Covarr said:
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. If you have a connection, Steam will check to make sure the game isn't being played on multiple devices at once, but it never requires a connection outside of a one-time activation.
Why is this important? Here's a few examples:
[ol][li]Youth organizations, community centers, church youth groups, etc. - Many of these are in separate rooms or buildings from their parent organization, and frequently without any sort of internet access, even if the main office or whatever has it.[/li]
[li]Children's bedrooms - Many parents have no problem with their kid having a TV and games in their room, but deliberately do not grant them internet access. One-time online activation is enough of a pain on its own, but to require it every 24 hours makes such a thing entirely unfeasible.[/li]
[li]Unreliable internet - This is a huge problem for college dorms, but even a problem for many people with their own homes and standard ISPs. If there's more than 24 hours of downtime, a daily activation requirement would make the system unusable. Not everyone has the option of simply switching ISPs in this case either, depending on the reason for the downtime and the local competition.[/li][/ol]
But that aside, attempting to copy Steam is a mistake anyway. The whole point of a game console is that it isn't a PC (even if the hardware inside essentially is). What works for one doesn't necessarily work for the other, and if they bridge the gap too much, people will reject the console on the basis that they already have a PC. Make a console a unique product, something that complements a PC with its differences, and people will be more likely to accept it.
P.S. Thanks
P.P.S. PC sales and Windows 8 sales are already not in the best place right now. Do you really want to try and cannibalize your own sales more than you have to, MS?
I was going to comment, but then I read this and saw that everything I wanted to add to the discussion had been covered. But then I decided to comment anyway, because this comment deserves recognition.
For me, the personal computer (PC) has everything I want in a gaming platform (not to mention a tool for work, study, etc.), so I would never consider buying a console for myself. That said, I recognise the value of consoles for more socially-orientated experiences; that is, I consider a typical usage scenario to be a bunch of friends playing the same game with different controllers - something which PCs rarely support.
Given this more social-orientated mode of play, it seems logical that a major demographic of console users (or, more to the point, buyers) would be those community organisers and youth leaders. Microsoft, however, seem to believe that the only way consoles are used is by one or two people in a living room. This oversight is probably how all of those controversial policies came about.
How they managed to completely miss this market in their initial policy announcements is beyond me, and is rather disheartening coming from the company which also produces the predominantly-used operating systems for PCs.
On another note, it seems consoles are becoming so much like PCs that they're losing focus of why they even had a market in the first place.
I mean, I could also say that smartphones/tablets are bridging the gap more and more between phones and PCs with the features they offer, but at least those devices have the ever-present quality of portability to distinguish them from the desktop market. But consoles are no more portable than conventional computers - giving them a feature set that falls short of a PC's anyway just seems like a way to lose customers to the more versatile platform.
My verdict: focus on the games, not the console. The console's OS should serve to provide direct access to your entertainment library, not to push so much fluff in your face that you need to jump through numerous hoops just to get to the game you want to play.
In terms of software design, Microsoft seem far too focused on the "delighters" (perhaps a misnomer in this case) when they should focus on getting all the "expected" features in first.
