The Verge: The Xbox One is the best console if you don’t care about exclusive new games
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That making a contentious article generates clicks? I mean, giving GoW a 10 will probably generate comparable clicks, without the death threats.
What alternate reality are we living in where the xbox one was facing negative press when it and the DRM plans were revealed? I remember a ton of games press calling gamers entitled for not wanting a mandatory wiretap and draconian DRM. I remember how "revolutionary" it was, and how Sony was definitely going to do the same thing. The media lapped up the power of the cloud for months, until those benefits failed to materialize better than driveatars.
That was the US press, mind you, but anyone saying that the US press wasn't very much in MS's corner until Sony shamed them on all fronts (price, performance, DRM, reveal tone and focus on games instead of tvtvtvsportstv) is living in a fantasy land.
Perhaps it was a holdover from the Xbox 360 dominating the US mindshare for so long. I don't know. But they certainly didn't face much opposition until it became clear that they'd lost the support of many gamers with their DRM (and then reversed it).
That was the US press, mind you, but anyone saying that the US press wasn't very much in MS's corner until Sony shamed them on all fronts (price, performance, DRM, reveal tone and focus on games instead of tvtvtvsportstv) is living in a fantasy land.
Perhaps it was a holdover from the Xbox 360 dominating the US mindshare for so long. I don't know. But they certainly didn't face much opposition until it became clear that they'd lost the support of many gamers with their DRM (and then reversed it).
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The players were mad though, the push-back was the biggest i've seen since the microtransaction blowback from last year.
Yeah. Players were fuming, and not preordering, while the press told us all we were entitled babies. And then MS got a whiff of the dire pre order numbers and began to right the ship.
Great post. Good to see someone else actually understand the way media works. Your post will be largely ignored though, because they just want to scream fanboy at me and pat each other on the back.
It doesn't prove your point, it proves mine. An 8/10 review by Eurogamer, not edge iirc, drew so much ire and hate that many people swore off reading that publication forever. They were Xbox fanboys, biased, looking for hits, etc. Had they given it a 10 they would have kept all those people happy and continued getting their clicks from them because it would have reinforced their purchasing decision.
The 8/10 thing was one of the most embarrassing displays of console fanboys you'll ever see, and it was on the supposedly mature, non biased, critical thinking NeoGAF. Many of the people that went on the warpath defending sony and attacking eurogamer are no doubt on this forum after the migration. The same would happen here for God of war if heaven forbid someone from a big site gave it an 8. A 5 would be next level meltdowns. If someone can find the thread it would be good, though I think it ended up being deleted. It really reinforced the SonyGAF nickname.
We must read different sites as all I saw was negativity around it.
It went like this iirc: press was excited about a digital future from 10 years in the future now. gamers revolt (imho out of ignorance). press changes the frame to echo "gamers". MS changes plans. Damage done.
At the time I thought it was all forward thinking, as in, "this is where we will end up", but sigh. MS really messed up the PR on it, but the problem was the whole thing needed nuanced discussion, and that is not what people are best at participating in.
Yes, a lack of "nuanced discussion" was the problem with Xbox One's failed always-online DRM policy. Oh and "ignorant gamers". You nailed it.
Extreme sarcasm, in case it wasn't obvious.
I am kind of hoping MS's big announcement at E3 is they become friends with all the Japanese Devs (who release on PC and are not using sonys engine)
I recognize your sarcasm, but I would kind of hope for more of your perspective at the time rather than a blanket dismissal.
Pretty much exactly, MS fumbled the messaging, console gamers freaked out and largely revealed they weren't ready for anything near that forward looking, and more or less since then the press has catered to popularity, as you'd expect a traffic dependent media to do.
The fact that you still, 4 years later, think that it was always online DRM says that yes, nuanced discussion was needed.
No we've been told that doesn't happen. Everything the press does, especially the held in extremely high regard as a bastion of real journalism gaming media does is just 100% fact reporting without any bias towards the popular opinion or product.
this's certainly the version i remember. it was presented as a 'vision of the future of gaming', & the press ate it up enthusiastically :) ...
My perspective at the time of the Xbox One always-online DRM policy was disbelief, and then revulsion. When Microsoft announced their first Xbox One policy 180, it was relief.
When the price dropped and Kinect was removed, I purchased an Xbox One. It was the white Sunset Overdrive bundle. It's under my TV right now.
Please don't tell me you don't think the original Xbox One vision wasn't always-online DRM. It was, full stop.
So in all honesty, I have forgotten most of the details, but werent there also benefits to the DRM scheme? Thats what I remembered about it (that it wasnt just the negative, that there were balancing positives). Aside from the daily? checkins I remember it was basically Steam with some other game sharing features.
I mean we ended up with most of it in some form anyway, so :/
And people talk about SonyGAF. This is fanboyism on a whole other level.
