The Xbox One: A Brick Without The Patch

We should all know by now that the Xbox ONE will have a Day 1 patch. I cried for it, you cried for it, babies were birthed crying for it. We fought and we won it, but oh boy, folks without an internet connection who buy an Xbox ONE are going to be pretty pissed off at us, I'll tell you what.

You see, in a talk with Engadget, Microsoft's Senior Director of Product Management, Albert Penello, was asked what the Xbox One will be able to do right out of the box, possibly in response to the fact that the PS4 needs it's Day 1 patch to activate some of its features (where the Xbox ONE's is designed to do the opposite, leading to features being deactivated because they encroached on things we find important as gamers: Like being able to share our games).

In response, Penello said, "Nothing. You need the day one update."

That's pretty terrifying.

So what we have here, in this gaming turf war, is a system (the PS4) that can play games out of the box, while it downloads it's update (or, you could pre-install the update -more on that later), while only having a few features you probably won't use  OR the Xbox ONE that, to use the crude parlance of our time, Xbones your $500 purchase, not allowing you to do anything, because some of us wanted fairer practices to make it to the next-generation of the gaming industry.

What this also means is that Microsoft's network is going to have to be in top form (which, from loads of experience, I'll always have my doubts...) possibly hours before launch, if it's going to keep it's fans happy by allowing them to download that lengthy (supposedly a 20 minute download, with a good connection) update, so they can go ahead. Today's gamer isn't going to tolerate staring at a big black brick because they can't get a patch, because the servers have turned into mush from the excessive load. I mean, what will that say about their cloud computing?

But hey, way to go Microsoft. Keep it classy.

(A small side opinion: About the header image. It's really hilarious to me that, with how many changes we've seen them make since that day, how little has actually changed. Somehow they keep on sticking us in the rear.)