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Jesse Schell: Listening to customers was Microsoft's big mistake

T

Templar_Dante

Banned
X1 =/= Steam.
It was not this. People need to drop this bs.
"small" community of complainers? Um... he thinks most people in the world has reliable internet.

Ooooh... I get it, He is basically saying MS shouldve kept telling their consumers "DealWitIt" *ObamaDealWitIt.gif*
 
3

3rdman

Member
What a crock of shit...The changes were benefiting them and their "partners", not us.

Steam? please...unlike Valve, MS would have us locked into their system where there is no competition. Games rarely (if ever) go on sale even when they do, it's usually a meager drop. Then if you wish to play online, you'd still have to pay out. Like Steam? Pfftt....
 
D

Dragon

Banned
Interfectum said:
This is talking about the distribution method, not PC vs console mentality. The way Microsoft wanted to sell you XB1 games (ie physical copies come with one use unlock code, exactly like a steamworks title) was completely inspired by Steam.
Click to expand...

Saying that the 60 bucks a year is no factor in this at all is disingenuous to say the least. Steam also doesn't have a 24 hour check-in. Steam also doesn't have the history of Microsoft either.

UnluckyKate said:
People are still comparing Xbox One to steam ? That was stupid 4 month ago, it's still so stupid god how can you pretend be in this industry and not understand it
Click to expand...

Welcome to following video games!
 
Interfectum

Interfectum

Member
JaseC said:
The check-in was nothing like Steam, though; Steam's Offline Mode doesn't expire.
Click to expand...

Yeah but the trade-off there was you could re-sell physical XB1 games whereas Steamworks title you cannot. And I said earlier that the 24 hour check-in was the biggest difference they had and that killed them in the press (ie bu bu military can't play).
 
S

Snowden's Secret

Banned
JDSN said:
Is Microsoft forcing people to act like we missed on the greatest innovation of the century? Its not the first time I hear random people complaining about us missing something amazing due our closed-minded nature.
Click to expand...

I think it's more the specific journalists having to justify why they specifically didn't join in to help get these policies overturned. When customers said, "This is terrible," and journalists said, "No it's not ($$$)," they looked pretty dumb when Microsoft did an about face.

So their only option is to beat the drum, saying, "Oh, this could have been amazing, if only you weren't so entitled."

The only problem, is that no one ever outlines how it was better, in any capacity. They always say, "Digital only/always online is the inevitable future!" Well, sure, maybe, and that may have put XBONE ahead of the curve, but what exactly makes that better? Human extinction is inevitable, that doesn't make genocide awesome because it's ahead of the curve.
 
batman2million

batman2million

Member
It just seemed that MS was trying really hard to control the consumer with a semi-no used games rule, online check-in and a higher price point. And then pushing this cloud BS without actually showing us anything worth while.

I don't see how those hamper innovation. If people want to keep their system online at all times, they surely have the right to and MS can still do the "innovation" that they're hope for.
 
F

Freki

Member
godelsmetric said:
Poor preorder numbers is consumer outcry.
Click to expand...

I agree - but this implies it's not only a small minority like presented in the article:
"The problem for Microsoft, Schell explains, is that while the subsequent outcry came from a relatively small section of the gaming audience, it is nevertheless impossible to ignore."
 
EdwardTivrusky

EdwardTivrusky

Member
JawzPause said:
I actually agree. All these changes by MS is making them look like they don't have their shit together.
Click to expand...

To be honest, I thought Microsoft looked like they didn't have their shit together before the 180. I know projects only really come together in the last few stages but i did not have the impression MS were even close to that.

They had no clarity on their policies and muddled PR, maybe listening to their customers stopped them from falling on their faces? We don't know. For the record i liked a lot of what they were trying to do but not the way they were going about it. They didn't sell it to us well at all.
 
J

Jhriad

Member
The reality is that they can't do what the customers want. Basically, Microsoft said, 'We're going to be Steam. You like Steam, don'tyou?' And we all said, 'No, we hate that. We hate you. You're an idiot to do that.'
Click to expand...

