Microsoft: If You Can’t Find Internet, Xbox One Isn’t The Console For You

Recently Microsoft’s Phil Spencer said if you couldn’t get internet access, you’d have to stick with Xbox 360, now the company is saying if you don’t have internet access, Xbox One just isn’t the machine for you.

At least Spencer’s being honest here:

If you’re in a situation—I’ll go to an extreme—where you can’t connect to the Internet, you can’t tether to your phone, you have no Internet connection, the Xbox One isn’t going to be the box you want to buy. Because the box, it’s similar… I’m not making fun of anybody else’s product, but if you think about an iPad, if you could never connect to the App Store, it becomes less functional, right? So what we’re saying is this is a box that is a natively connected box. The features and, frankly, the content that is created is expecting an Internet connection. That’s where the creators are taking this.

You can see the reference to Apple here, Microsoft is really looking to take the games industry into a new direction, one that’s always connected. Problem is, the music and gaming industries are inherently different. First off, CDs are way cheaper than videogames, and even then over 200 million CDs were sold in the U.S. last year. It’s clear that while the music world has move into the digital space, there are still people out there who treasure hard copies.

Gamers will be even more ardent about sticking to disc-based games for years to come, because paying $60 for a game and getting only 4hrs out of it isn’t good value. We’ll see how this turns out for Xbox One.