It’s finally here, the next generation of consoles is almost upon us, and with Nintendo happily excluding itself from the more heavy hitting console rivalries, it looks like it’s down to Sony and Microsoft to fight it out over dominance in the home entertainment space.

Before the official announcement of the 8th generation of video game consoles, I had assumed things would play out much as they did in the 7th generation, Sony would dominate Japan, Microsoft would dominate the US, and things would remain pretty even here in Australia, however what could not be anticipated was the tremendous PR nightmare Microsoft would experience at the announcement of the Xbox One, here is a summarised version of the events:

Compare this to the hilariously overdubbed version of the PS4’s announcement:

While obviously both of these videos are very tongue in cheek, you can see a definitive trend in the announcements, the Xbox One reveal was very service focused, and the Playstation 4 announcement was very game focused, this obviously had Microsoft to a slow start even before we’d seen the PS4, however general opinions seemed reserved to what would be revealed at E3, and with all my expectations set that Microsoft would run some damage control and really focus on the games this time around, we essentially got this:

a message to Microsoft

Here are some facts that were learned about the Xbox One at E3:

1. The Xbox One comes with Kinect by default, however you cannot disconnect the Kinect sensor.
2. You are unable to play games at all, unless you connect to the internet at least once every 24 hours. If you fail to sign in, your games will not function. Yes, this includes single player games.
3. You are unable to lend games to your friends
4. You are not able to sell games freely, you can sell your game to another Xbox One user, however that game is then locked to their user forever and cannot be resold.

When questioned about the “always online” requirement of the Xbox One, Microsoft executive Don Mattrick explained that Microsoft does have an offline gaming option, “and it’s called Xbox 360”.

All of these events caused major backlash among the Xbox community, and people were visibly upset:

When the official Xbox Facebook page updated it’s cover photo to promote the new console, the reaction wasn’t exactly positive.

Sony managed to take advantage of this opportunity by releasing the following “guide” for how to share games on PS4:

As well as this, a major focus of their presentation at E3 was in regards to DRM:

Sony making the most of Microsoft’s mistakes

It does have to be noted that after the overwhelming backlash shown by communities like reddit, and on video game websites like IGN, Microsoft has listened, and they have backtracked on 2 key points from their presentation at E3:

1. You can now play disc based games without having to sign in every 24 hours
2. You can now freely share disc based games

These are two very major points in my opinion, however the overwhelming social media reaction to Microsoft’s E3 presentation is going to be hard to recover from in my opinion, and with a less expensive console, Sony has a serious leg up in the next console generation at the moment.

With all that said, we won’t be seeing these devices on store shelves until the end of the year, so a lot can happen between now and then. What do you think, can Microsoft recover in time to make an impression on gamers before November? Let us know in the comments below, if you want my opinion, I’m with Fry on this one.