Good to know this incredibly inaccurate comparison is still being made. Kudos Jesse Schell.
 
J

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
Interfectum said:
Yeah but the trade-off there was you could re-sell physical XB1 games whereas Steamworks title you cannot. And I said earlier that the 24 hour check-in was the biggest difference they had and that killed them in the press (ie bu bu military can't play).
Click to expand...

Ah, sorry, I just realised I misread your post, haha.
 
B

Bundy

Banned
BS!

Just give us a choice:
- Games digital AND as retail discs
- I have the rights to sell my game whenever I want / how often I want (retail discs have to work -> always)
- no mandatory online check / always-online DRM
 
U

Ultimatum

Banned
Steam was hated when it launched, the only difference was that Valve were confident enough to stick with it. Yes the Xbox marketplace is a closed system, but it does have a competitor - Sony. Having better sales than Sony's store would be a compelling selling point for XBO, and the subsequent purchases snowball into system loyalty since customers find it hard to not invest (see: steam).
 
N

NotoriousPUG

Member
Mandatory Kinect plus forced online hurt them the most I think. Privacy is a big issue in the US right now with all the drone and PRISM talk, so they recieved a ton of negative attention from that.

Add in paying for online, no backwards compatability, closed system with no competition, and 24 hour check ins and it looks like Microsoft missed the Steam goal.

Edit: also, when you buy a game on Steam, that game is going to follow you to whatever computer you purchase next. That game will pretty much always work. XBox1 games most likely will work on it, and it only.
 
ElRenoRaven

ElRenoRaven

Gold Member
Quit reading and the argument lost any merit the moment the Steam comparison was used. Their nothing alike you morons. NOTHING ALIKE.

Steam is free and I don't have to pay for it. You don't have to pay to play online unlike with consoles. It has competition. You can buy your games elsewhere and also still in a digital state elsewhere. You don't have to check in every 24 goddamn hours with Steam. You'd have to if MS had their way.

SO DON'T TELL ME IT'S LIKE STEAM BECAUSE IT'S FUCKING NOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
D

Durante

Member
Where is that fantastic video which explains the many ways in which the original XB1 situation wasn't like Steam?
 
D

daveo42

Banned
Interfectum said:
Besides the ability to sell your Xbox One game and the 24 hour check-in it was almost exactly like Steam.
Click to expand...

Please point me in the direction of the article or news that states that game prices will also come down and that titles will occasionally go on sale with some pretty good discounts.
 
D

danthefan

Member
Spirit of Jazz said:
The writer attempts to explain it's all down to consumers regecting innovation whilst maintaining that said innovation was MS aping Steam. You can't copy a competitors model (which MS didn't even do, they just aped the less than desirable Steam elements) and then claim people hate them due to their innovation. The whole article makes no sense at all.
Click to expand...

Very good point, I hadn't really considered that.
 
B

BruiserBear

Banned
Every time I see some fucker try and compare the original XB1 plans to Steam I get a little dumber for having read it.

STEAM DOES NOT REQUIRE A CHECK IN EVERY 24 HOURS AND IT HAS AN OFFLINE MODE. STEAM ALSO DOES NOT REQUIRE A BIG GIANT CAMERA TO BE CONNECTED TO YOUR COMPUTER AT ALL TIMES FOR STEAM TO EVEN WORK.

Those two nuggets alone make render the comparison dumb at best.
 
M

Mistouze

user-friendly man-cashews
Way to miss what was the problem. Their policy for online purchases weren't that bad outside the mandatory pings to their server and the fact you would have been locked out of your games after a day without connecting to the internet, the problem is that they forced it for physical purchases which was flat out dumb, they should have permitted both.

Also, I'm not trusting Microsoft to be the next Valve in an ecosystem where they are the only one to sell digital content for their console. We would have never seen agressive pricing like we do with Steam, at least there is nothing to make me believe so.
 
F

Freki

Member
Spirit of Jazz said:
The writer attempts to explain it's all down to consumers regecting innovation whilst maintaining that said innovation was MS aping Steam. You can't copy a competitors model (which MS didn't even do, they just aped the less than desirable Steam elements) and then claim people hate them due to their innovation. The whole article makes no sense at all.
Click to expand...

