I wont say anything on your choices. Thats up to you.

You can respond to whatever you like. If its against my choice, then your flogging a dead horse.

4 words to use when buying a product.

Yes Please.

Or No Thankyou.

Unless the shopkeepers got a shotgun pointed at you telling you to buy the product he wants you to.

This has, as always, been a useless exchange of words.

http://www.uspirg.org/blogs/eds-blog/usp/ny-investigates-banks-forcing-consumers-buy-overpriced-mortgage-insurance

www.nowgamer.com/news/2100041/forced_camera_anticonsumer_says_sony.html

These two are equivalent.

1) Man wants a house. He needs to take a loan. He is (obligingly) forced into an undesired situation.

2) Man wants to game. He needs a console. He is (obligingly) forced into an undesired situation.

A lot of XBox One owners would have bought the kinect-less version had it been available. Be real.

And then there's the slightly unrelated:

http://www.consumerlawgroup.com/index/2013/11/14/forcedarbitration/

All in all, if you think you're free, you're living your life on your terms, and that you're not being brainwashed, then please know that there's a guy at the southern tip of Africa that thinks you are grossly ignorant.

Actually Kinect is more comparable to the Wii-U's tablet controller. Also forced upon and it makes the device more expensive, though both aren't really beneficial to core gaming.

More space is good for games, or we'd still have DVD or even worse. And in that sense, Kinect is completely unrelated to the gaming experience. I did, though, say wrong when I said 'anything' when I should have said 'gaming', in which case it's not completely true either, but in the vast majority of cases it is.

Yes, a stupid comparison. Makes me wonder why I dragged myself into this in the first place...

I think initially it will cost MS some sales with the "forced" kinect as it did sony with bluray, but in the end I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say sony and MS will be ok sitting on the mounds of our cash we hand to them.

It's the same in that there will be consumers who don't want a console camera as there were consumers who had no interest in Blu Ray movies, but considering that PS3 games were distributed on BD, it's not the same.

I don't see anyone complaining about XB1 or Wii U games being distributed on BD format (Wii U is a Panasonic developed proprietary format based off BD technology) on a single disc for games with data over DVD capacities. The only complaint for the BD drive in the PS3 is that it was utilized early which meant more expensive.

I speak only for myself, but I bought a PS3 and a 1080p HDTV in 2007 to watch HD movies. Yes, I bought it for the games as well, but the PS3s have been the only BD players I've bought since the format was introduced.

And it's partially because Sony stood behind their format by putting it in the PS3 that we don't have to buy movies on HD-DVD and BD with certain studios split between the two formats. That's something I had to do when both formats existed. I was simultaneously annoyed and relieved when HD-DVD was kicked in the head.

I think the problem was that Sony simply didn't have a rational understanding of the ecosystem at the time, and somewhat overestimated how much of a hand they had in the success of the DVD format.

VHS had been standard since, what, the 70s? The advantages presented by DVD were overwhelming and absolute in circa-2001.

Blu-ray on that front... not so much. It coincided with the breakout of HDTVs only 5 years later at equally colossal prices. Hell, at the time, people were still referring to them as "Blu-ray DVDs", the vast majority thought it was some wacky marketing term that Sony pulled out of their ass.

On the gaming front, I guess Sony also banked a little too hard on developers hopping on board because of a superior storage medium based on previous competition, especially with Kojima committing to the PS3 so early on, I hear that one of the SPUs in the Cell processor was designed with decompressing data in real time running MGS4 in mind. But Microsoft had far more financial backing than any of their previous competition (hence their mind-boggling obsession with GTA IV, paying out the ass just to secure a simultaneous launch, nevermind the timed exclusive DLC)

It was all grossly mismanaged product placement, so no I don't think it's the same thing as a specific peripheral driving up the price of already less technically nuanced hardware.

Something I did noticed mentioned was the Blu-ray laser's ability to read through scratches though. That shit is fucking Godlike, you have no idea how many of my PS1 games I assumed were out for the count only to find they run flawlessly on my PS3.

If Blu ray is a "peripheral" then so is the the processor, graphics card, and the freaking fan inside the console =/

You made a rather silly comment there. How can you compare a component that makes the console work to a completely optional accesory? Tell me, would you still be able to enjoy your Xbox if Kinect wasn't there? Could you still play the games, browse the web, watch Netflix, etc? Now, could you do any of those things if you took away the blu ray player from the PS3? NO! Because the console wouldn't even turn on! It's utterly ridiculous to compare the benefit that blu ray gave to games since it's a media format built into and not an outside product. Now, had Microsoft built Kinect into the Xbox One and made it a component within the console, you'd have an argument

And you can brag all you want about how Kinect can sign in 5 people and keep your track of your settings....but does it really? I mean, it'll try and sign in your cat

or a pillow on the chair

I wouldn't brag too much about it's facial recognition.

And with regard to the voice commands, do you send text messages via voice or texting them out? I know you know how much error there is in trying to speak out a text message. Don't think just because Xbox is doing it that those same errors won't exist. I prefer just writing it out, and if you want to get really technical, PS has mouse and keyboard support, which is faster than voice commands or using the controller. And if you want to argue "well, M+K is extra. Sony is forcing you blah blah blah" my point still stands. Can you enjoy your PS/XB without K+M or Kinect? The answer is obviously yes.

edit: Not to mention Blu ray was the solution to the #1 game killer - scratched discs. All in all, if you truly want to make a comparison, Blu ray wins. Kinect's advantages are neglible. All it is is an alternate way of doing what you otherwise normally do. Blu ray saved game discs from being scratched, gave devs the space they needed to make games (it started to show later in the gen when 360 had to have multiple discs in many games), gave us HD movies (I don't care what anyone says, the difference between blu ray on an HDTV and DVD on an SDTV is just as much a difference as VHS to DVD), didn't have to split games up into multiple discs (Mass Effect 3 had to have a separate disc for side missions on 360; kinda crappy to have to swap discs just to do a side mission) and more. If you honestly believe all of that has less of an impact than "Xbox: watch ESPN", you're delusional

I was in the shower when I thought about this one.

It made sense in my head and a good number of people agree. The poll proves it.

Bluray is indeed better than DVD, but it didn't make 7th gen gaming better.

The only major benefit we saw was the ability to Bluray movies. However, the masses bought a PS3 because they wanted a gaming machine, not a Bluray player.