<\/a>A hero was born that day<\/p><\/div>\n
\nAnd that was it. Xbox One will come out some time before the end of the year, like everyone already knew.Now, don’t get me wrong, because it sure does sound like I’m bashing Microsoft, but I’m not. I’m sure that the Xbox One is going to be an excellent piece of hardware, and many of the features that the company chose to focus on during the press conference are undeniably groundbreaking and innovative. Also, most of the big\u00a0games coming out over the next decade will be available on the Xbox One. And they’ll probably be awesome. In fact, as someone who owns both Xbox 360 and PS3 consoles, I opt for the Xbox version of games more often than not.<\/p>\n
What I am\u00a0taking issue\u00a0with here is the presentation. The entire press conference felt very artificially engineered. All of the booming applause that we heard were supposedly originating from the back of the room, presumably from planted Microsoft employees. I know it sounds redundant to continue to harp on comparisons to Sony, but the fact of the matter is, that company is the other major player in this market, putting out a similar product in the same time window as Microsoft and it chose to take a radically different approach with the presentation of the PlayStation 4. Sony directly said, “Hey, we’re about making video games. Here are\u00a0a bunch of those.”<\/p>\n
I feel like Microsoft, as opposed to targeting the demographic that made Xbox a brand in the first place, is approaching the consumer with vast, broad strokes that appeal to everybody on some level.\u00a0Rather than unveiling a score of new innovations and ideas, we witnessed a presentation largely focused on social media, multitasking, and sports games with a new coat of varnish on them.\u00a0The company is appealing to the lowest common denominator, which is\u00a0the same\u00a0thing Nintendo did when it started a casual gaming approach that the Wii espoused, which arguably led to that company’s decline. Xbox One’s presentation felt like the popcorn movie of the summer, with a lot of flashy explosions and\u00a0smoke and mirrors, but nothing that will ultimately ingratiate hardcore audiences.<\/p>\n
Gamers are the people who will buy next-gen consoles before anybody else. The big names that got thrown around during Microsoft’s press conference — Halo<\/em>, Call of Duty<\/em>, Madden<\/em> — are franchises that have a vast following of consumers who spend a whole lot of time playing those games exclusively. Those franchises are also going to see new games being made for current-gen consoles for years to come. Frankly, I don’t see my neighbor, who only plays Call of Duty<\/em>, buying a new $500 game console so that he can multitask in a more streamlined way while he plays, especially when he can get the new game on the 360 or pause the game to look at his smartphone when he wants to check out Facebook.<\/p>\nMicrosoft came out on top this past generation, but only because it had a head start on competitors. With Sony releasing a comparable console at the same time, only time will tell who had their priorities straight.\u00a0 The first shots have been fired, and the battle will resume in less than three weeks at E3.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nobody that plays video games can pretend for a second that they weren’t excited about the unveiling of Microsoft’s next generation of consoles. Or at least curious. Ever since Sony’s PlayStation 4 announcement and press conference earlier this year, everyone with an ear to the ground in the gaming world has been waiting with bated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":19756,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[905,45,907,3062,1920,46,47,26],"tags":[740,4819,3,3102,4817,4795,3250,4000,58,4818,2746,2046,29,5226,1102,4794],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19609"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19609"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19609\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19744,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19609\/revisions\/19744"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}