That's a great point you make - serious logical flaw in the writers argument. If people expected it to be exactly like steam there probably wouldn't have been any outcry.
 
S

spekkeh

Banned
Hmm yes and no. It is important that companies have their own vision of the future, and sometimes their vision is a whole lot better than that of the consumers. It's already in the name really, they (we) are consumers, not creators (except for the people here in the industry obv.). We want what we always want, and are not informed about the future because it concerns us less.

That said, the problem for the largest part seemed to be that MS too wasn't thinking about what consumers wanted in the future. Everything seemed directed at what everybody except for the consumers wanted. This may well have been a case of bad communication, and if it was, then MS took the wrong route of appeasing the moaning customer. But seeing as nobody in the upper regions of MS was able to explain why we'd want the vision they were giving us, I somehow doubt that this was the case.
 
D

Dennis

Banned
Oh no, that yet another one of the those bullshit corporate suck-up "You should never listen to customers" articles......

Yeah, we get it already.

me no brain customer me need corporate overlord tell me best for me
 
T

twobear

sputum-flecked apoplexy
JDSN said:
Is Microsoft forcing people to act like we missed on the greatest innovation of the century? Its not the first time I hear random people complaining about us missing something amazing due our closed-minded nature.
Click to expand...

I think it's sort of absurd to seriously suggest that MS are making people say it. How many people have come out and said this kind of thing about the Xbone 1.0? I think you could count the number on two hands. Assuming that the majority of the people in the industry thought roughly similar things to everybody else (i.e. that it was a bad idea), we can thus pretty safely deduce that the people who support it are the minority, hence, their supporting it is newsworthy and attention is drawn to it.
 
G

Gartooth

Member
Steam is not nearly as restrictive as the old Xbone policies and the complete misinformation and broken arguments from the side that makes these comparisons never ceases to piss me off. Removal of offline gaming is on MS and MS alone and that should by itself stop the Steam comparisons. It's a pet peeve of mine when some shitheads on the internet back these corporations which were eager to remove our consumer rights and profit from them, all the while blissfully ignoring and discrediting the other side as a bunch of whiny hardcore gamers who wouldn't have put a dent on the system. Well guess what, Xbox One for many already has a tainted image which is currently affecting MS's bottom line in comparison to their competition.
 
A

Afrikan

Member
Microsoft's mistake was the launch price and leaving an opening for them to be forced to do a 180
.....imo

Both of those mistakes could've have been prevented if they released a console with no optical drive. If they were going for an always online gen anyway....they should've made it digital download only. And released it for much much cheaper. I mean they seemed like they were already ready to move on from consumers who didn't have always online connectivity. The main reason they backtracked was because they feared losing their connected consumers to Sony because of the anti-consumer message that was being perceived.

But with most customers, the cheap cost of the system would've eventually brought in the crowd...even if it were perceived anti-consumer.

But with the bad image, once a day check in, Kinect always watching...and on top of that $100 more expensive than a more powerful system? It was doomed.

How much do some think they could've sold the XboxOne with no optical drive?
 
F

FyreWulff

Member
. Basically, Microsoft said, 'We're going to be Steam. You like Steam, don't you?'
Click to expand...

Naaaaah. It wasn't even like Steam. It was a half-baked half-retail half-digital solution they had that nobody wanted, at all, in the slightest.
 
diffusionx

diffusionx

Gold Member
daveo42 said:
Please point me in the direction of the article or news that states that game prices will also come down and that titles will occasionally go on sale with some pretty good discounts.
Click to expand...

Steam didn't start with giant sales. It's easy for publishers to discount games because they can see exactly what their games are selling at all times. They can see when a game's interest has been dried up at $60 so they lower it to $40. Then $20 and then $5 on sale. This is information publishers don't have when there is a giant market sloshing around for your goods that they have no part of. Publishers today effectively are competing with used game sales.

