The Xbox One is fast approaching, and with less than one month to go the Xbox team are hard at work making their final preparations for launch. Recently, a number of reports coming from unofficial 3rd party sources have begun revealing information about the current situation regarding the Xbox One, and it doesn’t look good.
According to a number of different sources, the Xbox One OS is a mess. Functionality wise it doesn’t work as intended to. Both developers and 3rd party sources are claiming that SmartGlass is broken, Xbox LIVE isn’t working as it is intended to, Xbox Snap is causing games to crash, and that apps are unstable. Some are even calling it a ‘horror story’.
An anonymous user asked a developer at GiantBomb about the current situation regarding the Xbox One OS. The developer responds simply with “You may have noticed that they [Microsoft] haven’t exactly been out there showing it off in live environments.” He continues, claiming that Microsoft has been reluctant to show off any unedited footage of the Xbox One Dashboard.
One of the sources are claiming that it could be ‘months’ before Xbox One is working as it is intended. According to another source, Xbox LIVE is having some serious connectivity issues, parties will drop contacts when switching from one thing to the other, and simple things like sending friend requests are all buggy.
It’s possible that some of these issues are the result of the DRM functions being removed from the OS. The DRM functionality was baked into the OS a long time ago, and as the OS developers have had to remove it, it’s left holes in the OS that are causing some problems.
Microsoft are indeed in shut-up-and-ship mode, which means they are working their backsides off to get everything out on time. It’s even possible that Microsoft has shifted some of the Windows team onto the Xbox One OS, just to get it mended in time for launch. Some developers seem to think the Xbox One launch won’t go as smooth as people are assuming it will.
Of course, as Microsoft hasn’t (and probably won’t) comment on this information in an official way. Although Microsoft’s Phil Spencer gave the non-specific “games are in certification now and we are playing SP & MP nightly. Anyone can post “stuff” to the web” remark on Twitter in response to this. Either way, we have to ask you to read it with a grain of salt.
