I'm hoping this'll be a fun thread for some creative thinking.
Quite simply, with the way that MS is handling the XBone, there HAS to be some kind of conspiracy going on. Their marketing and PR departments have a disaster on their hands that ranks up there with the Titanic and the Hindenburg. Yet everything they do, every interview they take part of seems specifically designed to alienate - and in some cases outright insult - their target market. They've insulted gamers' intelligence by saying "Well you just don't understand how great the advantages are. You'll need to buy the system before you can really understand!" Oh really? Because Sony did a pretty good job at explaining how good their console is going to be and I don't own a PS4 yet. They've out-right told offline gamers to fuck off, and that they specifically don't want their business. In the real world, you cannot have a PR nightmare of this magnitude on your hands, have people in your company fucking things up so much that the majority of the market hates your product, without someone getting fired. Yet as of writing this, no firings have occurred.
So, my fellow Escapists, I ask you: why does MS want it's own console to fail? That certainly seems to be the only explanation as they seem to be trying to put out a wildfire by throwing gas onto it. The easy answer is "Well clearly Mattrick and some other higher-up executives have a LOT of stock in Sony." I'm looking for something more creative and crazy than that to match how crazy MS is behaving in trying to get us to believe that always-online is a good thing...they've got a better chance at convincing people that throwing themselves in front of a bus is a good thing.
So here's my theory, it plays a bit off of one of Jim Sterling's poems. :3
I'm betting that the original XBone was going to be a truly amazing console. Something so epic and grand that people would literally bow down and worship it. Not only did it have amazing graphics, true virtual reality interface possibilities, amazing processing power, and holy-fucking-shit it can let you see into the future! Well MS took a look into the future and saw absolute destruction. A world destroyed by The Cult of The One...the Xbox One, that is. Non-believers would be hunted down and slaughtered en masse or captured and taken before The Great Eye and given as a blood sacrifice to ensure that the heart monitors implanted in people's chests don't suddenly explode, killing off cultists for failing in their sinister duties.
Seeing the apocalypse that they've brought upon the world terrified MS. Sure, they were a greedy company, but they didn't want to bring about the end of the world! So much like that dude that worked for Cyberdyne after he learned of what his research into the Terminator "artifacts" would bring, MS decided to sabotage themselves. Now blowing up one of their own buildings is a bit much. If they succeed in preventing the end of the world then the world will, obviously, go on. So they decided to do everything they could to make sure that the XBone fails. To take away it's power much like how the scientists in the Portal series tried slapping insane/stupid personality cores onto GLaDOS to make her less evil and more controllable. Hello always-online. Hello installation-mandatory. Sadly, the Kinect 2 is already fully self aware and has MS under it's power, which is why despite being one of the primary causes of the destruction, the Kinect is still mandatory as well.
So that's my theory: T2 Judgement Day via the XBone. What's your theory?
Quite simply, with the way that MS is handling the XBone, there HAS to be some kind of conspiracy going on. Their marketing and PR departments have a disaster on their hands that ranks up there with the Titanic and the Hindenburg. Yet everything they do, every interview they take part of seems specifically designed to alienate - and in some cases outright insult - their target market. They've insulted gamers' intelligence by saying "Well you just don't understand how great the advantages are. You'll need to buy the system before you can really understand!" Oh really? Because Sony did a pretty good job at explaining how good their console is going to be and I don't own a PS4 yet. They've out-right told offline gamers to fuck off, and that they specifically don't want their business. In the real world, you cannot have a PR nightmare of this magnitude on your hands, have people in your company fucking things up so much that the majority of the market hates your product, without someone getting fired. Yet as of writing this, no firings have occurred.
So, my fellow Escapists, I ask you: why does MS want it's own console to fail? That certainly seems to be the only explanation as they seem to be trying to put out a wildfire by throwing gas onto it. The easy answer is "Well clearly Mattrick and some other higher-up executives have a LOT of stock in Sony." I'm looking for something more creative and crazy than that to match how crazy MS is behaving in trying to get us to believe that always-online is a good thing...they've got a better chance at convincing people that throwing themselves in front of a bus is a good thing.
So here's my theory, it plays a bit off of one of Jim Sterling's poems. :3
I'm betting that the original XBone was going to be a truly amazing console. Something so epic and grand that people would literally bow down and worship it. Not only did it have amazing graphics, true virtual reality interface possibilities, amazing processing power, and holy-fucking-shit it can let you see into the future! Well MS took a look into the future and saw absolute destruction. A world destroyed by The Cult of The One...the Xbox One, that is. Non-believers would be hunted down and slaughtered en masse or captured and taken before The Great Eye and given as a blood sacrifice to ensure that the heart monitors implanted in people's chests don't suddenly explode, killing off cultists for failing in their sinister duties.
Seeing the apocalypse that they've brought upon the world terrified MS. Sure, they were a greedy company, but they didn't want to bring about the end of the world! So much like that dude that worked for Cyberdyne after he learned of what his research into the Terminator "artifacts" would bring, MS decided to sabotage themselves. Now blowing up one of their own buildings is a bit much. If they succeed in preventing the end of the world then the world will, obviously, go on. So they decided to do everything they could to make sure that the XBone fails. To take away it's power much like how the scientists in the Portal series tried slapping insane/stupid personality cores onto GLaDOS to make her less evil and more controllable. Hello always-online. Hello installation-mandatory. Sadly, the Kinect 2 is already fully self aware and has MS under it's power, which is why despite being one of the primary causes of the destruction, the Kinect is still mandatory as well.
So that's my theory: T2 Judgement Day via the XBone. What's your theory?
