[:plant:] E3 2013: "Xbox, turn on PS4 so I can actually play games"

Lol at Halo on mobile phones. If what would once upon a time have been a Live Arcade game is the most exciting thing coming out of Microsoft studios this year, they better hope there's a ton of people who don't already own a laptop with an HDMI output who are looking for a way to watch tv online or else sales of the ONE are going to be laughable.

All the games I might once have been looking forward to have been shelved or never even got off the ground. Rainbow 6 got canned, Konami seem almost ashamed of the Suikoden series now, Sacred 3 looks like being some kind of horrific "YOU MUST PLAY WITH STRANGERS" perma-online effort so not holding out much hope for that any more and there wasn't really anything else exciting on the way anyway.

It's not a great sign when the only game I'm vaguely looking forward to this year is GTA.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I only ever buy used games and I often lend or borrow the ones I own. I've never played a Call of Duty game and have only ever bought one EA Sports title.

I guess Xbox One isn't for me.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

So the TVBox One is out in November for £430/$500. That suggests there's just the one model getting launched.

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Sony just turned me from a "Meh, upgrade to next-gen when the price drops" to "That seems like a reasonable use for my end of season bonus". Likewise, signing up to PSPlus and ditching Live around the same time.

I mean, I've been waiting for a new Killer Instinct game forever but that doesn't quite outweigh the extra £80 and not being able to buy second hand games.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Even if they do pull a massive U-turn, I fear the damage is already done at this point. Microsoft has suffered a PR disaster in the last couple of weeks and even if the One launches with none of the second hand games bullshit or whatever, in the back of people's minds is that Microsoft are the guys that wanted DRM and to stop us selling our games or lending them to people and Sony are the guys who didn't, yay Sony.

It's like the PSOne was an industry changing event and made gaming cool and socially acceptable and then everyone was really excited about the PS2 and it had GTA3 and was awesome. Then out of nowhere MS go and launch a console and everyone was a big suspicious and it was a slow starter but the Halo was awesome and Live made online console gaming easy and it caught on in a big way. Next gen Sony tried really hard but failed to capture what was great about Live but kinda missed the point and the PS3 was pretty expensive for nothing that special whereas the 360 improved on the original and went from strength to strength until MS saw some advertising dollar signs and launched a horrid new menu interface that was all about paying for tv shows and social networking and not really games. Now MS announce the follow up and it's sold as a tv box that sometimes plays games only MS want every single quid they can get out of you and Sony leap in and suddenly re-capture some of the excitement about PS2 and manage to make MS look really cynical and corporate in the process.

Xbox One has been weirdly marketed so far. They're all about watching tv and going on facebook but literally everyone has digital tv and a laptop that do those things better already. How they thought they could try and control the entire second hand games market and get away with it is anyone's guess. I imagine someone's getting sacked soon though.

I was speaking idiomatically.

It was a sound business decision but for one small but hugely important factor. MS tried to enforce a monopoly market for used games and probably thought Sony would play ball and do the same thing, hell right up to their conference most people assumed the same. Instead, Sony have taken the gamble, possibly in the time between the MS conference and theirs, that the money they'll now clearly make from so many people picking up a PS4 rather than a Bone at launch and having a bigger, established customer base as a result will outweigh the cash they could have made from controlling second hand sales. I'm sure the Bone will recover but Sony are going to be in a really strong position for years off the back of this. Whoever made this call at Sony is due for a hell of a bonus whereas some people at MS are clearly gonna get sacked.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?