Sony absolutely crushed Microsoft at E3 by simply stating that all the things we can do now with our video games will still be true with the next generation. Really, all it took was one 20 second video…
Before the news today, that Microsoft is dropping most of its DRM policies, I was fully prepared to welcome the competition between Sony and Microsoft on these issues. Now, it seems like the competition has been won by Sony. It probably didn’t hurt that representatives from the military were almost up in arms over these policies. You can’t win the PR battle when your enemy is our armed services.
I still have concerns over the Kinect, especially after the NSA scandal broke and we learned that Microsoft was the first company to cave to NSA demands for customer info. Granted, Microsoft has tried to assure us that we are in full control over what Kinect can see and listen to but unless the default settings are completely off you will get millions of people used to the idea of a camera in the home always watching, akin to big brother.
Privacy concerns aside, I am still not sold on Kinect as actually useful for gaming. My initial impression of the Kinect when it was first sold was that it was gimmicky and definitely not useful for any game that I wanted to play. Until great, and I mean truly great, games are released which fully utilize the Kinect and make it a must own that initial impression will not be changed. At the same time I can see the chicken and the egg problem here. Developers will not be incentivized to make a great Kinect game unless there is a large install base ready and able to play it, so forcing us all to buy a Kinect in hopes of getting a great game in the future is the strategy here. Either way, I’m still not happy about having to buy it upfront.
I bought an Xbox 360 a year after it was released when games started coming out which were not available on the Xbox. Before today that was going to be my plan and even with this most recent news I think it will remain my plan. I’ll let the early adopters pay the initial high price, discover all the technical flaws in the new hardware (red ring of death anyone), and wait until the price comes down. When games start coming out which are not available on 360 then I’ll make the switch.
