Fears

Xbox One:

  • worries about an always-on Kinect; especially in light of the NSA PRISM news
  • murky we’ll-see-how-it-plays-out used game policy
  • regular online checkins, even if you can do them from your smartphone
  • onerous game lending / giving / sharing restrictions

None of these things individually is a really big deal. The Kinect “always listening” thing in particular is overblown, and the used game policy likely won’t be so bad thanks to strong competition from Sony. But when you wind all these things together, it feels like a swift kick to the shins for the consumer. Everybody has something they can worry about with the Xbox One. The odds of at least one of these functions going catastrophically wrong during one’s ownership of the system are good.

Contrast to Sony, with their revolutionary “nothing’s changed” policy. Everyone knows what to expect. No one is complaining that downloadable games will be tied to your account. Heck, no one even seems to mind that Sony will now require a paid subscription to play multiplayer games online, just like Xbox Live. The lower price point is the real gut-punch to Microsoft.

Strategy

Microsoft is pursuing the same “no compromises” policy with Xbox One that they used to develop Windows 8. It’s everything to everyone. It’s a TV box; it’s a Netflix player; it’s a game station; it’s a casual… thing, with Kinect. If they stripped the game system out of it, the Xbox One might actually do better. But they unveiled it at a press conference right before E3, to an audience of fickle gamers and game press.

Sony centered their entire press conference around gamers. Almost everything on stage was games – no Skype, no UStream casting, no “game sharing” or demos of the other system features. They had one guy from Sony Pictures who had nothing to talk about. No new movie, music, or TV show announcements, other than the continuation of the same video & music channels which no one cared about on PS3. But even he mentioned gamers five or six times.

The future

Nintendo has their work cut out for them.

Parting wisdom: remember how much PC Gamers despised Steam when it first came out. Even poor initial sales won’t doom Microsoft if they move fast and keep improving.