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What if Microsoft had stuck with their original Xbox one plan.

No, it really wasn't. Half the crap Microsoft was stating after the announcement sounded like they were making things up as they went along aswell.

Yeah, I always got the impression they were just making shit up in order to try and sweeten the deal. There's nothing to stop them having implemented family sharing by now if it was a real thing.
 
I Just expected a relevant drop on current digital games price.

Maybe 39,00 would be the actual 59,00...
Would've never happened. The whole idea behind locking games in an account was to kill the used games market, solidifying the new games price. Game prices would never drop, and greedy publishers would just drive prices up.
 
I'll say this, with how many times the networks have gone down (I'm including PSN here as well because I know what I'm saying will probably be seen as inflammatory console warrior fodder) there would have been some really angry Xbox owners out there.
 
My best guess for what they were planning for on the family sharing would be stuff like:
  • any single game license can be shared to up to 10 people, total, over the lifetime of the game
  • only one person can play a shared title at a time
  • limits on adding and removing people from your "family"
  • all of this can be overridden at publishers' request
etc.

I'd guess the reason they never gave full details is that they hadn't worked them out by the time they 180'ed anyway, the plans they had would require a lot of negotiation with third party publishers and retailers that they probably hadn't finished yet.
 
That family game share sounded too good to be true, but is there any real reason it wouldve existed? Seems like it only benefit gamers, not MS or devs/publishers.

Then again, I have my lil brother and his friend added under my family for Xbox live gold right now so they can play online under my sub without me needing to be signed in on their console or anything.

And I don't really see how that benefits MS either, but it does only impact them, not devs/publishers.
 
Yeah, I always got the impression they were just making shit up in order to try and sweeten the deal. There's nothing to stop them having implemented family sharing by now if it was a real thing.

I think that people really need to give up on this family sharing utopia. 10 people?

If you look at a similar, but definitely different, idea of PS4 share-play, and the fact that some publishers (Activision - CoD come to mind immediately) do not allow it, how can anyone believe that they would allow 10 copies for the price of one.

But, let's pretend that it is possible. It's really not Activision or EA that would hurt the most. The little guys, indies would be obliterated. Unless MS would benevently pay them the difference. And we know how likely that is.
 
It's interesting to see just how much of a disappointment the Xbox One is. Even with the 180 from their initial unfriendly consumer policies, we still ended up with a box that was overpriced and underpowered, missing many of the aspects that made its predecessor the success it was.

It's also interesting to see how MS could have pulled this off, by implementing the policies described by the OP rather than what was actually planned. And still we'd have an underpowered, overpriced box.

I just don't understand what MS was thinking. What world do they exist in where they thought their original plan would have worked? It also makes me nervous for future iterations, because as much fail as the Xbox One has been, I wonder what they might try to pull over on us in the future. "In Phil We Trust," I know, but he hasn't been a savior as much as just saying the things we want to hear. I'm still waiting to see him put his money where his mouth is in terms of giving us the Xbox One we've fantasized about.
 
And that's why I switched to the ps4. I would have had an Xbox One on launch day but I didn't like all the things Microsoft tried to do with lending games out, online 24 hour check, etc.
 
I think that people really need to give up on this family sharing utopia. 10 people?

If you look at a similar, but definitely different, idea of PS4 share-play, and the fact that some publishers (Activision - CoD come to mind immediately) do not allow it, how can anyone believe that they would allow 10 copies for the price of one.

But, let's pretend that it is possible. It's really not Activision or EA that would hurt the most. The little guys, indies would be obliterated. Unless MS would benevently pay them the difference. And we know how likely that is.
We get obliterated anyhow on PC.

The last place we have for legit sales is consoles and we certainly would be giving the middle finger to any or all of the big 3 if they asked us to share 1 sale with 10 people.

It was never happening. Ever. It was just a pipe dream that somehow keeps getting regurgitated even though it's absolutely batshit insane. You can say their plans included summoning dragons that will fly you to a friend's house and dispatch your foes for you with every XO sold but that's the catch - it never happened so you can always play the "this is what was behind the door you didn't pick" bullshit to make people fall for your bullshit.
 
There's no fucking way family sharing would have worked like they said. I'm willing to bet their inability to nail down a suitably pro-consumer sharing policy is a big part of the reason they backed off.
 
If Microsoft really wants to stick with their digital fairytale, nothing is stopping them from continuing their original plan on digital games.
 
I thing if they could have explained it a lot better it could be doing good. I see it going either way tho a bomb or at 30 million units right now and closer in the race. Because right now even tho I love my Xbox it really is a weaker PS4 because it doesn't do anything different.

Why do people keep saying they should have explained it better? Everyone understood what was said they just didn't like it.
 
Imagine if the current Xbox One came out a month or so before the PS4 with a $350 price tag? They would have dominated the market even with their weaker console. Basically a repeat of the 360.
 
It is pure condescension to think the strong backlash against the original XB1 plans were from people who just "didn't get it." People "got it" just fine, and they concluded it was a shitty plan.
 
If they stuck by the original plan I'm pretty sure the sales would be less than half of what they are now. Its incredible they have endured like they have, makes me hopeful for the next iteration of the console.
 
No one is ever going to give away 9 copies of every game you buy.

People are also forgetting that at the time Microsoft was charging people $60 a year to be able to pay a further $9 a month for Netflix. Those are not the actions of a company that's going to let you pay less for new games of its own volition.
 
That 2:1 sales disadvantage we're currently seeing would be 4:1, if not higher.

Weren't Amazon's pre-order numbers pre-DRM reversal like 94% PS4 6% Xbox One? I think they've have to have been incredibly lucky to even get 4:1, especially since always online would effectively be dead in the water everywhere other than the U.S. pretty much (not to mention in sizeable portions of the U.S. as-is).
 
