ZOMG! They listened!!

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#1 Wed, 06/19/2013 - 16:14
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ZOMG! They listened!!

So, anyone going back with an Xbox now?

Wed, 06/19/2013 - 16:20
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lol Microsoft is comedy gold.

They took the only thing that was worth buying a XB1 away.  What benefit is there to owning this thing now?  The privledge of paying $100.00 more, paying more for online, a terrible record of hardware failure, some shitty kinect thing in your living room watching you get a bj from your wife during the superbowl half-time show that you have to talk to and dance around in front of to get it to do shit?  Jesus what a mess lol

http://news.xbox.com/2013/06/update

Thu, 06/20/2013 - 11:29 (Reply to #2)
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BlowMonkey wrote:

lol Microsoft is comedy gold.

They took the only thing that was worth buying a XB1 away.  What benefit is there to owning this thing now?  The privledge of paying $100.00 more, paying more for online, a terrible record of hardware failure, some shitty kinect thing in your living room watching you get a bj from your wife during the superbowl half-time show that you have to talk to and dance around in front of to get it to do shit?  Jesus what a mess lol

http://news.xbox.com/2013/06/update

cutting out all the hyperbole, PS+ is now required for online play, so it's the same cost for online (yes, you can find XBL Gold cards for $40ish).  Haven't had hardware failure on the 360 for years.  Bought my slims in 2010 and they're perfect.

The benefit is now just exclusives and futuristic motion/voice control.  

Wed, 06/19/2013 - 16:19
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it should be said that sadly I will own one lol 

 

stupid video game addiction.

Wed, 06/19/2013 - 17:22
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Glad they listened but I have no use for the xbone.

Wed, 06/19/2013 - 17:59
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They didn't listen to me,I don't want the fucking Natal/Kinect. I sure don't want to have to pay for something that I don't want. That is amazing that noone when designing or talking about the items they just reversed had any inclination that that would piss off consumers/gamers. I'm sure the new stance had NOTHING to do with the early projected sales of the PS4 eating into Microsoft's profits. I'm glad they only listened AFTER people complained,they should have never fucked with an ecosystem that has been fine since Atari 2600 days. That comeback is coming from a gamer with a non-fanboy slant. I don't want Jonah Falcon to come in here and start a flame war,too soon?

Wed, 06/19/2013 - 18:05
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adding kinect and making it a focal point of this thing is a mistake for me as well.  charge more money for a less powerful machine so that I can talk to it and dance in front of it - yeah that's not an option I want to pay extra for lol

 

Wed, 06/19/2013 - 20:24
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Yeah, I appreciate what they did, but why did they have the evil DRM stuff in the first place?  Because they were a little too greedy.  I appreciate a business trying to maximize profits, but not at the expense of the customer.  It's bullshit!  They never ever needed to have that crap on that box.  They just though everyone would just fall in line and deal with it.  Well, screw M$oft!! I will not go back to them again, guaranteed.

 

Now, I would like more info on paying extra for multiplayer on the PS4.  I don't know all the specifics, and I think it's a little bit of a dick move.  If I'm a + subscriber, why should I have to pay even more for MP access?  These console guys just want to push the lines.  

Wed, 06/19/2013 - 20:38
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MP is behind the PS+ cost. It's $50. Same PS+ you pay for now if you pay for PS+.

I don't like it but I think PS+ is a pretty damn good service and I'm going to pay for it anyway. No other services (netflix, free2play games, amazon, video services etc.) will be behind that wall. Want SP and a little netlix? Don't pay for PS+. MP and perks? Pay for PS+.

Wed, 06/19/2013 - 22:06
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This is a train wreck that gets more entertaining every day.. Now people are pissed about the fact that MS stated  Ok we are going to loosen the restrctions, but for that to happen some of the features we announced at E3 will change, such as sharing and the gaming from the "cloud" on disc based games as they will now have to be in the console...  Now the rage has gone from OMG I HATE MS, to OMG THANK YOU MS, to OMFG HOW DARE YOU TAKE AWAY FEATURES.. 

