So exciting, a new console is coming out! But why am I so indifferent about buying one versus the last two launches MS had with its consoles? It seems they are trying to gain hold on more of the pieces of the puzzle and in the process have ostracized some groups of gamers and at this moment have left a bad taste in a LOT of people's mouths with the last announcement in May. I'm going to give my two cents, hopefully it's useful if not amusing.
Always connected: there are so so many people without an internet connection that enjoy video games. Why would you cut out a huge part of potential buyers for what... cloud computing? It has decent specs with its connectivity and components which leads me to think, why not do the computing in the console itself? My mind thinks of latency times, download/upload speeds, ISP customers with bandwidth limits...I mean, cloud gaming just doesn't seem like a good idea at first glance. Can anyone shed light on what will actually be processed in the cloud? Have they released any info yet?
Kinect required: What about people with small houses/apartments (LIKE MYSELF) or noisy atmospheres or who simply prefer not to talk to a device? My friend Brad who's been in a wheelchair all his life loves playing X360 online and it's what he does a lot of the day for fun. Will the Xbox One exclude him from playing video games because he cannot move his arms around properly? What if your family is noisy, what if its night time and you don't want to talk to the thing? What about lan-parties, will the separate iR signals interfere with each other? These questions lead me to think the Kinect will be how it is currently; some games require it, some do not. To me, the Kinect has always been a cool trick to compete with the family friendly Wii and serve a bigger audience, never applicable to hard-core gamers.
No backwards compatibility: It's sad, but not surprising. I'm not sure if it's a hardware limitation thing or if it's just to make more money, probably a little of both, but the PS3 phased it out over the course of a few years in favor of making money off of the old titles via its own online store and MS is following suit.