During the hustle and bustle of E3 2013, I had the chance to sit down with Craig Flannagan, Microsoft Director of Marketing, to talk about some of the Xbox One‘s more unique features: The Cloud and the Kinect.

THE CLOUD

Being introduced to the new generation of console gaming is cloud computing. The Cloud, as Microsoft calls it, will open up a number of possibilities for game developers. We’ve already learned how developers Respawn Entertainment are going to utilize the Xbox One’s Cloud to host dedicated servers, and even offload some of the game’s data to provide a better, smoother experience.

I asked Flannagan for his take on how The Cloud will improve gaming on the Xbox One.

“The cloud is a really important part of it,” he reassured. “Xbox One is going to be the best place to play games and a big reason for that is that games come alive because of the cloud. So, the game that you get on that first day is going to change. It’s going to be a different game. It’s going to evolve, have living worlds, worlds that change, worlds that persist. What we’re doing is we’re giving developers a palette so they can create games they wouldn’t be able to create anywhere else.”

“From an Xbox Live standpoint, [you’ll have] the ability to play your games anywhere. Anywhere you go, you can sign in and all your games are there. With game DVR and Upload Studio, [you’ll have] the ability to capture your multiplayer moments, good or bad, epic wins or epic fails, edit them up, and share them out. Those are the social features of the cloud and what’s going to make games different and only available on Xbox One.”

“We’re just at the beginning. We’re a day and a half into this [at the time] and there’s so much more to come, but we’re already seeing the promise of games that you’ll only be able to find on Xbox One because we’re the only one giving those developers the tools to do that.”

THE KINECT

When it comes to the Xbox 360, the Kinect was a bit of a hit-and-a-miss. Not every 360 gamer had one in their household, and therefor, developers were constantly faced with the question, ‘do we use up resources to create an experience centered around a device that not everyone owns?’

While every Xbox One is going to come packed with the newest version of the Kinext, making things a bit clearer for game developers, Microsoft doesn’t want to shove it down your throat and have you waving and yelling at your TV non-stop for the rest of your gaming life time.

“I think you’re going to continue to see experiences that are predominantly Kinect, that include Kinect, and some that are mostly controller-based,” Flannagan explained. “We’ll continue to give consumers choice and, really, creators choice. The fun part, from a creator’s standpoint, for us, is that every Xbox One comes with a Kinect. There’s that toolset we’re giving developers that’s just awesome. Every Xbox One’s going to come with a Kinect, every Xbox One is going to be connected to The Cloud. That gives you opportunity. There’ll be a lot more to come on Kinect games as well.”

Xbox One hits shelves this November. You can reserve yours here.

At this point, I think everyone is shaking their heads in confusion and frustration.  One minute, Don Mattrick is telling people to buy Xbox 360’s, the next he’s saying the Xbox One needs to be improved and they’re changing key policies to make it better.

Frankly, whoever’s running the Xbox One ship at Microsoft is screwing up big time.  How do you screw up the launch of something people have been begging for since 2010?  How do you present something in such a complex way that news outlets like ours and others have to explain what you can and cannot do with the hardware you’re releasing?  Shouldn’t the Xbox One be exactly what we’ve been asking for and easy for everyone to use?  Isn’t that the core philosophy behind the idea of a console?

Well, if you’re Microsoft, apparently not so much.

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I will give Microsoft credit for sucking it up and changing their DRM strategy.  It’s the right move and it’s rare for a company as big as Microsoft to reverse their decisions like this.  So in that regard, Good Guy Microsoft.  However, the good doesn’t come without the bad.  In removing the always-online requirement for the Xbox One, Microsoft also removed the ability to share your game library with up to ten people.  This was a huge selling point of the Xbox One for me.  It was the one thing as a gamer that set it above the PS4 and made it a competitor to the PC market (just slightly, mind you).  Now that it’s gone, there goes the Xbox One’s competitive edge from a “this device can do this and others like it can’t” perspective.  Granted, buying a console should be a choice informed by both hardware features and games.  But the fact remains that Microsoft isn’t working with a unified strategy in mind.

What Microsoft desperately needs to do is stop talking about the Xbox One.  They need to gather their people and figure out what makes the Xbox One good and bad and what customers want out of it.  They need to stop having 10 different PR people saying 3 different things about every feature/restriction of the Xbox One.  And most importantly, they need to make a unified strategy that fixes all the issues people have been talking about for two months, and keeps the features that we like.

In short, this is what Microsoft needs to do to make the Xbox One something I’d even considering buying:
No always-online DRM, which they’ve done
The ability to share your game library
Make the Kinect the optional peripheral it is

Now, if the only way to enable game sharing is to have the always-online DRM for users that want to share/use shared games is the way to make it possible, I’m ok with that, provided it’s not required for anything else or at the very least disk-based games.

As far as the Kinect goes, I get that Microsoft is trying to make it a uniform thing that every developer can utilize for all their games, but the fact that it’s required and inflates the price of the Xbox One despite being non-essential is just unacceptable to me.

Regardless of what Microsoft does, they have a long road ahead of them before they can even begin to overcome the negative press they created for themselves over the past 2 months.

What do you think?  Is this reversal of policy, but removal of a key feature, make the Xbox One more or less attractive a product?