Staying with the topic, I really want a reason to upgrade my XB1 to a 1X but how long will it be until we get some decent exclusives in order to warrant that? I love my PRO for the awesome exclusives that MS just dont have, but would love to see MS kick back in style and return to the 360 heyday.
By the very nature of you not having to be "always online" it was not always online DRM. It was daily license checks. You had to be online for a minute a day. You could then play offline for 23 hours and 59 seconds.
Most of the benefits of the X, and the reasons to upgrade, are the things that it does to the 99% of the games out there. It will have the best looking and playing version of 99% of all games that release from now until the end of the generation. That's reason enough for many people, as multiplatform games are mainly what most people play. Even if it Microsoft never released another exclusive game, the top 10 most played games and best selling games on PlayStation every year will look and play better on the Xbox one X.
It may be forward thinking, but the infrastructure is not here yet to make it viable. MS wasn't willing to take the hit on the user base (imho understandably).
Surprised that this thread is still going, the premise is such an overstatement.
What if i care about JRPGs? or platformers? Xbox One is not the best console in those cases, even without mentioning exclusive games.
What if i care about JRPGs? or platformers? Xbox One is not the best console in those cases, even without mentioning exclusive games.
Yup I was thinking about this earlier. We had a lot of "disgust" threads back on Gaf due to so many outlets eating all of this up and clearly favoring MS. Pretty sure arthur gies still owes a member money after losing the secret sauce bet. He was so adamant that MS was going to have the best console no matter what. I also remember a video with Sessler and Stephen Totillo (before he ran kotaku), I think it was during E3, where they were making every excuse possible in defense of MS. If I have my timelines right this was the same E3 where Sony and Tretton did the big used games/no online drm thing but since they didn't start until later at night it hadn't happened yet. This show was like a reaction vid to MS' conference.
Even Digital Foundry took some heat mostly because of Leadbetter. He really had a rough ~6 month stretch before the specs of the consoles were known.
That was his point. It was the general public who were pissed off and rightly so.
Meanwhile gaming journalists everywhere couldn't stop falling over themselves to praise MS' "forward thinking" all while calling the complainers entitled brats for not bending over for MS.
On the plus side, the backlash against the journalist led to assholes like Adam Sessler finally being shown the door.
I was about to disagree, but then you said "full stop", and now I can't. Well played.
If you can't find any reason to upgrade, then you should probably wait until you see some decent exclusives you think would warrant that. I'm afraid nobody can tell you when that will happen, because nobody knows what "decent exclusives" means to you.
Gotta love the hyperbole employed willy nilly, now X doesn't even have decent exclusives. Not even decent. Indecent, all of them. lol. My guess is to be considered a decent exclusive it has to be 9 or 10/10 with the media and/or come in a blue or red box.
The irony of all of that is that the only real reason for the 24hr daily license checks was because MS was trying to preserve physical disc trade-ins (the used game market) at retailers (at least, to a limited extent). Since the ability to trade-in discs at "authorized retailers" was still a planned feature, that was an obvious way to prevent the "I install a bunch of games, go offline, and trade the discs back in while I keep playing it at home" situation.
If they just wanted to immediately kill off any sort of trade-in/reselling, the way everyone assumed, then they would have just made the discs a one-time activation tied to your account and hardware, and allow for a full offline mode on the hardware it's originally registered on, like so many other items. That would have made the disc mostly useless afterward, which is the pretty much how Steam retail games have worked since 2004 with physical discs (I don't recall ever being able to trade-in or resell my Half-Life 2 or Skyrim discs after I redeemed the code on Steam, after all). That would actually have killed used games on MS consoles.
Granted, that probably wouldn't have went over very well either (console gamers and PC gamers view discs very differently), but at least it would've avoided the daily check-in criticism. And since everyone thought they were 100% immediately killing used games anyway, they might as well have just really did it, instead of the awkward half-step that they couldn't get a decent message around.
I linked it mostly as a primer on understanding the concept of manipulation and framing, and I agree it's not a great match to news that really doesn't have socio-political ramifications (or if you will, theres really nothing at stake here other than entertainment).
I think they were just taken aback about people hating it. I think its freaky the consumer backlash to kinect voice control, and now look where we are - it just blows me away! (talking about alexa and google home)
I understand the infrastructure concerns, but I mean look at the patches you need day one on almost every game. I would be interested in what/how people game who have no broadband at this point.
But my point was that the media also gave them backlash almost immediately.
Also saying "rightly so" is subjective. Nothing about the original plans "rightly" deserved backlash IMO.
See? Nuance!
I really wonder how long gamepass was a complete product before they launched/announced it too. Can you imagine all digital + gamepass from day one? Interesting thought experiment.
Gamers on nuclear subs are effed (unless they have a 360).
