Microsoft Was Surprised By Xbox One Outcry

[KeyMaster45]

It's this exact attitude of obliviousness they seem to have that will keep me from buying this console even after all the changes. They didn't change because they came to understand why their customers were upset, they changed because they saw how much money they were going to lose. That they continue to show this inability to understand only cements my reasons for why this console is a bad investment.

 

[fwiffo]

Microsoft has always been out of touch. Business as usual. Nothing to see here...Move along.

 

[flamedance58]

Steam still needs to check in, it's just every week instead of every day. Trust me, that has bitten me in the ass on so many trips.

Does it? Oh wow never knew it was a set amount of time! My bad, guess I'm partially wrong on my claim then >.<

 

[Lil devils x_v1legacy]

Nope. Nopenopenopenopenopenope. Nope.

If you want to copy Steam, then F*ING COPY STEAM!, don't make a bastardized and blatantly anti-consumer version of it. Heck, even Origin got it (mostly) right.

Interesting you should say that:

The original Xbox One allowed you to do the following with digital games:

Buy at day one
Cloud storage
Access on friend's machine

Sharing of digital games(not on Steam)
Giving of digital games (not on Steam)


That's already two things that the original Xbox One would let you do that Steam doesn't let you do. You could even say that Steam is *gasp* more restrictive than the original Xbox One.

So much for the consumer backlash. Perhaps Microsoft just didn't plan on getting so much criticism based solely on misconceptions.

What are you talking about?
1) You can access your Steam games from any PC, and friends have been able to play my steam games by doing so.
2) I have GIVEN games as gifts on steam, they make this easy to do.
Q&A on steam gifts: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?p_faqid=549#expire
3) You can add non Steam games to your steam to launch them from there for convenience.
4) You have a support community with no subscription fee.
5) Steam's contingency plan for if they ever shut down entirely is to allow customers to download their games and they play them without steam needed. ( Microsoft's Zune just screwed their customers instead.)
6) You can play offline Steam games offline.

 

[Genocidicles]

When even EA can copy Steam more effectively than you, you know you fucked up.

 

[ReinWeisserRitter]

Well, this is what happens when you have greedy old bastards that neither play your games nor interact with your customers in any genuine capacity handle your customer relations, idiots.

 

[Something Amyss]

Obviously. The way they handled it screamed "unprepared."

So let me get this straight. They listed out all the ways they were going to fuck over the customer while any benefits were poorly explained at best, if they got mentioned at all, and it's a surprise that there's customer backlash?

Yeah, but to them it wasn't a bug. It was a feature.

This just goes to show how far they had/still have their heads up their asses.

You wan't to be like Steam? THEN COPY STEAM. Don't try to make an evil clone and tell us it's the same thing.

Steam is the evil clone. This was the lab accident they had to kill with fire.

When you debuted the console, you had a perfect opportunity to explain to everyone why what you were trying to do was good and pro-consumer.

The problem being it wasn't, and we still have absolutely no reason to believe otherwise. Their manchild conduct of mocking the consumer base is more or less irrelevant to the basic problem: they really couldn't come up with a pitch to sell this as a positive thing.

Can you honestly blame them? No really, the amount of shit they got away with this generation with the 360 it's no wonder the Xbox division had so much hubris.

The RROD debacle alone would have fucking killed almost any other brand, so the fact they got away with it as well as charging for Xbox Live and gating everything behind it they probably thought they could do no wrong in gamers' eyes.

I don't think it's "can do no wrong" so much as "they'll ***** and moan and buy it anyway." Which is what we did with the 360. And A lot of things not Microsoft. Mass Effect 3. Dragon Age 2. Every Call of Duty this gen.

And let's be fair. The "launch with broken hardware" thing wasn't of Microsoft design, either. Sony released two consoles prior with hardware failures, each worse than the last. It didn't kill the Playstation brand (which, of course, also got too big for its britches this gen).

Gamers just appear to be shitty consumers. Apparently, though, we have our limits.

 

[Something Amyss]

Rule #1; just because the bloke got his own show doesn't mean he knows anything more than you or me.

No, rule #1 is "The Doctor Always Lies."

I'm not even sure that show thing makes it to the top ten.

I thought journalists were suppose to keep their opinions to themselves.... oh well

Most journalism these days doesn't. Reporters are frequently also pundits these days. If you want straight reporting of facts, good luck. Even the AP and Reuters will weight the facts heavily, even if they don't directly opine in their articles.

But honestly, this is The Escapist. Most of the staff here does opine, so this should be nothing new. I mean, if you don't like it, fair enough, but you probably should get your news elsewhere.

