I'm not sure when Microsoft added the best thing ever to their Xbox Live game store, but I'd like to show you some video of it so you can marvel with me. Seriously, who needs breathless catalog copy or sketchy user reviews when you can get live gamer-driven broadcasts of the $60 Xbox epic you are considering buying?
If you turn on an Xbox One and go to the system's game store, you can select any game that you're curious about and then bumper-button over to a "broadcasts" tab and watch one or two streams of the game being played by perfectly ordinary gamers live in front of you—without exiting the store. (You'll see in the video above that some games just aren't being streamed via the Xbox One at the moment, so they have no broadcasts.)
This is incredibly civilized.
Steam has something sort of like this thanks to a new "broadcasts" section you can access from any game's "community" page.
That's a nice try by Valve, but Microsoft's implementation via Twitch, it seems, is far smoother.
Part of what I love about this is that broadcasts/streams have a better chance of showing a gamer a genuine presentation of the game than a trailer, publisher blurb or user review. They might even be more useful than a demo, if you're lucky enough to catch a stream by an expert player who is saying what's good and bad about the game.
Good on Microsoft for this. Sony and Nintendo, please add this to your stores.
To contact the author of this post, write to stephentotilo@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo.