Privacy advocates argued that Kinect sensor data could be used for targeted advertising and to perform unauthorized surveillance on users.

In a press conference on May 21, 2013, the new console was publicly unveiled under the name Xbox One and was presented as an all-in-one home entertainment device.Some journalists thought that Microsoft's messaging and positioning of Scorpio alongside the release of Xbox One S were at odds with themselves and "confusing". Perreault initially tried the same approaches as the team had done with "Fission", but due to the differences in memory management sizes and chipset bit-rates, these initial tests failed. Xbox 360 games contained within Rare Replay are packaged as standalone applications using the Xbox 360 emulation.

As with Xbox 360, premium online features such as multiplayer, voice communication, broadcasting and Upload Studio require an Xbox Live Gold subscription to use.The overall interface was also considered more intuitive and flexible than that of PlayStation 4, but its game library view was described as being a "jumbled, sadly unfilterable rows of every owned piece of software", that also knowingly listed games that require their disc to run alongside those which did not.