They were downright combative when we (consumers) voiced our concerns over those policies.

Not to mention ignoring the concerns for several months, and even ignoring them a bit after their presentation.

In short....

Jesus, you dumb bastards. Stop defending your stupid anti-consumer positions after you've retreated from them.

Quite. If they truly thought it was the best course of action, they would have stuck to their guns.

But at this point, MS just sound like a spoiled brat who didn't get his way.

No, right now they're more passive-aggressive.

 

[II2]

Who the hell is running things at Microsoft? A lobotomized chimpanzee?

You know, you are not very off for that description of Steve Ballmer at all really. XD

OT: The fact that they are "surprised" about all the reaction of this console shows just how desperately out of touch Microsoft is with the rest of the world. Really a lot of people in the industry makes you feel that way, but MS took it too a whole new level. I honestly was thinking that some of those "decisions" were just to see what they could get away with, but then again I've lost all hope at Microsoft making any rational sense or making decisions that aren't fully retarded. Recent case, buying the rest of Nokia when their shares in the Smartphone market are pretty much nonexistent at this point.

I know a few of people who know or have personally dealt with Mr. Ballmer, most of whose interactions were at tech conferences from the mid - late 90s. They're polite, professional folks, who aren't inclined to bad mouth their contemporaries, but to a person I've heard them describe him as a forceful ego with a 'my-way-or-the-highway' approach... I doubt rising the corporate ladder has changed that much.

 

[TimeLord]

I guess I would be surprised too if I triggered the biggest shitstorm since the Horus Heresy.

So if Steve Ballmer is Horus acting like a spoilt brat throwing his toys out the pram, who is the Emperor?

I wish the HH was more like this though. Reading about Horus holding a meeting of his traitor Primarchs and have him pull comedy gems like; "I didn't realise me rebelling against father would be such a big deal and cause so many people to hate me" would have been fantastic!

 

[Riotguards]

"We were looking at what Steam does, we were looking at what iOS is doing, we were looking where the customers were going and saying 'I think we can actually give you a better all-digital experience.'"

two completely different markets, Steam is successful because it offers a local area in which games are stored and downloaded, not requiring the user to insert a physical disk because its already saved on their servers, its also popular because it has huge sales

and as well as because PC gaming has a 99% no returns policy (1% being the odd dev or two)


IOS gaming is simply mobile gaming, unless you can take that VCR (i mean xbone) with some anti gravity + built in monitor there'd be no way to compete with such a market

unless microsoft are imply they wanted to sell their console on phone hardware which is minimal at best, or simple, cheap, and many hundreds of angry bird type games

In the end, Penello believes it may have boiled down to a simple misunderstanding. "I think the problem was that people got in their minds that what we were trying to do was somehow evil or anti-customer." Considering the somewhat dismissive way Microsoft responded to consumer concerns, that might not be a poor assumption to make.

big flaw in that, presenting your console on its big reveal and ending up having a majority of your consumers confused or
"misunderstand" is a huge shot in your own foot, its advertising 101, don't put a negative image otherwise it'll stick forever

of course they wouldn't understand how nobody liked the idea that they essentially never owned their own games most people who aren't fanboys (fanboy isn't an insult its someone who blindly follows in subject X without reason) of the xbox one pretty much picked-up and then cried afoul on learning this "new generation" of ownership


overall microsoft tried being greedy and it shot them down faster than a moba game being released onto the market, they deserve everything they got for it

 

[Infernal Lawyer]

Like Steam? Wut?!

With Steam you can still play your games if you have no internet connection.
I can play ALL my Steam games offline! (Unless of course it's an multi-player only game)

Don't try to use Steam as an excuse when you couldn't even get something as simple as Offline playability right, heck having the check in every 24hrs? What is this the XBox MOM? Will we have to phone in to Microsoft and tell them who we're playing with and then have to have Microsoft officials to meet our friend's parents?

Steam still needs to check in, it's just every week instead of every day. Trust me, that has bitten me in the ass on so many trips.

Does it? I've been able to use offline mode for weeks on end just fine. That said, Steam does have a tendency to 'break' offline mode when you update it, meaning that you have to quickly set it up again after downloading a Steam patch, so there's that. Even the Valve fanboy in me isn't going to claim that a bug excuses it of suddenly locking you out of all your games.

 

[Bostur]

"I think the problem was that people got in their minds that what we were trying to do was somehow evil or anti-customer."

I would think that was the reaction to the problem rather than the problem itself. I wonder if MS would want to try to fix the reaction, or the cause of the reaction. ;-)

I suppose that quote makes some kind of sense from a PR perspective, but probably not from a consumer perspective.

