Microsoft Was Surprised By Xbox One Outcry

[Cid Silverwing]

Are they trying to ascend to some super saiyan level of stupid?

Sexnifficent statement. Couldn't have said it better myself.

OT: Another piss-poor piece of rhetoric from M$. They CANNOT possibly be surprised at all the shit the Xbone got for its draconian features.

 

[faefrost]

So wait? Let me see if I get this straight? The problem was not that the Microsoft Product Development team made a bunch of wrong assumptions about what consumers wanted or would even vaguely tolerate. The real problem was that we, the gamers and general consumers made wrong assumptions about their product was, what it offered, etc and surprised everyone by how savagely we turned on them based on our flawed assumptions?

Wow!

Even more telling is the fact that this surprised them at all? I mean really? Did none of them start having second thoughts after SimCity? After seeing the shear consumer outrage over that product? That didn't give them even the slightest clue that thy may need to change the approach, fast? Did they somehow not pick up on the steady stream of increasingly hostile questions from fans and the press regarding always online? Even after the "deal with it" controversy? Their Product Development and Marketing people were still so obtuse and insulated from the fans that they still went with that reveal?

 

[Seydaman]

This just in

More bad Microsoft PR!
Hear the rest of the story, in the next half hour!

Are they really this stupid? I mean, come on, they can't be this stupid.

 

[OldFogeyGamer]

"We were surprised" is the corporate equivalent of "it was a joke" on forums.

Do something incredibly retarded? Become "surprised" at the backlash, use "surprise" as proof they didn't really mean all the bullshit they are on record for saying, play the well-meaning "surprised" victim of unfair assumptions.

As long as they can't admit they've learned from their mistake and won't do it again, they'll try to slip it in again in the future. They didn't learn from their mistake in GFWL, they're not going to learn from this either.

 

[ObsidianJones_v1legacy]

Here's the thing about copying steam. You have to do it better. the iPhone wasn't the first smart phone. We had smart phones since 1996. What iPhone did was combined all the shit that worked, and added pretty. There's nothing pretty about Xbox One. Literally nothing.

And to the 'game sharing' that everyone touts? It's of little use to me. Of anyone, really. My cousins game on the same pc. Different screennames. One signs out, the other signs in. different Games. Their library is freaking huge. And guess what? That's perfectly ok. And given that hard drives on PCs won't top out at ten games like early projections of the Xbox One storage, that's a lot of games.

Also, one last bit of fun? I was at my other cousins this week. I missed my games. She let me use her laptop. Two seconds signing on to steam, about thirty minutes downloading the games I want to play, and I was done. Her laptop is completely different than my pc. There was no hassle, just a check from my email to see if it was me. Once it was, everything I ever owned was retrievable.

That's a comparison to steam that the Xbox One will never, ever beat. I will find access to my games if there is a connection. Free access to games that goes to any pc. Xbox One can never compete with that.

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.

This is a comment that I think a lot more people should focus on. I mean, Even with the tremendous sales that the Wii generated, Nintendo still had to admit they were missing out on sales of people who liked mainstream games and not the casual stuff. Their launch title with ZombiU was like "Hey, we can do gore. Accept us again, please?"

If it worked, that's any one's guess. Most likely not since sales are so abysmal. But at least Nintendo got the fact that they DO need to pander to their core audience every now and again.

It's a running joke "So, what 360 are you on?". I parted ways with Apple the second I had to go to my third iPod and never looked back. People take the shit that Microsoft serves with a smile because of HALO and COD!!! Why should the marketing really think that all of a sudden, Xbox owners would start to speak out on getting screwed?

 

[Atmos Duality]

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

Pretty much sums it up. What they wanted to give us was actually [mostly] pretty neat, but what they told us we were getting sounded like shit. It did sound evil, but that's because you basically told us that it was evil. There may be fault on both parties, but most of it was a failure of PR and marketing.

NO. It was -NOT- just poor marketing. They don't get to hide behind that excuse.

Lets just subtract how they pitched the Xbone; remove the glamor and glitz of the reveal, remove how PR stumbled over themselves day after day during said reveal, and remove the endless knee jerk braying of the internet and muckraking press.

What were we left with, really?

