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[PATV] Monday, June 24, 2013 - CheckPoint Season 3, Ep. 2: XBox-One-Less-Thing
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[PATV] Monday, June 24, 2013 - CheckPoint Season 3, Ep. 2: XBox-One-Less-Thing
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Sure, some of those things (like the daily check-ins) were just plain awful ideas, but most of their plan would have sounded fine if they had communicated it effectively.
The main problem with the door-in-the-face notion is that they stand to lose way more than they stand to gain, and that's just not consistent with how big companies operate.
Or maybe this is all an even bigger conspiracy by the NSA to get military-grade surveillance technology into every home! Everything else was a cover to distract us! The Kinect is a Trojan horse! Wake up, sheeple!
When dealing with Corporate America, it's very easy to confused "evil and malicious" with "dumb".
In fact, here's a preview of Microsoft's next PR campaign.
Microsoft: We're Not Evil or Malicious. We're just dumb! Sry, lolz
Like Graham said, it's about making money. MS thought, and probably could prove, that building the XboxOne that way would make them more money. End of story. It's then up to marketing to work out how to sell those decisions to the people. MS also probably thought that the new playstation would be doing almost exactly the same thing because re-sale has been as much a thorn in their side too. If that had happened no-one would even care, because you don't have a choice.
Execs care about making a product that gives them the best return. They have no interest what so ever in how many people whine about it online as long as they keep making money. You might think they are just stupid in putting in things that no-body wants but that's the same as saying that its stupid that free to play games have ads in them, because no-one playing the games wants ads. You don't get to decide what comes in the box. The players are on the receiving end. You've just spent too long on the internet assuming that huge companies are paying attention to your thousand page forum wars about why they suck. They are not.
Microsoft isn't stupid, they are merely a profit seeking entity who thought they had a way to make more money and that people would just adapt to the new circumstances. Then Sony sucker punched them. And hilariously, now both sides basically are stuck in the same rut they were before with essentially zero new stuff on the new consoles except 'moar power'. Maybe that's what you want, but that is whats killing console gaming. That is what continues to make consoles unprofitable, and you've saddled us with it for another genortation. When things aren't obviously profitable, no-one ever takes risks.
So I hope you like Halo and Gears and other dis-interesting games market tested to appeal to the widest demographic possible with no differences from the last increment in the series. Because that is what you have wrought for another decade. Have fun with that.
Honestly, I'm not sure what they could have explained to make this more appealing. Especially if the whole "demo system" thing was as rumoured.
Most of the plan was based around turning all games into digital services and requiring daily check-ins(hourly on a non-primary console). Saying "most of the plan that revolved around ideas I just admitted were bad sounded fine" is a poor argument, but essentially what you just did.
Now, I know what you're saying with the whole "nobody intends to piss off their customer" thing, but this is fairly similar to what the automotive industry actually pulled, so it's not like it doesn't happen. Hell, we could compare it to banking while we're at it.
We can very easily prove that it won't make them more money, though. Whatever model they used was wrong in this scenario, and there's no point in blaming marketing for not being able to sell toxic policies. You are right that they probably thought Sony would do the same, though. The only downside there is that it's probably the "best" logic they've got to offer.
What Graham said was ultimately pointless, though. Of course it was to make money, and corporations are built around that. That doesn't make some money-making schemes utterly stupid, however.
So why were the MS execs out their touting these great new features?
And perhaps I was being a little too tongue in cheek with my verbiage, and I apologize.
But Microsoft obviously saw something in their research that indicated that "always on" and "no used games" weren't really big deals. And ultimately, maybe they aren't. And I can bet Microsoft was looking at what Valve did with Steam, and how they now basically have a monopoly on digital distribution in the PC market, and told themselves, "We want to model that for our nexgen. That's where the money is at!" Again, they probably looked at the research as to who is connected 24/7, or really buys and trades used games, and made the call that they could build their system with an architecture that looked a lot more like Steam and a lot less like Xbox360.
Most of the backlash we've see is from angry mobs on the Internet, which may or may not make up a large portion of their customer base. However, what they failed to calculate was how loud and how much reach these people command via the Internet. And really, we still don't know what the long-term impact on sales will be. My bet, given how fickle gamers are (EA continues to be successful), by the time these actually launch, the whole ruckus will have blown over...except for those people who went out and preordered a PS4 based on their emotional reaction to everything that's going on, who will be incessant on bringing up these same non-issues five years later, trying to justify why they got the PS4 instead of the Xbone.
The key point here is that we as a consumer are in the middle of a PR flame war...I'm personally holding my money tight until I actually see these consoles launch, concretely know what's in the box and what services (or disservices) I'm paying for.
