Lightknight said:
They were downright combative when we (consumers) voiced our concerns over those policies. Several of the things they call "assumptions" were outright conclusions. They saw how steam did things and wanted that kind of action and tried to take it. Part of that is at the cost of a used market. Not only that, but Steam doesn't necessarily require you to be online and certainly doesn't try to make people check in once a day like they tried to do.
In hindsight, why we exploded against them should be obvious. That they are still surprised by it is... if not a lie, concerning. Because it would mean that they are so out of touch with their consumer that they can't even begin to fathom that we saw what they were doing. Microsoft thinks they know what the future brings, and they may be right, but to force the future on us now when we do not want it is naive of any business to do. They've got to remember that the customer may not always be "right", but you better treat them like they are if you want their money.
Look, I owned an xbox and a 360. I was hopeful for what the next gen system would look like. But as the reports came in and as I watch live feed, all I saw was a Microsoft rep looking us in the face and selling us Sony products. Sony then just had to laugh at them along with us, buddying up and becoming part of our group. Beyond that, they just had to not try and force stuff on us and they were golden. I have got to be more surprised that Microsoft tried this at all than they are about our reactions.
If they wanted to compete with steam, there's no reason why a digital and physical distribution can't coexist. They already do this on computers. You've just got to create a digital environment that makes gamers want the digital license more than the physical one. To say you can't have that and retail is a lie and is purely them trying to muscle out preowned games and pocket the cash. That's blatant and we all know they were doing it and there's no assumption to be made. You make the digital environment better than physical ones with price and convenience. There's no reason a digital game should be full retail a year later or even ever the same price as physical retail.
Let me just add my thoughts on that. Firstly, you say that if they wanted to be like Steam, they should have just let retail and digital sales coexist peacefully on the same platform?
Only; that's
nothing like how Steam is doing things. Keep in mind that Valve received massive backlash back in 2004 for deliberately locking out retailer versions of Half Life 2 (everything had to be registered via Steam).
Steam is so massively anti-retail that any game distribution service can possibly be.
And Valve was right to do that seeing as cutting out the retailers allowed for lower game prices á la the Steam sales. Obviously, if Microsoft wanted to be like Steam they should be as anti-retail as possible. So your comparison there just doesn't make any sense to me. Also, you do know that the original Xbox One would support physical copies and even used games, right?
You also say that Microsoft's inability to predict backlash proves that they are completely out of touch with the consumers. Maybe that's true, but I can personally say that I think a lot of that backlash was quite simply unfair.
It's a value proposition right? It's Microsoft saying "here's our new console, it does require internet connection but that's only so we can give you digital features you've never been offered before - the ability to give and share games etc". It's up to each and every consumer to decide whether that's a decent trade-off, and it wouldn't have surprised me if a lot of people would simply pick the PS4 instead. But the aggressive response it triggered did surprise me.
See, the original Xbox One's digital sharing was way less restrictive than that of earlier generations, than that of Steam, Origin and even the PS4. Anti-hack internet connectivity was the only way to justify that kind of liberty to publishers.
So it was a trade-off. They defined their consumer market as everyone with a decent internet connection so that they would be able to enhance the way digital sharing works. And for me with an Internet connection, the advantages clearly outweighed the disadvantages.
Is it anti-consumer to define their market for their new product as just people with Internet connection? Not in my opinion, unless they'd be lying about the fact that it does require Internet connection. But they didn't, in fact they seemed blatantly honest about it, and in the end it's their product and their choice which market segments are interesting to them.
In summary; Microsoft offered something different which in some ways was better, some ways was worse. Ultimately, it's up to each and every consumer to make that choice - but Microsoft shouldn't be demonized for going for a digital distribution model with their own hardware. And I would have greatly preferred if I had the choice between two consoles doing things radically different (Xbox with enhanced digital sharing, PS4 with unrestricted offline) over the choice between two glorified PC's that are exactly the same.
