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Gamesindustry.biz: Why did Microsoft do it?

They thought the combined power of shills, pr mouthpieces and pocketed journalists would be able to sway public opinion and smooth over the negatives, they were wrong.
 
Yeah I mean look at what they've been doing with MS Office, making that into a subscription service rather than simply software. It's the reason why I'm going to have Office 2010 forever.
 
Being deaf to the world around them is Microsoft corporate culture. You can see it in their handling of the Surface and Windows 8 long before the Xbox One. They simply do not react to what the general public is telling them until the public becomes so deafening they can no longer ignore it. See adding the start button back to Windows 8

vince-mcmahon-walk.gif
 
are the two other articles that are being quoted in this thread, THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH OP's article, are they being quoted and link to in here just to confuse and mislead people?

because when someone quotes from those other articles, they give the impression (maybe on purpose?) as if they are quoting it from the Gameindustry.biz one.

like so



^
those quotes are from the pastebin Microsoft anonymous "engineer" which I find hard to believe.

Jesus, I was talking about the OP.

I dunno what other article being posted about in here.

Yeah I mean look at what they've been doing with MS Office, making that into a subscription service rather than simply software. It's the reason why I'm going to have Office 2010 forever.

There is a retail/offline Office 2013.
 
Except the noisy majority clamoring for a start button in Windows 8 are the people who aren't even using the OS. It's completely pointless in the age of indexed filesystems and type to search. People don't browse Google, they search it.
I hate typing to search when I could just be accessing a file list.
 
Imagine the possibilities of being able to sell ad space on an Xbox if 100% of the market is connected to the internet.

There isn't a McDonalds Burger Wrap big enough to hold all that cash.
 
The problem is, they are trying to evolve to fast and to hard.... Their like Cavemen trying to bring a computer in a world who hasnt discovered fire yet.
There will be a time where Xbox one is acceptable, but we have not even evolved yet to where it can be reliable without problem.
 
yes, no one disputes that- and by and large people are fine with this. There is no one up in arms about not being able to sell PSN games, or not being able to trade apps bought on itunes or google play. It's viewed as a necessary tradeoff for greater convenience and/or lower pricing.

I think the lower pricing for digital goods is supposed to come from the lower cost of delivering goods, the lack of many middlemen between producer and consumer, and other physical mass production related issues. It should not be thought as something balancing your lack of ownership... You should be allowed to resell digital goods.
 
office 365 suggests MS are completely comfortable moving entirely away from 'ownership' of products and towards ongoing subscriptions to access their services.

This isn't MS being 'evil', this is MS doing what they think is right. That makes it even more scary

.

My only issue with this article is that it assumes that it was the pubs who forced MS to implement DRM, while in reality it was MS who went to pubs with the idea.

Man...you guys are on fire.

I'm starting to get back some of that distaste I had for Microsoft back in the 90s.
 
I think the lower pricing for digital goods is supposed to come from the lower cost of delivering goods, the lack of many middlemen between producer and consumer, and other physical mass production related issues. It should not be thought as something balancing your lack of ownership... You should be allowed to resell digital goods.

Fucking this. I can't wait for the eventual EU snafu on this forcing digital stores to offer facilitation of second hand sales. It is inevitable.
 
They did it because it will make money. Plus in the end Sony will do the same thing because that is what the publishers want. All of my friends have 360's and are buying Xbone not PS4's. I will be buying both but will be playing multi mostly on the Xbone.
 
The problem is, they are trying to evolve to fast and to hard.... Their like Cavemen trying to bring a computer in a world who hasnt discovered fire yet.
There will be a time where Xbox one is acceptable, but we have not even evolved yet to where it can be reliable without problem.

The problem is they're not the right company to lead the industry into an all DD future. DD is about consumer trust first and foremost, and people do not trust Microsoft.
 
They did it because it will make money. Plus in the end Sony will do the same thing because that is what the publishers want. All of my friends have 360's and are buying Xbone not PS4's. I will be buying both but will be playing multi mostly on the Xbone.

Great! Hope you guys enjoy that!
Oh..and glad to know that you believe all physical media will rapidly come to end.

Do you know when? Will it be in the next 10 years?

If the answer is no, then.., I'll be on the PS4.
 
Jesus, I was talking about the OP.

I dunno what other article being posted about in here.

woo there...

I edited my post a bit, but I probably shouldn't have quoted you...more so just generally asking others. Because like you stated, the Gameindustry.biz was a well written article with good points....but a couple of others in this thread seem to be trying to mislead people by quoting a different article and making it seem like was from the Gameindustry one.

sorry for the confusion.
 
Personally I feared they would sign up some of the leading publishers to exclusivity deals which would make core gamers look past DRM and games ownership policy.
and by the sounds of it, EA isn't really on board? it's the strangest move, but they probably felt publishers want drm. so with their hardware a drm gateway, they figured it would be an easy choice for them.

totally neglected consumers. and if the brainwashing here is to go by, they probably did have gamers design the thing. mindless gamers, butnone the less.

I just like with universal condemnation of ms by all non gaming media, you have the holdouts here pending to not "get it" or that it doesn't matter. yet they don't consider a large number of gamers being treated like shit after they got them where ms is now. we are a community imo. and fanboys on both sides are seeing this as non essential for our media. it's not steam.
 
