Email: Looks like Xbox One has an Online Pass

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/05/xbox-one-analysis/

Also, I agree the new Xbox has a stupid name (how do you go back to one when you’re on the third system?), and I also thought that it seems like a more modern CDi and 3DO.  Remember that chapter in “Game Over” where David Sheff ran all those quotes from Trip Hawkins where he couldn’t shut up about “multimedia” being the future of gaming (oh boy, oh boy!  I get to look at Encyclopedia CD-ROMs on my gaming system!  Just what I always wanted!)?  Boy did that ever blow up in Trip’s face.  I’m laughing at how Microsoft is repeating all the mistakes from the mid ’90s.  There is nothing new under the sun.

What I want to know is, if cable and satellite viewership is going down rampantly, why the hell is Microsoft investing so heavily in getting those services on their box?  If the Xbox 360 was a dumbed down PC, then the Xbox One is a over-glorified cable box.

Oh, and on another note, I’m laughing at how these “journalists” are already engaging in historical revisionism by running lines in their Xbox “reveal” stories claiming the Xbox 360 is the “market leader.”  How can it be the market leader when the Wii has still sold more than the Xbox 360 in total sales?

I suspect the Xbox gamer probably feels like the PlayStation gamer did prior to the PS3 coming out.  The PS3 was Sony’s heavy handed attempt to trojan horse non-gaming functions of its business (Cell chip, Blu-Ray, etc.). Xbox Dumb seems like a heavy handed attempt with the same mentality.

Out of everything I have ever read or learned about the game console business, the business guys are never interested in gaming on the consoles. It is always stupid movies, music, Anoter-Way-To-Access-Facebook, etc. Hiroshi Yamauchi knew what a game console was. It was a box you bought in order to get to a game. Since Yamauchi’s retirement, everyone (including Nintendo) is trying to make the game console do things we don’t want it to do.

It’s not so much that they are adding junk we don’t want, it is that the sense that gaming, as a medium, is beneath the company. Did Microsoft seem proud of gaming in the Xbox Dumb reveal? Or did it seem like they were more excited to show off Steven Spielberg?