For me, the big deal is going to be the delay in appearing in the Vault. FIFA14 is the current game. If 15 shows up within, day, 4-6 weeks of release, that’s totally worth it for me, right there, I can wait that long. If it’s 6 months, less so.
That’s going to be the rub for many people, I think. Older sports titles have a place, but I doubt many FIFA or Madden fans will stick with EA Access if they don’t get the latest version within a few weeks. I don’t think many people are willing to pay for Battlefield 4 and Peggle 2 on a subscription. EA is going to have to take a hard look at either keeping more current sports titles in there, or dumping a lot of their back catalog into this.
RickH
5451
I can’t believe my favorite X1 game so far is PvZ Garden Warfare, but it’s the most fun I’ve had with an online shooter since TF2. It’s a much better experience than the typical player-hosted 360 game. I can’t stop playing it.
Guacamelee Super Whatever edition plays better than the Vita version, and I’ve already run across some of the extra content. This is definitely the better version, the complex platforming moves are much easier to pull off than with the Vita’s setup.
Crimson Dragon, thanks to GwG. Is there really a market for flying rail-shooters anymore?
Dead Rising 3, this is the jewel of the new gen so far. Despite the seemingly unavoidable Capcom controls wonkiness, the number of enemies onscreen and the amazing draw distance is exactly what I thought would happen with 8gb of RAM for devs to play with. Can’t wait to see what Rockstar, Volition, and Avalanche can do with this capacity.
Try Ryse. I can’t explain it… but I keep replaying that game
I also enjoyed Ryse a lot. Unexplainably so. I’m glad it’s coming to the PC too, so more Qt3 denizens will get to play it.
I’m interested in how far Microsoft plans on letting this go. I can’t see “condition potential customers to expect PC ports of Xbox exclusives several months down the line” being a good long-term strategy for the platform’s health!
Didn’t that go on for most of the last generation too?
Aleck
5456
Several months, no, but a year down the line? At that point, I kind of feel like they will have wrung all the console sales they’re going to get out of it, and PC sales are just gravy. It feels a lot like what we had with the earlier GTA games, where the console exclusives lasted at least a year before a PC version came out (and what it looks like we have with GTA V, incidentally).
Is there much evidence that a significantly time delayed PC port of a console game cannibalizes console game (or hardware) sales?
Well, there’s a lot of evidence that a late PC game gets pirated to shit.
Aleck, normally I would agree with you, but we’re talking about a platform that still has very few exclusives available on the market, almost a year after hitting store shelves. That number decreasing from the initial amount at launch doesn’t instill much faith in the Xbox One as a platform worth spending $400 on.
Mind you, I’m approaching this from a position of “why should I (or any other savvy customer) buy an Xbone?” To properly answer your question, no, I don’t think there’s any evidence there, and the average dudebro who was already interested in an Xbone most likely isn’t going to be any less interested because of a PC release of a given game they wanted, especially one that happens months or years after the original Xbone version’s release.
Moore
5460
I dunno, the DR3 port removes the last tiny chance of me grabbing an XBONE.
Their initial blunders and poor HW choice pushed me to stop even using my 360 much. My vita got me to grab a ps+ sub, then I started playing my ps3 more. MS migrated me to the PS ecosystem - all that was left was exclusives. If I can get even 50% of those via PC, I’m golden without an xbone. The only fuckup Sony has had this gen for me is zero games, and MS has the same issue.
This has been the weirdest ‘next gen’ ever.
Chromehounds 2 would make me buy a ONE. That’s their only chance and there is no way it will happen.
At the beginning of the PS3/360 gen, Steam had less features and was less popular than it is now. Additionally, PC gaming was in a bit of a slump. Big publishers were either ignoring PC ports or pushing them to contractors to create.
The landscape has changed drastically. Steam is crazy popular as is Twitch/Youtube let’s plays of PC games. Dota 2, Team Fortress 2, Minecraft, various survival games, MMOs, F2P games, etc are the fashionable games to play and watch. Big publishers are making their own PC gaming services because they want to get into the sweet margins Valve has been raking in. Early access games are an easy win for publishers. “People will pay for unfinished games!? Score!” On top of this, it doesn’t even take that much PC money to graphically outpace just-launched consoles. A lot of PC gaming roadblocks have come down.
Shadari
5462
Another area where the PC is gaining ground is in couch gaming. It’s certainly not there yet, but it seems to be rapidly expanding in that direction.
FINALLY, MS announces DLNA TV streaming support coming
I also saw that there’s a 1 TB white special edition coming for COD Advance Warfare.
Cyrano
5465
Looks like we’ll get a new media center app too which will support more formats that the old 360 media center. It has taken a long time, but the Xbox One is approaching parity with Xbox 360. Woo, I guess.
stusser
5466
Only DLNA, which kinda sucks.
Plex is supposed to be coming out with an Xbone app. That should actually offer a high quality experience, albeit one you can easily match with a $99 amazon firetv.
Aleck
5467
Still no media center extender though, right?
RickH
5468
Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry compares the relative merits of different types of external USB 3.0 hard drives for use with the Xbone:
Overall, while we see some improvements across a few games with the SSD, the use of a fast storage medium doesn’t appear to speed things up as much as we expected: going by the huge difference in benchmark results between the three drives we imagined that the impact on loading times would be a little more pronounced on titles where we saw a fairly large difference on the PS4, rather than the mild uptick in speed we actually get. That said, some of the titles we tested on both formats loaded more quickly on the Xbox One by default. Once again, we’d say that the £69.99 2TB 5400rpm drive clearly offers the best value while at the same time losing little in terms of performance.
In sum: an affordable 5400rpm drive should work just fine.