-As a gaming system, utilizing both physical and digital media distribution systems.
-It was a platform that had all the drawbacks of Physical and Digital Distribution systems with few to none of the benefits of either. (consumer's perspective; prior to the "180", supply actually gains relative to demand, but since they're pitching to demand...that isn't a point in favor of any "pro-consumer" argument)

-Because of installs from physical media, they had to implement a 24 hour online DRM check in.
-Because of digital downloads, they had to make serious restrictions to reselling and lending media (no used games or first sale benefits).

Yes, even the game sharing feature; the one thing pre-180 apologists and white knights rally behind, is in fact a new restriction.
To their credit, it's a restriction with potential convenience benefits, but that's just as circumstantial as before.

(the benefits are based on proximity; it's of little/no benefit to me to share the game online if my friend just lives down the street where I can just take a few minutes to lend him/her the disc instead of forcing a lengthy several gigabyte download. It is of much greater benefit if s/he lives 100 miles away however.)

Finally, there is now a new major potential point of failure thanks to the requirement of Internet access.

And that's all the objective failings; I'm not even touching on the speculative potential for abuse.

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 >.<

Odd.
I was on a 10 day fishing trip without internet this summer (just two months ago) with my laptop, and after enabling Offline mode Steam worked perfectly fine all 10 days.

 

[Guitarmasterx7]

A lot of what they were trying to do makes sense, it's just you have to have some sort of consumer loyalty for it to work and... well I mean lets be honest, microsofts reputation involves frequently having a dollar sign replace the "s" in their name. It's not exactly the company you would want having total control over your games library. Even if they didn't abuse their power, the knowledge that they easily could looms very large. They want to raise the price of xbox live, what are you going to do about it, not pay the extra 5 bucks a month and lose all your games? You get banned because your name is "Balls Cawkington," what happens to your library?

And that's not even getting into the Orwellian shit they could possibly do with the ever-listening always online Kinect. Maybe it's a bit tinfoil-on-head to think that they care enough to listen in and monitor everybody but the fact that they potentially CAN is pretty weird and scary too.

 

[RicoADF]

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.

I agree in some areas xbox was trying to beat Steam at it's own game and some of the ideas were great indeed. However, like it or not the online requirement is not a small cost and requiring Kinect to be plugged in also wasn't a small cost. The horrible PR didn't help and then for the whole "USA is spying on foreigners" coming out about the same time that a massive US corporation is releasing a console with a camera that they admit is watching and listening at all times was seriously bad luck/bad timing.

In order of priority:
Always online - Lets face it, this was the big white elephant in the house. Always online doesn't work and from the consumers perspective it's a bad thing. Yes it gives some nice features and when your online anyway it really doesn't matter. However, those online features could just be optional things for those that go online, they don't need to force the whole game online to work. And while your net may stay up what happens when they shut their servers down? As someone who has PS1, PS2, PS3, PSP, PSVita, Wii, Xbox 360, PC and every game I've bought on each platform I still own (never ever sold or given away a game of mine, their all in my collection) the Xbox One was not looking appealing that they would one day turn off the servers (and they would) when they decided it wasn't popular enough, then the console and all games on it would literally be useless. I am not and never will be interested in such a system. Yes I play MMO's (Free to play ones) and will put a few bucks into them, but their a different matter to a whole system and all its games being able to disappear one day. I also spend my money accordingly on them (that is to say not alot as their finite life gives them little value to me).

Kinect - This one has 2 issues, 1) not everyone has the space to use one (or even have one sitting to one side), so for some that would literally make the system unusable when it required it to be plugged in. 2) As with mentioned above about the spying on foreigners and just in general privacy concerns having it required and always watching and listerning was a dumb idea on their part. There was no way this was going to fly to the public in general, especially since in alot of European and other nations it would literally be illegal, thus making the system unable to be sold there (may explain the fact only 13 countries are getting the thing).

Now that they have removed both issues the Xbox one is competing and I may get it one day, but due to the bad PR mentioned above it wont be day 1 anymore, I don't trust Microsoft, and at the end of the day that's what all of the above comes down to. Trust is earned, not a given, and Valve has spent 10 years earning and continues to do it well. Microsoft on the other hand hasn't been good at it even with their OS, considering how often the EU has smacked them down with fines, so for them to then turn around and say "deal with it", and tell people if they don't like it then stay with the 360, well frankly they burnt their bridges. There's no defending that and I have no sympathy for them, their a bunch of greedy corporate pigs that want to have total control so they can force you to buy the next system in 10 years time. And before you say their a business and businesses exist to make money, making money doesn't require you to punish and step on your customers, if anything you earn more by working with them in a mutually beneficial partnership that both sides are happy. Valve, Sony, Nintendo and many others know and understand this and thats why their successful, Microsoft doesn't and their suffering for it (not just with the xbox).