They had a real chance here to still give people what they wanted, and still stick to their guns, but they didn't. I cannot fathom why that opportunity was beyond their capabilities, and it just seems to me that they childishly said "Fine! Then no one gets it!" and took their new toys home
But I got to wonder.
How silly do people feel trying to defend the always on DRM bs MS was trying to push.
Duurr way to hold gaming back another gen durrrrrrrr
Umm how does getting MS to get rid of a "dial home" feature effect game play. Hell not one thing they cut really impacts game play.
We were going to bring out this awesome game with dialog trees that you impacted by speaking with Kinnect, it would even read you heart beat to see if you were lieing. But now that physical disks don't need to dial home, we had to cut it.
What .... huh ... how does one relate to the other.
I really got to ask, how does anyone type that with a straight face.
"Thanks alot crybabies, you wanted to have access to your purchases without restrictions, way to hold gaming back."
Please stop talking like that, your disappointment is as insincere as it is stupid.
Just stop.
Ahh, if only there was a Kinect in the boardroom that day...
The answer to all of those is their previous intent on using cloud gaming, which they had to cut to make the XBOne an offline box (see below). Cloud gaming would have allowed a massive expansion to game size and depth, but required an always on connection to use. Steam's been using this for some time now, and why most major PC games require you to authenticate and download through one of the steam-like services.
Look, I don't understand why they decided to cut Cloud gaming or anything else, but my assumption is that they tied the XBOne utilities in with the always on internet status, and had to go with an early offline build. I've been told by people more knowledgeable about programming than me that to enable the switch between always online cloud gaming and the offline gaming, they would have had to had two system infrastructures with a bridge between the two. Which I'm guessing wouldn't have been completed before November.
@Ironzerg
Unfortunately it seems we'll be a long time coming to get any solid numbers on what a majority of gamers want, rather than just what the internet rails about. However, it's worth pointing out that the only people Microsoft can get metrics from is people who are connected online.
Also worth mentioning that Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are drawing more information from you right now with your online gaming than Microsoft could get through the Kinect.
best opening ever.
I haven't seen anything about cloud gaming getting cut. All of the features cut were tied directly or indirectly to game ownership. No-Disk in Drive and Sharing and Resale of License (of disk sold content) both required periodic connectedness to verify you haven't sold the license and the staid disconnect to continue using the game (that you sold). Microsoft could have gone several directions, but going back to a known model with known limitations makes it a lot simpler to communicate what you will be getting.
As far as going back to a previous build, you're making a false assumption about how each console is developed. It's not like the X1 is built by taking all of the 360's source and adding new changes to it. With a major release like this and a change from PowerPC to X86 based CPU's you can imagine almost all of the client code is probably "new" and built from the ground up. Reverting back to an old build would just remove existing features it wouldn't implement the "new" (ie, old licensing) model. If I was to guess anything, some things got cut because Microsoft wants to hit their deadline, and changing a licensing model like this means more development work to make things work in the specific way that they believe the community wants.
Your comments about the "switching between" cloud compute and not are also a bit naïve. Basically cloud compute is a platform available to developers, there's nothing actually on the console to go back and forth between them, either a game utilizes it (in which case to use that feature it must be online) or it doesn't. Think of this as the difference between WOW and Fable. Fable is entirely client side, all multi-player games run on individual Xbox's. WOW on the other hand has a "cloud compute" feature (the servers could be thought of to be in the cloud). So no internet, no WOW.
I'd be curious to see where you saw that cloud compute was cut.
As far as seeing where games land. I'm very glad Microsoft did NOT cut day 1 digital download. This means all games should (in theory) be purchasable online (similar to xbox live). I'm already a big user of steam, and due to the long hours I work I hate physical media.
There's no functional reason that if the demand for physical media goes away, you might not see X1 games released entirely digitally...and if that happens who, knows, maybe some of the more interesting features like family sharing will come back.
The reason people are saying the reversal is holding back games is because the dial home feature makes complete sense once you stop focusing on the buzz words.
It should be pointed out, that Microsoft stated they built the X1 model to move forward to a purely digital model. This means that the actual disk itself is meaningless. It's just saves you downloading the game.
The dial home feature becomes necessary as a product of the goal to enable resale or sharing of the license. Consider this scenario: User A buys a game and installs it on two machines (x1.a1 and x1.a2). Now the user makes the second machine (x1.a2) go offline. That user then sells their game to a friend using their first console to release the license (x1.a1 -> User
If Microsoft had not tried to enable sharing or resale of the license, then the need for the dial in feature goes away. Except...
They also had the idea of having a specific machine in which your licenses get attached to. Basically this scenario behaves like Live arcade today where anyone can play the game on the first console you install to, (though it was unclear if it was first install or some other mechanism) but any other console you install to, you must be logged in for the game to be played (that's not even occasional phone-home, you must be actively connected). When you try to apply this model to disk distribution though, it gets a lot tougher. How do you know when a disk has been installed more than once without connecting to the internet? It's not like the xbox changes the state of the disk.