More digital sales and less used sales lowers game prices.
 
S

spekkeh

Banned
Authoritative Shark said:
Naaaaah. It wasn't even like Steam. It was a half-baked half-retail half-digital solution they had that nobody wanted, at all, in the slightest.
Click to expand...

Nobody wanted Steam either. It came forced down your throat with Half Life 2 and everybody hated it. In that sense the comparison is apt.
 
B

BruiserBear

Banned
Afrikan said:
Microsoft's mistake was the launch price and leaving an opening for them to be forced to do a 180
.....imo

Both of those mistakes could've have been prevented if they released a console with no optical drive. If they were going for an always online gen anyway....they should've made it digital download only. And released it for much much cheaper. I mean they seemed like they were already ready to move on from consumers who didn't have always online connectivity. The main reason they backtracked was because they feared losing their connected consumers to Sony because of the anti-consumer message that was being perceived.

But with most customers, the cheap cost of the system would've eventually brought in the crowd...even if it were perceived anti-consumer.

But with the bad image, once a day check in, Kinect always watching...and on top of that $100 more expensive than a more powerful system? It was doomed.

How much do some think they could've sold the XboxOne with no optical drive?
Click to expand...

The optical drive wouldn't have saved them much. Maybe $25. The Kinect is responsible for a $100 price increase though, and a good percentage of XB1 owners will never really use it. That's the definition of a stupid idea.


As for why they didn't offer a 100% digital console with no disc drive. Because they know that while a good number of people have broadband, many of them don't have super fast broadband, and downloading 20 gig games would have sucked for those people. Even worse, some people have data caps on their internet, so downloading one or two games a month would put them at their limit. This wasn't an acceptable option.

So they basically wanted to have it both ways, which was dumb.
 
V

VariantX

Member
GhostSeed said:
That's true, but think about all the people on PC that said they weren't going to buy COD because of the lack of dedicated servers and look at how that sold. The difference with Xbone was that people actually put their money where where there mouth is.
Click to expand...

CoD sales on pc are nowhere near what they are on consoles. You rarely see more than 10, 000 at a time and it averages 3-6000 users mostly. The consistently low player counts make it difficult to play most of the other modes like party games, there are zero players in the leagues. Its pretty much nearly as dead as the Wii U ver.
 
R

RooMHM

Member
Everybody hated it? No.

Also, quotes and opinions like this used to come from 'insiders' of the industry who talked anonymously or behind the scenes. Now crap like that is blown out in the press, in the open. What an era my friends ...
 
P

Ponn

Banned
Interfectum said:
Yeah but the trade-off there was you could re-sell physical XB1 games whereas Steamworks title you cannot. And I said earlier that the 24 hour check-in was the biggest difference they had and that killed them in the press (ie bu bu military can't play).
Click to expand...

The ability to sell your games was far from ironclad. The most info we got was trading in to MS partnered shops, which would have meant shit trade in values.
 
D

Dio

Banned
diffusionx said:
More digital sales and less used sales lowers game prices.
Click to expand...

This works best with Steam because it's competing with dozens of other companies doing the exact same thing. On the One, there is only one marketplace and they already roped you into dropping 500 bucks on the damned thing - they're not worried about stringing as much money out of you as they can.

Note: Valve wants as much of your money as it can take too, but it's reined in by competition.
 
C

Claude Kenni

Member
I feel like a lot of people posting didn't read the whole article. The topic title doesn't help either as that doesn't convey the overall message at all.
 
P

Patryn

Member
If this guy is really accurate, then he should be getting to the real heart of the issue: Microsoft's stunning inability to explain to consumers why these changes would benefit them. They certainly explained why it would benefit them and their partners, but barring the family sharing thing there was no benefit to the average gamer, and several downsides.

It's not the consumers' responsibility to accept change simply because it's change. You need to sell us that change, or have the balls to force the user to accept it (like Valve did by forcing Steam upon Half-Life 2).
 
M

Metalmurphy

Member
No, completely misunderstanding the market and only doing something about it weeks after becoming a laughing stock was MS big mistake.
 
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