Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Finally Selling Xbox One Without Kinect
DroidJason1 writes: "Microsoft has unbundled the Kinect from the Xbox One. The unbundled system's price now matches the PlayStation 4. Microsoft is touting 'your feedback' as the reason for this move. Any Xbox One functionality that relies on voice, video, gestures, etc, will not work without a Kinect, and users will be able to purchase a standalone Kinect later this year."
The 180s never cease.
s/Your feedback/A massive lack of sales
The Price isn't what is making people choose the PS4 over the XBox. But the fact you can access internet services such as Netflix without having to pay a monthly fee, to access data you are already paying for.
The PS4 gives you Netflix without PlayStation points, but you need XBox Live Gold to get get Netflix.
No Xbox live gold isn't that expensive... However if you need to cramp down on a budget, it is one of the first things you will stop paying for.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
when you treat optional peripherals as though they were as integral as the controller itself. I'd say that hopefully MS learned their lesson but we all know they haven't.
Every step you make
every move you make
I'm watching you.
Microsoft also announced they are dropping the requirement to have an XBox Live membership to access third-party services like Hulu, Netflix, and HBO To Go. I couldn't understand why that was a requirement to begin with.
Starting from when they said there would be an always-on internet requirement (and then there wasn't), and then the whole "no selling of used games policy" (and then there wasn't), Microsoft has more or less annoyed. confused and alienated their potential user base.
Sure, some people will buy it no matter what.
But, for some of us, give us a gaming platform which doesn't need an internet connection, isn't providing an always on internet connected camera, and doesn't handcuff us to how you think we want to use it.
I don't want a gaming platform for Netflix, Hulu, Bing, Dong, Boing, or anything else. I'd also like to be able to play motion controlled games without an internet connection, because I'm not playing on-line games. Ever.
And, if you can't provide that to me, I don't want your product.
At this point, I see more value in buying a spare XBox 360 than even considering the XBone.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Gamers don't like to Kinect, maybe because when the One was released, they were told they would always have to connect. Then when MS said developers could remove the ability to play used games, the gamers began to connect the dots. MS seems to have connected with their customers and made a connection between things they don't like about the new console and their sales numbers relative to their biggest competitor. Has this connected?
I know this is an anti MS tech site but I was favoring an xbox over a PS4.
The reason being is I am not a heavy gamer. I wanted a nice OS platform that was more a media center with a dvr, netflix, skype ready, voice activated system that could play games too but did a little of everything.
Sony fanboys have been saying it is sooo much faster thinking it is 2007 all over again. But in reality the performance differences have been similiar. They are almost the same hardware with the xbox slightly slower but with faster shared ram for more multitasking stuff.
Unless you are talking exclusives I see no reason to chose a ps4 for my needs. ... however I did not bother purchasing one as I did not want to pay twice for Hulu and Netflix with a gold account. It wasn't the $100 difference up front of the kinect. It was the greed.
I think MS is making a mistake as many developers wont focus on the kinect now as systems wont have it.
http://saveie6.com/
I personally hate using voice command with eletronics because they can't talk back to me but some people like it, couldn't they have left the mic in? How expensive even is the mic?
the Republicans are going to be pissed Microsoft is fucking over their spying like this. Their kind doesn't respect our privacy, and Microsoft hit on their plans is going to cause violence. That is their way.
Also streaming apps like Netflix and Hulu will no longer require Live Gold subscriptions which is $60/year. It would have been one thing if the Live Gold subscriptions included Netflix and Hulu fees but they don't. No other devices like Blu-ray players, Roku, AppleTV, etc charges a monthly fee to use apps. There will still be some apps that require Live Gold but these mainly have to do with the gaming aspects of Xbox.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It wouldn't be Microsoft unless they doubled down on a bad foundation concept, and pulled the plug on it after the cost has been incurred but before it could actually pan out.
2009 called, and 2010-2013, they all would like to provide feedback on this joke of a press release where Microsoft shrugs off the 500mil a year it made locking people into gold and forcing ps3 owners to use discs for netflix due to M$' exclusive deal with netflix.
I will never use MS for an entertainment hub.
Who messed up worse, Microsoft with Xbox One or George Lucas with the Star Wars prequels? Blows my mind that they couldn't figure out people would have a problem with a camera staring out into people's living rooms.
Anybody else really pissed off at the "text only" popup at the top of slashdot?
I didn't think Microsoft would ever do it. Kinect made the XBox One unique at least. Now, it's just a weaker version of the PS4.
Removing the Kinnect is a terrible idea. While some of you think that the Kinnect is all about arm waving and jumping about there was a lot of opportunity for other (optional) gameplay.