Just gonna sit back and watch, Im sure its not over. 

 

[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/2XGa3.gif[/IMG]

Wed, 06/19/2013 - 22:58
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No matter what they do people are going to be mad.  I've seen people pissed over it not playing Xbox360 games.  Sorry but things do have to move forward and that sometimes means it won't be backward compatible. I just think they tried to go too far forward with the online checkin everyday even if you planned on playing offline.

Thu, 06/20/2013 - 02:26
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OnTheGas has it right - What they listened to is their XBone Sales Projections dropping into the toilet.

tiny xbone sales = tiny xbone games sales

so Xbone publishers screaming at Microsoft to do "something" as their multimillion $$$ AAA Xbone title won't make any money.

Bean counters and lawyers at MS scramble to reverse the DRM idiocy - but make sure the Terms of Service still allow turning DRM back on once sales get back on track.

Fall 2014 - MS turns DRM back on once the sales numbers meet target, PR guys spin it as some kind of enhancement.

 

Thu, 06/20/2013 - 05:39 (Reply to #12)
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yaok888 wrote:

OnTheGas has it right - What they listened to is their XBone Sales Projections dropping into the toilet.

tiny xbone sales = tiny xbone games sales

so Xbone publishers screaming at Microsoft to do "something" as their multimillion $$$ AAA Xbone title won't make any money.

Bean counters and lawyers at MS scramble to reverse the DRM idiocy - but make sure the Terms of Service still allow turning DRM back on once sales get back on track.

Fall 2014 - MS turns DRM back on once the sales numbers meet target, PR guys spin it as some kind of enhancement.

 

 

No doubt.  It's all about greed.  Whatever.  Piss off xbone.  

Thu, 06/20/2013 - 20:28 (Reply to #13)
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yaok888 wrote:

OnTheGas has it right - What they listened to is their XBone Sales Projections dropping into the toilet.

Thanks for that. Just being a gamer for so long and calling it like I see it both ways,I tend to do that with everything in life. I guess its the old don't piss on me and tell me its rain or don't feed me shit and tell me its steak. I know we will never get the truth in any kind of media,but it would we nice to hear the truth in this decision.

Thu, 06/20/2013 - 05:50
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Thu, 06/20/2013 - 08:07
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I'm still not getting an XB1.  cheeky

Thu, 06/20/2013 - 10:35
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The hilarious part is that people actually believed that the publishers would be ok with MS just giving 10 free copies of their games out for every 1 person who bought them.....here is a MS employees blog post after the announcment (I should say supposed MS employee--I have no idea if the guy is legit or not - but this makes A LOT more sense than the pie in the sky dream everyone was raving about).  Basically the bold part says that you could share your game library with any 10 people BUT that those people could only play the game as a demo for a time limit uf 15 - 45 or an hour and then they would be directed to the marketplace to buy the game.

 

It’s 4am and I’m still up, some hours ago, we at Microsoft had to basically redact on our Always Online infrastructure and dream. Being part of the team that created the entire infrastructure to include the POS (point of sale) mechanisms I must say that I am extremely sad to see it removed. But the consumer knows what is best, I can place the blame on no one but us here at Microsoft. We didn’t do a good enough job explaining all the benefits that came with this new model. We spent too much of our time fighting against the negative impressions that many people in the media formed. I feel that if we spent less time on them and more time explaining the great features we had lined up and the ones in the pipes gamers and media alike would have aligned to our vision. That stated, we felt the people we would have loss would have been made up by the people we would have gained. We have 48 million Xbox 360 users connected online nearly 24 hours a day. That is much more than any of our closet competitors and vastly more than Steam. The people that we would have left behind I feel would have eventually come around as they saw what advantages the platform had to offer. But as I previously stated we at Microsoft have no one to blame other than ourselves for failing to convince those hesitant to believe in our new system. Microsoft might be a big company, but we at the Xbox division have always been for the gamer. Everything we’ve done has always been for them, we have butt heads with the executives many times on what we’ve wanted to, some times we lost (removing the onboard processor from Kinect 1.0) and other times we’ve won (keeping Gears of War as an exclusive).

