What's killing the new Xbox is that they're going overboard with DRM. The way to fix it yet still allow games running without the disk in the console is simply to apply the following 4 steps: 1. Each disk will have a unique embedded serial. 2. If you have the disk still in the machine, you can play offline without online checks. 3. If you sell or trade-in a game, as soon as the game checks in on another console, it will fail to work on yours. 4. For games never checked in for some time, a physical disk check will be needed every 180 days. I've owned both the current Xbox 360 and the original Xbox and can tell you plainly that I'm not planning on picking up the Xbox One when it comes out later this year. Though I've never owned a Playstation, Sony did a much better job of telling consumers to get their product at this year's E3. Sony was hurt in a big way when they launched the PS3 and demanded that customers pocket out $600 for their console. It seems as though it's Microsoft's turn to fall victim to the sin of Hubris when they ask for complete control and supervision of your living room. After hearing and reading about the NSA leak on how they are essentially watching you, how close to Big Brother does anyone want to get? If they apply the 4 easy steps that I specified above, I think that both publishers and customers can be made happy. If they don't, I'll be Microsoft's turn to lose money as Sony has done for the past 6 1/2 years.
Then you have the problem of having them forcing Kinect to be on, can't upgrade internal HDD, no mic included, charging $500 for a console with less powerful hardware than PS4 that costs $400. And now people are thinking of MS as a controlling-charging for everything greedy bunch of jerks.
Time will tell which is more powerful however I anticipate that both consoles will be similar enough. PS4 has DDR5 however the XBO has cached RAM for buffering. All that said, I feel sympathy for people who spend their time counting pixels on games to find out if there even is a difference. That was always a fair example of looking so closely to a tree that you can't tell if you're in a forest. As for the price, they're basically charging everyone an extra $100 for Kinect. While this is risky, I think that their policy with DRM is what is most likely going to bite them.
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