The Xbox Reveal Had an NFL Commissioner on Stage and About Four Minutes of Actual Games

I watched the Xbox reveal this morning on my phone, propped up against my monitor at work with the sound turned down low enough that my desk neighbor wouldn't notice, and I have some thoughts.

First, the obvious thing: it's called the Xbox One. Not the Xbox 720, not the Xbox Infinity, none of the names that had been floating around forums for months. Just "One," like they're starting the whole console numbering thing over from scratch. Fine. Whatever. Names dont matter that much in the end, Sony's next box is apparently just going to be the PS4, so nobody's winning any creativity awards this generation.

What actually got me was the pacing of the thing. Don Mattrick and company spent what felt like forty-five minutes on live TV integration, voice commands, and this whole "all-in-one entertainment box" pitch before a single game got shown. You could say "Xbox, on" and it wakes up. You can say "Xbox, watch ESPN" and it switches over. There's an HDMI pass-through now so your cable box plugs into the Xbox and the Xbox sits between you and your TV for everything. Kinect is bundled with every unit this time, always plugged in, always listening for its wake phrase, which is a detail Im choosing not to think too hard about at 11pm when Im lying in bed.

And then, and I am not making this up, they brought Roger Goodell out. The NFL commissioner. On stage. At a console reveal. Talking about fantasy football integration and stat overlays. I actually said "what" out loud at my desk and had to explain to my coworker that no, this wasnt a joke, this was really happening.

Games got maybe four minutes total, right at the end, and it was mostly a Call of Duty: Ghosts trailer that didnt look meaningfully different from what Activision ships every November anyway. No Halo gameplay (though apparently Spielberg is producing a live-action Halo TV series now, which is its own strange sentence to type). No price. No actual release date beyond "holiday 2013," which could mean October or could mean the week before Christmas and those are very different promises to make in May.

I own a 360 that's been chugging along since 2008 and has survived one red-ring-of-death repair and an embarrassing number of dropped disc trays, so Im not exactly an unbiased observer here. But if youd told me a year ago that Microsoft's big pitch for the next generation would spend more airtime on fantasy football widgets than on games, I would not have believed you. Maybe E3 in a few weeks fixes this and its all games all the time. I hope so, because right now the whole thing reads like a cable box that also, incidentally, plays Call of Duty.

Small unrelated complaint while Im here: our office wifi chose today, of all days, to be completely unusable between 10 and 11am, which is exactly when the stream started, so I ended up tethering off my phone and burning through a chunk of my data plan just to watch a press conference about a box that streams television. There is a joke in there somewhere about the state of infrastructure but I dont have the energy to finish it.

Also, quick aside because I dont think it deserves its own post: Yahoo made the Tumblr deal official yesterday, 1.1 billion dollars, and Marissa Mayer's whole pitch is "we promise not to screw it up." Ive had a Tumblr since 2010 that's mostly just photos of my desk setups and half-finished side projects, and Im not panicking exactly, but Im also not deleting the "export my blog" bookmark I made this afternoon. We'll see.

Anyway. New console, no price, no games, an NFL commissioner, and my wifi died. Tuesday.