Back with the first Xbox I payed for a month trial of live that somehow got me charged for a full year. I tried it a couple of times the first week and never used it again. I was still fairly young and had nothing better to do, but I just disliked the experience of playing with strangers. I guess if you liked MP, getting busy will ruin it, but for me age had little to do with it.

Someone for whom buying Live was a given to game on, the pay gates probably weren't a big deal But as someone that had no intention of ever gaming with it, having normally free content gated just came off as pathetic, prickish money grubbing behavior. Of course this was only listed as a 360 change. I'm not sure what the XBOne policy is for the same content.

Perhaps, but how many of them are buying Blurays and don't have a huge collection of DVDs?

Also, I'd wager that most of the "HDTVs" being sold aren't really HD, they're using 720p, which is more than the DVD 720x576, but not that much higher and if you're sitting away from the TV it's likely that you're not even going to notice.

Then there's the fact that pretty much everybody and their cousin already own a DVD player to go with their DVD collection at which point, there's not much point in buying a DVD player with more parts to break when you can buy a dedicated box for a bit less that's got fewer mechanical parts to break.

But, that's just my sense, I haven't done a survey, so I don't really know for sure.

I think it's more of a software issue than a hardware one. There are games in which the Kinect works pretty well and there are others in which it doesn't work at all.

Take a look at the Kinect review by Pro Jared, for example (you can find it on Youtube). It's a review of the Xbox 360 Kinect, not the Xbox One's improved version, but you will get the idea. He tested some Kinect games and he found out that some of them worked fine, others didn't. For example, he praised how precise and smooth Kinect was in Kinect Adventures and Just Dance. However, when he tested Sonic Riders and FIghters Uncaged, the controls didn't work at all. In Fighters Uncaged it was so fucking ridiculous that when he did a punch movement the character kicked his opponent. Angry Joe also did a review on Sonic Riders and mentioned how broken the Kinect controls were.

Maybe. Most examples for Kinect implementation I saw were devastatingly bad but admittedly *did* leave me thinking that it looks more like a software problem. For instance, in Angry Joe's of Fighter Within video I saw that the little image showing the player's current pose is updated pretty quickly and very precise, so the failure seems to be the game's disability to properly interpret the poses and play the corresponding move.

Actually the first thought I had when I saw that was that the biggest mistake devs do when working with Kinect is to use the Kinect input to trigger pre-defined events rather than just basing the game directly on the position and movement speed of the player's limbs. Indeed, most problems I see when looking at Kinect games are the same ones which occurr whenever complex input must result in choosing the best fit from a small pool of potential effects. It's actually the exact same problem you can also observe with optical character recognition or voice/gesture recognition in general. I mean, similar problems could already be observed in Black & White which used a depressingly awkward gesture system for triggering miracles that would often fail to trigger anything. The VSIM combat system in Die by the Sword on the other hand always leads to *some* effect that at least roughly corresponds with the stuff you do and observe because it uses quite basic variables to determine rather simple results - it may be clunky but it works. Game devs developing for Kinect should stick to a philosophy similar to the latter.

An example I thought of in particular was the fistbump in Steel Battalion. Rather than executing the fistbump if very specific conditions are met the fist should just move in three dimensional space accordingly to the player's moves and the fist bump should succeed when the player's virtual fist roughly collides with the AI controlled team member's fist. That *should* be a fool-proof solution that would succeed pretty much every single time (if Kinect itself is indeed as precise as it seems) - and on top of that the experience would be far more immersive this way.

But see, the thing is - I can perfectly imagine all these explanations and various solutions to many of the problems related to Kinect but I kinda just refuse to believe that professional game developers with a high budget and cooperating with Microsoft are stupider than I am. That's why I tend to see problems with the technology itself rather than incompetent game developers. But who knows... maybe I'm giving game developers too much credit and am too skeptical of novel technology.

Now it seems MS is willing to offer refunds to people wanting to kill their live service after the pay gate removal.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/14/5717360/microsoft-offers-xbox-live-refunds-after-making-netflix-free

I guess it a nice gesture. I wonder who these people are though that bought Live only for Netflix. I figure you must be ill informed or not worried all that much about money.

A common sense decision from a company where it seems common sense isn't too common. The original Xbox One concept was always going to be a hard sell because it was what Microsoft wanted customers to want rather than what customers were actually demanding. This is a symbolic gesture of the large dismantling of the original vision for Xbox One, as so much of the concept depended on it. However, it will allow Microsoft to be more competitive against the competition in terms of price, making it more relevant in the marketplace. Maybe in time Microsoft can introduce elements of the original vision back and let user demand determine their success. Either way, this announcement is a step in the right direction for now and time will tell if users want a complete entertainment experience or a game console.

We probably give them too much credit. If Kinect wasn't precise enough, then no game would work well on it. The thing is, there are games that do. I have a Kinect myself (for both the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One) and i have to admit that this thing is impressive. The only Kinect game i played was Kinect Adventures (came bundled with my Xbox 360) and i have to say that Kinect works pretty well. The game itself is nothing special, just a Wii Sports rip-off, but the controls are very precise. And some of the game modes do require quite a bit of precision.

If you look at the Wiimote, for example, you can see that it suffered from poor precision from the beggining. And it was a hardware issue, which was later fixed with the Motion Plus add-on.

So, yeah, everything leads me to believe that the problem with Kinect is software related. Maybe even the game developers are not the ones to blame. Maybe the Kinect dev kit sucks? Maybe it's too complex? Who knows?

I'd say that Kinect devs will be shitting themselves.

"More than 80% of Xbox One owners are actively using Kinect, Microsoft said Tuesday."

That is such a stupidly vague statement. I'd love to question them on exactly how they arrived at that figure.

They probably consider turning the XB1 on as a Kinect "activation" :)

Yeah, I was thinking something along those lines as well.

I'd still rather go for a PS4 for console exclusives but the XBone has gone up from "Not even on a bet" to "hey, if it's real cheap in some huge sale...".

I have no wish to ever bother with Kinect, whether it works well or not it cannot change that I have no desire to stand around waving my arms and legs about yelling commands at the TV. When I game I just want to... game.