Subtle things like a slight lean for your in-game character as you go round a corner in a racing game as you yourself lean into it (we all do it)
Battlefield has an option for head tracking when in a vehicle or on a corner so those times you fruitlessly try to look round a corner wont seem so silly.
None of this will now be implemented because I can easily see a cheaper console being a more popular option for parents buying consoles for kids. I can see developers wanting to 'not waste time' on content that 'not everyone can use' which is exactly what happened with the XBox 360's Kinnect. We'll be left with a bunch of gimmicky games that get played once when you have friends round.
They way Microsoft showed their arrogance at the launch of Xbox One and tried to dictate the terms to the customer, I said in my mind - I will never buy this garbage DRM console...
I don't give a crap what they do now - its too late... I refuse to support the nasty management of Microsoft, who are selfish butt wipes...
In fact, I'm now in the camp that believe consoles are a total rip off - the price of titles is extortionate... PC on Linux seems the only real future now.
They've reversed on almost every bad decision at this point. If they can just get around to reversing on backwards compatibility, I won't have any more reasons not to buy one. Don't do it Microsoft. I've been so productive lately.
a BSD box (a PIII that has grown up OUTER SPACE THE Large - kkep your direct orders, or list of other Slashdo4t's Had at lunchtime
It's too little, too late. Sony has probably won this generation already. The Xbox One isn't a failure, but it is going to be relegated to second place.
If Microsoft REALLY wanted to sell some systems and possibly win the war, they would do away with "Gold" Live! subscriptions, and make the full online experience free-to-all.
In this context "peddle" seems pretty appropriate.
We tried to peddle something, nobody wanted.
We reversed our unpopular stance by back-pedalling, and now we're back peddling.
Just whilst I'm on the topic, I'm most narked (and I accept alone), in actually *liking* the original "always-on-in-the-cloud" original XBone pitch.
The kinect can just wither and die though - voice was great. Camera...oh I'm sure it looked great in the pitch.
Media stuff looked pretty damn good when I was convinced they were going to sell it as a cable/ADSL streaming trojan Tivo+ box. I've now no idea wtf they were thinking.
Sell an XBone+ with 1080 games and you can refurb the millions you've sold as leased cable boxes.
While the Prequels and spinoffs may have alienated the long time fans, unlike Microsoft with the XBOne, the Prequels and their related merchandising was actually hugely successful. While it may have been moral/artististic/etc bankruptcy, it was commercial gold.
Microsoft on the other hand would've been like the movie whose sequels flopped and whose merchandising sales were extremely slow, neither of which Lucas had a problem with. (And you'll note, successfully positioned him into Disney in a similiar manner to Jobs with Pixar.)
Also: Slashdot needs to fix the fucking post system here.
I think it goes to show that the market for consoles has become more conservative. When you compare the PS4, XBone and the WII U(yes the Wii U is a part of the market), the PS4 is probably the most simple in its configuration. It doesn't have extraneous gimmicks like a Kinect camera or Wii U tablet that increase the cost of the system. Sure the controller has a LED and a touchpad,but it's not a huge new way of gaming that leads to more casually focused games.With the PS4, you only really get a box and a controller.
The casual market that Microsoft and Nintendo built their machine to appeal to is already satisfied with their phones and tablets for their day to day fix. And for the majority of gamer in the market for a PS4 or XBone, they also have phones and tablets with a great selection of casual games. So when the choice is given between the different consoles, they choose the one with a more enthusiast focus. Their itch for casual games is already sated. And it doesn't hurt that the PS4 GPU is 30-50% more capable and at the same price as an XBone(Kinect-less SKU).
... when these announcements start coming with an apology and resignation of whichever C-suite mandated the "feature".
Maybe if they were buying the unit back from you, that would be "backpeddling."
As it is, they are just providing a new offering.
The PC is making a comeback with gaming again.
The consoles become popular as gaming pcs were thousands of dollars in 2000. It was a rich kids thing and 3d graphics started arriving on consoles. The DIYS market is heating up where for about the same price you can build a moderate pc with a moderate gaming card and be stuck with a controller. The PC market is shrinking but enthusiast and gamers are taking a large slice of that recently.
Game makers who abandoned the pc 10 years ago because of the lack of DRM are returning too as they are making as much money on the pc now as the marketshare increases.
http://saveie6.com/
Mavericks are so 2010. We're on Trusties now.
Well, I have a horse in this race and it's already won [...] It's called a PC
On an Internet-connected PC, you have to worry about antivirus and other security issues. Or on an Internet-disconnected PC, you have to worry about reconnecting it to the Internet every few weeks so that Steam can renew its receipts. That and the PC doesn't have quite as many games designed to be played with multiple controllers. Sure, you can use an Xbox 360 Controller and use a TV as a monitor, but publishers aren't necessarily willing to accommodate this setup. On the whole, PC multiplayer games tend to be designed around the assumption of one player per machine so that the publisher can sell multiple licenses to a single household.
