Maybe you don’t know my history, but I did write about this stuff for somewhere around ten years professionally. I don’t have a pipeline to an ancient deity, but I did spend a lot of time studying the industry and understand a lot about it. My personal experience at home is just one tiny piece of the puzzle. I’ve worked in retail at the ground floor selling it, been able to see it at the warehouse level, talked to executives and then reviewed and editorialized on it for a long time after that.
I’m still working in retail (not videogames) daily (20 years next year in Business Intelligence) so I understand a lot about selling and data and advertising, blah blah…
Anyway, I’m glad you dig the One and that it was right for you. I think Microsoft needs to make more changes if they hope to capture a marketshare on par with the 360 which they’re nowhere close to right now. @Desslock wanting to watch 4K movies is super too, but I’m sure he’d agree that it’s a niche thing to be a cinephile on the level that he is to use the X as that big a selling point.
I tried really hard to think of a polite way to say I don’t give a damn but I came up snake eyes. Sorry. It’s wonderful and all that you found a way to make this great little hobby into a paying job, you’re another dude on the internet with a crystal ball, and I’ll accord your opinions the level of respect that I give all those other talking heads.
There’s no great mystery why Playstation is beating Xbox. The MS team fumbled pretty badly out of the gate and Sony didn’t. PlayStation is also a much more worldwide brand than Xbox I think, and will have more audience draw outside the U.S. It’s likely Sony will always be ahead of MS in this regard. So my question is, why should I care?
You shouldn’t because it’s clear that you don’t. Can you allow that maybe the rest of us like having that discussion regardless of whether you care or not?
To add… IIRC, @Brad_Grenz is solidly a Sony guy because he wants more and better games on their hardware. He totally digs it and it’s his thing so he likes that they’re working for him as a consumer. He wants them to win because then he wins with more awesome stuff. Don’t you want more awesome stuff?
Dave also casually throws in things like ‘if you also play on PC’. Um, most console players don’t- that’s why they have a console. And I’ve said it before, but one of the things that drew me to the Xbox this gen was they announced he Early Access program, starting with Elite: Dangerous. I wanted to play that game, have no PC that could run it, so MS is where I go. I’ve gotten a steady stream of games there, that I won’t be able to play for years on the PS4. So, in some sense, there’s your exclusives. They don’t need to be first-party.
I think Spenser has already ackowledged the lack of exclusives, and I think they’re slowly working on it. But those plans don’t come to fruition for a few years, because it takes a long time to develop games. They’ve also acknowledged that in the past they announced games like Crackdown 3 and others too soon, and that they learned from that and won’t announce games so far in advance anymore. So I think they’re working on the exclusives issue, but we won’t see the fruits of that for a while.
At the same time, those “exclusives” will be Play Anywhere titles, which just makes me so happy. I know a lot of people count that against Xbox (I can just get a PC, since Xbox has no real exclusives), but I count it as a positive since I own both Xbox and PC, and I love switching between the two. I love that game saves automagically are taken care of between the two versions. I love that I can play on the TV and then go play on the PC when my wife needs the TV.
Sony not doing 4K blu-ray on the PS4 pro is epically dumb and is going to bite them in the ass in a year or two. Maybe not as dumb as the forced Kinect + “we love TV” of the Xbox One launch – that was catastrophically dumb – but it is a pretty big fuck you to a large number of folks with lots of money.
If the PS4 Pro had a 4K blu-ray drive, I would own one already. A standalone 4k blu-ray player isn’t worth it for the relatively small number of movies I would watch, and the XBox One S doesn’t have enough games I can’t play on my PC.
Instead, I ended up buying no consoles and stream the handful of 4K movies I want to watch.
For sure - most people don’t need or even want a 4k bluray player. Even I don’t want almost any of the 4k bluray disks that currently exist. But 4k physical media is amazing, and I won’t want to buy normal blurays for any media that exists on 4k.
I generally agree with you on Xbox One - I had both a ps3 and an xbox 360 and they probably got relatively equal use, but the original Xbox One had zero appeal to me - a more expensive, less capable console, and a terrible future business plan?
But Spencer has really gotten the Xbox division on track - backwards compatibility is a great feature, significantly addressing the hardware deficiency is a huge step forward, detaching and essentially abandoning Kinect immediately was another great move, matching/improving upon the monthly free games offered relative to Sony with an online subscription - even some of the other apps/3rd party software seems to be getting more support from Microsoft than Sony. And 4k blurays.
EA Access alone means I get plenty of use out of my Xbone, and while I don’t really love any Xbox exclusives, apart from Crackdown, I quite like a lot of them.
By the way, has there been any confirmation that that the X will have HDMI CEC?
Streaming 4k movies is really a myth - I do it too, and the quality is very nice to have, but it’s not close to the same quality of a physical 4k media disk because of compression.
I believe you, but I’ve never actually seen a physical 4k disk play on my TV because of the aformentioned set of bad choices. Also, I don’t have a megahuge 4k TV (mine is 55"), so it might not matter anyway.
The price of 4k players is a huge detraction too. If you could pick one up for less than the cost of a console you and others might have, and given the medium a shot.
A bigger problem with 4k players is the lack of content and, especially, the price. $35 a movie? It’s almost deliberate sabotage of the medium. Blurays often being under $10 now, and generally under $20 other than brand new releases, and the significant increase in 4k restorations being used to create blurays of older movies - have really reignited that medium for film fans like me. I’m actually doing something I initially had zero interest in doing - replacing movies I already had on DVD (makes me sad to just chuck those, but who wants them now?). Initially a handful, but gradually a sizable portion of my library has been rebought because of cheap prices and significant content improvements (I avoid conversions that are just slapped on disks, but there are few of those, other than some crappy old sci-fi movies, etc.)
As to size of your TV - you’d probably notice the difference, although I will say that my tolerance for normal DVDs significantly changed going from a 50" plasma to a 65" OLED. Unsure if that’s because of the TV type change or the size, however. Another reason for the library conversion.
Physical media is higher quality, but most people simply don’t care. Movies on little spinning pieces of plastic are increasingly archaic. In a couple years they’ll be like vinyl records, and only pompous and/or dedicated cinephiles will have them. And of course, both internet speeds and streaming quality will continue to improve too.
That doesn’t discount your preferences, 4K Bluray is a perfectly valid reason to go for the XboneX. But it isn’t anywhere remotely close to the big 4-- Price, Performance, Friends, Exclusives.
