4. Media
Xbox One wins here, no two ways about it. The whole point of the console is as an all in one entertainment system, because Microsoft want to rule your living room. Thats okay in theory - apparently you can run your TV and various other media services seamlessly and easily through the Xbox One and it works very well (with perhaps the exception of the fact it expects you to use the voice commands). Personally, Im saving "shouting commands at electronic devices" until I am a deranged old man, when I can get away with it and have my eccentricities treated kindly. The PS4 will have some multimedia functionality, but as general rule is sticking to being a games console and thats not such a bad thing. I dont need to feed all my devices through one box - or that is to say, I already do: its my TV. It could be argued that the Xbox One streamlines this, giving it all to you on one menu and saving you the hassle of flicking through the various inputs. Whats that, Xbox One? You have saved me the effort of pushing a single button using a reliable, effective and easy interface, and instead I can come out of one device and into another by speaking nicely to you? I dont do speaking nicely. My remote doesnt need to be told. I just give it a poke and it does what I want. In fairness, I am not doing justice to the Xbones media capabilities: it does seem to have a lot to offer, but it all seems like the solution to a problem that doesnt exist. As my friends tell me, just because I can get naked when we go to the pub, it doesnt mean that I should, in much the same way that just because you can plug everything into the Xbox One, it doesnt mean it's a good idea. So this is another one to watch: the service may end up proving itself invaluable, but at the moment it doesnt strike me as useful. Then again, the exact same thing was said about Digital Rights Management. Everyone got caught up in the raging torrent of controversy over the Xbox Ones prohibitive level of Digital Rights Management: always online, check in system and Big Brother camera. They rapidly back-pedalled following the backlash. Watch closely though, and I would bet the value of an Xbox One that this grand plan has not been dropped. See if it doesnt come creeping back at some point in the future. A friend of mine who was working on the Xbone at Microsoft at the time argued in favour of this ability to stop the loan and sale of second hand games because this meant higher profits for the games industry which would mean they could drop the retail prices of games and then pointed to Steam as an example of where this model has worked. If you havent heard of Steam, it is a digital distributor that doesnt have to deal with the costs of packaging, storage, transport infrastructure, shop premises or staff for those premises so that they can offer you games at pretty much the same cost as every physical distributor anyway. Yeah, nice one mate. He pre-empted this point by arguing how great the Steam sales are. This is true, they are - but a sale event is not to be relied upon as a way of purchasing games. It's an opportunistic thing, not something to be waited on in case they put that game that I want on sale. On the PS4 side of things, they have taken a carefree, almost flippant approach, saying to the gamer that you are free to do what you want with it. They won a lot of support here, and so they should, but it is a very rare thing to see a profit driven organisation turn their nose up at a way of increasing their margins, so might they be trying to have their cake and eat it? Think about it, once they have the support and youve bought the console, thats it - youre already invested. While this is purely conjecture, it once again wouldnt surprise me if the insidious creep of owning a licence rather than a game and the restraints that go with it begun to rear their ugly head before too long.