Xbox One-Eighty

The new name?

This was very predictable. They simply never thought it through from a customers perspective.

Now they just need to drop the Kinnect functionality

Lol at xbox180.

Not 100% sure, but if it has to be on to work then, it is a fail. It should not be essential unless every game will have kinect features. I am a little concerned that it needs to be on all the time.

I was also thinking about the extra cost of the bundled sensor. When you think about it, all they have to do is release it without and they're probably on the same field as Sony, despite the system looking like something from the 80's.

I do not have a kinect so it would make sense to extend numbers with the inclusion of kinect as a bundle. Though allowing XBox 360 kinect games to be used would help sales.

They need to extend sales of the system first to my mind, though I reckon they think using Kinnect for all your TV watching needs will become second nature (it won't).

I'd happily put money on them eventually selling a version that doesn't come with Kinnect

I seriously doubt that the general public will accept it as normal, being watched watching TV is unnatural when you have no idea what the benefits are. My current Xbox only goes on when I want to play a game. Microsoft clearly want to make the console the centre of your living room entertainment, but they are going about it the wrong way.


Yes I think so too. It might be a while, six months at least.

I know you have amnesia thus may forget about it but currently kinect will need to be connected to tye xbox one but doesnt need to be active. All the privacy concerns have been addressed as countries like Germany would go ape [LIFTED] if it was always monitoring you. So you have the ability to shut off all those pesky monitoring abilities.
By bundling in kinect with every console game designers know that they can code for kinect and it won't be a barrier to people buying the game. This could also mean designers can actually use the power of kinect to do innovative things and not solely rely on the traditional controller. The big problem is of course the added cost to the console.

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I do agree with you about designers being able to design games for the kinect with confidence that there will be sufficient numbers of potential customers about. It makes a lot of sense in that respect.

Unless the kinect can be deactivated it might face significant problems in Europe. Though with the fleet of fail that Microsoft have launched recently will they be trusted?


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The lack of an off switch for the whole device puts me off. The old Apple TV is bad enough, 'stand-by' means turning the video card off, but the processor and the hard disk still run at full pelt. The only way to shut down the hard drive and put the processor to 'sleep' is to pull out the power cable! Sounds like Microsoft are maiming the same mistake here.

Having something that gets used for a few hours a month running 24/7 is very poor design, especially considering the spiralling electricity costs at the moment.

Define 'active'. The Kinect won't be active as in tracking, but it will be active enough to listen for voice commands e.g. 'Xbox On'. In fact, does the Xbox One actually have an on/off/standby switch, or are you expected to always use voice?


Again, define what you mean by 'monitoring'. A lot of voice recognition systems push sampled voice up to the cloud for processing. I dunno about you, but I consider 'listening to my voice and sending a recording of that off onto the internet to be processed' as a pretty decent definition of 'monitoring'. Not in the tinfoil hat sense, I have no belief the NSA will give a crap about anything I say, but we need to define terms here.


They've had several years to do that already. Kinect for Xbox 360 sold massive numbers yet the amount of innovative, interesting things that it was used for on consoles is practically zero. It was used for innovative interesting things when hooked up to PCs and MS's distribution of the API for windows was an excellent idea but in game terms, it really hasn't set the world on fire. There were enough people with 360 Kinect units that anyone coming up with a 'must have' game would have made a fortune, regardless of whether every 360 owner had a Kinect or not.

It comes fundamentally down to this : gesture control is an interesting form of technology that has interesting and useful applications, it's just that experience suggests gaming isn't one of them. Nintendo have pretty much abandoned it after having massive success with the Wii, Playstation Move was stillborn and KInect made money but won few hearts. Pinning future hopes that a given previously moribund technology might suddenly 'come good' generally is path to disappointment.


Sadly, it's a catch 22 - either you make it mandatory from the start and kill adoption of your platform due to high price or you make it optional and then you've got the 'we won't make games for it because some people won't have it' arguement. The fact is though MS sold 24 million Kinect units for 360 - according to wikipedia - and that of itself is a big enough platform to make a truckload of money on, if you have a good game idea.

I don't think the legal status of kinect in Germany is an issue - it's not doing anything the previous one did in general and that didn't have any legal problems as I recall.

I have an Apple TV and you can turn it off via the apple remote using a menu in the settings section.


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