10 Biggest Xbox Fails Microsoft Wants You To Forget

3. Always-On Internet, Mic and Kinect

With the Snowden revelations about government surveillance seemingly proving that all those crackpot theories about our governments were correct, it wasn't a great call by Microsoft to announce that the Xbox One was going to require an always-on internet connection, and monitor you with its always-on Kinect camera and mic. The whole idea not only felt creepy and paranoia-inducing, but outright authoritarian. As a clunky means of DRM, if players were offline for longer than 24 hours, then crucial features such as your cloud-dependant saved games would be locked down until you reconnected. If you logged in on your account on someone else's console, then you'd get locked out of any games associated with that account after an hour of being offline (or logged out of your account). It felt very messy, and overbearing. The mic on the Kinect was also intended to constantly listen out for player commands as long as the console was switched on. The camera, meanwhile, wasn't going to be always on, but would switch on when you were in relevant games or apps, and would send certain image data of you to Microsoft's cloud. Unsurprisingly, this triggered a freak-out pandemic in the gaming community, who forced Microsoft into yet-another u-turn on their pre-release Xbox One promises.