XBox One [console]

[Morto Vivente]

I haven't owned a Playstation since the 1st generation and have been with Xbox since the original console, but after following this thread it's pretty tempting to return to Sony after 11 years with Microsoft. I suspect many others will be equally tempted considering the Xbox One , talk about commercial suicide. Sometimes extremely smart people are really bloody stupid. Even if I don't get a PS4 immediately the further drop in price on the PS3 will make buying one just to play "The Last of Us" all the sweeter.

[LouCipherr]

The fact that Microsoft's policies governing game ownership, sharing and privacy are not surprising does not make them any less devastating to consumer rights, should they be formally adopted and become a standard. They sacrifice our freedom to own and trade games for no other reason than corporate GREED. Fixed your quote, krisvds.

[krisvds]

Fixed your quote, krisvds. Hehe. Good one. But hey, people might grow a brain and vote with their wallet this time and thus make sure microsoft can shove their xbone you know where? Right?

[LouCipherr]

Hehe. Good one. But hey, people might grow a brain and vote with their wallet this time and thus make sure microsoft can shove their xbone you know where? Right? I certainly hope so.. We shall see.

[babomb]

Part of the connectivity signing in every 24 hours would prevent people from using a friends login info to play their game. When you add all these things up, it equals more revenue for MS and their licensed game partners. Even if alot of people decide not to buy the next gen console. Because eventually no more games will come out for the 360. So then you'll be forced to either buy a next gen or quit playing console games. Another thing to consider is that this next gen xbox is marketed to a younger generation. A generation that's highly addicted to internet access being constantly available. They can't go 10 minutes without texting, chatting, updating facebook, tweeting. There's this new idea that anyone who doesn't habitually take part in online activity is weird or has something to hide. So the older crowd, that prefers single player games and doesn't have xbox live, or a constant internet connection, well, these aren't people that MS really gives a shit about. These are 2nd class consumers in the eyes of the tech giants. Because the next gen consoles aren't the only industries that are implementing these kind of dictator style business policies. Remember that MS doesn't only make consoles. And these policies work hand in hand with their other products. This is beneficial to them because now you not only have to buy the console for a hefty initial price, but to use it you have to pay for an xbox live subscription. A constant stream of revenue. You can't get a free game from a friend, or trade something else for a game. Now you have to pay a tax to use an older game. It's this new business aristocracy taking hold. All these companies know that a great majority of people are dependent on their products so they'll pay more and more. Adobe recently announced that they're no longer selling software. Now they're selling their software products as a service called "creative cloud". To use their software now you have to have an annual contract that cost $50 a month. And it's authorized through the cloud service. So if you aren't connected to the internet when you try to launch an Adobe application like Photoshop, you won't be able to run it. This is the same thing as if they deauthorized their software everytime a new version was released so you had to buy the upgrade to keep using it. There's an awful lot of people that buy Photoshop and use the same version for several years before upgrading. Those people will now be forced to pay $600 every year to use photoshop. So they're forcing you to pay for upgrades that in many cases you'll never actually use. If you're a photographer and only use a small set of photoshops tools, like the HDR tools and basic photo editing features, those features won't have major upgrades every year that justify paying $600 every year for. You wouldn't normally pay the $600 to upgrade if the parts of the application you used didn't justify it. Now you have no choice. You pay or don't play. What's worse is that other companies like Microsoft and Apple are watching to see how it works out for Adobe. And if it works well they'll adopt the same policy. Which would mean that you'll have to pay a monthly or yearly fee to use Windows/Office, or MacOSX/Final Cut/iOS. And if you don't like the newest version, well, tough shit. You're still gonna have to pay for it. Or if you have an older computer that can't run the newest version, tough shit again. Buy a new computer or else you'll be paying for products you aren't even using. These policies work hand in hand for all the companies involved. They're effectively forcing people to continue to pay for products they don't want or need, and in some cases can't or won't even be able to use. Within a year or so Photoshop will stop supporting Windows7 or MacOSX Mountain Lion. So then you'll have to upgrade your OS or you'll be paying for upgrades to Photoshop that you can't use. Then in 2 years if/when MS and Apple switch to subscription based service, that brand new PC or Mac you just bought won't be able to update the OS you payed for without paying more for the subscription. Then in another year Windows and OSX won't support your CPU anymore, so you'll be paying for a subscription to MS or Apple for upgrades you can't use, AND to Adobe for upgrades that your OS is too old to run. So then you'll have to buy a new computer or keep paying for subscriptions for products you can't use. So people will be locked into this cycle where they have to continue paying several technology companies for the use of their products. Not when YOU choose, when the company says it's time. This works out well for vendors like HP,Dell, Apple that sell hardware also. Because now people will be upgrading their hardware to keep up with software. It's insulting that they think they can do this.