While publishers have never come right out to us at MS and say “We want you to do something about used gaming” we could hear it in their voices and read it in their numerous public statements. The used gaming industry is slowly killing them and every attempt to slow down the bleeding was met with much resistance from the gaming community. I will admit that online passes were not well received nor were they well implemented, but I felt given time to mature it could have turned into something worth having as a gamer much like DLC (we went from pointless horse armor to amazing season passes like Borderlands 2!). Videogame development is a loss leader by definition and unlike other forms of media videogames only have one revenue stream and that is selling to you the gamer. So when you buy a game used you’re hurting developers much more than say a movie studio. Many gamers fail to realize this when they purchase these preowned games. It is impossible to continue to deliver movie like experiences at the current costs without giving up something in return. It’s what gamers want and expect, the best selling games are blockbusters, the highest rated are blockbusters, the most loved are blockbusters. How can developers continue to create these experiences if consumers refuse to support them? Many will argue the development system is broken, and I disagree. The development system is near broken, it’s used gaming that is broken, but regardless I think more emphasis on this from both us at Microsoft and publishers would have gone a long way in helping educate the gamer, but again it is us who dropped the ball in this regard for that we’re sorry.

Going back to Xbox One’s feature set, one of the features I was most proud of was Family Sharing. I’ve browsed many gaming forums and saw that many people were excited about it as well! That made my day the first time I saw gamers start to think of amazing experiences that could come from game sharing. It showed that my work resonated with the group for which I helped create it for. I will admit that I was not happy with how some of my fellow colleagues handled explaining the systems and many times pulled my hair out as I felt I could have done a better job explaining and selling the ideas to the press and public at large. I’m writing this for that reason, to explain to gamers how many of the features would have worked and how many of them will still work.

First is family sharing, this feature is near and dear to me and I truly felt it would have helped the industry grow and make both gamers and developers happy. The premise is simple and elegant, when you buy your games for Xbox One, you can set any of them to be part of your shared library. Anyone who you deem to be family had access to these games regardless of where they are in the world. There was never any catch to that, they didn’t have to share the same billing address or physical address it could be anyone. When your family member accesses any of your games, they’re placed into a special demo mode. This demo mode in most cases would be the full game with a 15-45 minute timer and in some cases an hour. This allowed the person to play the game, get familiar with it then make a purchase if they wanted to. When the time limit was up they would automatically be prompted to the Marketplace so that they may order it if liked the game. We were toying around with a limit on the number of times members could access the shared game (as to discourage gamers from simply beating the game by doing multiple playthroughs). but we had not settled on an appropriate way of handling it. One thing we knew is that we wanted the experience to be seamless for both the person sharing and the family member benefiting. There weren’t many models of this system already in the wild other than Sony’s horrendous game sharing implementation, but it was clear their approach (if one could call it that) was not the way to go. Developers complained about the lost sales and gamers complained about overbearing DRM that punished those who didn’t share that implemented by publishers to quell gamers from taking advantage of a poorly thought out system. We wanted our family sharing plan to be something that was talked about and genuinely enjoyed by the masses as a way of inciting gamers to try new games.

The motto around the offices for the family plan was “It’s the console gaming equivalent to spotify and pandora” it was a social network within itself! The difference between the family sharing and the typical store demo is that your progress is saved as if it was the full game, and the data that was installed for that shared game doesn’t need to be erased when they purchase the full game! It gave incentive to share your games among your peers, it gave games exposure, it allowed old games to still generate revenue for publishers. At the present time we’re no longer going forward with it, but it is not completely off the table. It is still possible to implement this with the digital downloaded versions of games, and in fact that’s the plan still as far as I’m aware.

