(Picture from mashable.com)
So, Xbox One was announced the other day. I know this because my Facebook is crammed full of statuses about what my friends thought of the specs. It came to a point where my friends and I sat in the Student Union office yesterday and debated whether the new console is worth it to buy or not.
It turns out that although there are some pretty cool things about it (i.e you can use it to control live TV rather than just catch – up, and that you can use motions to control the screen) there are things about it that are not as great as they ought to be.
Firstly, the major hang-up my friends had with it won’t be backwards compatible. This means that any Xbox or Xbox 360 games that we already own will be made redundant, meaning that we wouldn’t be able to play them on the new console. Boo. The other major hang-up is that the games have to be bought and played brand new, as if you want to unlock the game if you’ve bought it preowned or borrowed it, you’ll have to pay an extra fee in order to play the game on your console. This is also bad, as one of my friends explained, he said that with 360, if he can’t afford to buy the latest game, but someone owns it already, he can actually borrow it with no problems and then hand it back. With Xbox One, however, he would have to go round the friend’s house to play it, as he wouldn’t be able to afford to pay the extra fee to have it unlocked for his own console. BOO!
Quite a lot of gamers are college or university students, meaning that they can’t necessarily purchase all the latest games or gadgets straight away. It’s bad enough that Microsoft charge us to be online (what happened to good old wi-fi without the extra charge?) and now charge if you want to change your gamer tag (£8.99) but when you’re a student with a lower income, then you can’t afford all of this. So when they introduce all this other stuff, a lot of gamers will be sorely tempted to leave Xbox altogether and go off to PC, or Playstation (although I heard that Sony might start charging for their membership as well).
I like the Xbox One, don’t get me wrong, it’s pretty damn sweet, but when it comes to getting a fair deal, it’s not really doing it for me.
Geeky Scribbles 
I feel like I’d be paying a lot for a lot of features I don’t really want to use. Like waving my hand at the screen or watching TV, but I’m a complete Luddite.
I do think I will join you on that one!