keep up? And this is just technical issues, not malicious… If someone wants to knock it down, they can,… last year, Sony had a one month and a half of downtime because of a hack… If that happened with XBox Live, people wouldn’t be able to play their OFFLINE, PURCHASED games? -
Used-sales… I can understand this one, but it seemed that the system as it was built was made to stop people from buying second hand games without a viable alternative that could reward publishers for their efforts… A lot of defenders said that this measure would allow for cheaper games, but nothing in the industries long history point in that direction… that would be more profit for the developers/publishers, but games wouldn’t become cheaper because of that… the big retail chains would probably make it even harder for prices to be able to fluctuate due to this… So, the benefit for the consumer on this one would be a theoretical one, a “we’ll see”-type of situation… This one was reverted as well.
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No decent indie support… You can’t show off Notch and say you’re supporting indie, just after you say there will be no self-publishing and killing XNA (the basis for indie on XBox 360), without a viable alternative in place… This hasn’t changed, and it’s one of the deal-breakers for me… Although I’m not an indie-elitist (I love both my AAA gaming, and my indie gaming equally), indie games is where the innovation is at the moment, and some of the most pleasant moments I’ve had in the last years was playing indie and semi-indie (I’m thinking of things like XCom and Telltale Games) titles… While the semi-indies shouldn’t have no problems getting on the service, true indie studios are shafted… Again, what’s the consumer’s interest in this? Less variety/choice of games?
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Always-On Kinect: So I can turn it off, it seems, but after everything that’s been said (and the current Prism scandal), I don’t simply trust any corporation with that kind of access… No, I‘m not doing anything illegal at home, no I’m not a conspiracy freak, no, I don’t even believe they’ll use it that way (too much data to sift through to be usefull)… It’s the principle… It’s Orwellian and if we say it’s ok now, there will be a time when we believe it’s excessive and out of line, and at that time it will be harder to do something about it…
And what’s the benefit for the user? I can wave my hands around to command my XBox? I can give it voice commands (in English, because in my native language, that kind of crap NEVER works)… This wasn’t reverted and shouldn’t change… -
Speaking of regions, region-lock… XBox services were severely lacking in my country, so I’m not expecting that to change in a small country like mine… so, most my games come from online shops. All that TV stuff will be available for the US and UK, not Portugal, so what’s the benefit there for me? And if you factor countries that are even smaller than Portugal, Microsoft is losing a lot of target market there, so why do games for XBox One and target 10 countries, when I can do them for PS4 and target 200? This was reverted, so it’s a moot point now…
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End of life: consoles aren’t backwards compatible, so what happens to my games when Microsoft decides it’s not worth supporting the XBox One? I’m a collector, I like having my games so I can get all nostalgic about them… But Microsoft (and it’s supporters) say that I’m backwards and I should live in the future… in my opinion a dystopian future where a single company controls and curates what I can/can’t watch, play, etc… Because Apple is already doing that, and Microsoft is trying with the Windows Store and stuff…
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XBox One is a mid-range PC, period… In one or two years, it will be completely surpassed by any 500€ PC (specially with NVidia’s idea of selling their chip designers to 3rd party vendors), and I’m betting that we’ll see a resurgence in PC ports of games (it’s cost-effective again, since both the PS4 and the XBox One will be fundamentally PCs), so if I get an XBox, I’m trading the convenience of the PC for the DRM of Microsoft (while in the past it used to be the exact opposite)
So, exactly where is the consumer benefit? Of being able to go someplace without my console and if there’s an XBox One there, I can play my games?! How often does that happen? In my case, not enough to justify 500€ and the lack of ownership of my own stuff!
Microsoft has acted with an arrogance that doesn’t sit well with me, calling consumers names (backwards, dinossaur, etc) when they didn’t get on board with what they thought was “the future” (because Microsoft can totally call that!), and for that they proved that the most important thing for them is not the consumer, but their bottom-line…
I’m all in favor of companies making profits, but making profits of happy consumers, not drones that have no choice…
As a final remark, I have no doubt that Sony was thinking of doing exactly the same and they gave up on it when they saw the backlash, but even that proves that Sony is more concerned about the consumer than Microsoft: Sony backed off because of the consumer backlash, Microsoft backed off because Sony wasn’t going to do it as well…
This generation, I’m going with a PS4 as a primary (unless there’s some huge change in the near future)… and I might even hold off on that, and maybe invest 400€ on a new video card for my PC and play the games there… The only games I’m really interested at the moment are “Watch Dogs” (will have a PC port) and “Assassin’s Creed 4” (also has a PC port), so I might do a “wait-and-see”…
If the console manufacturers don’t wise up, this might be the last generation of consoles, which I don’t know if it’s a good thing or not… So, wait and see… wait and see…