I think the point about Microsoft's overall culture is an insightful one.

At this point, they are trying to turn products into services in every single part of their business. Also applying this same philosophy to games would seem like a logical next step to in such an environment.



Yep. I think microsoft sells a whole lot of software outside of gaming where people don't care about their rights so they assumed it would go over just fine with gamers.


Turns out they were wrong.
 
Here is what happened:

Microsoft while designing the Xbox One listened to Publishers.
Sony while designing the PS4 listened to Developers.

Publishers are primarily concerned with the bottom line.
Developers are primarily concerned with making something cool and getting it into as many hands as possible.

If you look at their approaches you will see that this is true and why Microsoft was led so far astray from the consumers.
Consumers more closely identified with developers, than publishers.

Look at their indie policies where they won't let indies self-publish unless they attached to a publisher.

It's Publishers, Publishers, Publishers, when they should have listened to Ballmer: "Developers, developers, developers!!"

It is as simple as that.
 
Microsoft's not going to be happy when they finally realize that the public doesn't see licenses the same way they do.

I was at a Hallmark store yesterday and two young female employees were talking about how Microsoft had shot themselves in the foot. Far more people are upset about this than Microsoft ever suspected.
 
Windows has been hiding UI elements for years. The kind of person with low IT proficiency who needs "Control Panel" to be on the start menu is also the kind of person who probably shouldn't be in there.

Have you read an iPhone manual recently? That's supposedly the bar for user friendly but the manual explains nothing and the UI is littered with hidden features. I had the same experiencing booting a MacBook for the first time a couple of weeks back. I was straight onto Google to find my apps, file explorer and the command prompt.

The fact is these are not just applications, they are operating systems. Sure they can try to be user friendly, but regardless of UX principles you simply can't put every feature 2 clicks away, and I'd argue nor should you. The browsing paradigm does not work for complex systems. So at the end of the day you need either a book, Google, or prior experience to use them effectively.

Installing and using Windows 8 is a dream for a first timer compared to Windows 7. Oh and Start->Shut Down. Think about that for a second.

Lol, no.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxmIsv88xO4

My parents are in their 70s and can manage to find their way around Windows 7 without many problems because they know they can usually find what they are looking for in the Start menu. I will be holding off on buying them new laptops until I see some more user-friendly UI in Windows 8.
 
Being deaf to the world around them is Microsoft corporate culture. You can see it in their handling of the Surface and Windows 8 long before the Xbox One. They simply do not react to what the general public is telling them until the public becomes so deafening they can no longer ignore it. See adding the start button back to Windows 8

Nailed it.
 
woo there...

I edited my post a bit, but I probably shouldn't have quoted you...more so just generally asking others. Because like you stated, the Gameindustry.biz was a well written article with good points....but a couple of others in this thread seem to be trying to mislead people by quoting a different article and making it seem like was from the Gameindustry one.

sorry for the confusion.

It's cool, bro. I meant no offense as well.

Ah I had no idea. All I ever hear from them is about the subscription service one.

Well, they are trying to push it but unlike the Xbox team, they are taking their time and going slowly.
 
Guarantee when this comes out there will be zombie sheep threads saying "oh actually it's not too bad and I can live with it". They will have been brainwashed by MS through resistance, change and acceptance. That's what MS wants.

To be fair, any console gamer who's mainly only interested in internet multiplayer games has already accepted the idea that their ability to play is dependent on company-run servers. Even games that internally run peer-to-peer still require a matchmaking server on consoles; it's not like console games give you an interface to enter IP addresses directly. (Are there any that do?)
So for those people, adding yet more server dependency doesn't really change the feeling of ownership for them in the long term, even if it does restrict their ability to trade games in the short term.

For the rest of us who also like single-player/local multiplayer, the idea that there may never be an Xbone retro thread on GAF is a sad thought.
 
Yeah this is my theory too. MS has been squeezed by iOS and Android harder and harder in the last 3 years, that made Microsoft, specifically Ballmer, lost his mind. This is why MS is trying to use the only products that are still popular, the Xbox and Office, and stuff every hook to other MS services ever into these 2 products and try to sell them as hot cakes.

MS would not try to change so much, so drastically if the upper management is not in panic mode.
I feel like MS is missing something really important here, which is that most people aren't all-or-nothing with what they buy. For reasons that vary by individual, they may put some money into rentals/services/transient DRMed things, but at other times they want to own things. They have Steam but they also have a 360. They have iPhones but they also have 3DS. They have Netflix but they also buy DVDs. And they know the difference between those things and make purchasing decisions based on that difference. So when a company that up to this point has been a big provider of the "own" side of things suddenly wants to make all of their stuff "rentals," people are naturally going to frown at that and start looking to other brands to provide what they can no longer get from that one.

Account-locked DRMed downloads aren't "the" future.
DRM-free downloads aren't "the" future.
Disc-based copy protection isn't "the" future."
Because there's no single future. The future is a big mess of different things and always will be. And that's good.


EDIT: blah double post
 
The problem is they're not the right company to lead the industry into an all DD future. DD is about consumer trust first and foremost, and people do not trust Microsoft.

maybe now.. with the next generation, but you cannot ignore their reign over this generation before playstation slowly crept up. People preferred Xbox over PS3 givin PS3 higher hardware capabilities. Microsoft had a nice lead, they lost it with Xbox One
 
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