Will The Xbox One Rule The Living Room

The Xbox One continues what Microsoft started with the Xbox 360, building in plenty of non-gaming services, apps and tools that could appeal to a broad range of audiences, including sports fans and people who just generally enjoy media content of all stripes. The Kinect interaction potential looks to be able to provide pretty extensive feedback for athletes and people training, and its new voice-recognition tricks offer a chance at a completely revamped way of interacting with the television. Microsoft also looks to be courting partners for a la carte TV content delivery, which is a huge potential alternative market to traditional cable and satellite providers.

New features of the Xbox One are clearly designed to cast a wider net and rope in people who might not care all that much about games. But price will determine whether Microsoft actually lands those customers or whether the Xbox One remains a gaming machine first, which just happens to provide gamers with a number of other benefits besides.

Rumors have pegged the new Xbox One pricing at anywhere from less than the initial cost of the Xbox 360 and PS3 (each was around $350 U.S.), to $770 (likely a high guess to prevent sticker shock later on) as it has been listed on Amazon Germany, to anything in between. A gap of just a couple hundred dollars could make all the difference here: Users who aren't so interested in the gaming aspects have plenty of options now for over-the-top services from providers, including Apple, Google and Roku, all of which offer similar access to custom content, if not the unique interaction methods and Snap multi-information streams of the Xbox One. And most of those are available for around $100 or less, which will have a significant impact on buyer choice. xbox system