Everything Is Different Now.: allystoybarn said: it’s hard to really respect MS when they didn’t...
allystoybarn said: it’s hard to really respect MS when they didn’t respect the gamer base in the first place. the reason they implemented all those things is because they were covering their own ass in terms of DRM and didn’t think we’d notice/care about the implicatio
yeah but…
I’ll agree with you to a point. Trust can be regained and maintained, but Microsoft would definitely have stuck by their original plans had Sony not been quite as impressive as they were. It’s face saving, which Microsoft is really really good at.
Unfortunately for them, Microsoft’s reputation really precedes them with a lot of suspect business dealings and practices happening in the 80s and 90s, and their reputation still hasn’t really recovered.
A lot of it falls down to the weight of expectation. Had Microsoft honestly thought about things, asked around, then they would not have let their fan base down so epically. And while this removes certain issues that people have with the Xbox One, it barely goes halfway to saving it from the issues that plague it.Mandatory Kinect, you can still get trolled just by someone walking into the room and saying “Xbox off”, the facial/voice recognition stuff, while neat, has the potential to be extremely shady. Mandatory installs are still up in the air, are the initial system updates and TV stuff still gonna take up a “substantial” amount of hard drive space.
This may fix some of the larger, more egregious and rage producing problems with the Xbox One, but behind it there’s a hundred more little things that this announcement does not make up for. Also, in order to admit they made a mistake, Microsoft would have to use such rhetoric and they haven’t. As always they’ve been cagey. Perhaps this is good business, but with such ill will fostered through bad business practice and the fact that both their own conference and their conference at E3 were poorly presented, this is the time above all when they should be seen to be being honest with people.
The Xbox One, above all else, fails to really be a gaming platform. Even with the removal of many of the aspects of DRM, the hardware is just not built for gaming. Microsoft themselves focused heavily on the television aspects in their conference, which aren’t even available to consumers outside of the US at this stage. They basically said that they want it to be the entertainment system for the family, and the inference is that this will be at the cost of the hardcore gamer.
The price as well.
You can argue that this is because it includes the Kinect, etc, but these should be optional peripherals, because as most consumers will tell you, they don’t want a Kinect. Microsoft have leaned heavily on the functionality of the Kinect without checking if anyone wanted one. Also, the amount of space you need for a Kinect… most people don’t have that space in their bedrooms and stuff.
Microsoft have built something that no one really wanted, and yeah, maybe people taking pleasure in the fact that they had to scramble to save face (and a fair bit of capital) is perhaps a little harsh, and yeah, they have thrown their hands up to certain things. However, with Microsoft’s history, it’s pretty easy to infer that this isn’t because they genuinely care for the consumer and their opinions. Were that the case they wouldn’t have stuck to their guns about this stuff through E3, they would have announced the changes at E3. They waited until after E3, until after the perfect forum to announce this kind of change, they waited until after Sony had explicitly confirmed their stance on such controversial mattersborrowing directly from Microsoft’s rhetoric.
Okay, this is really long, but the more I thought about stuff the more I unpacked it and it all got a little complex. Needless to say, there’s different states of remorse and repentance and Microsoft’s is more ‘I’m sorry you got upset’, than ‘I’m sorry I did a bad thing’. A nonpology, if you will.
