They did a good job with the conference in general, played it straight to the home crowd and saving any 'distractions' that might appeal more to the European crowd for Europe, which in the last few years they hardly even bothered to show up for, so that may promise some serious progress as well. They did well not to include Call of Duty this time I think, there has been too much of that and Battlefield. They made up with the Indies mostly now it seems by making publishing to Win10 and Xbox equally easy, and in general just continued to right wrongs, also promising a dashboard overhaul later this year. The presentation also wasn't as monotonously violent as last year, though that was partly because the violence was a lot les realistic looking. If I caught that correctly, I liked Nathan Fillian as a voice in Halo, but he seemed so much better than the rest of the cast that I almost hope that above anything else, they upgrade the rest of the voices as well. Multiplayer may be the star again though. Gears 4 looked good too, but very far off (Holiday 2016). Lara looked good but again with crazy pacing - running and or climbing over crumbling surface was in most all the big titles shown here (Halo, Gears, Lars ...).
I was clearly right (was obvious enough) about the Minecraft purchase purpose, I congratulate them on delivering it almost exactly as I expected, minus the actual building being done with the device itself, and I am going out on a limb here and say that Hololens, while being the last VR/AR device announced is clearly the first with a true killer app. If they can actually manage to make that thing affordable and work stand-alone for, say, $399, this could be a whole lot more successful than any VR device if it manages to release along with the rest. Even if not, they have a nice segment currently all to their own basically and this will easily find plenty of uses. However, there is a lot of money out there that will only be spent once, so the success of VR may still influence their chances, and, say, VR LEGO World, could end up being a meaningful competitor. But if they can stop a Minecraft VR from happening, that's terrible but good strategy all the same.
Anyway, starting to ramble, but in their current position of lesser hardware they really need strong first party exclusives to compete and it is clear they know it, and are positioning themselves well to reclaim at least some of the U.S. Market. A solid presentation altogether.
