Tag: xbox

Xbox has announced that it will continue to sell Xbox One’s – it’s next generation gaming and living room console – but it’s going to do it at a reduced price, without the Kinect. The $499 bundle with the Kinect still does exist, but for the future users will be able to save $100 by leaving the Kinect behind. It’s potentially part of a system thought out by Microsoft to catch up with sales of the PS4, which has been outselling the Xbox console in part because of the price. The Kinect also hasn’t quite justified its additional $100, as there are few games that support it, and fewer users still who use it to genuinely navigate through Xbox’s UI; it’s faster and ultimately easier to pick up the controller. Though the Kinect might indeed represent the future of gesture control in gaming situations, the reality of the situation is that the technology isn’t quite perfect enough yet to be consumer facing. Microsoft is spurning that future for the present, it seems, and in the process will hope to simply get the device into as many living rooms as possible – without that, Microsoft will have no platform on which to launch further developments.

Microsoft has been hinting at several different original television projects for months – including an upcoming project with Steven Spielberg to make Halo a television series – and today gave us a look at how Microsoft’s original content would shake out. The plan is to launch the newly-minted Xbox Originals with the previously-announced live, interactive stream of Bonnaroo Music Festival on June 13th. Xbox owners will be able to switch vantage points and take part in Skype calls with artists backstage; this degree of user control and interactivity will be a prime feature of many of Xbox Original series as well. On that front, Microsoft promised a host of non-event-based content, including “Every Street United,” hosted by international soccer personalities Thierry henry and Edgar Davids, “Signal to Noise,” focused on the influence of technology on directors, and the promised “Halo” series. After looking at how cautiously Netflix and Amazon have eased into original content, Microsoft’s broad lineup is certainly the most ambitious off-the-bat launch in some time. It also is a fantastic ploy to keep living-room consumers off of their cable boxes and on their Xbox’s as much as possible.