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Phil Spencer: We shouldn't have "sugar-coated" the Xbox One controversy

ElTorro

I wanted to dominate the living room. Then I took an ESRAM in the knee.
http://www.totalxbox.com/73174/we-s...the-xbox-one-controversy-admits-phil-spencer/

"I look at last summer and that wasn't a highpoint for me, coming out of the announcement of Xbox One and E3, where I thought our messaging around what we believed in was confused," he admitted (via gerrenlaquint). Spencer didn't specify which aspects of the messaging Microsoft had gotten wrong, but the reference is presumably to the console's now-abandoned 24 hour online DRM checks in particular.

"I learned a ton last summer as leader of our groups about being true to your core vision about what a product is, not being confusing, and frankly, when you're going to say something to a consumer that might put them off, it's better to just be direct and honest, rather than trying to sugar-coat something that might be controversial.

"I'd rather deal with the controversy of what we're doing, and have an above-table conversation about that topic, rather than trying to sugar-coat it with some other news. And again, my interactions over the last six months, and I really think the interactions of [Xbox chief marketing and strategy officer Yusuf Mehdi] and [Xbox corporate vice president Marc Whitten] and other members of the leadership team - we're meaning to build on what we learned last summer, and just build on who we are as people."

Damn right.

Beta-test my family sharing in the future if old.

Via shinobi602. He'll be forever making threads in our hearts.
 

PhatSaqs

Banned
Too bad Phil wasnt the voice from the jump. Now he has to clean up the mess that Mattrick left him.

Admitting mistakes is far from pointless....
 
So, how about you finally take off your vision from your closet and start telling us up-front in proper detail, how your vision actually is in practice?

Let us judge it on its full merits, pros, cons, etc... instead of your so-called sugar-coatings of 'ITZ DA FUTURE111"

These kind of words mean nothing if you aren't going to take the skeleton out of the closet.
 

Dredd97

Member
I wonder if the Feb NPD data is awful and this is trying to explain (in a roundabout way) why they suck....
 

LAA

Member
Good to learn that lesson now rather than later (or never).

Still not so trustful in MS atm though, hopefully they can regain that trust.
 

jacobeid

Banned
Now that people have seen titanfall there's nothing left to use other than the truth of what the system actually is capable of.
 

erpg

GAF parliamentarian
Honesty is the best policy.
The truth shall set you free.
Keep it simple, stupid.

Who knew?
 

x-Lundz-x

Member
Well personally I think they still had no idea what they were trying to do last year with all the DRM madness and clearly no one was on the same page so they had no choice but to sugar coat it.

Now that they have learned from that it would be nice for them to come out and explain in exact specific detail on how the online only console would have worked and exactly why that is better for me as a consumer.
 

cchum

Member
Wait what....they didn't sugar coat anything. They stuck to their guns until customers overwhelmingly shifted their preorders to PS4. When this happened, it was a quick change in policy.
 

ElTorro

I wanted to dominate the living room. Then I took an ESRAM in the knee.
Sugar-coating? I dunno, Don was pretty straightforward.

Their statements about the console having DRM because it was built "for the future" where absolutely dodging the subject. The console's DRM and online-only requirement was in the interest of Microsoft, publishers and retail, not in the interest of the consumer. They should have been more honest about that, or at least kept silent about it. Call me naive, but I'd like to think that consumers understand reasonable arguments about these things when put in the context of rising game development costs.
 
For me, the confusion stemmed more from the fact that every Microsoft executive seemingly had a different vision/understanding of what the system was and they all kept giving separate interviews. It became almost impossible to determine who at Microsoft to listen to.
 

Hoodbury

Member
This E3 sure will be interesting to see if they actually do turn things around.

"Negative this, negative that, but have you seen TitanFall" didn't seem to work out so well last year.

Nintendo has this problem as well but they never seem to actually learn from their mistakes, will Microsoft?
 

LuchaShaq

Banned
The messaging wasn't just confused it was arrogant, gross, and worst of all full of blatant lies any idiot could see through.

The power of the cloud! Oh you mean dedicated servers? That isnt original or revolutionary shut your dumb mouth.
 

bluehat9

Member
Is making stuff up on the fly the same as sugarcoating?

And I thought they were pretty direct with "if you don't want to have to be online all the time, buy a 360."
 

Hasney

Member
You'd think someone at the company would have PR experience

That's the problem, they did have PR experience. That experience is to try and spin anything into a good thing and bullshit their way out of situations and hope that their audience is a bunch of idiots.

Phil Spencer seems like someone who gets his audience. Phil Harrison is one of those people who just doesn't.
 

level44

Member
hindsight1.jpg
 

Sweet Ivy

Member
So taking people for fools didn't work right... well, not necessarily to be expected, but you know, sometimes it doesn't work.
 

jelly

Member
Yusuf Mehdi

Well, it may not matter so much to Microsoft. Sure, core gamers complain, but the folks who don't really pay attention and who just want a fancy box will be fine with Microsoft's Xbox One. "In a broader set of community, people don't pay attention to a lot of the details," said Mehdi. "We've seen it in the research, we've seen it in a lot of the data points."
 
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