Microsoft’s NXE, Cut in half?
Even though we all know it’s a step up (or step down, if your on the hating-avatar train) to the current dashboard, Microsoft’s New Xbox Experience isn’t going to be as great as it was expected. Many of it’s features have been hacked for unknown purposes. “There’s still a lot of stuff we want to do,” said Microsoft’s Jerry Johnson. “Half the things we wanted to do we cut out of the service.”
Since Microsoft cut many NXE services down, it’ll allow them to have more frequent updates instead of their planned seasonal updates.”One of the nice things we did was this architectural change to make things more published and driven from the service,”….”All of a sudden we opened up the platform to say, ‘I don’t have to wait until once or twice a year to release something onto the dashboard.’”
Features like avatar customization and Netflix Video streaming are ready to launch with the NXE November 19th but services like the “Photo Party”, which allowed you to share and view photos with your friends has been pulled. Users are still allowed to choose anddownload future features that may show up after the NXE launch, instead of doing an entire update crammed with services. Johnson also confirmed that Xbox Live Primetime, which was recently delayed, will launch in spring of 2009.
