Microsoft is launching a new gaming console Brand Presence for your living room. It is a family entertainment center where you can pretend you are a football player or a gun man with more lifelike detail than ever before. Innovation! Read my editorial.

This blogger is quite correct in that I’m not the target market. Yet I’m usually the one with the “yes, but it isn’t for you” retort. Not this time: Perhaps it’s the “content whale” they describe, yes — but I think that’s actually a much narrower slice of America (because a lot of the content and services described so far are unlikely to be available so robustly elsewhere) than people think.

Whether or not it’s for me, I just don’t think a device for the home tech-curious with plenty of money to burn is a sustainable gaming platform. They will buy the top five, or the top ten biggest console franchises, maybe, but indie games? Anything whatsoever outside the risk-averse mainstream that the top-tier AAA publishers produce?

The cost of game development isn’t decreasing — companies like Microsoft and Sony see to that when they present Eyeball Physics and Forearm Hairs as the admirable future of play. This mainstream target audience thinks better graphics mean better games. That means risk-taking and creative maturation will take place on more open, less-expensive platforms — and the built-in audience for, say, PC, browser, tablet, mobile, anything else — is already there and has nothing to prove.

Any developer outside the corporate infrastructure is more interested in Steam and Android and things like that than a console. Developers are growing up, too. Microsoft is asking them to go once more unto the breach and spend 65 hour weeks on Franchise Sequel 7 in the hopes the gadget consumer, fundamentally more interested in flashy accessories than in the games themselves, will make their work profitable. I’d bet fewer professionals than ever are interested in that working proposition, when they have so many other options that didn’t exist even at the beginning of this generation.

The Wii exploded into mainstream homes across America, but we quickly learned they bought Nintendo games and little else — even music and fitness software proved to be a fad that ebbed.

And Nintendo is absolutely struggling to upgrade its Wii audience into a Wii U audience, even with a meaningful evolution on the control system that seemed pretty smart and logical to lots of people, myself included. I am incredibly skeptical that Microsoft can upgrade its Xbox 360 audience into an Xbox One audience just because it has premium viewing features the prior console doesn’t.

So,  fine. The Xbox One may continue the console market. It just won’t be as relevant or diverse or interesting as the console market once was. And, I’m betting, unlikely to be as profitable, but we’ll see.

“Twenty years of playing a pair of arms,” a friend mused bleakly as we watched the presentation.

There is, hopefully, an entire Xbox Live presentation to be seen at E3. I’m looking forward to that, since a more accessible, healthier, indie-friendly online infrastructure with a good and flexible pricing model could make all the difference here.

Anyway, if you missed the presentation, you can just check out this highlight reel. Our friend Matt Lees takes on the event in this video, which is so good that I’ve watched it like four times now (Matt also pulls off a dress incredibly well and teaches you how to make scones in this ‘unusual’ board game review).

Also Spoiler got married to Spoilerette. Latest Game of Thrones recap is up! Thanks as always to the excellent commenters for a rad discussion.