So it's been three days since Microsoft's big Xbox reveal and I'm still annoyed about it, which is probably why I'm finally sitting down to write about it instead of just complaining to whoever will listen at work.
Quick recap for anyone who missed it: Tuesday morning, Don Mattrick stood up on the Redmond campus and showed off the new console. It's called Xbox One, which is a dumb name (we already had an Xbox and it wasn't called "Xbox Zero," so now everyone's going to have to say "the original Xbox" for the rest of time to disambiguate). Fine, minor gripe, I'll live.
The bigger issue is that the whole hour felt like a pitch for a cable box that happens to play games. There was a long stretch about live TV integration, snapping Skype over your football game, saying "Xbox, watch ESPN" out loud to your television like a maniac. Roger Goodell came out. The actual commissioner of the NFL, on stage at a console reveal, talking about fantasy stats. Steven Spielberg showed up on video to announce he's producing a Halo TV series. None of this is games. I don't say that as a snob thing, I just bought this event expecting to hear about games and got forty-five minutes of set-top box marketing instead.
And here's the number that's been bugging me: one game. ONE. Call of Duty: Ghosts got a teaser trailer right at the end, some dog running through a jungle, explosions, the usual. That was it. No price, no release date, nothing about backward compatibility (which, we now know, isn't happening, which is its own annoyance since I've got a shelf of 360 discs). EA came out and showed sports trailers for Madden and FIFA running on something called the "Ignition" engine, which looked nice but also told me nothing.
I get that E3 is only a few weeks away and they're obviously saving the actual game lineup for that. I understand the logic. But if you're going to name your event a "reveal" and put "Xbox" in giant letters on the wall, maybe don't spend most of it talking about your cable box partnership and fantasy football widgets. Call it something else. Call it "the future of entertainment" and I'd have known what I was getting into.
There's also been a low hum of rumors going around, going back a couple months now, about the new Xbox requiring some kind of always-online check-in and blocking used games somehow. Microsoft didn't confirm or deny any of it on stage Tuesday, which if anything made it worse, because now it's just going to hang over every bit of Xbox One coverage until E3 when they're forced to actually answer for it. If that stuff turns out to be true I genuinely don't know what I do, because right now most of my library is used copies I picked up cheap from the GameStop by my apartment, and the guy at the counter there already knows me by name, which either says something nice about my relationship with him or something sad about how often I'm in there. Possibly both.
None of this means the box itself is bad. The specs sound reasonable, the new Kinect is apparently a big step up and comes bundled in the box this time instead of being an add-on nobody bought, and I'm sure there will be good games on it eventually, there always are. I'm not doom-and-glooming the whole platform off one press conference. I just think the event itself was a miscalculation, and judging by the reaction I saw scrolling through Twitter and a few forums Tuesday afternoon, I wasn't the only one who felt like they'd wandered into the wrong room.
Sony's got their own event coming up next month before E3 proper starts, and it'll be interesting to see if they read the room here at all, or if everyone's just going to spend June arguing about specs neither company has fully disclosed yet. My guess, for whatever it's worth, is Sony leads with games because they don't have a cable box story to tell, and that alone might end up being the smartest marketing decision either of them makes this year without even trying that hard.
Anyway. Back to actually working today. More on this once E3 happens and we get real details instead of vibes and a dog running through a jungle.