Games

10 hidden powers of the Xbox One

The Xbox One is about to be launched, but what will it be able to do in five years’ time?
Written by Guy Cocker
8 min readPublished on
10 hidden powers of the Xbox One

10 hidden powers of the Xbox One

© Microsoft

We’ve been waiting so long it seems difficult to believe, but the next generation of gaming kicks off in just a couple of days, as the Xbox One launches around the world. The tech that Microsoft has packed into the machine is cutting edge right now, but it’s got to last years - perhaps even a decade.
So how has Microsoft future proofed its brand new console? Read on, and we’ll show you how the company can unlock its potential one, two, and even five years down the line.
An indie game turn around
Indie game makers are flocking to the Sony PlayStation 4 right now, but in time, the Xbox One will become a haven for offbeat and low budget titles too. Microsoft recently announced that game development toolset Unity will be free on Xbox One for developers who are signed up to ID@Xbox, its independent developer publisher program. Unity is the development engine behind some of the biggest mobile games out there, including Dead Trigger 2, as well as PC indie hits like Kerbal Space Program. Microsoft has lost ground with indie developers to Sony, which has been courting the most prominent small game makers for PS4 and PS Vita, but by by making it easy for indie developers to port their existing Unity games over to Xbox One, Microsoft has just gained some valuable ground in bringing smaller, cheaper and more experimental titles to its new console.
Emotional gaming
Xbox One’s Kinect sensor is advanced enough to sense your feelings through what Microsoft calls the “emotion platform”. This technology is embedded into Kinect, so the system knows when you’re happy, sad, or just bored and looking at something else - and Microsoft’s hardly used it yet. While slightly spooky and perhaps a little invasive, this data could prove really useful for game makers, as it’s effectively telling them how well their game is working on you, in real-time.  
It’s not difficult to imagine the impact this tech could have in certain games: imagine the next series of Telltale’s The Walking Dead being able to tell which characters you care most about, and then being able to focus on those characters, or even worse, kill them off. It’s a feature that will no doubt be of interest to film and TV makers too, as they can gather real data not just on how many people are actually watching their content, but if it’s having the desired emotional impact. Add in the heart rate monitor, which can tell if you’re excited by an increased heart rate, and you’re looking at the future of adaptive entertainment.
SmartGlass Everywhere
SmartGlass, which hooks your tablet or phone up to your Xbox experience, has been slow to catch on this generation. But with next-gen, SmartGlass could soon prove a major feature. Every big release on next-gen from EA, such as Battlefield 4 and Need for Speed Rivals, and Ubisoft, such as The Division, makes use of the second screen tech. At launch, Dead Rising 3 uses SmartGlass in a really clever way: when people in the game want to call you, it’s done through your actual real-world smartphone. In future, expect SmartGlass to work remotely, so that you can interact with your game when you’re out and about, or even play a version of it on your tablet, if your connection is good enough.
Up in the clouds
Microsoft has made bold claims about its cloud infrastructure: it has built 300,000 servers to upgrade Xbox Live for the next gen, which it says is the equivalent of “three Xbox Ones in the cloud for every Xbox One in the living room”. At launch, first-party developer Turn 10 has been able to offset some of the data processing for Forza 5’s physics engine to these servers, which it says allows the box in your living room to focus on running the game at 1080p at 60 frames per second. As broadband connections become faster, expect the cloud to offer similar processing benefits for lighting and special effects, as well as more players, and data that can be used to create new Achievements that change over time.
Game streaming
Microsoft is set to be the only one of the big three manufacturers to not stream games from its home console to a handheld device. Nintendo’s Wii U comes with a tablet controller that can be used in another room, while PlayStation 4 streams its games to the PS Vita, allowing you to play your games while the main TV is used for something else. It’s also something Nvidia has started offering to users of its Shield Android gaming handheld through compatible PCs. Microsoft is late to the party, then, but it seems perfectly positioned to offer similar features through its Surface line of tablets. All Microsoft has to do is figure out a way to connect an Xbox One pad to a Surface, and we’d finally have a compelling reason to buy a Surface.
Everyone’s a broadcaster
Right now, live streaming your gameplay to Twitch and uploading game videos to YouTube is the preserve of a large but niche audience of gamers who have purchased a dedicated card. With Xbox One, you can stream to Twitch at the touch of a button, while the last five minutes of gameplay is constantly buffered in the background, ready to send to YouTube when you do something cool. Not only is it great to show off your skills to the world, you can make real money by serving ads against your content, something Twitch and YouTube make easy. Of course, with so many people getting access to such a feature, expect the number of Twitch and YouTube broadcasters to grow exponentially over the next few years, meaning your videos will have to be pretty special to stand out. But supplementing your income by playing games? Sounds pretty good to us.
More games to play for free
Microsoft’s Killer Instinct is only the start of free-to-play games on Xbox One: like mobile gaming, expect the pricing model to become the dominant way to buy console games this generation. In Killer Instinct, you can download the game for free with one character available, with extra fighters available for £3.99 each, or you can buy the lot for £16.99. While hardcore gamers are wary of the pricing model, the results in mobile speak for themselves: free-to-play accounts for 90 per cent of US mobile game spending, while 51 per cent of the top 25 grossing games in the App Store are free. It’s only a matter of time before the likes of EA and Activision start experimenting with free-to-play on Xbox One, even if, like Microsoft, they offer all the content for one bundled price.
Games that travel with you (as long as they’re bought digitally)
Microsoft enraged gamers when it initially announced that games purchased on disc would be locked to your user account. It meant you could play them on any machine without needing the disc, but it also meant you couldn’t sell them on. It was forced to backtrack and change its policy so that games could be sold after use, but it meant that any disc-based games would need to be in your Xbox One’s drive every time you wanted to play.
However, Microsoft will get its way soon enough -research from DFC Intelligence and Live Gamer suggests 36 per cent of Xbox One and PS4 revenue will come from digital sales by 2017. While this inevitably means you’ll be paying more for your games, it also means that over a third of you will have done away with discs and be able to go to any of your Xbox One-owning friends’ houses, be instantly recognized by Kinect, and download your games to their console.
Going Social
The Xbox One is going to be a far more social platform than the Xbox 360. For starters, the friends list has now expanded so that you can have “over 1,000” people on it. In fact, there’s no hard limit on the number, another benefit of Microsoft’s new cloud system. This means you won’t have to delete people to make more room for new friends like on the Xbox 360, which was limited to 100 people in a quaint, web 1.0 kind-of-way. You’ll also be able to have Skype calls in 1080p, and you won’t have to wait around if you want to join a friend in that game you’ve not played in a while, as updates are downloaded and applied when you’re not using the system. It’ll mean that joining friends in games will be easier and more instant than ever.
A bright future in art and science
Kinect

Kinect

© Microsoft

The first version of Kinect is already extensively used in science and art projects, so we’re expecting great things from the much-improved Kinect Mark Two that comes bundled with the Xbox One. Recently, a theoretical chemist called David Glowacki put together an installation showing how atoms and molecules behave using Kinect: by combining research-grade molecular simulations with Xbox cameras, he was able to interpret people as masses of color that move and react in realtime, demonstrating scientific principles through fun game mechanics. The Xbox One Kinect camera captures video at 1080p and is so clever it will sense palpitations in the skin to read your heartbeat. We can’t wait to see what scientists and artists do with it.