Jar Jar Binks is worse. Excising the crap from The Phantom Menace requires breaking the law (The Phantom Edit is copyright infringement). Excising the crap from Windows 8 does not (Classic Shell is freeware).
Subtle things like a slight lean for your in-game character as you go round a corner in a racing game as you yourself lean into it (we all do it)
Controllers have had accelerometers since the Wii Remote and PlayStation 3 SIXAXIS controller.
Battlefield has an option for head tracking
How does that work? If you physically turn your head, you face away from the monitor. Does the game amplify the rotation angle before passing it to the camera?
I'm now in the camp that believe consoles are a total rip off - the price of titles is extortionate
If you have four people in one household who want to play a game together, one copy of a $60 console game that supports multiple gamepads is cheaper than four copies of a $30 PC game that doesn't.
But why can't the Xbox One (x86) play games for the original 2001 Xbox (also x86)?
I've never heard Microsoft say that there was a "no selling of used games policy"...ever. What I did hear was they were contemplating not using physical media, which sparked a bunch of people to make wild assumptions. When asked about it, Microsoft responded that you could resell them (based on licensing agreements by 3rd parties), and you would get a code that you could then give to someone else so they could download and activate it. Always seemed reasonable to me, but the wild theories about everything were floating around everywhere that had no actual basis in fact or statements from Microsoft itself.
"Always on" issue - gone
Gold Membership to use streaming apps - gone
Bundled Kinect - gone
Almost everything that people have complained about has been removed / improved / fixed. I know there is a long tradition of slamming Microsoft on Slashdot ... almost a sport really, but come on. They are doing exactly what we've been asking them to do and everyone is still bitching about it. I for one commend them for listening to feedback and addressing the issues that we've known were there from the start.
I don't own an XBOX One, I'm a PC gamer, but I have to say I'm impressed to see a company that's willing admit their mistakes...I'm looking at you Nintendo...get your act together.
What can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
Competition can suck, but it's usually worse (for consumers) without it.
In this case, the worst effect of competition is that you might have to buy two game consoles to play every game that you would like to.
It beats paying 2x for the only game console with no competition.
whenever I've sat down with more than one person on a console the lack of screen real estate due to split screen kills it for me.
True, first-person shooters and racing games need a split screen because their camera angles depend on which way a player character faces. But why would you need to split a screen for something that puts both players' characters in one view? Consider arena combat games like Bomberman or fighting games like Street Fighter or cooperative adventures like Secret of Mana or New Super Mario Bros. Wii or cooperative shoot-em-ups like Contra or Smash TV or Ikaruga. Some other games naturally use a view whose orientation is opposite that of a 16:9 playfield, such as Klax and Dance Dance Revolution. For these, splitting the screen does not annoy because the screen space would otherwise have just been wasted on a background.
Behind a NAT not really, unless you use a web browser.
And guess what a lot of games embed for matchmaking. Besides, have people managed to break into the Xbox 360 through its Internet Explorer app?
The reason PC games are historically "single-user per computer" is that few users had them set up to ergonomically accommodate multiple players in front of one screen anyway.
I'm aware that consoles have historically been connected to physically larger monitors. But it's been easy to set up a PC to accommodate multiple players since 2007, when VGA and HDMI inputs became more-or-less standard features on new TVs. Why has it taken so long for PC users and major developers to realize this? Did it just take that long to replace SDTVs in living rooms?
"users will be able to purchase a standalone Kinect later this year"
Yes, but....
will it run on linux?
Its nice that you've listened... its just too bad that you took this long to actually respond.
Not a console gamer so I can't gauge how this effects anything. I'm PC gamer. The consoles of any brand are an irrelevance to me.
But MS's launch of the One has seemed troubled from the beginning. I do wonder why they bother with it. MS could have done much better simply by releasing an actual MS windows PC with a console form factor and a console GUI dropped on top of the windows OS. That would have given the Xbox One cross platform game compatibility, legacy support for lots of things windows is compatible with an the one is not, given additional utility to MS windows systems that would be able to use things initially designed for the Xbox, and generally given the Xbox a big advantage over the Playstation.
But they decided to go with another divergent incompatible OS with no legacy support even for most older xbox games. Its pathetic.
Every console should be backward compatible with consoles of the same brand. At least build a reasonable emulator into each. And its deeply foolish for MS not to leverage their command of the desktop environment to gain an advantage over Sony.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
It never went away.
