Because No One Asked For...An Insight Into When I'll Buy An Xbox One

I’ve been a proud owner of an Xbox 360 for 6 years and been a player of the console for even longer (oh thank you former shared house situation). Before that I also owned the original Xbox console for a couple of years and continued using it into the infancy of its successor. I will at some point also own the newly announced Xbox One console. I’m pretty darn certain of this. The next generation of gaming does look promising; the technology seems impressive, franchises are arguably in something of a golden age with critical success after critical success and certain big money publishers are dominating the industry with annual quality efforts. Indie games developers have also excelled themselves when using the current generation technology and the prospect of what they’ll be able to deliver in the next five years on a new machine is mouth-watering to say the least.  I’m less certain however, that I will be making my investment into Microsoft’s next brave new world within the first 12 to 18 months of the console’s launch this Autumn, and this is for a number of reasons.

But first, a small journey through time...

My first Xbox was purchased secondhand from a guy at work in 2004. It stank of cigarette smoke, the huge unwieldy controllers needed to be bleached clean of the caked on grime - a purchase of a fresh S-pad came not long afterwards - and he’d forgotten that he’d left a game in the tray for which he had no box and so to this day I assume it was a loan from one of his friends that never made it home. I paid £50 in total. It came with Halo 2 and I quite easily invested over 50 hours of playtime into killing and dying on the multiplayer mode to make my purchase surpass the £1 an hour benchmark that I still now follow as a sign of gaming value. By 2004, Microsoft’s first foray into the home console market was nearly three years old. The Halo franchise was on the path to becoming a true phenomenon and the manufacturer was securing and producing some decent platform-exclusive content. The online multiplayer side of its equation for gaming dominance was proving to be reliable and showing Sony how it was done on its first attempt.

For all of this success and praise though, Microsoft had not received much of my money. I was paying the Xbox Live subscription and I’d bought a new pad, the rest had gone to that guy from work. I was borrowing games from friends’ growing collections and the number of AAA titles being released was starting to dwindle as Microsoft began planning for the future.

The Xbox 360 launches in 2005, a housemate makes the investment and we all put money into some new games when we deem them unmissable from launch. Gamestation and Game become a first port of call should we end up with itchy trigger-fingers as the second-hand prices are pretty generous. I make the leap for my console purchase two years later as the white box price begins to plummet amid the furore that was the ‘Red Ring Of Death’ debacle and I never look back. I’ve purchased maybe 7-8 games within the first month of release during that subsequent half decade. Considering that these include Skyrim, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Battlefield 3 and Halo 4 within their ranks, I have literally obliterated the aforementioned £1ph standard during my ownership of that pearly gem of computing goodness thanks to days worth of aimless questing and headshots (delivered and received). The machine is still running well today, I own a handful of games which I’m still yet to get properly stuck into and at time of writing my watch list for unplayed titles includes (somewhat embarrassingly) Batman: Arkham City, Assassin’s Creed 3, Mass Effect 3, Far Cry 3 and COD: Modern Warfare 3.  It’s within the existence of this list of untouched premium quality games that we find my attitude towards the impending Xbox One release.

The only clear reason for me to buy the Xbox One within the first 12 months of its release would be to indulge in a superb multiplayer experience that sees me pumping hours of my leisure time into its imagined and competitive world and that will arguably be at its strongest during those early days as everyone learns to survive and fight through match after glorious match. At the time of writing I only have one Xbox One title flagged as a ‘must have’ on the next generation machine and that’s Bungie’s Destiny, which, yes, will also be available on 360. Will that one title be enough to lure me into a near £400 purchase? No, I’d say that no gaming experience is currently worth that expenditure. I’d rather use that sort of money for a holiday to America, or a decent mountain bike, or perhaps on my next desktop PC.

Destiny is looking disgustingly promising...but I can wait

We’re still in the midst of a world recession, people have less disposable income than before and everyday essentials continue to rise in price. How many people will be rubbing their hands together at the thought of coughing up close to half a grand for a new console with a growing, yet limited gaming library? The last time I did that it was 1995 and I was buying a Sega Saturn! The initial sales of Xbox One will still likely be impressive - and I don’t mean to ignore the fact that Microsoft are selling it as a multimedia machine rather than just a games console - but with over 70 million 360s having been sold worldwide there’ll still be a huge gaming fanbase who won’t make the immediate jump and will continue to play on the older platform for a while longer yet.

The only title to drag me away from Modern Warfare 2 back in the day was Battlefield 3 and that made me ignore multiplayer antics on COD: Black Ops and Modern Warfare 3 as I continuously helped destroy tanks advancing across the River Seine. Halo 4 turned up last year as a fresh blasting distraction and meant that Black Ops 2 failed to make my radar. Battlefield 4 is queued up for an Xbox 360 launch on November 1st which should fall within the close vicinity of the launch of the Xbox One. I anticipate there being many gamers who will stick around for the 360 version rather than shelling out for the new console and so my lock for multiplayer goodness into 2014 is still pretty much guaranteed. Bungie have already stated they have a ten year plan for Destiny so that should be going stronger than ever by the time 2015 comes knocking and I suspect I’ll be able to pick up a firsthand copy for a snip, hopefully at the point where the retail price for the console will also start to tumble in order to keep competitive with Sony's monster. And this follows the same path that I’ve been on as a consumer and gamer for the past 10 years.

Yes, I follow some gaming franchises and there will be moments where I’m there on day one, wanting to be involved from the very outset with the thrill and excitement that comes from a new launch, and quite possibly with a pre-ordered copy winging its way to me, but in the main I’m happy to let some games pass me by. I pay attention to the initial burst of positive reviews, TV, billboard and website adverts and other media coverage, but can just make a note to pick it up a couple of months down the line. I only have so much time available for gaming, I only have so much money available for gaming and I generally want to maximise that where I can.

The newest title I have played this past couple of months is Tomb Raider. I played it all of the way through and very nearly completed the single player game with 100 percent of the targets and available achievements in the bag. And I spent hours doing it rather than rushing through. I’m doubtful that I’ll pick it up again to accomplish those straggling targets and while the multiplayer seems interesting, I find no enthusiasm to revisit it. Since I’m not going back to ravage the multiplayer like a crazy person I could have picked Tomb Raider up at any time in the next couple of years, for the 360, and it wouldn’t have made much of a difference to my experience. As it was, the copy of Tomb Raider belonged to a friend and I paid nothing for the privilege save for the electricity powering the console and screen. Having spent literally nothing to play this game, would I now say that I would pay to play further games in the Tomb Raider series? Yes I possibly would, yet I may not have said that had I not borrowed this game in the first place.

In recent years I’ve actively held off buying newer games firsthand until they fall to around £20 in order to maximise the £1ph potential. I have bought some games for less than that during my time as an Xbox 360 owner and am yet to break into double digits for the hour count on some of those so I think it’s a formula to keep sticking to in general for those games where it does work as method. With the rather cloudy and muddled news surfacing from Microsoft on just how the secondhand market is going to be affected by its restricting (should that read ‘crippling’?) fee policy in the next generation - and we can pretty much assume at this stage that the idea of lending friends your games will become extinct soon - I can see myself waiting a few months to nab a bargain as the online retailers get competitive and while the next chapter of my gaming ‘career’ with Microsoft's next generation machine of wonder will be about the awe-inspiring stories, visuals, action and emotional resonance, it will also be about making it as cost-effective an era as possible and that will mean starting a little later than everyone else. Somehow, after all these gaming years, I don't think I'll miss a great deal, just this perhaps...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2iku7pkbf0