[shootemindehead]

Thanks Ba. Dying with a hangover here and you've just made it worse. Seriously though, if companies do take this route as a general rule, then an awful lot of people will simply tune out. I don't use any Apple products because I fu*king despise them and Microsoft will go on the same list if they want to as well. People who are savvy enough will just go to Linux, or something like that. An alternative OS will open up. I'm hoping that this Xbox One nonsense blows up badly in Microsoft's face. So badly, that heads roll and the "features" being implemented are seen to be a retrograde step and are abandoned from future plans. Likewise I hope that Adobe's dicking about fails as well. The idea of the cloud licence is fine when you're working for a company. I am using the cloud at the moment for Photoshop, Lightroom, etc. But for the man in the street, as it were, it's a terrible idea and I can't see it working. There's no way in hell that I would sign up to something like a monthly or yearly suscription fee for photoshop. I'll simply make do with what I have. I only moved from Photoshop 7 to CS 5.5 very recently at home and I am very happy to stay with 5.5 for the forseeable future and I only moved because of "content aware fill", which is the best thing to happen to the program in decades. I'm still using XP for gods sake and have no intention of moving to anything else and if I do, it'll be to Win 7 on a duel boot machine.

[babomb]

I hope this all blows up badly in all these companies faces! Thing with Adobe pisses me off because I get upgrades through a small company I do work for, they have a volume licensing contract. I don't do that much work for them anymore because they keep scaling their whole operation down. So it's pretty much definite that with Adobes new cloud licensing that it's all over for me now in that regard. This company isn't gonna do that because they're among those customers that totally skip versions until there's several new features that actually make the price of upgrading worth it. So by the time that they feel that opting into this new creative cloud service is worth it, they're not gonna be able to offer me a seat in a volume license plan because adobe has changed their pricing and it will cost them substantially more. So any work I do for them after that will likely have to be done in-house on one of their workstations unless I decide to pay for my own subscription plan. Which i can't/won't do. Then there's the inevitable, where Microsoft will likely go the same route with cloud subscriptions. Apple screwed me real bad on the last workstation I bought from them. So I don't use their products anymore at all. Except iTunes and Quicktime which are free. I just recently switched to Win7 from XP because I got a deal on a Dell workstation at an estate auction. But it's not a brand new machine and it's likely that after a couple more years, once a new CPU comes out, that MS will stop supporting older hardware on their new versions of Windows. I have several older machines that run Linux. For general computing it's the way to go if you're willing to put in the time and effort to learn to use and maintain it. The problem is that very few professional applications run on it. None of the pro apps I use run on it. You can run Photoshop 7 under Wine, which is a win32 emulation environment. But performance is bad. For 3D your only option is Blender, which is open source but it's not very good on accelerated graphics because Linux doesn't have good support for GPU's. It only supports OpenGL2, so Linux can't even take advantage of the updated features and performance of a new graphics card. So it seems that the future of technology could turn out to be an exclusive thing. If you are in a position to afford to keep up with regular hardware upgrades and software subscription plans, then you can be part of the "in-crowd" that's forced to constantly pay for the pleasure of having the latest and greatest. But if you're a person that makes due with modest hardware that's always a few years behind, well, you're gonna be forced to either pay for costly subscription plans for software that you're not able to run just so you can be licensed to run software you've already payed for. Or else you'll have to make due with cheap and free solutions that make doing what you want/need to do more difficult or not possible. It's like some secret group of big business players got together and brainstormed on how they can screw everyone just a little bit more.