No more than consoles required thousands on a sound system and gigantic plasma television.
Why reward them with your money after they've been jerking around their customers with user-hostile "features" and charging money for "features" you aren't going to ever use?
No. There isn't.
Not any game that depends on the use of the controller....which is pretty much all of them. You want to stand up while playing GTA so the Kinect registers that as an action, or would you rather press a button? Anything use you think you can come up with for the Kinect, you can do better with a motion sensing controller. Because it wont require you to move from your seat or take your hand off the controller.
.. Hitler is finally selling his candy without additivies!
This, in context of MS, means they have been so completely pwned that they've now decided to do ONE THING their customers want.
This is only to shut you up, not because they give a fuck about you want.
If they gave a fuck, there would be a new version of Windows 7 coming out and Windows 8 would be dumped.
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
Kinect was something that should have always been a option and not bundled into Xbox One. Again, this was Microsoft deciding for you what you wanted to buy.
Just another way to try and get the margins up because let's face it. XBox is the one bright spot in Microsoft's business model these days. So why not muck it up,right? For one thing when Microsoft realized Sony PS 4 would be $100 cheaper, why did Microsoft not simply drop the Kinect off the bundle and offer a XB 1 by itself? I'm really not sure how many gamers really find the Kinect interaction that important to gaming? It again appears to be another gimicky way of selling more games and hardware. Much like the Rock Band fad and the Nintendo Wii fad which thought everyone would love to get a physical work out while gaming?
Has anyone seen much of the hard core gaming community? I am not sure a work out is what they are wanting playing a 12 hr stretch of Call Of Duty?
secondary cpu?
"Gold Membership to use streaming apps - gone"
Does that mean I can use my Netflix on my Xbox 360 without my Gold Membership anymore?
Citation?
I would just like to repeat everything Dutch Gun said in a louder, angrier voice. This is exactly it.
Maybe because most of the people who were concerned with the above have already bought a PS4? Yeah, the changes are great... and many of the reasons to NOT BUY are now gone, but what are the reason TO BUY an XBOne?
Prior to HDMI you needed VGA or DVI and then had to figure something else out for audio. And even once you got HDMI you needed a computer that had an HDMI card.
Some TVs, such as my Vizio VX32L, have an analog audio input by one of the HDMI video inputs. This is designed for use with DVI-D to HDMI cable, as I mentioned in this table.
And for a lot of us the computer we use with the TV is our previous computer
Good point. Adding to my list of counterarguments.
One advantage of bundling Kinect: it made the development of new kinds of game interaction more appealing. Kinect isn't all that useful for most existing games; dance and fitness games are the exceptions and we had dance games with pads long before Kinect. And perhaps too many gamers are slugs who don't want to move. One problem with the business model for fitness games is that the people who like them seem to be content with continuing to play the same one, so there isn't a lot of repeat business.
I don't know if we ever would have seen Fantasia: Music Evolved if there had not been a large number of potential customers who already own the hardware. Though Harmonix was able to sell Guitar Hero and Rock Band even though people had to buy instruments to play them, so perhaps they would have risked it anyway.
Disclosure: I got to play test Fantasia last year. Harmonix has now announced it so I can say that it exists without violating the NDA I had to sign. I think a lot of people are going to enjoy it.
on the one hand yes, it means there is probably a 'weaker' PC hooked up to the TV then the latest and greatest; on the other hand today's weaker PC is no longer gaming obsolete.
Seventh generation AAA The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 GPUs held back graphical detail in multiplatform games over the last generation. This was long enough for even Intel IGPs to catch up. Eighth generation AAA But once most console games target Xbox One and PlayStation 4, new AAA PC games are probably going to start requiring GPUs comparable to those of the newer consoles. I'm told the only reason Titanfall works on a 360 is because they dropped a lot of the textures down to N64-class detail. In any case, the Intel IGP that runs XBMC smoothly is unlikely to cut it for a PC game with PS4-class detail. Indie Of course, indie games will likely have lower detail due to budgets being a generation or three back. But the commercial failure of OUYA showed that not enough people will buy into a platform just for indie games. This is why a successful video gaming platform needs AAA support.MS actually had some decent ideas, but totally dorked them up. If you want people to buy digital licenses, you have to make it more appealing than buying physical disks, not just force DRM on people. I thought roaming profiles (buy once, play anywhere) and game lending would have been two big selling points to get people excited about digital sales. They could have implemented these, but also allowed physical disks and offline play at the same time.
Hi! everybody, give you recommend a good shopping place. ( http://www.cheaponcn.com/ ) Good quality and good service but cheap price, Believe you will love it. You must not miss it!