Another feature that we didn’t speak out about was the fact we were building a natural social network with Xbox One in itself that didn’t require gamers to open their laptops/tablets to post to their other friends nor did they need to wrestle with keyboard add-ons. Each Xbox Live account would have a full “home space” in which they could post their highest scores, show off their best Game DVR moments, what they’ve watched via Xbox TV and leave messages for others to read and respond to. Kinect 2.0 and Xbox One work together and has robust voice to text capabilities. The entire notion of communicating with friends you met online would have been natural and seamless. No reliance on Facebook, or Twitter (though those are optional for those who want them). Everything is perfectly crafted for the Xbox One controller and Kinect 2.0 and given that shine that only Microsoft can provide.

We at Microsoft have amazing plans for Xbox One that will make it an amazing experience for both gamers and entertainment consumers alike. I stand by the belief that Playstation 4 is Xbox 360 part 2, while Xbox One is trying to revolutionize entertainment consumption. For people who don’t want these amazing additions, like Don said we have a console for that and it’s called Xbox 360.

Thu, 06/20/2013 - 10:45
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Yeah. Not really sure where people came up with 'free!' games with this share list. You could hypothetically have access to every xbone game for minimal cost if every person on your friends list bought a different game. That doesn't make much sense to me if they are trying to curb used game sales.

Thu, 06/20/2013 - 10:57
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lol you wouldn't even need to physically meet the person to lend them the game - just 10 people you know downloading full games for free......yeah I'm sure game publishers were all over that business model lol couldn't wait to give their shit away for free!

Thu, 06/20/2013 - 11:08
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It would have turned out like the 'sharing' on ps3. They moved that limit from 5 to 2 or 3 real fast once people figured out how to share and full retail games started being available for dl.

Thu, 06/20/2013 - 11:21
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I've been assured by Aurtach that the publishers were in love with this plan and that MS backed off because a bunch concpiracy theorists and trouble makers who weren't even going to buy the XBOX in the first place were making a lot of noise.  Those trouble makers!

Thu, 06/20/2013 - 11:57
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I know you're going to find this hard to believe - so sit down.  Your personal experience and expectations are not the same as everybody elses.  I know it's shocking. 

I've been through 5 360's.....that's about 3 too many.  And just for full disclosure I have been through 3 PS3's - although one was to move from the fat to the slim (I bought 360 first and after about a year I bought my PS3).

Retail price of PS+ is still $10 cheaper than the retail price of XBL Gold.  Yes you can find it cheaper - there are sales etc. but the retail price is what we have to go on and what is used when comparing prices - that's just how shit works.

 

So still 100 dollars more for a machine that isn't as powerful, that has a rich history of hardware failure, and that has the Eye of Sauron in your living room that you can talk to and dance for.

 

Thu, 06/20/2013 - 12:16
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Really? So the sharing thing is pretty much the same as demos we have now, except I get to keep all my progress I made in that whole 1hr of gameplay. I'm sorry that feature isn't attractive to me at all. If companies aren't making money, lower the damn budgets on your games, AAA blockbuster games aren't the ones I love most. In fact my favorite series of all time .Hack, didn't have huge budgets, other games companies like Suda 51 make good games without huge budgets. Huge budgets ruin games, b/c they have to appeal to the masses, instead of being unique games. Honestly, I don't even see the need for a new console right now, and would be quite happy with my 360 for anohter 5-6 years. We don't need new consoles for fresh IPs and breakthrough games, and nothing at E3 really wow'd me and nothing felt fresh or new to warrant the cost of a new console.

While the above poster may have had no issues with his 360, I personally have been through 12, and my friend overseas has been through 16 consoles and numerous family members have been through a few. All broke due to poor manufacturing and design. Many RRoD's, many disc drive failures, and even 3 Xbox 360 slims in the past 6 months due to the power unit inside the console failing. In fact I'm even on my backup 360 right now, b/c my newest slim I bought 3 months ago had a power unit failure.

