kilenem said:
Lightknight said:
There weren't very many ways Microsoft could have positively spun everything they did. Basically, their only way to have avoided that would have been to properly research their markets before making those huge mistkaes. They're still surprised that consumders don't want those things.
This was pretty much rumors and never confirmed but if you actually could trade digital games that would've probably helped them out because that would've been something that was next gen and something that PC rarely does. I belive you can trade some games on Green man gaming. I didn't really care about the family share rumor thing because you can already do it on the PS3,and PSP. Its probably against the user agreement but you can login into PSN on a different profile on the PS3 download content and any user on the PS3 has access to that content. The PSP is a little bit tricky. The PSP will ask you to save your profile don't do that because if you do someone esle can't log into their account and download content you have to wipe the PSP but not the memory card and you then you can log into multiple accounts. They say you only can download a game to 3 different systems and up to five time total but it isn't true. I'm pretty sure its unlimited.
Even the rumor only said that any single game could only be traded one time permanently and then not again. The idea was to remove the retailer. At best they could only facilitate the transaction or consign it but not get the game from you and then resell it.
What's really bad is if you do succeed in killing retail, what happens once they're gone and the companies you now buy directly from decide to turn up the prices or change the user agreement in malicious ways? Microsoft killed their pc gaming service, didn't they? What happened to those games? What's preventing them from eventually doing that with MS Live for the Xbox? I mean, there's nothing preventing Steam or anyone else either, but Microsoft is the one that has actually done it for one of their services whereas there are games from the 90's that still have servers running to play on.
There were several other things. Like the Kinect 2 for example. To the public they said it's not for marketing and you don't have to send anything over while in the same week the Marketing VP stood up in front of investors and marketing representatives from other companies to tell them that the Kinect 2 represents the next era of marketing directly to the relevant consumers. He even stated to reporters that they only get a "few" points of biometric data (think age, number of people in the family, general health statistics, etc. There really isn't a lot of biometric data that you'd need).
Then you have the basic price point issues and the obvious fact that the Kinect 2 was just pushing up the price despite not really being all that wanted. It's the whole "Forcing" bit that upsets people. Especially when it means more than $100 of the ticket price.
Then there's power disparity of the console, the way they treated people during the conference when they complained about the way things were being done (come on, they made an ass of themselves), the online checkin requirements and everything else.
Even now, the fact that they plan on making up for the power disparity with online processing means that many games will be functionally "always online" because the publishers insist that the game lighting had to be processed elsewhere.
I like my 360. I even just bought a game for it. But the XBO is too big a pill for me to swallow.
