Wow, that's a really cool product. I might check it out - I travel a lot.
But...doesn't Microsoft lose money on every Xbox they sell, in the hopes of making it back on games and MS Points? And doesn't the still-high price of a console represent a barrier to entry for a lot of potential customers?
Why don't they just sell us one of these cheap little "client" boxes, and run all the games on a massiver server farm somewhere? No more game discs - "digital download" for all content, with the added bonus that you don't even have to actually download it! They'd just grant access to your account for files already present on that server farm.
Third party developers would have to rent space on the MS server, I suppose. It would probably also enable console MMOs, right? And our theoretical server farm would have the potential of offering better computational power and faster loading times. And you wouldn't have to upgrade your console every few years - you could continue to use that same client box however many times they upgraded the server farm.
Seems like they could even roll it out with minimal risk because both types of consoles could co-exist. Present it as a cheaper option with some limitations - no way to play without an internet connection, for one. I'm sure the regular model would soon be seen as unecessary hardware - "What, are you going to go play in a log cabin or something? Gonna buy a generator, to go with that?"
Fascinating!
