11 Things Microsoft Wants You To Forget About The Xbox One
7. Their Initially Awful PR
What do you do when you've previously lead the pack and have just dropped a bombshell in the industry, the ramifications of which have prompted thousands of questions that need answering for the sake of your own reputation? You go dark of course, barely even being able to convey your own policies to the spokespeople who are out there at press events, meaning that those aforementioned answers that should have been clear and concise, were muddied to the point of complete confusion. Take for example the idea of a 'Cloud-powered system'. It's nice to be dazzled by corporate speak initially, but it has to be followed up by cold, hard facts that will be understood by every potential consumer. Here we'd heard about how the system itself will handle some processing, whilst beaming the rest of the game back and forward to a server hub overseas. You're probably thinking that's not very reliable, and there'll be a ton of lag and spotty graphics, right? Well no one really knows, as amongst a swathe of mixed messaging following the reveal, Microsoft have never fully explained how, or why, this idea of a 'Cloud-powered' machine is worth the hassle. The nearest a company came in trying to get across the potential benefits was Titanfall-developer Respawn Entertainment, but even they were forced to talk in the same tone as the rest of us when getting around how blurry everything has become:
"Now Xbox Live has a cloud that somehow powers games. Cloud doesnt seem to actually mean anything anymore, or it has so many meanings that its useless as a marketing word."
It's great that a developer can just lay out exactly what needs to be said, but it's a crying shame that they should have to at all. This is a hardware issue, and something that Microsoft need to clarify and impress with if we're ever going to take the idea seriously in the future.
