5629

The odds of what I was talking about happening are extremely slim. Buy your console.

5630

Provide an upgrade service for a nominal fee for the existing consoles and it would still cost them less than the rrod; the design flaw they accepted in order to get to market first in the last gen.

5631

No my point was last gen I bought the xbox 2 times. Reg and slim versions. I don’t want to do that again.

5632

I can only speak for myself but I am mad at MS. I was an Xbox guy. Loved the hard drive in the first one, thought it was a big tech advantage over the PS2 and it was before its time considering its been a component in both the Sony and MS offerings this gen and last. The 360 was clearly better for games than the PS3 (though built in blu-ray and wifi are strong advantages for Sony) and I reveled in it. So when deciding which console to pre-order, it was a no brainer for me, the Xbone!

But it sucked. And maybe sucked isnt the right word/term, but it was/is objectively worse. Fuck Kinect and voice bullshit. I don’t care about that. And I don’t care about working my DVR via my gaming console, why the fuck would I? My remote works. Talking instead of pressing buttons does nothing for me. I do, however, care about shit being 1080P on the competition, and not on my $500 system.

So a year later they, MS, rewards my early adoption by dropping the price and throwing in a free game? That bothers me. If they released a version with better performance and did not give me a reasonably priced/free upgrade path, I would be pissed. But for me at least, the damage is done. I unplugged my Xbone and bought a PS4.

5633

I don’t get it. Current users lose nothing. Why be angry with an update that makes it on par with the PS4? The fastest it would come around would be 2 years and by that point early adopters are set and got their time out of it. Instead people would rather have Microsoft continue to lag?

Would the same anger be there if the menu’s were just 50% faster on new hardware? What about boot time, heat output, noise, or energy usage? Where do you draw the line on the validity of gamer outrage from refining an existing product? The Xbox One should have shipped with DDR4. That was a monumental mistake and some of you are expecting MS to live with that mistake for 10 years. In the future that could maybe mean the Xbox One has a shorter lifespan by 1-3 years vs. the PS4.

And there’s more at stake than just current game resolutions. What if Occulus VR requires the memory bandwidth and speed of DDR4 and Xbox owners are forced to sit on the sidelines because PS4 can handle it while the Xbox One cannot. Would that make the refresh be more palatable to people and acceptable? I’m just genuinely curious because it’s not like people didn’t know what they were buying when they got the XBox One (if they did research) and currently the pressure is all on developers to try and make up the performance chasm between the 2 consoles and that seems very unfair. Unless you’re Activision budgets are already super tight and why spend lots of extra development time for the console that is way behind on sales?

5634

There won’t be a revision. If holiday sales aren’t strong enough this year MS will start preparing to roll up the whole Xbox business.

If they were willing to take a ~$300 loss on all the 6M Xbox Ones sold so far, plus spend a few billion engineering an upgraded model in a year’s time to turn things around, giving the next 15M Xbox Ones off the assembly line away for free would be a cheaper way to improve their market penetration.

5635

We knew all this before the consoles were released. If you went ahead and got one anyways then you should be mad at yourself, not MS.

5636

Agreed. I don’t know what Xbox One is playing, but mine doesn’t suck at all. I like how versatile the OS is (especially after the regular updates we’ve been getting). The games have been a blast and everybody in the house uses Kinect voice commands regularly. The games we want to play are on it.
It’s been in use almost every day since we bought it.

Even Kinect games like Fantasia are great for family play time with my 7 year old daughter.

Now it very well could be that it’s not the console for you, Olaf. But the console is pretty much as MS advertised and works very well.

So what are you mad at MS for?

Wendelius

5637

Sorry, I should have also added some hand-waving maths pulled out of my ass to support my post. They’re already designing a chip capable of higher cpu speeds. They added 10% just before launch, I’m sure with a few billion in research funds they could work out the impact of adding another 20%. I suspect the impact would be good, but maybe you now feel the urge to disagree with me.

If they think these consoles are going to last 10 years they’re crazy. VR on its own will kill this underpowered generation.

5638

The XBone can’t handle 1080p without substantial optimization. That’s the minimum cutoff, really. It needs a boost.

VR looks like it’ll be 1440p at minimum, and 4k TVs will be cheap next year.

5639

No they aren’t. They working on a die shrink to the 20nm process just like everyone else that doesn’t have Intel’s fabs. The fundamental problem with the Xbox One hardware is its reliance on a small pool of embedded SRAM to make up for its slow DDR3 main memory. That doesn’t go away with a process shrink or a higher clockspeed. They would need an all new APU with an all new memory architecture and a completely refactored OS and SDK. It is a huge expense even before you start dealing with unsold Xbox One inventory and trying to compensate current owners. It is a total non-starter.

5640

Yeah, and VR seems to be incredibly frame rate sensitive, so hitting those high resolutions with a high, steady frame rate is the key to not having your user base vomiting on itself. The current console generation can’t hit that and keep the eye candy going. And it won’t be any more likely to do it in four years time when VR becomes consumer friendly.

5641

Oh are we all “THE XBOX IS DOMED” again?

5642

Without the speed of DDR4, how can it not be? I mean, who in their right mind would buy an XBONE that can’t possible make use of some future VR headset that’s designed for PCs?

5643

Somehow i find the idea silly that all of the console gamers constantly talking up playing on the couch with their big screen tv will switch to wearing a VR headset.

Also VR movies. There is certainly no indication at this point in time that there will be significant VR impact in games in the next decade. VR movies still have not caught on at all after all.

5644

I wouldn’t expect VR movies to catch on over VR games, that’s a weird line of thought IMO.

5645

Fair point, but I was including the PS4 in the current generation that can’t handle VR, so matter how many demos of Morpheus Sony give.

VR is potentially a disruptive technology in games, so it definitely belongs in a discussion of future capability of consoles. Imho, ymmv, etc.

5646

I agree, but nothing indicates it will be a must have technology this console generation.

5647

I can’t imagine VR being the big thing this generation. It’s not even done THAT WELL on PC yet. I have a Rift, I like it and all, but it’s far from ready for primetime

5648

Agreed. It’s way too fiddly and the requirements on the user for setup are too high for general audience sales at this point. It’s going to need some time to cook.