I have my Xbox set to remain in standby mode at all times. The mode does use power but it means system and game updates are applied when you’re not using the console and the system boots faster as it’s in a sleep mode and not completely turned off. Cold boot takes almost 3 minutes on my Internet connection. About the kinect camera? Well, I use a mount for my Kinect so it goes on top of my TV and that came with a slider that blocks the camera. I’d say it sounds paranoid to worry about your console watching you but really it’s not given all of the spying going on these days.
Despite my best efforts, the Xbox one standby mode works as in it instantly powers on but it is not downloading game updates.
The result? My twice a month sit down to race with some friends or join a group battlefield tournament always means updates. They come out often almost once every 10 days so I go to play and I’m hit with an update warning.
See that? 433 megabytes. And at my Internet connection, that’s a 2 hour download. Translated to, that’s my bed time as in I’ll start the update and go to sleep. The update always finishes but by the time it finishes, I’m not interested in playing anymore. This is my Xbox screen a few nights ago after not playing for 2 weeks:
There were 3 updates available almost 2 gigabytes worth of downloading. Oh and I wanted to mention, see the 43.8% used? I don’t do anything on my Xbox One except play video games. I only own 3 games. and as you’ll see, that’s already half of my storage used. I hope I don’t one day own a 7th game…if I do, I’ll have to go out and buy a 2nd Xbox.
I’m pretty disappointed in how this was implemented. Lots of research on automatic updates, standby mode and being able to play without updating don’t help. Basically I bought an Xbox so I could run updates every 2 weeks. I haven’t played any games since November.
Sure I could turn the console on when I get home, run updates and then play it later but can you honestly tell me that this is our future? 2 gigabytes of updates before I can hit the start button? Ridiculous.