Wow this has got to be one of my longest posts here, I hope it's of use and helps you understand where some of us were coming from and why Xbox One was not Steam nor as good as steam even though it had some features that could have given steam a run for its money if it had of been done correctly.

 

[TiberiusEsuriens]

snip

Was it perfect? By far, nope. Not very. Was the intent neat? Yes definitely. Don't get Microsoft's paternalistic implementation confused with the idea they were going for. The CORE FEATURES they were trying to implement were cool, they just went about it in the worst way possible. That's what I meant.

 

[Flames66]

"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 <a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/124891-Microsoft-Exec-Offline-Gamers-Should-Stick-With-Xbox-360>somewhat dismissive way Microsoft responded to consumer concerns, that might not be a poor assumption to make.

The Microsoft chap here has his terminology right, please never refer to anyone as a consumer as the term is insulting.

OT: I'm not sure how it was surprising, but in an organisation of people who all think in a similar way one choice can cause the whole project to derail.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Was it perfect? By far, nope. Not very. Was the intent neat? Yes definitely. Don't get Microsoft's paternalistic implementation confused with the idea they were going for. The CORE FEATURES they were trying to implement were cool, they just went about it in the worst way possible. That's what I meant.

"Paternalistic implementation"? Well, props for your deft choice of a euphemism.
But systematically eliminating consumer benefits to implement some ambiguously defined "core features" doesn't sound "neat" to me.

As for "intent", that is highly questionable.
You're in no position to say definitively what their true intent is. Neither am I. Nobody is.

Of course Microsoft wants to -claim- that their intentions were good, who wouldn't?

But saying and doing are different things. And what they were going to do didn't match up with what they claimed, so forgive me for not assuming benevolent intentions on their part.

 

[Lightknight]

First off, let's be clear. The DRM was not the only thing consumers were frustrated about. Just one of the biggest. They were dedicated to meeting non-needs this generation and forcing something radically different on consumers when what we already had was working for us.

Here's the big thing. Pirates aren't killing the game industry. They aren't stealing console games in droves or anything like that. What is hurting some publishers is that they think they can spend COD money on any game to make COD profits. When titles can sell millions of copies and the company still loses money then the problem was on the budgeting side, not consumer side as that is wildly successful. So them taking huge steps to side step a non-issue only inconveniences those that are customers. They are trying to force the pirates to be customers at a cost to us. That's naive at best.

There were combative to complaints on the policy. They said the average consumer doesn't pay attention to the details and that they did expect some backlash. They said that if the internet thing was a problem that they have a product for us called the 360. They forced us to buy a Kinect 2 which is said to cost nearly as much as the XBO itself. Initially they said the kinect 2 was required to do anything on the XBO and had to be plugged in to function. Don't forget the other major concerns over the Kinect 2 including things like the marketing department saying they only get a "few" biometric points of datum from consumers. There's the weaker hardware that will make a difference in the last couple years of the lifecycle. The cloud computing push is the big one for me. Because God only knows how much better lag would have made all the big name single player games of the last few years.

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?

Three things:

1. Please explain how steam somehow tried to stop the second hand market from existing by making second-hand games unplayable on the computer? You're talking about what Valve did with their own IPs as a development studio.

2. Steam never makes money on software that isn't their product in the retail market at all and does not have a storefront in the physical world aside from that steam card you can buy in gamestops. Microsoft DOES make money off the first sale of physical disks that are sold in the XBO format. Microsoft essentially decided to be like a book publishing ompany that only allows digital sales and first sales of the books but absolutely prohibits the physical books from being read in libraries or by friends (unless they've been on a family list for 3 months or something like that).

3. Playing steam in offline mode has worked perfectly well for me. Microsoft wasn't offering an offline mode. If steam goes under, I should be able to play my games on my pc going forward as long as I have the games installed. If Microsoft discontinues their XBO, and they will, then I'm just screwed because apparently I don't really own my IP with Microsoft.

