Take a glance at CVG's comments threads (here's a good start), and you'd be forgiven for thinking that Microsoft had invested money in North Korea's nuclear program, or, er, confirmed a constant 'always online' console.
Core gamers (if you excuse the label) seem to have reacted with indifference or outright negativity to Xbox One. Of the first 200 comments under our main Xbox One story, roughly 25% were positive, 25% mixed and 50% negative i.e. 75% with a mixed to negative reaction. This might just be the nature of comments threads, or a rallying of the 'Sony Defence Force', as some noted, but it's no co-incidence.
Microsoft's unveiling clearly wasn't aimed at 'us', but the mass market: focusing on TV, sports and Call of Duty as this fun, 90 second wrap up video, neatly suggests.
Xbox One is being positioned as a catch-all entertainment device first, and games console second. It took 30 minutes for the first game to appear at the unveiling, and even that consisted of sportsmen waffling about 'contact' and 'intensity' over wire-frame renders.
The world's journalists and critics were slightly more agnostic in their views, it seems, and we've rounded up the best of the good, bad and mixed reactions below:
The Positive
Zoom"Just before he died, Steve Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson about his dream for revolutionising television... Today, I saw something very close to Steve Jobs's dream device. Just like he envisioned, this machine turns itself into the hub of your living room. It plays video games, Blu-ray discs, TV shows, and everything you could possibly want from the Internet. It switches between this stuff seamlessly-you can forget about the Input button. And it does indeed have the simplest user interface imaginable, an eerily accurate voice-recognition system that is far more intuitive than a remote control... Before you say anything, though, you've got to say its name: Xbox."
Farjhad Manjoo, Slate
"I'll go ahead and say it: I love the look of the Xbox One. It reminds me of the original. And more than that, it's not trying to be futuristic for the sake of it. I wish the whole thing were doused in a matte coating, but it's a pretty clever design overall. Now that we're beyond that, I think it's going to be an excellent system if it sells for under $400. Including a Blu-ray drive was a great step forward, and the graphic prowess is obviously laudable."
Darren Murph, Engadget
"Microsoft hasn't simply created an incredibly powerful and flexible piece of gaming hardware - roughly eight times as powerful, we're told, as the Xbox 360, and able to run a vast array of games and applications simultaneously thanks to ambitious operating system design. Nor has it settled for just upgrading Kinect, ramping up the device's precision and responsiveness to allow instantaneous, friction-less entertainment browsing and new, compelling kinds of videogame. Microsoft's secret weapon, the lightning-in-a-bottle that could redefine everything, is the cloud."
Edwin Evans-Thirlwell, OXM
The Mixed
"Having complained at the PlayStation 4 launch in New York in February that Sony's presentation was too humble and reactive, it was a pleasant surprise to be sat listening to smart Xbox engineers define a vision for the future of games and for it to be, well, an actual vision of some sort, rather than mere amplification. Computation in the cloud, natural interfaces and multiple devices: tools that will empower developers in ways they either haven't had or haven't been able to rely on in the past. I'll take that for now."
Tom Bramwell, Eurogamer
"The other striking impression I had from today's announcement wasn't what Xbox didn't say, but what it did say - and how that compares or contrasts to Sony's PlayStation 4 unveiling earlier this year. I think the result lays bare the core strategy for the two devices. And while the aim is the same - create the best console, sell the most games and hardware - the approaches are almost polar opposite. As the respective companies' own execs put it: PS4 is "designed by developers for developers". Xbox One is "designed by gamers for gamers". My extra take: PS4 is designed as a reaction to what Sony has done.Xbox One is designed to secure what MS wants."
Michael French, MCV
"As a home entertainment device, Xbox One sounds impressive. As a video game console, it's too early to tell. The Xbox One's new gaming focus features are intriguing: Smart Match that lets players enjoy other activities while waiting for a new match and Game DVR for recording game sessions. As for actual titles, it's tough to get excited right now. More titles in the longstanding racing series Forza Motorsport and first-person shooter Call of Duty await. Most video game players are well aware of what to expect from those franchises."
Brett Molina, USA Today
The negative
"I'm still shocked that, during early Xbox One design meetings - a time when obvious, sprawling and significant changes were occurring across the western household - Microsoft executives decided to bet the house on the future of live TV and cable.
"More to the point, it's frankly staggering that Microsoft observed the modern ways people view cable TV and believed, somehow, that it could add to the experience by getting in the way of it. The existing consumer demand to interrupt TV with Skype calls, and a hand-gesture controlled Internet Explorer, can only be described as fictional."
Rob Crossley, CVG
"Microsoft's confused, boring reveal event angered the core audience and worried business commentators. E3 will be a chance to set things right. There's a more pessimistic interpretation... here is a company which is so arrogantly confident in its dominance of the core gaming space that it believes it no longer has anything to prove - that it can take for granted the support of core gamers and early adopters, instead focusing its energies from the outset on television, movies, sports, music and, er, Skype. If that sounds familiar, it's probably because - like me - you watched the Xbox One reveal with strong flashbacks to exactly the kind of hubris and arrogant assumption which dogged and ultimately crippled Sony's launch of the PlayStation 3."
Rob Fahey, GamesIndustry.biz
"By the end of the event, I sat disoriented, feeling like I'd seen one of the Big Three take a hard left into a past decade, a fictional privileged nation where everyone owns a giant television they want to talk to, where they entertain themselves with high-end fictional simulations of football season and futuristic, nebulous wars abroad. Where we supposedly want whole-body play. Where the fantasy is that all our living rooms are big enough for that. Not only am I unmoved by this "groundbreaking" reveal, but I can't imagine who reasonably would care -- except for the most high-end, most traditional niche "adult gamer" fan who does not represent a broad enough cross-section of the market to stay viable, who never will. So maybe what I feel isn't old. Maybe what I feel is moved on. I'd like to see the console industry move on too, but judging by Microsoft's performance, it doesn't look good."
Leigh Alexander, Gamasutra