So...
No I don't feel terrible about defending the brave changes Microsoft was changing. But to be perfectly fair, my xbox 360 is always connect to my always on cable internet and I personally hate trying to get physical media since it's not convenient for me, but with my big fat internet pipe, digital downloads are (convenient). I would say that the changes being proposed in the first place marketed exactly to my real day to day use case.
Also since my wife also has an Xbox, I was looking forward to the family sharing feature.
And as for the tin-foil hat stuff regarding the Kinect. In the end Microsoft is most interested in making money. Recording games without their knowledge seems like a huge risk with no real profit. Who cares about watching someone play games. I think people place more importance on themselves than there really is. The work to record every Kinect's feed, send that data to Microsoft and then use it for something "bad" would be astronomical. You'd have to have some money printing reason for that...and mass blackmail just seems implausible.
That said. It's true there were some very clear down-sides to the check-in requirement (the never-connected console case being the primary).
The question of good/bad is not so clear-cut.
No, you're just taking it to a ridiculous extreme. Computer hardware and software is developed as a sort of snowballing effect, though there are portions that are made in chunks and added onto previous builds as a whole after having gone through their own testing phases. You have different builds that are made, tested, and added to to create new builds that are then tested and added to. My assumption is that they moved to a previous build in the software before they had finished the DRM/connection, which would very likely be near the last thing they added to the build and tested because they would have needed to thoroughly test and fix their basic functionality first. What we're looking at now is probably closer to the basic functionality build than the build we would have seen at E3.
So, the switching between cloud compute was not about a game switching between cloud enabled or not, it was about your game library. Game libraries were planned to be cloud based in the XBox One, which was how they were going to base their family share plan, their ability to play any game from your library on any XBox One, and even how you would be able to share games.
However, this recent change noted that it also completely changed how you were able to share games (the current method of just handing the disk to someone). It also mentioned that you could not play the game without the disk in the tray. So yes, that's two major functions of the cloud based game library shut down by this announcement.
My idea that they could have enabled the cloud library to be optional was that they could have switched between what we have now, which is a non-cloud based system, to the cloud based system they talked about in their previous demos with a (to the user) "simple" option or subscription. It's not naive either, it's something Steam does already, and in exactly the same way. You can disable or enable cloud based games in Steam to choose to copy your saved games to the cloud, and Steam itself acts as the service that lets you download and play your games on any computer you can access Steam with. It's not a "if the game is cloud enabled, it's always cloud enabled" it's an actual choice you have. Microsoft was making a play at making their own Steam system that would have worked only with their console. However, from the looks of their announcements, that's been tossed on the back burner.
Aside from the Kinect. Steam isn't a ton better, and actually does a lot of the same things Microsoft was planning on.
Oh, and here:
http://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/828934723973590336/
That's Steam's equivalent of Microsoft's 24hr check-in. It deletes your userdata after a period of time when kept in offline mode and bricks your games.
This statement:
the switching between cloud compute was not about a game switching between cloud enabled or not, it was about your game library
You're talking about 3 different features and lumping them together as "cloud gaming" which is really confusing. The three features are cloud compute, cloud storage and cloud licensing (what I believe you mean by "game library"), being specific is important here because not doing so make it impossible to understand what you're intending to say.
Microsoft hasn't wholesale cut any of these, just stated they cut specific features around sharing (which would be in licensing) which definitely depended on the 24 hour checking. They've already stated they will offer Day 1 digital downloads of games (think all titles are now XBLArcade titles...some just cost more and can also be bought with a disk instead of through XBLA). And it seems stupid that they wouldn't persist the cloud saves feature that exists today (though I don't recall seeing it be mentioned explicitly...I haven't looked terribly hard).
That said...XBLA already acts very similar to steam today. You can login with your profile on multiple consoles, download and play any game you purchased (on XBLA) on any of those consoles (with the caveat of one console at a time, logging into a new console will boot you if you are online on another...been "gotten" by this more than a few times). If you remembered to enable it, for many newer games you can save to the cloud store (cloud save space) so your save migrate with you as well (though you have to enable it on each console you intend to play on).
Well...okay there may be one other "major" feature which I would call physical to digital license conversion. This is basically what would allow you to install the game with the disk and then play it without the disk (anywhere). That's something no one is currently doing with a console system(though if you think back to PC games a close approximation would be the license key that comes in the box...it acts as that conversion from disk -> digital library ownership).
Still, it's hard for me to agree that they've cut "cloud gaming" in any way...just...paired it down to today's XBLA model...which is still _really good_ imo.