After what seemed like an eternity in the minds of gamers, Sony and Microsoft geared up for another big console war. It had been 7 years since the launch of Xbox 360 in 2005 when the Xbox One was officially announced. Fans had long pondered what the next generation of gaming would bring to the living room, courtesy of Microsoft. What they got was something entirely different. When Microsoft revealed details of their new, shiny Xbox One, it came with a set of "features" that many simply did not want. For starters, Microsoft planned to tie all purchases of games (whether digital or physical) to a gamer's specific Xbox Live account along with their specific console. The idea was to allow gamers to have their games on a cloud platform, meaning they could potentially play their games on a different Xbox One console. In order to do this, your Xbox One would be required to "check-in" every 24 hours; if it failed to check in, you would be unable to play your game from the cloud. These restrictions also meant it would be difficult to sell your used games, something that many game publishers might actually prefer. There was a proposal to have a fee applied when someone purchased a used Xbox One game and attempted to play it on their own console. Many feared this would hurt independent game stores who rely on used games in order to turn a profit. As if that wasn't enough, Microsoft also announced that the new Kinect peripheral (a camera-sensor used to play certain games) would be required on at all times, even if the game did not need to use the Kinect. Of course, anyone who cares about their privacy was up in arms over this decision. The thought of a camera being able to monitor you in your living room is not a particularly desirable one. Ultimately, the uproar was enough for Microsoft to reverse these new policies and treat Xbox One like a normal console. By that time, however, Sony used the opportunity to mock the initial Xbox One policies and it paid off in strong sales of their Playstation 4 console. At the end of the year, Sony sold more than a million additional Playstation 4 consoles than the Xbox One.
Ryan Estabrooks is a film writer/director and photographer. When he is not busy solving mysteries, he can be found working on his feature length film. You can view all of his work at the imaginatively-titled RyanEstabrooks.com