Steam is a digital distribution business arm of Valve which is also a development studio. Microsoft is both a digital distributor and physical distributor that has their hands in a huge range of titles from any number of publishers that aren't necessarily Microsoft. They (Microsoft) were trying to get all the advantages of both while getting rid of the customer friendly aspects of both. I say that to explain that Microsoft will not treat us to the kind of sales Steam does any time soon and tried to kill the second hand market altogether on their system while still selling a physical disk. Hilariously enough, Microsoft almost inadvertantly made their system a chalege levied directly at hackers around the world. The response may have been absolutely epic, especially with x86 hardware in the game now. Like the time PS3 issued the challenge and saw itself cracked in what? A month after the challenge?

Microsoft isn't just trying to use this DRM though. They're combining it with always online drm in which cloud computing functions as the remaining part of the IP. They see this as the best way to get rid of hacking but the truth is that as long as you can dupe the server into thinking it's a legitimate copy of the game then it'll give you that part of the processing every time.

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.

No, I said that their inability to understand why we backlashed (past tense) even with hindsight is either an open lie or completely indicative of them being out of touch with the customers.

Seriously. If you're Microsoft and you're looking back at the public backlash and are still befuddled about why we responded that way then you haven't been paying attention or you just don't care. A good company does everything they can to get into their customer's frame of mind and will make changes in the future that show that they understand what they did wrong and won't try it again. Instead, Microsoft stands there in a huff and says, "Well, we'll get our way eventually." which futher illustrates that they don't get us as those who were still on the fence now have the future of their library in the incapable hands of Microsoft. Sorry, not incapable as in unable to hold onto the library, but incapable as to let customers have it when they want it. For example, I enjoy camping. I'll also occasionally rent an internet-free cabin for a week and take some buddies. Enter the kinect and FPS games for evening entertainment. You just haven't lived until you've played Fruit Ninja on the kinect in the middle of nowhere at 1am with a legs only rule. Had microsoft had their way, the system gets unnecessarily tethered to the internet in all situations for the purpose of preventing people who aren't me from doing things I don't do. That example was just me, it wasn't soldiers or people living in rural areas who have spotty internet at best.

There's other stuff too. They were openly rude to reporters and consumers sharing their concerns with a company they've enjoyed for the past two generations they've been around. They called consumers dumb in a lot of ways with a lot of things.

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.

The aggressiveness of the response for a console company trying to kill the preowned market suprised you?

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.

1. They arbitrarily tried to impose a daily check in. Have a game loaned to a friend? You have to turn on your XBO every day or they won't be able to play it. Once a week or month would have gone over significantly better. Either way, the hackers they want to keep out will figure out a workaround for this every few months and then people who are legitimate customers like me are stuck checking in like a chump.
2. They pushed and are still pushing for cloud computing. For COD-esque online games that's fine. Those have to be online anyways. But for the single player portion of those games or single player games in general, all a publisher has to do is offload one element to calculate on the cloud server and bam, they have justifiable always online DRM. Just like EA with Sim City 5 most recently only this time for real.
3. According to a few reporters. The game sharing feature wouldn't have been a full length game. It would have been a timed demo. If you could finish Skyrim in a couple hours then I guess that is full length...
4. Are you claiming that hackers are not currently playing cracked copies of always online titles?
5. Less restrictive? I'm sorry, but I've never been that bothered by handing a friend a copy of a game I'm finished with. I believe my old copy of Red Dead Redemption is currently keeping a buddy company in South Korea. I just handed it to him and he did the rest.

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.

It's anti-consumer to rob us of the right of first sale. Yes. That is the definition of anti-consumer. To take away the rights of the consumers just because Microsoft believes this is the future. Whether that right is important to you personally or not is irrelevant to the response it garnered from the rest of us.

Look, we've seen Microsoft's and Sony's and even Nintendo's gaming stores. They aren't steam. They think a 10% price reduction in the full price after a year is a reasonable discount. I do not trust them to manage the prices appropriately because console owners are locked into their stores for digital distribution. You can't buy and download a game from steam or amazon onto your XBO/PS4. They have a monopoly in that area for obvious reasons. People are already invested by having shelled out hundreds of dollars to have a console and suddenly they have to buy games new nearly every time?

