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.
TomWiley said:
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.