 

[Verrik]

Again with the Steam comparisons... Even if it were all-digital, there is one major, fundamental difference that they have missed:

Steam has a little feature called "Offline mode" that works forever, even if you never connect your device to the internet again.

In my experience, Offline mode becomes pretty much unusable after a certain number of days, often following a restart at which the point the system simply won't let me sign in before I get an Internet connection.

Valve has even gone out and acknowledged this:

"There are many components involved in Offline Mode, and some of them have known issues and bugs which we are continually working to improve. We're aware that it doesn't always work as flawlessly as we want it to, but please keep reporting bugs with Offline Mode. It is not broken 'by design'. "

Right, now add to the equation the fact that Xbox One was actually less restrictive in terms of digital games, allowing you to share games and even give away full games to friends, and the comparison becomes more relevant..

And yes, I am saying that the original Xbox One featuring a sharing policy less "anti-consumer" than that of Steam.

There may be a set amount of time you can stay offline, I really don't know what the max would be. All I know is, I was deployed over seas, and because the internet there was pretty much non-existent, I would go weeks at a time without logging into Steam, just played what games I had already downloaded before deploying.

 

[Orange12345]

The problem isn't that they're wanting to go digital - the problem is the required internet connection and daily check-ins.

Its all the "You have to use it like this" stuff that people don't like.
You have to be online.
You have to use Kinnect.
And so on.

No one wants to be told what they can and can't do with a product they purchased.

THIS, a thousand times this. The problem wasn't the t.v. or the online focus it was the required internet connection and kinect, no one wanted those things and as much as Microsoft would like us to believe almost none of the features they announced required always on connection

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

I think a quote from Ellis from Left 4 Dead 2 best suits my reaction to this latest press release.

"At first, it was funny; then it just got sad, but then it got funny again! Oh, man!"

Seriously MS press releases have gone from hilarious to depressing and back to hilarious over the course of this debarkle.

I can't wait for the next one, its like a joke a week!

 

[Headdrivehardscrew]

It's all nice and sweet to talk about it, really, but last time I checked, Microsoft is still peddling the genital warts of operating systems, Windows 8. It can be considered fact, then, that their disconnect from reality is still in full effect.

 

[archvile93]

So let me get this straight. They listed out all the ways they were going to fuck over the customer while any benefits were poorly explained at best, if they got mentioned at all, and it's a surprise that there's customer backlash?

Who the hell is running things at Microsoft? A lobotomized chimpanzee?

No it's a guy who still thinks it's the 80's when Microsoft had no meaningful competition and could make millions in profits with no effort on their part whatsoever. Now that they're in an industry where their consumer base has options beyond just eating their shit or starving, they're having problems.

"We were looking at what Steam does, we were looking at what iOS is doing, we were looking where the customers were going and saying 'I think we can actually give you a better all-digital experience.'"

Says the company that made GFWS (no not L, S, as in shit.)

 

[Caiphus]

This is evidence that the corporate culture at Microsoft is pretty out of touch with their own consumer base. Especially with their consumer base in other countries. If they weren't able to see the negative response coming, well, where were they? You'd have to never visit a non-Microsoft gaming website to miss it. Which you shouldn't be doing if you work in gaming.

Story time!!

So, I was discussing it with my father. He used to work in the New Zealand sales department for Shell (the petrol company). Around twenty-ish years ago, the South African division of Shell put a "bounty" on Jonah Lomu (Possibly the most famous New Zealand rugby player ever, rugby being the most popular sport here by a considerable margin). By "bounty", they were going to donate money every time someone tackled Lomu.
This was during the era where South African apartheid had just ended.
Lomu is also of Tongan descent.
For the South African Shell division to put a bounty on him, well, it was a bit daft. The people over here started boycotting Shell. The English picked the news up and started threatening to do the same.
My dad goes and phones up the head of marketing in South Africa and tells him to cut it out because the petrol station owners here were yelling at my dad. The response from the South African was basically "Piss off, we aren't doing anything wrong."

So yeah, it is possible that the Microsoft marketing division just don't get it. That's not to excuse them, they should have figured it out much sooner, and communicated much, much better. And they're probably going to pay for it.

So yeah.

 

[ThunderCavalier]

So let me get this straight. They listed out all the ways they were going to fuck over the customer while any benefits were poorly explained at best, if they got mentioned at all, and it's a surprise that there's customer backlash?

Who the hell is running things at Microsoft? A lobotomized chimpanzee?

.... Do I really need to say anything else besides quoting this?

Honestly, Microsoft. Did you not read over your policies after planning them out and think, for a second, about how more practical and normal customers would approach them? HONESTLY.