Killing the preowned business isn't helping consumers. The ability to share the games could still be there. They just don't want to do it. What they were trying to get was a piece of the pie that gamestop gets where they sell the same game ten times with only the first time going to the publishers and then all preowned copies being pure profit for gamestop less the price they paid for the tradein. There is no reason why both the ability to trade in and the ability to loan games purchased digitally through the Microsoft storefront could not occur. You think this was them trying to do us a favor, it wasn't. It's them trying to get more money out of us at every turn.

 

[Ishal]

Nobody can say that there aren't any hate threads for things other than Nintendo around here, can they? XD

OT: Hindsight is always 20/20. I don't believe that Microsoft was that stupid, the people claiming they are on the other hand...

It's true they made bad decisions, and they are paying for it and they backtracked. But the stuff that we all know and decry for being gamers (cuz we post on a gaming forum, we are committed to the medium as a hobby) perhaps might not be all that bad to other xbox consumers. We know they are bad, but what does the guy who bought an xbox for sports and CoD think? Would he like a centralized experience? The only other gaming he does is with smartphone stuff that is always online anyay. See where I'm going with this? I think Microsoft screwed up, but they aren't necessarily stupid. Out of touch, yes, but I'm betting they were focused elsewhere and were genuinely not expecting a backlash like this. Like others said, they got away with RROD... They might have thought they could get away with it because SONY was going to do it as well. And SONY does have a history of DRM.

But none of that happened. Gamers voiced their opinion and changed things back in favor for the consumer. Funny thing about that, for certain content contributors here at the escapist bitching and moaning about "entitled gamers" and the "entitled attitude" of the gaming community ruining creative endeavors... looks like it has its uses too. Imagine that.

 

[TiberiusEsuriens]

Was it perfect? By far, nope. Not very. Was the intent neat? Yes definitely. Don't get Microsoft's paternalistic implementation confused with the idea they were going for. The CORE FEATURES they were trying to implement were cool, they just went about it in the worst way possible. That's what I meant.

"Paternalistic implementation"? Well, props for your deft choice of a euphemism.
But systematically eliminating consumer benefits to implement some ambiguously defined "core features" doesn't sound "neat" to me.

As for "intent", that is highly questionable.
You're in no position to say definitively what their true intent is. Neither am I. Nobody is.

Of course Microsoft wants to -claim- that their intentions were good, who wouldn't?

But saying and doing are different things. And what they were going to do didn't match up with what they claimed, so forgive me for not assuming benevolent intentions on their part.

I find it so interesting that when a company makes a bad decision everyone assumes it is PURE EVIL. The only companies I have ever witnessed purposely screwing over their customers are companies that were already flailing and American ISPs because they have a pseudo monopoly.

Microsoft is a financial powerhouse with major competition. There's no doubt their intentions were good, but as we have witnessed time and time again this summer, there was a terrible lack of communication. They have since learned that they do not in fact know what the consumer wants, and good PR requires communication both ways. This is just yet another case of Silicon Valley executives and eggheads getting so excited about their own brain children that they forgot to tap back into reality. This is happening all too often and is one of the biggest underlying reasons why investors say that companies aren't innovating as well as they should. We've heard it from them over and over again: to them they weren't "systematically eliminating consumer benefits" because to them there was no benefit. Every single one of the terrible things about the original XOne, and yes even some of the good things (which there actually were a few) all stem from the fact that they didn't stop once to think, or dare I say ask people (i.e. COMMUNICATE) whether it sounded like a good idea.

In a perfect world with unbound internet, money, and goodwill the original XOne would fit perfectly. However, the creators and execs never had the time to pull their heads out of their butts and see that is not how the world is. They guessed that there would be maybe a little outcry, as there always is, but they assumed they knew better and didn't bother to check. It's fairly obvious now that they listen to extensive and negative customer feedback, so why would they just ignore it for the last few years? The only reason they didn't listen beforehand is that they never bothered to ask. I would stand by my original claim and call that a lack of communication. They simply view themselves as too big to fail and have learned the hard way over the last few years that it was a false assumption.

 

[Terramax]

Microsoft were shocked of consumers backlash after hearing they'd be screwed over?

