Haha. Just kidding. There wasn't any Good or Bad in MS's presser today. It was all just Meh.

As I said in “Future of Gaming,” Microsoft seems to think its primary competition is AppleTV and Roku. They spent two-thirds of their one-hour event talking about interactive TV, an exclusive television show with Steven Spielberg's name attached, using Internet Explorer to Bing search while watching live TV[1], etc.

I really don't know what to say about this non-event today. One commenter on a gaming news site said Microsoft “one upped” Sony because MS showed us the actual box.

That's it? That's all you've got? A black brick proves superiority? (It should be noted that, while Sony never showed the box—which probably hadn't been finalized back in February—they did at least actually show people playing games on it. That's way more than MS showed.)

Initial reactions aren't mixed. They're overwhelming that Xbox One is underwhelming. Gamespot's “Twitter Battle” puts PS4 ahead of X1 by 74%. Gamasutra thinks the X1 is “a desperate prayer to stop time.” Kotaku's judgment is the conference was a “disaster.”

The two things that stood out to me the most were these: First, all the cool interactive TV stuff is limited to the US (maybe North America, but nowhere else). MS has long conceded the Japanese market to Nintendo and Sony, apparently it is now conceding the entire world outside of America. Second, they touted a 500GB hard drive. That's just laughable. In today's digital download world (and on a machine that requires every game to be installed to hard drive), 500GB is nothing. That should double (at least) or any purchaser of an X1 had best factor in the cost of a bigger hard drive within the first six months of owning the console.

It's all just a little depressing. I was hoping for something at least as cool as Sony's PS4 reveal. I was hoping for at least a brief demonstration of Illumiroom. I was hoping—albeit against everything we've heard from MS the past three years—there would actually be discussion of games and not just more, “here's how we're integrating even more tightly with ESPN!”

Gamers play games. Is Microsoft even making a game console any more?

[1] Does anyone actually watch live TV any more? And if you do watch live TV, would you spend hundreds of dollars on a game console so you could Skype with your friends while you watched TV?