[Neil]

I'm still using XP for gods sake and have no intention of moving to anything else and if I do, it'll be to Win 7 on a duel boot machine. Most people only move from something like XP because the support is pulled on it, so they have little or no choice... For 99% of users the functionality of XP is no different to what they can get from Windows 7 - They boot up, click on an icon, and run a program...

[babomb]

Most people only move from something like XP because the support is pulled on it, so they have little or no choice... For 99% of users the functionality of XP is no different to what they can get from Windows 7 - They boot up, click on an icon, and run a program... This! Windows7 has some bells and whistles. Mostly eye candy though. Slightly different filesystem structure. Some changes to the networking protocols, it has a subsystem for UNIX based applications, NFS support. But nothing the average user is gonna ever need or deal with. The biggest difference is just the interface. It gives more information about files and drives in explorer, has transparent windows and taskbar, and more realistic icons and interface elements. You can apply alot more themes now too. My favorite features are the "libraries", you can create libraries for filetypes and media and include an unlimited number of different locations in the library. So when you open the library it lists files from all the different locations. So you don't have to hunt down photos, videos, music, documents that are in different folders on different drives. And it's as easy as right clicking a folder and clicking "include in library". And Windows Media Player now has a feature called "Windows Media Networking Service", it catalogs all your media and allows you to stream it to other windows media aware devices. So you can copy DVD's to your hard drive, or create music and photo collections, or store videos in MP4, WMV, AVI, and then watch that media on an Xbox360 connected to a TV in another room. It works really well too. Only downside is that the service that runs on the win7 machine tends to use almost half your CPU power to index the media. But it isn't constantly indexing though. It indexes your media after you set it up, and then periodically checks to see if you've added more media and then indexes it.

[MinionZombie]

This! Windows7 has some bells and whistles. Mostly eye candy though. Slightly different filesystem structure. Some changes to the networking protocols, it has a subsystem for UNIX based applications, NFS support. But nothing the average user is gonna ever need or deal with. Couldn't resist.

[Danny]

Welp, todays the day. How do you think damage controls going to pan out? They've already cancelled their Q and A so they clearly want full control on exactly what information is coming out today Personally im expecting a train wreck, followed by halo 5 and fable 4 announcements.

[Neil]

They've already cancelled their Q and A so they clearly want full control on exactly what information is coming out today. Wow!!

[Danny]

Some more comments from industry journalists going to e3: Confirmed Microsoft is actively attempting to get developers to not mention PS4 versions. If they don't say "OUR GAME IS EXCLUSIVE FOR XBONE" expect a PS4 version. More DRM messaging at Gamescom. There is no rental strategy. Try to sweep it under the rug and hope people don't remember. Cloud power was designed as DRM. Period. DRM was Microsoft's idea. EA and Ubisoft are supporters, Activision is against it. DRM plans are actually worse than what they've stated. Mirror's Edge 2 at MS conference. Prince of Persia reboot at MS conference. Secret Phil Spencer game = World of Tanks Xbox Live paywall still there, expect a price increase. Dead Rising 3, and exclusive DLC for another Capcom game at MS conference. No online paywall for PS4. Unconfirmed. No DRM info for PS4.

[Neil]

No online paywall for PS4. Unconfirmed. No DRM info for PS4. Sorry, so this means to play online with people you don't have to pay on the PS4? ie: You need to pay for XBox Live on the XBox? And with DRM, you can just give/sell second hand discs with the PS4 and not pay unlike the XBox One? This is going to sway a lot of people, especially as the two bits of hardware are so similar now, with the PS4 if anything being more powerful!?

[krisvds]

Apparently one of their marketing slogans on an e3 banner reads "all in one, input one". I know where they can input one as far as I'm concerned.