After weeks of backlash, Microsoft pulled arguably the biggest about face in gaming history by announcing the fact that they were removing all of their new DRM policies from the Xbox One. While this is great news overall for consumers, this whole debacle has gone a long way towards diminishing my goodwill with them.
Before all of the DRM came to light, I was already down on the Xbox One from the moment that initial reveal ended. Here they were on stage, peddling a console whose primary selling points were TV functionality that I’ll never use, and a better Kinect, which is built on a core concept of motion gaming that I’ve grown to actively hate. Worse yet, the new device must be connected to the system at all times, may not work at all in my small gaming space, and is listening to me at all times, which became infinitely worse later on when Microsoft got outed as part of the big NSA scandal.
Over the past few weeks, more information had come to light about the Xbox One’s DRM policies with physical discs that screamed anti-consumer. Want to rent games? Lend games to friends? Sell games to whoever you want? No dice. Want to play games without being connected to the internet? That will be problematic, too. While Microsoft had planned for a few benefits to this system, such as digital game sharing, they were poorly communicated and in my opinion, still not enough of a carrot to entice me to try this out.
As crappy as this was, I would have simply accepted it if Sony had followed suit. At that point, it would simply be a case of the industry moving forward, whether we like it or not. Of course, that’s when Sony ate Microsoft’s lunch at E3, proudly proclaiming that the PlayStation 4 would have no part in their competition’s DRM practices. As icing on the cake, Sony revealed that the price for the PlayStation 4 would be $100 cheaper than the Xbox One. Wanting nothing to do with a DRM-filled console that’s more expensive than its closest competitor, I happily pre-ordered a PlayStation 4 and shook my head as Microsoft continued to insist that their vision for an always-connected world was the way to go. According to them, if you don’t like the “thousands of dollars in value” that the Xbox One provides or hate the always-online requirements, go buy an Xbox 360.
Despite how poorly they communicated their vision for next gen, they stuck to their guns, lashing back at the press and consumers who ‘didn’t get it’. Then all of a sudden, they turned on a dime and abandoned ship. Their spin is that they listened to what the people wanted and responded accordingly. I think the reality is they couldn’t care less what we think, except for the fact that Xbox One pre-orders were getting trounced by the PlayStation 4 and they had to stop the bleeding. If they really cared about consumers, how could they be so oblivious to the ways in which people use and perceive physical media? If they really did care about the consumers, why would they have invested years of time and millions of dollars into a DRM infrastructure that featured virtually no end user benefits? If they really cared, why were they such jerks to the media and their potential consumers about the matter right up until they scrapped the whole idea? If this vision for the future was that important to the platform, why is it something that can be completely undone with just a patch?
Just because you gave the people what they wanted doesn’t mean everything is cool now. At least not between myself and Microsoft. The system is still $100 more expensive than the PlayStation 4, which is a product of approximately equivalent value from a company that didn’t try to screw me over with an inferior physical medium experience. It’s still a system that is heavily reliant on a peripheral that adds cost to the package while providing me personally with no benefit. Heck, it still might be spying on me for all I know after the whole NSA fallout. Worse yet, the Xbox One is backed by a company that lost all of my goodwill that I had for them. They’ve spent the last few weeks being smug jerks to anyone that disagreed with their fundamentally flawed agenda, and only now are begging for forgiveness because I (and many others) voted with our wallets and pre-ordered a PlayStation 4 instead.
That last part is going to be a much harder thing for me to get over. I didn’t forget when Sony alienated me with their hubris around the PlayStation 3. I didn’t pay $599 US dollars for one. I didn’t get a second job in order to afford one. Instead, I invested elsewhere and actively avoided everything Sony until it made sense for me many years later. At its peak, I sold a brand new PSP that I got for free because I wanted nothing to do with the company. It took years for them to win me over and by then, I was already deeply invested elsewhere. At this point, Microsoft arguably deeper in the dog house with me than Sony ever was, as they were a company I had deeply invested in that just went out of its way to alienate me at every turn. The DRM is gone, but the rest of my gripes with the platform and the company remain.
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In Third Person 
Some good points, it’s a shame Microsoft rushed to “stop the bleeding”, I wouldn’t have bought one either but it would have been interesting to see what the sales figures would have been like.