> - Edit: Forgot trying to turn the Xbox One into an always-online TV set-top box

people call this a terrible idea, i thought it was a great fucking idea. At the time, and frankly still, streaming apps are mostly what we use tvs for these days, and the platforms to run them that are shipped INSIDE of the tvs we buy fucking suck, uniformly.

While the xbox was built as a gaming console initially all they really wanted to do was expand that notion. It could be an everything box for your '10 ft experience' It could play games, and be a dvr, and be a streaming interface, and and and. They could easily spin out another sku with lower specs to curtail some of the gaming power and make a more streaming focused box (like an apple tv but by microsoft) and sell that to the parents while selling the beefy gaming one to the kids.

I think the thing that sunk it was some Orwellian notion about the kinect. It's awesome tech, get a siri/alexa plus body tracking. The biggest downside being that MS's stance on privacy is 'peasants get no privacy'. At the time siri/alexa were still in their early stages and people were creeped out by them. Siri with eyes was extra repellent.

Well that and gamers throwing a fit because they didn't want their gaming console to be useful to their parents and other non gamers ...

You're misrepresenting what people were actually upset about with the Xbox One's original plans leading up to launch. If they wanted to add that Kinect functionality, whatever, but they announced it in a state where the Kinect was REQUIRED and had to always be plugged in. And it wasn't just always-on motion-tracking sensors, but an always-on microphone. In addition to that, your Xbox had to do a call to home every 24 hours to make sure you were still allowed to play physical games you purchased. You couldn't buy or sell used games, or lend them to a friend.

The DVR stuff wasn't a big issue for anyone, but it was emblematic of the fact that Microsoft didn't give a shit about gaming. Sony was already pulling ahead with exclusives people wanted by the end of the previous generation, and all Microsoft had to show for the next generation was a home entertainment system that had too much DRM and focused on their motion control gimmick at the point where everyone knew it was a fad that came and went in 2006 with the Wii. And on top of all this it was an extra $100 on top of the PS4's price.

Saying gamers were mad because the system could be useful to their parents is incredibly disingenuous.

Wasn't the biggest thing with the kinect everyone was upset about was that if you say, rented a movie, there would be an implicit agreement that x number of people can watch at that price. If x+n people were watching, you would get up charged. Then also question of, what if only x people are watching but 1 person walks in a room, then walks out, would they have counted that as x+1?

First I've heard of that. I did a quick search just now and it sounds like it was some patent that was filed but there was never anything officially stated about it.

Yeah it's certainly something that they hardware could enable (in a limited and easily gameable way). But I don't think they talked about that anywhere but maybe with studio execs.

Mighta been a case at the time where someone saw the patent and a bunch of people jumped to the conclusion that it was a for sure thing that was gonna happen.

>Well that and gamers throwing a fit because they didn't want their gaming console to be useful to their parents and other non gamers ...

I think it's worth revisiting the announcement. Gamers were upset because the launch presentation of the new console spent very little time talking about games. That presentation was followed by a Q&A with the notorious "we have a console for people without reliable internet, it's the xbox 360" quip. The "peasants get no privacy" attitude really felt like it was just part of a bigger "the peasants will buy what we say" attitude.

I'm with you on the utility of the basic concept. I actually really enjoyed using the Kinect to control Netflix. There was a good concept buried in the xbone vision that I would still like to use today - but Microsoft fumbled the execution tremendously badly and in particular, did so in a way that did not show "good stewardship to gaming."

On that note, the Kinect almost ended Rare as a studio...and the cool media features introduced with the Xbox One are now as dead as the Kinect.

I have a pile of kinects I built up by snagging them out of goodwills and other charity shops. It's still cool as fuck tech. I mostly use the original 360 version because there are open source sdks for them that run on pretty much every platform. I think there are a few half baked K2 sdks that are open source these days but I haven't looked. They are great for interactive art projects. Tons of use in the computer assisted art space.

Totally, the Kinect was the first device I ever “hacked” with and really was what got me into programming. It’s a lot of fun to mess with to this day, when I last pulled mine out I was tinkering with full body tracking for SteamVR. It's too bad the K2 never got the same robust software platform since the hardware had some interesting capabilities, I recall the project I was working with said it had some advantages in the scanning range but the software was too unreliable to recommend it.

Is there anything like it available on the market new in box today? I recall the RealSense cameras seemed comparable but those are gone now.

Golly. I still do miss being about to navigate Netflix titles by just swiping my hand in either direction. That really felt like the future made real and now it’s been discontinued for years.

Microsoft has sought to dominate the living room long before Xbox.... remember Windows Media Center? I don't know if it is still their strategy (seems like not by your post, I don't have an Xbox One S and my living room runs Kodi on Android TV) but it has been their intention for a while.

Windows Media Center is truly dead and all the TV-focused/Roku-competitive parts of the Xbox One were turned off years ago in OS changes. (Many were turned off only months after that sad launch. Some of them were great features and there is reason to lament their loss in the massive turnaround.) The Series S/X successor consoles have never had any of those parts of the OS and the above comment that this "Xbox One living room debacle" being "recent" feels outdated at best.

Microsoft seems to have given up on the living room entirely outside of gaming ambitions.

Its funny, prior to getting a SmartTV I used my Xbox One basically as Microsoft imagined. Game console, dvd player, and box to run my streaming apps.

Even after getting a smart tv I still use gaming consoles or an apple tv for everything. The smart tv apps are generally dog slow and terrible uis and menuing in comparison to the apps that have decent compute behind them.

I've transitioned to using a chromecast and my phone for most everything. I expect it uses a little less juice than running the console, so I come out ahead there.

Xbox's role in the gaming industry has, funny enough, very little to do with Xbox itself. It's their competitive presence that has kept Playstation from stagnating and making terrible decisions. You can see this extremely clearly when the 360 was outselling the PS3 and Playstation/Sony made plenty of management changes to shift directions.

I can agree there - MS has an important competitive role in the marketplace and it's not like Sony has always been a great steward to the community by comparison. I have mixed feelings about exclusives in general, but Sony has certainly played that game more than MS.

But the 360 was unveiled in 2005 and was replaced in the market a decade ago. My criticisms are really oriented to the last 5-10 years. On that note, I'm reminded of the Xbox One "your game console is for watching TV and will always be connected to the internet" release. And in that generation, it was the clamoring market and Sony's response (like the classic 'how to share secondhand games' video[0]) that pushed Microsoft to stop acting unreasonably.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48nCBnc9VBs

Yes that's very true! Much to their benefit, Playstation has been positively aggressive in recent years, I would attribute a lot of that to Mark Cerny (and the core platform tooling team) learning from PS3 mistakes and making the platform prioritize ease of development, and also from Xbox's mistakes on trying to pivot to general entertainment.