When consoles launch, there are a lot of things left up in the air for consumers, developers, publishers and the console manufacturers themselves. Will the new product be a hit? What kind of glitches will be present? Will there be any good games making the purchase worthwhile? These questions have to be answered by the non-hardcore gamers before they can justify $400-$500 on a new console, and that’s before games and other accessories are acquired. While millions have adopted the Xbox One, there’s still a 75 million console gap between it and its predecessor, the Xbox 360. There has been good reason to hold off, but that time is quickly coming to an end. Here’s why you should consider buying an Xbox One in the very near future.
The Kinks Are Pretty Much Ironed Out – At launch, the Xbox One had a sort-of-smooth-sailing venture, but there were some issues found in usability and a few party-related bugs that hindered the experience. Since launch, Microsoft has resolved nearly every issue that was present at launch and have drastically improved the usability of their UI. There still is a small learning curve to get through, but coming from an Xbox 360 will be beneficial since much of the look is the same on the One.
There Are Good Games Available Today, Tomorrow – On the Xbox One, you can play games like Forza 5, Titanfall, Dead Rising 3, Ryse: Son of Rome, and a growing library of indies (some exclusive) that cannot be found on the Xbox 360. These games impress in different ways, but the fact that you cannot get them on a 360 is a good reason for gamers to look at what can be had with a new generation of titles. More importantly, fall of 2014 is lined up to be a killer season for games. A new Assassin’s Creed, Destiny, Battlefield, Call of Duty are all lined up to take full advantage of the new power the Xbox One received with the June update, but there’s the growing buzz over Sunset Drive on its way and the sure-thing that is Halo: The Master Chief Collection that will take the greatest franchise exclusive on any platform and bundle its four core games together (along with their multiplayer modes) and offer some cool additions (Halo 5 beta invite, Halo: Nightfall digital series) to sweeten the pot. Sometime in 2015 there’s the likelihood of Gears of War, Quantum Break on top of others that are also being teed up for maybe a first-half launch, with Halo 5: Guardians dropping that fall. Plus, Minecraft for Xbox One will be out in August and the already-available Project Spark is quite incredible for creators and players alike.
The games scene is going to bust wide open on next gen consoles and the older 360 will no longer see consistent parity with releases (if any). The 360 will quickly become a reasonable console with a large back-catalog of games with streaming capabilities. Not a bad thing, but it’s not way to get in touch with what’s new.
One Console To Rule Them All – The Xbox One was named and touted for its capability to take over your living room in a way that no other console can. That still remains the case (mostly), but it’s the coming applications and the new application development path that Microsoft are taking between its Xbox, Windows and Windows Phone OS’ that will catapult it into the lead for set-top-boxes. There are already a ton of apps coming over this summer & fall to add to the Xbox One app library, but with the ability for app developers to port their apps to the Xbox One (assuming they are relevant to the system in some way) we will see a greater explosion of cool apps on our consoles, effectively making it a Windows 8-like PC that is dedicated to entertainment. Having a pretty robust Internet Explorer 11 on-board doesn’t hurt either.
Price Changes – The no-brainer is the recent decoupling of the Kinect and Xbox One, in terms of core bundling. You can buy an Xbox One for $399 without a Kinect, which will push way more of these units off of shelves and into living rooms across the world. Speaking of across the world…
Worldwide Expansion Coming September 2014 – Microsoft missed their worldwide launch intentions and scaled back from their initial 20+ launch markets to a slimmer 13. Since then there has been no action in terms of new territories available to purchase an Xbox One locally. The Xbox One isn’t as regionally-locked as previous consoles, so it’s easier to jump onto eBay and buy one even if it isn’t natively sold (yet). In September of 2014 we will see a huge jump in market availability. Countries like China, Japan and Russia will be able to buy the Xbox One, on top of dozens more, which will spur sales greatly and get the console closer to parity as far as availability in other countries with moderate-to-large populations. The Xbox One could quickly close the gap for sales between it and the rival PlayStation 4. With more console adoption comes more attention to the console. Developers won’t so easily pass on optimizing their software for the Xbox One hardware, meaning better support. It also means there will be more people to play with worldwide, so matchmaking could drastically improve if you’re outside one of the core countries currently supporting the Xbox One.
If you don’t have the money to buy one, start saving. Sunset Overdrive is looking great, a bundled Halo is guaranteed to bring a slew of gamers back to old school Halo for at least a little while, plus games like Quantum Break are truly ambitious and fresh looking, something that the Xbox platform as a whole hasn’t been so good about in the past. The console will challenge Sony for exclusive quality in the future as well. Halo 5: Guardians is getting so much quality attention and financial backing that it’s likely going to wompa-stomp Battlefield and Call of Duty. We don’t want to get our hopes up too high, but everything that we’ve heard so far has been very reassuring. So, what are you waiting for? Pick up an Xbox One and tell your friends to do the same, because the truly next generation of games are coming and your 360 won’t be the vessel of choice anymore.
Xbox One Game Source 