Oh dear.

I've just had a bunch of acquaintances on Facebook proudly announce that they've put down their money to reserve their Xbox Ones. I pointed out the thing about the online activation requirement. Some said they were going to cancel their preorder right away and that they didn't know that games had to be activated, others accused me of not knowing what I was talking about and refused to believe that a console would require an internet connection.

This is not going to end well with the not-so-tech-savvy consumer base.

Anyway, before Xbox One premiers, most of the new tvs will have "voice control" anyway. I wonder how convenient that shit is, when you have to shout some shit to your tv and shut all your friends the hell up, because tv won't recognise your voice anyway.

Like standard tv remote is something inconvenient.

Srsly, almost everything they announced about Xbox One is a disaster.

I don't doubt that it will succeed, unfortunately. The console will sell on the strength of the name alone, as there are masses of illiterate, anti-social idiots out there who will go out and buy it under the pretense that they can't live without their headshots.

The interesting thing will be the aftermath. Ebay will probably put measures in place to prevent the resale of the games, lest people try to sell their copy of FIFA 14 or CoD Ghosts when FIFA 15 and the next CoD comes out, and many buyers probably won't know exactly what kind of shit they've driven themselves into until they try to buy or sell a used game.

The resultant media shitstorm will then probably destroy Microsoft, as well as Sony if they've made the same mistake.

I actually really like the way the Console looks, simple and sleek

A shame that everything else I've seen about the system so far is a complete dissapointment

LOL :D

http://uk.ign.com/articles/2013/05/21/sony-stock-up-nine-percent-after-xbox-one-reveal

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=SNE

Speaking of, did any market outside of Japan ever get TVs that auto shut off when they detect no one is looking at the screen? They tried selling one such model here. Don't know how well it did, but as someone who sticks the TV on to listen to, and not actually look at; it seemed like such a useless addition.

Not to mention, if it knows when you are lookin and what are you looking at, it's just another step in advertising companies controlling our lives :P

but the funny thing about voice control is - before you manage to say "television: channel 5!" your grandmother will already be on channel 5 after pressing one button on her remote.

Since now people tend to be used to DRM technologies. In many cases they don't understand the limitations they impose.

I hope you will be right about the future though.

I've been wondering what's been with these design throwbacks lately.

After reading the highlights about the Xbox One, I think that the interesting reveal of yesterday was the Be Mine 8 mystery game being Guncraft. That really took me by surprise.

I'll be waiting for more details. So far the Xbox One looks like an unremarkable but decent console, and a cool living room novelty. If they bundle it with a food printer it will have a real Star Trek vibe.

I've never sold games, and there's not much opportunity for that on PC these days, so I don't see that as a serious problem. It's an interesting experiment I think. Which probably shouldn't be done, but things were going there anyway.

Edit: One thing I was happy to see was that 8GB of RAM. That parity with the PS4 should allow game developers to aim at that level.

Seriously? I thought half of the success of the original Playstation was down to how easy it was to obtain pirated games for it...

You really have no idea what you are talking about, do you?

Are you talking about PSX here? Man, it's 2013 already.

It took years to finally crack PS3.
http://www.geekosystem.com/playstation-3-cracked/

Piracy on PS2 was very low as well.

I think he's talking about the PS3, for which piracy wasn't particularly widespread for much of its life.

For what it's worth, the PS2 and PS3 were particularly well protected against piracy simply by way of their design. PS2 piracy was slow to take off because DVD-sized games at the time were impractical to pirate (and DVD burners were fairly rare and expensive), and the same applied to the PS3 with Bluray.

The original Xbox's hard drive proved to be its downfall (with people copying games onto a modded Xbox's hard drive), and the 360 still used DVD, which was remarkably easy to pirate by the time of its release.