11/21/13 18:11
I'm going to say it up front: I think the Xbox One and PS4 are doomed. There, I said it.
Here's why:
You can buy a last-generation Xbox 360 w/ Kinect for $250 today ($180 without the Kinect). The new Xbox One will set you back $500. It's double the price, yet nothing I've read in the reviews suggests that it delivers close to double the value. Certainly not with the launch titles, and it's hard to see how this will substantially change.
Games sell consoles, not the other way around. None of the launch titles make the Xbox One a must-buy. At least not for me. I'm a CoD fan, and I can get the latest CoD Ghosts for the older Xbox 360.
I can't believe Microsoft didn't even make
Spartan Assault an exclusive for Xbox One. If that isn't a tip off, I don't know what is. Also, the latest news seems to suggest Halo 5 will be released in 2014. Um, yeah, that sounds like a big fumble to me.
This is a particularly bad decision. Over the course of 8 years, the value of my Xbox game collection is many times greater than the cost of the console. Sure, I hardly touch the vast majority of them, but I still want to play CoD MW3 and Black Ops 2. If I get an Xbox One, I'll have to buy them again.
Besides gaming, the TV-hub capabilities were heavily touted as a game changer. Yet, there's nothing in the list of features that particularly stand out. Personally, I use an Apple TV, mainly for Netflix, and it's awesome for that. So are a slew of other sub-$100 devices.
I don't see what the Xbox One adds above and beyond these.
Everyone's paranoid about privacy these days, and probably for good reason. I leave my Kinect unplugged. There's
no way I would leave it on all the time if I had an Xbox One, just out of principle. I'll bet I'm not alone.
Yet, Microsoft is heavily promoting the Kinect as a differentiator. The product managers should have known better. At best, people will see it as the same or neutral. Some consider it a negative. Forcing it into the bundle was not a good idea. Not in this climate.
I'm in an interesting position as a customer. My Xbox 360
RROD'ed a few months ago, and I'm itching to replace it. Given the above, I'm probably going to buy another Xbox 360.
Ok, I get it. It’s only the launch year. Things will be very different next season when all the new games are exclusive to the new consoles. The problem is, can the consoles survive a bad season?
In a world with
$100 Android consoles and ever improving
tablet gaming, consoles are getting squeezed. Hard. There’s also that ever present rumor that Apple (or Amazon, or Google) might enter the TV/console market anytime soon now.
If ever there was a perfect recipe for disruption, this would be it.
In theory, this would drive console makers up market, which is what we are seeing here. The question is: Have they gone up market enough, and
can they ever go high enough? i.e. have they already overshot the market?
Judging from the launch titles, my observation is that they have. These “next-gen” consoles aren't sufficiently differentiated from the last one, certainly not to justify a 100% markup. Just having more poly-count means nothing. In fact, other areas such as load-times may even be worse.
My prediction is that this year's sales will be bad, leading to a death spiral. I know, it's a bold thing to say, but here is is on the record. I might be wrong. As a Microsoft shareholder I even
hope I'm wrong on this. We'll find out in a couple months.
3/9/14: TechCrunch compiles the
console numbers. They aren't pretty.
Related: Business.