I like Kinect. And the wifey gets some extra motivation for her Zumba by something that keeps score, so I think they're on to something there.  It smokes the Wii, interface wise (go find the Alec Baldwin SNL clip...)

As for the horror show that is MS's publicity, can't argue that.  Several features they were discussing are the exact sort of thing you don't tell your customers.  Publishers, sure.  But yeah.

I really like my Steam account.  At first I worried about the DRM, but I have since replaced my PC - three times.  The ability to never worry about keys, system locks, or DVD scratches is a good tradeoff, IMO.  Besides, I can't think of a single piece of PC software that I have ever resold.

Finally, I find it super ironic that the Xbox One catches so much hell for something the Wii has been doing for almost a decade now. Don't believe me? Wait until it breaks and you try to move your digital content to a new unit.  It's locked not to a single user, but to a single piece of hardware.  But no lets freak out about the better of the two options, because it's cool.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;664218I decided yesterday that from now on, I'm referring to it not as Xbox 1, but as Xbox 180

I've been favoring the "XBone".

What do you all think of the Ouya? http://www.ouya.tv/

Think it will gain any traction against the Big Three?

Quote from: Spinachcat;664680What do you all think of the Ouya? http://www.ouya.tv/

Think it will gain any traction against the Big Three?

Doubt it.

A good rule of thumb is that "the next big thing" is rarely predicted by any sizable amount of people, so if lots of people are saying that it'll "take on the big three" it probably won't.

Quote from: Spinachcat;664680What do you all think of the Ouya? http://www.ouya.tv/

Think it will gain any traction against the Big Three?

I actually own one. Was a KS backer.

I can't judge it, since it won't have its official launch for a couple days. But right now it's kind of rough. It's improved, but the UI and interface is not great.

The controller is better than I thought it would be, but worse than I hoped. It's more like a $20 semi-cheap 3rd party controller as opposed to the $5 super cheap you can buy. It's not terrible, but it's nowhere near as good at the 360/Dual Shock

I don't think it will gain traction. It just doesn't have much in the way of games. It's funny, you hear all this press about how wonderful indie games are, especially with Sony promoting them. But the Ouya is basically all indie games and it barely gets a mention in the press these days.

I guess because most of the Ouya games are indie even by indie standards. You have low budget games from 1-2 people.

I was expecting more of the higher quality mobile games to make it. Stuff by Gameloft, Gamevil, etc. Which isn't anywhere near console standards, really, but stuff that is decent enough and a PITA to play on tablets without buttons.

On the plus side though, it's really nice because everything has a demo (or is free). And there are some gems. And I think it might be competitive versus the Vita.

Quote from: Piestrio;664138Looks like Microsoft is pulling a 180 and removing the "check in every 24 hours" and "can't play used games" crap.

On the one hand, hey that's awesome.

On the other hand you already showed everyone how stupid you were, it's a little hard to put that genie back in the bottle.

It's an interesting story. MS was clearly trying to move towards digital as their primary delivery channel, and these policies were in support of that. But to say they bungled the message would be something of an understatement (it's also possibly true that a lot of people don't want digital to be the primary delivery channel).

I can't believe Microsoft were claiming that it'd be more convenient to download an entire game to a friend's XBox 1 than it would be to just lug the disc over to their place. What sort of weird hyperfast broadband bubble do you need to live in to believe that that's going to be the situation for all of your consumers? For that matter, how elitist do you have to be to say "Welp, if you don't have an always-on broadband connection we don't actually want you as a customer"?

I also can't believe their petulance in announcing that all those cool new features they were going to bring out like Family Sharing aren't going to happen now. Um, guys, why not apply those solely to games bought via download and let people who prefer physical media use their physical media they way they expect to be able to? There's no good reason to treat games bought via one route exactly the same as games bought via a different medium, and whilst the options given looked crazy-restrictive when applied to games on physical media they actually seemed quite nice when applied to downloaded games.

Fire the entire Microsoft PR division, they're clearly incapable.

Quote from: Grymbok;665184But to say they bungled the message would be something of an understatement [...]

I know people who work at Microsoft in the games division and I'm trying to get confirmation on a couple of things, but I will say this: in general, Microsoft is nowhere near as stupid or incompetent as popular opinion has it.  90% of people's complaints about Microsoft products come from a deep ignorance of what Microsoft's real priorities are.

Pending confirmation, I feel pretty comfortable opining that the whole passel of digital DRM feature announcements was a trial balloon to see just how loudly people would scream and about what.  I think they always intended to walk back the limits, but how much was going to be dependent on consumer reaction.

That makes sense. Other companies do this as well.

For example, the big patch notes for "the" major rebalance of guild wars 2 was leaked last week. It was on all the forums and people talked a lot about them. The items that were complained about the most often didn't actually happen in the actual release yesterday, but a whole bunch of other stuff on the "fake" release notes did. I'm pretty sure anet did it on purpose, despite what the forum warrior fanboys on the gw2 forum say.

Quote from: daniel_ream;665714I know people who work at Microsoft in the games division and I'm trying to get confirmation on a couple of things, but I will say this: in general, Microsoft is nowhere near as stupid or incompetent as popular opinion has it.  90% of people's complaints about Microsoft products come from a deep ignorance of what Microsoft's real priorities are.

Pending confirmation, I feel pretty comfortable opining that the whole passel of digital DRM feature announcements was a trial balloon to see just how loudly people would scream and about what.  I think they always intended to walk back the limits, but how much was going to be dependent on consumer reaction.

In other words, a whole bunch of people have just been played.

Quote from: flyerfan1991;665748In other words, a whole bunch of people have just been played.

Maybe, but I can't see how it would be worth it.

Their 'trial balloon' sure did one thing. It handed Sony E3 and won the PS4 a huge pile of easy goodwill.

Not to mention Internet MS-rage is still festering like a rotting hog in a Georgia July. Will that impact sales? I'm skeptical it will. It has certainly impacted pre-orders, but to what extent no one outside MS knows.

Quote from: KJDavid;665778Maybe, but I can't see how it would be worth it.

Their 'trial balloon' sure did one thing. It handed Sony E3 and won the PS4 a huge pile of easy goodwill.

Not to mention Internet MS-rage is still festering like a rotting hog in a Georgia July. Will that impact sales? I'm skeptical it will. It has certainly impacted pre-orders, but to what extent no one outside MS knows.

Considering hard core gamers are a small subset of MS's sales, I doubt it.

Quote from: daniel_ream;665714Pending confirmation, I feel pretty comfortable opining that the whole passel of digital DRM feature announcements was a trial balloon to see just how loudly people would scream and about what.  I think they always intended to walk back the limits, but how much was going to be dependent on consumer reaction.

If so, then somebody miscalculated drastically: They created a situation in which the only thing Sony had to do was walk into E3 and say "we're not assholes like Microsoft" in order to win the approbation of gamers everywhere.

Microsoft is now trying very, very hard to staunch the bleeding: Why are they suddenly offering free games to X-Box Live Gold customers between now and Christmas? Because they were bleeding subscriptions and they needed some way of encouraging people to keep their subscriptions until the X-Bone comes out.

(Why have they so completely screwed up that free games program that it's created another PR disaster for them? Well... incompetence is pretty much the only answer at this point.)