You might have noticed something a bit… off about the introduction of the Xbox One yesterday. One of the points that is pounded into your head in public relations is that you need to constantly repeat your key terms. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing a post about the Xbox One or making a video about the Xbox One. You need to repeat the term Xbox One a lot, but in an organic way so people don’t notice. Unless they’re making supercuts.
This supercut is simultaneously hilarious and disturbing: All YouTube user DarkbeatDK did was pull out every time three key terms were referenced: “Television”, “Call of Duty“, and “sports”. And it kind of throws everything about the Xbox One introduction and what Microsoft wanted to achieve with it into painfully sharp relief.
It makes it pretty clear where Microsoft’s overall priorities lie, although it must be said that apparently we are going to see a lot of games at E3, so there will be plenty of squabbling over shiny prizes from game outlets that mean nothing, by which we mean we were not invited.
Nonetheless, it’s a bit troubling that the focus of this console doesn’t seem to be games but television. As some have pointed out rather forcefully, Microsoft is assuming all of its customers are a very specific type of person, one with a massive television and a living room to match, one that wants nothing more than to re-enact Minority Report to watch Rockford Files reruns because making stuff happen by waving your hands around is cool.
It’s true that Microsoft doesn’t just come up with this crap out of nowhere, though; presumably they did some market research. And it’s not like another major gaming company introduced a console tightly integrated with viewing services in an innovative way, and promoted those viewing services heavily as a “hook” for non-gamers and casual gamers to buy the system, right?
Uh oh.