Looking back I think the original plans are actually better in some ways than what is still going on today. Many people do like buying digital games, that is just a simple fact going by how much it's grown over the years on consoles. On the pc you are right, I bought a game last year and it came with the disk but I just used the code inside. Once you do that it's a one time download that is now always tied to your account and yes that disk is useless to anybody else. With the plans Microsoft had I could have sold that once I had enough, I can't do that on Steam after playing for a few hours or after 14 days on activation (correct me if I'm wrong). So how is that really so bad to how digital games work now on any console? It is the collectors that worry as well as though who fear access once the servers are offline which is a good point but I look back and see some great ideas and how even today how far behind we are. Microsoft was actually too ahead of itself and the traditionalist couldn't handle it. Even today many can't handle the idea of Denuvo or other DRM on the pc or non-physical games on consoles.
Game reselling was not well detailed, along with the completely fabricated game sharing plan. They started promising the world when the backlash got too heated, and then took their ball and went home when they had to walk back their plans. What's stopping MS from allowing all of that game share and reselling, as long as you opt into daily checkins?
Oh. Yeah. The simple fact that they never actually worked any of this out and were just hoping people would buy their product anyway. It was arrogance every bit as strong as Sony's "two jobs" PS3 reveal.
Oh. Yeah. The simple fact that they never actually worked any of this out and were just hoping people would buy their product anyway. It was arrogance every bit as strong as Sony's "two jobs" PS3 reveal.
are we really still doing "stupid entitled gamers" in 2018?
As far as the "revolt" goes, people tried repeatedly to get detailed information on how used games and game sharing would work and we never got solid answers, so people assumed the worst.
And yes, the biggest gaming outlets were all for Microsoft prior to E3. It was Youtubers like Angry Joe that were on the other side of the coin.
Steam doesn't have online check-ins as far as I'm aware.
And Steam does have family/game sharing, but it doesn't require the owner to always be online for it to work. In fact, it was one of the arguments used against Microsoft when it launched on Steam a year later.
Is this opinion or do you have some inside knowledge? If you know this was the case it would be fascinating.
Just read up this page a bit at all the responses - I am not saying gamers were stupid, I am saying MS presented their ideas poorly (like if I talk to you about network routing and you dont know anything about it - you arent necessarily stupid, you just dont have enough information.)
This is revisionist history. They absolutely detailed family sharing. There was an official page on the Xbox website about it. People just didn't want to believe it because they were already outraged. We then had "insiders" on NeoGAF spreading FUD about it only being 1 hour demos, which of course everyone then believed and spread, despite either penello or Larry specifically saying that's wrong.
Not really, at least not that any publications have tested. No doubt some people will point to games like battlefront 2 where the X had a single frame drop once in a 20 minute video despite running at almost twice the resolution, but in every case it's been just fanboys trying to talk down on the X.
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Absolutely accurate except for the Ledbetter part. Don't recall anything with him.
Another part of the press defense of Microsoft was the claim that Sony was also going to do the always online thing but pulled the plug at the last minute. There was nothing rumored about this ever, and it always seemed unlikely Sony could have been so close to doing this without anyone knowing about it or leaking it, but people like Klepek repeated it often for a while.
They might have had a web page (don't recall that) but they were still very vague and offered few details.
Presented poorly and half thought-out as soul creator 's post explains. It was an awkward half-step that benefited nobody. The "authorized retailers" bit was just ripe for abuse (especially with the likes of Gamestop being at the helm of the used game market), and would destroy library preservation in the future. Not to mention that we would have been at the mercy of Microsoft keeping up XBL to have access to our games, and remember this was before we knew about their BC initiative, with MS shutting down the original Xbox Live a few years prior.
The family sharing thing was vague at best. Again, they wouldn't give us any details on how it worked. And, to be fair, maybe they didn't know yet either, but if you're going to push for such a radical change, you better at least be ready explain to consumers why this will be better for them, so that's no excuse. And there was, and is, nothing stopping them from doing this with digital games. Don't they actually have family sharing now?
Given the circumstances at the time, people had every right to be skeptical, if not worried.
well I better know something about it, lest these last few years of school were all for naught!
I still wanna see how th original MS
Plan woulda turned out. I got banned from "the other site" as a MS
Paid shill just because I said I wanted to see what happened.
Plan woulda turned out. I got banned from "the other site" as a MS
Paid shill just because I said I wanted to see what happened.
Yet here we are in mid-2018 and digital games still holding no value after you've finished them, so tell me again about how none of these plans benefited nobody.
You get the idea then. Go talk to your grandma about the wonders of DNAT, and watch her eyes glaze over
I don't think so.
MS should think about that for a minute...and check the results of the NPD threads since it launched.
Like right now, it's unofficially 3rd this month. But Sea of Thieves is 2nd in software sales.
Think about that for a minute MS...