Joel Sabillón

Xbox One worth the 500 bucks?

June 10, 2013

Microsoft announced today at e3 that Xbox One will have a $500 price tag in the US.

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My first reaction was “woah that’s a bit pricey”. So let’s go into more detail to see if this console is indeed worth the 500 bucks. 

Pros:

  • Blu-ray drive
  • Skype video calling
  • Updated Kinect 1080p camera
  • Twitch (new feature to broadcast gaming sessions)
  • Multi-tasking (be able to pause game and go back to dashboard)
  • 500GB storage (360 Elite comes with 250GB at $399)
  • Games will be in the cloud (which means once you install you can play your game at any Xbox One)
  • Steaming services, confirmed right now: Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Instant Video, Youtube, ESPN, Vimeo, HBO Go, NHL, MLB.tv and others
  • Internet Explorer
  • Facebook

Cons:

  • No backward compatibility (360 games will be useless)
  • No used-games will be allowed to be played
  • $100 more expensive than PS4

Hardware
The Xbox One has an APU with eight x86-64 cores, 8 GB of DDR3 RAM with a memory bandwidth of 68.3 GB/s, a 500 GB non-replaceable hard drive. 3 GB of RAM will be reserved for the operating system and apps, leaving 5 GB for games. The graphics processing unit (GPU) is based on an AMD GCN architecture with 12 compute units, which have a total of 768 cores, providing an estimated peak theoretical power of 1.23 TFLOPS. Source: Wikipedia

So…
About the cons, I don’t really care about the no backward compatibility. It sucks yes, but I don’t play old games as much and as long as you keep your 360 you’re good. But the No Used-Games policy really bugs me. I love buying used games on craigslist/ebay so this is a big deal for me.

The pros are great really, but the one I only care about is the multi-tasking one. The rest just make this game console into an all-in-one media center.  If you already own a smart-TV, a blu-ray player, an AppleTV or Roku then you don’t really need all these extra features.

One positive I see is that purchasing an Xbox One allows you to move all these other devices to another TV you might have in another room.

So is it worth the $500? I think yes. Most people will say well the PS4 is cheaper, yes but that doesn’t mean its a better console. I’m a PC Gamer and a happy owner of a 360 so will I buy one? Not sure, I don’t need it right now. But after seeing some of the games previewed today at E3 like Killer Instinct and Forza 5 is gonna be tough not to buy it.

What I wish
An Xbox One Light version would be ideal for me. I just want to play games, offer me a console without media center capabilities and for cheaper and I would pre-order right now.

/js