All the consumers would focus on would be the lack of a second-hand market similar to the established one.

They would of tanked the system.
 
Wasn't the game sharing with 9 other people actually not as MS made out? I remember reading something along the lines of your friends only being able to play the game for so many hours? Pretty much like a demo.
 
It would be dead, Jim
Super dead. Abysmally dead. Laughably dead with a small niche audience being nickled-and-dimed in spectatcularly novel ways to try to minimize the disaster by bleeding the heaviest spenders dry. The rest would be disillusioned former Xbox owners who believed the most optimistic scenarios behind each of the Xbox's proposals and found the bitter truth when it came to publishers opting out.

We'd already be neck deep in Xbox Two leaks and speculation.

Funny thing is, if they try it again a few years down the road, on games-first hardware specs, they could probably do very well.
 
3 years later and people are still trying to make it look like it was just like Steam. That's so cute.
Well I'm saying it could have been we would have no idea. People acting like it was a garentee fauilire which it could have been, but let's not act like it couldn't have been a success
 
Well I'm saying it could have been we would have no idea. People acting like it was a garentee fauilire which it could have been, but let's not act like it couldn't have been a success

At what point would it have been successful? When they used all the shit you made up in the OP? Or when they've dropped so much money in a floundering console that they have to get rid of their gaming division, or at the most, start all over?

Real world examples, including MS themselves, have proven this shit would not have worked out. I suggest you stay in reality during this discussion, because you seem to be drifting off into a world of endless possibilities and magic that has no real roots here.
 
the fact remains that the xbone was the worst console launch in history, no amount of coulda-shoulda can change that. every gamer friend i had had something bad to say about it, and half were on xbox 360.
 
the fact remains that the xbone was the worst console launch in history, no amount of coulda-shoulda can change that. every gamer friend i had had something bad to say about it, and half were on xbox 360.
Lol it's nowhere near the worst. Nothing can top the Saturn launch.
 
Wouldn't have been nearly as beneficial as people were thinking it could have been. If they wanted to do that stuff they could easily have done it with windows 10


Alas they didnt


Kinect has always been the real stinker for the platform though.
 
What amazes me is people still cling to these so called utopian features of the Xbone, yet the execs and every single person in the PR dept. at the time couldn't give concrete answers to anything. This is less than 6 months from the console launch itself. How in the world does an OS mega-company like MS not know what the OS will effectively do in 6 months?

People believing anything MS said were outright naive and foolish from the getgo.

Also the likes of Adam Sessler, et al. who kept saying/yelling to the rooftops "Sony TOO!" further mishandled their jobs and made consumers believe the horseshit. I'm glad most of those people are silent now. They served no purpose to us as consumers. Since then as well, most of the official MS people have stayed away from Neogaf once they were called on their PR mishaps, blunders, and lies.

If the Xbone came out as they originally stated, MS would have ditched the console business faster than Nintendo has ditched the Wii-U.
 
I don't think the sales would be particularly close even if MS hadn't botched the XB1. This generation is the first time PlayStation and xbox systems launched together in the same year and to top it off, the xbox was $100 more until they dropped the Kinect. Rewind back to the 7th gen, I have a strong feeling that if the Ps3 and xbox 360 launched in the same year, with 360 being more expensive or even if it was the same price, Sony would have likely outsold it rather handily.
 
Pretty much all of the supposes benefits (family sharing, digital resale) would have turned out to have been absolute horseshit, and the backlash would have driven Microsoft out of the console space.
 
Or as actually turned out, the manufacture sees the product and plan as such a monumental loser ( low preorders) they recoil at their own plan and 180degree it.
Not to mention developer support. His idea of "don't buy it if you don't like it" won't get very far when developers ignore the platform due to a plethora of reasons.

I'm quite sure the internet outrage and hard data weren't the only pitchforks MS had to endure.
 
TBH I'm pretty tired of having to install a disc just to play it. What's the whole point of getting the disc version. My PS4 hard drive is jam packed and I always have to decide to delete something everytime I start a new game.
 
TBH I'm pretty tired of having to install a disc just to play it. What's the whole point of getting the disc version. My PS4 hard drive is jam packed and I always have to decide to delete something everytime I start a new game.

Textures and stuff loads way slower if it reads everything from the disc like previous generation.
 
When people ask this question they do realize that this original Xbox plan includes stuff like Kinect, not just always-online?

Remember Kinect, that thing that was supposed to be the future of gaming? Many people advocated for it all around the web, especially Western guys? Except it was more of a gimmick than the WiiU gamepad is?

Yea, it wouldn't have turned out well.
 
OP and people saying: Family share would never have worked got it all wrong.

It was never meant to be a 10 licenses for your family to use thing. It was just one license that you or any (and only one) of your friends/family could play at a single time. Literally like a library, if two people bought the game and added it to the shared library two people would be able to play it at the same time, and so on.

Why would publishers allow that? Because it's a better deal than what they have now, currently they give two licenses for each purchase (one per console and one per account) and that leaves room for effectively having two full copies with the price of one.

That's also why they can't just add that back now. That worked because they were only going to give a license to your account, thus the console would have to be online. Same reason why they can't merge physical and digital games now... They needed the always online checks to add new licensing schemes, it wasn't just a way to try removing consumer rights.

And imho, it would've been a hell of a lot better.
 
The point is to have the ability to do what you want with the disc. If you are tired, go all digital?
Not as easy as it sounds when games are up to 50% more than retail at launch in some regions

I'd love to go all digital but I'm not paying 55-60 for a game when I can get it for less than 40 even before sales
 
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