On top of this even if you buy an ext. warranty, once you cash it in, even if it's faulty hardware, you can't turn it in again. So when I buy a 360 at Best Buy, and send it in for repair, and MS mails me a new one, when that one broke 1 month later for the same reason, MS refused to fix it, b/c since I didn't buy it, I have no legal rights to it getting fixed. They've even said to me numerous times, that it was faulty hardware, that they were wrong, and that they weren't going to fix it.

I don't wanna get a new console when they can't even make the old ones correctly yet. I'm getting a PS4 but I'm waiting til at least a year after launch, b/c I'm not getting screwed again b/c of my love of gaming, I'll just go back to library of older games and consoles.

Thu, 06/20/2013 - 12:22
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If things don't stay civil here I have no problem nuking posts. 

Thu, 06/20/2013 - 12:26
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understood.  34

Thu, 06/20/2013 - 13:45
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I thought about jumping ship and getting a PlayStation, but I'm not really sold.  I can wait until 2014 anyways.  I dont' know of any launch titles I must have.

Thu, 06/20/2013 - 15:07 (Reply to #26)
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Dixon_Tufar wrote:

I thought about jumping ship and getting a PlayStation, but I'm not really sold.  I can wait until 2014 anyways.  I dont' know of any launch titles I must have.

 

Very true.  Not to many must haves out there.  I think Adam Sessler during an interview said that the best thing consumers should do is wait.  No big games right now, and the library will only get better.  Still...the ps4 is so purdy!  I must have it NOW!!

Wed, 06/26/2013 - 14:00 (Reply to #27)
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landdon wrote:

Dixon_Tufar wrote:

I thought about jumping ship and getting a PlayStation, but I'm not really sold.  I can wait until 2014 anyways.  I dont' know of any launch titles I must have.

 

Very true.  Not to many must haves out there.  I think Adam Sessler during an interview said that the best thing consumers should do is wait.  No big games right now, and the library will only get better.  Still...the ps4 is so purdy!  I must have it NOW!!

 

Eh.  I think the best thing that Microsoft can do is to fire their PR team and hire someone that actually gives a shit.  Release a series of videos that have this person showing some demos, particularly new features of this new Kinect, what it does and what its capable of, and why it's fucking awesome and why you want one right now.  Then go through how some games, titles redacted and that are currently in development, want to do with the technology that's in the Xbone.  Even after all this kerfuffle, I know pretty much nothing about either of these systems.

Thu, 06/20/2013 - 15:18
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Killzone is a must have for me.....day 1 must have.  Love the Killzones!  Need to hear that chirp. 

Wed, 06/26/2013 - 14:35
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I still see a lot of talk on various game sites with people complaining that Microsoft is dropping digital distribution.  Seems that's a piece a lot of folks wanted on the Microsoft platforms.  Did they definitely say they were dropping the whole thing completely or just not the sharing of games digitally?

If they said they were dropping the entire thing Sony should really jumnp on that and advertise how you can download games on relase day with the PS3 and soon PS4.

Wed, 06/26/2013 - 14:43 (Reply to #30)
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mdl70 wrote:

I still see a lot of talk on various game sites with people complaining that Microsoft is dropping digital distribution.  Seems that's a piece a lot of folks wanted on the Microsoft platforms.  Did they definitely say they were dropping the whole thing completely or just not the sharing of games digitally?

If they said they were dropping the entire thing Sony should really jumnp on that and advertise how you can download games on relase day with the PS3 and soon PS4.

 

See, again, that's a massive selling point in one way or another, and nobody knows a thing about it.  I think the big problem is that neither Microsoft's nor Sony's console is fixed.  They're both liquid right now, I think.  Hell, Microsoft engineers are probably working triple time to have a Day One patch to cover up some of the backtraking they've had to make already.

 

Every passing day, waiting until after release, and until 2014 just seems like the smarter thing to do.  I'm not declaring until I know something, and until I get a fuckload of treats for doing it.  Microsoft could have done two things already to fix this/ repair damage: put dedicated 3G chips into the consoles that strictly perform a quick DRM check and/or put out an unlimited one or two year warranty on all hardware.  

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