Then again, Apple uses practically LOVE being screwed over, so in a way, it makes sense that they thought they'd get away with it.

 

[Atmos Duality]

I find it so interesting that when a company makes a bad decision everyone assumes it is PURE EVIL.

Honestly, I find it tiring when people do that.

But then again, I try my best to disconnect morality from business since business has little practical use for morality save for where law requires it.

When I say that they're stripping away consumer benefits, I'm not saying it in the "Bwahaha, look at us, we're evil and we can get away with it. Because we have money, and evil." but as a longer term gambit to alter the market to suit their needs.

A gambit that comes primarily at the expense of consumers, if it succeeds.

There is no secret that a lot of big media content producers (esp in the USA) want to push into an Always Online service model, because it offers them so much more control than the current model. This wouldn't be problematic if all of that benefit didn't come at the further expense of the consumer, and if some of them would stop lying to our face about it (EA and SimCity, as overused as that example is).

The push for Always Online isn't anything new: In the last decade, Blizzard and Autodesk laid the legal groundwork (precedent) that ensures total legal dominion over copyright in a service-centric environment.
Apple and Steam (and Blizzard, again) demonstrated that it service-centric media can be very lucrative and popular.

M$ has strong incentive to alter their platform to copy that success (Tit-for-Tat) and to make it appeal more to their business partners, the AAA publishers. But they were doing it in such a way that they have to give up every advantage of consumer appeal they had over those platforms (anytime home convenience, consumer purchase security).

There's no doubt their intentions were good, but as we have witnessed time and time again this summer, there was a terrible lack of communication.

I have plenty of doubts about their intentions, but that's because I actually look at factors beyond whatever their PR department spits out. "Good" or "Bad" intentions is just a matter of perspective.

This is happening all too often and is one of the biggest underlying reasons why investors say that companies aren't innovating as well as they should. We've heard it from them over and over again: to them they weren't "systematically eliminating consumer benefits" because to them there was no benefit.

Microsoft has the benefit of hindsight. Large companies like EA, Ubisoft and Blizzard certainly are aware of how unpopular Always Online DRM is at this point. Yet they keep trying to do it anyway.

(A cursory search of the internet will reveal the myriad of problems and consumer outrage; I'm sure even their most overpaid sociology majors working in PR could figure out Google.)

Furthermore the biggest publishers have been quite vocal about certain hot button topics like Used Game Sales and Piracy.
Not just blue collar PR peons; CEOS, shakers, brass.
But oh what a coincidence! An Online DRM system could let them eliminate those problems!

Even Microsoft's own admission of wanting to copy Steam flies in the face of ignorance.
Either they have EXTREMELY selective vision for features, or they didn't actually research why people liked Steam at all before trying to copy it. The latter of which would be counter-productive and insane for anyone claiming they were trying to copy anything.

And let us not forget Adam Orth's "Deal with it". His vitriol and toxicity matched by his later hypocrisy.
Prior to his sacking, he was the creative director for Microsoft and he demonstrated in no uncertain terms how familiar he was with the public's opinion of Always Online DRM.

If the creative director publicly engaged in arguments against criticism (no matter how fuckwad-esque, as is the wont of the internet) he knew.

So no, it's not just "miscommunication", more likely, it's the old business chestnut called "calculated risk".
They knew about the problems, but chose to ignore it hoping that the vocal minority is the lunatic fringe that the average gamer didn't belong to or listen to.
Or that the popularity of the 360 brand was broad enough that the average gamer was blissfully ignorant of those issues.

I'm willing to accept some things as "miscommunication" on account of how large and complicated the market is (not all data is reliable), it's a wild place, but not all of it.

It's fairly obvious now that they listen to extensive and negative customer feedback, so why would they just ignore it for the last few years? The only reason they didn't listen beforehand is that they never bothered to ask. I would stand by my original claim and call that a lack of communication. They simply view themselves as too big to fail and have learned the hard way over the last few years that it was a false assumption.

You can call it a lack of communication if you want.
I'm calling it "arrogance".

 

[TomWiley]

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.

What are you talking about? Steam doesn't allow you to give games to anyone, unless by give you mean the option to purchase a game as a gift. That's just not comparable to the ability to give a game which you've already purchased and played.

Also, I don't see how your other points are even relevant to digital sharing =/