So Microsoft did their big Xbox One reveal yesterday afternoon, up at the Redmond campus, and I spent my lunch break watching the stream instead of eating an actual lunch. Worth it? Eh. Kind of.
Here's the thing nobody seems to be talking about yet this morning, or at least not loudly enough: they showed almost no games. I mean almost none. An hour-long event for a game console and the actual games got maybe three minutes at the very end, when they teased Call of Duty: Ghosts with a dog (a dog!) and some vague new-engine talk. That was it. That was the games portion.
What we got instead was a solid forty-five minutes of "this is also a TV box now." Don Mattrick up there talking about HDMI passthrough so you can plug your cable box into the Xbox One and flip between live TV and games with a voice command. Fine, neat trick I guess. Then Roger Goodell walks out — the actual NFL commissioner, on a stage at a gaming console reveal — to announce some content partnership between the NFL and Xbox. I sat there for a second just kind of blinking at my screen. I like football fine but I did not tune in for football.
And look, I get what they're going for. They want this thing in the living room as the one box that does everything: TV, games, Skype, fitness stuff with the new Kinect, all of it. The new Kinect sensor does look genuinely improved, wider field of view, can apparently read your heart rate off your face which is a little much honestly but sure. The controller's had a redesign too, slightly, though from the photos I can't tell how different it actually feels versus the 360 pad, which I still think is one of the best controllers ever made and didn't need a ton of fixing.
But here's my actual complaint, and its a real one: no price, no release date, no real look at what you'll be playing on this thing beyond a two-second teaser. They're saving all that for E3 next month, which, sure, that's the traditional thing to do, but it means this reveal event existed mostly to generate a week of "what does this MEAN" discourse without giving anyone the information that would actually let them decide if they care. The internet's full of console-name jokes this morning too, Xbox One, following the Xbox 360, following the original Xbox, so now we've got three different Xboxes with wildly inconsistent naming and somebody at Microsoft signed off on that. I don't know how that meeting went. I'd have paid to be in it.
Unrelated tangent, but this is also the week Yahoo confirmed they're buying Tumblr for something like 1.1 billion dollars, and Marissa Mayer put out that whole "we promise not to screw it up" statement, and I have thoughts on that too but I'm saving them because I think it deserves its own post once we see what actually happens to the site instead of just reacting to a press release. Feels like everybody's making a big acquisition or a big reveal this month and none of us have any idea yet how any of it shakes out.
Anyway. My actual gut read on the Xbox One event: this was a reveal built for shareholders and cable partners more than it was built for the people who buy consoles to play games on release night. I don't say that as some hardcore gamer gatekeeping thing either. I've got maybe six hours a week for games these days between work and everything else, and even I came away from that stream wanting to know less about live TV overlays and more about what's actually going to be fun to play in November or whenever this launches. My backlog on the 360 is embarrassing enough already (I still haven't finished Mass Effect 3, I know, I know) that I don't need a new box promising me television unless the games underneath it are worth the jump.
We'll get pricing and the real game lineup at E3 in June presumably. Until then it's just a very expensive-looking box that plays TV and, allegedly, also plays games, three minutes of proof provided.