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

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.

It's not underpowered though with the Infinite Power Of The Cloud though, right?
 
xbox one is still feeling the consequences of their initial plan in the form of bad sales and bad public image,if they stuck with it and do it anyay...lt's just say that sony could have announced that every ps4 now gives you an electric shock every time it's turned on or off,and they would have still won the gen
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.

actually i was rather (pleasently) surprised that it DIDN'T work

just think about how many bullshit practices gamers have come to accept as "normal" from 2006 since now (day one dlc and microtransactions in full retail priced games to just name two)...they thought they could do anything,but they ended up stepping on one of the only two mines in the minefiled (the other one being paying for mods it seems)
 
It would still be under powered compared to the ps4.

The sales would be even worse than they are now too, as changing their minds recovered some goodwill with consumers.
 

Nah. I don't buy used, I don't lend/borrow and I rarely sell games. Which funny enough, aren't those things most devs/publishers would like? They'd rather sell 2 copies of a game as opposed to have one guy lend his copy out to a bunch of mates once he's done with it.

Which I guess is also why Microsoft were so vague with the family sharing. True sharing with 10 people would have pissed off devs heaps.

But yeah as someone who only buys new and keeps game with reliable internet options 24 hours a day, 7 days a week who lives in Australia, the original Xbox One was the perfect console. Our disc based prices are at minimum, $20 cheaper than digital launch day and sometimes up to $30 cheaper. For me? Up to $40 as I get staff price through my brother at JB Hifi.

So yeah, again, for me, it was perfection.

Ah of course it's almost always anecdotal evidence/experience people use in this situations. The reality is that firstly no not "everyone" is already connected to the internet or have good internet speeds. Secondly there is zero evidence to suggest prices would be lower just because physical media was going be now a digital license that was delivered via disc. Given they were not removing the cost of manufacturing, distribution of discs, etc where do you think cost savings would come from if pubs actually agreed in the first place to past saving back to consumers.

What is wishful thinking? The family share? An ex ms employee that worked on the bone (the sound block) said on B3d before launch that it was very real and even give details how it would work.

- When an family member would "rent" the license no one else could use. The minimum time for that rent was 1 hour (that's apparently what CBOAT twisted into being 1 hour demos). Meaning that even if you played a shared game for 10 minutes other people would have to wait an hour for the license of that game to be released;

Actually this was what a supposed ex MS employee actually said
and CBOAT was just confirming it along with the verge but they were saying it wasn't demos but they were purposing 1hr limit playthroughs. Given you have two supposed "ex-microsoft" employees saying very different things am inclined to believe it wouldn't have worked nearly like that. Also they were supposed to have given a detailed breakdown of how it works but choose not to in the end, funny enough this was 5 days before the annuouncement of the big 180s for their drm.
 
Re-selling the license to the game was NOT part of the original plan. It was not, or else all this fuss would not have been made. That's bollocks. The original plan was to have NO resale value and purchased discs would be pretty useless coasters as soon as you've used one. THAT was the plan.

Any notion of reselling the license to discs must have come afterwards when the shit hit the fan.

EDIT: If they had never backtracked, which happened pretty quickly, their launch would have been an utter shambles, they'd be looking at Wii U like "success" versus PS4 compared to the relatively good showing they've had. People HATED their original plans.
 
The Xbone is still suffering because of the initial plans. The only reason it´s doing as "well" as it is right now, is because they backtracked on it. How do you think it would be doing if they stayed course?

Shit, the WiiU might actually be in second place now. (Without selling better).

LMAO at the whole part about the 10 people game sharing. That would have never happened period. Publishers were pushing Sony to remove the 5 people game sharing they had on PS3 to 2 people. But MS can do 10, sure.
 
xbox one is still feeling the consequences of their initial plan in the form of bad sales and bad public image,if they stuck with it and do it anyay...lt's just say that sony could have announced that every ps4 now gives you an electric shock every time it's turned on or off,and they would have still won the gen

actually i was rather (pleasently) surprised that it DIDN'T work

just think about how many bullshit practices gamers have come to accept as "normal" from 2006 since now (day one dlc and microtransactions in full retail priced games to just name two)...they thought they could do anything,but they ended up stepping on one of the only two mines in the minefiled (the other one being paying for mods it seems)

I think their plans did nothing to hurt sales. What killed them was launching 33 % slower hardware than the competitor for 25 % more money.

499 - 1.2 TFlops
399 - 1.8 TFlops

Any sane person can only make one decision (I am insane).
 
Xbox One is so tainted by it, I think they'll dump the name come E3 with the new console and push it towards a backwards compatible reference. They'll still support the platform but no doubt they'll take the marketing focus far away from it whether it's just 'Xbox' or 'Xbox Something'.
 
There's nothing preventing you from going all digital if you care for it.
And the family share thing was BS.

Considering how much their plans which they eventually dropped hurt them, I think it's fair to say that it would have been a complete disaster if they hadn't backpedalled.
 
Didn't CBOAT confirm that "family sharing" was nothing more than 60 minute timed demos?
Cboat said a lot of things



Why do people think Family sharing will never happen? Steam already does it and doesn't require publisher approval. What makes xbox so different in this case? If steam can do it without publisher approval, xbox should be able to aswell. On a smaller scale even xbox does it already with home gold sharing.

They've also said multiple times since launch they still want to do family sharing and it's in their plans, Mike Ybarra has said they have two things as big as backwards compatibility to announce at E3, family sharing and free online (not happening lol) are the only two things I can come up with.
 
Cboat said a lot of things



Why do people think Family sharing will never happen? Steam already does it and doesn't require publisher approval. What makes xbox so different in this case? If steam can do it without publisher approval, xbox should be able to aswell. On a smaller scale even xbox does it already with home gold sharing.

They've also said multiple times since launch they still want to do family sharing and it's in their plans, Mike Ybarra has said they have two things as big as backwards compatibility to announce at E3, family sharing and free online (not happening lol) are the only two things I can come up with.
You can already sort of do the Steam version of family sharing on Xbox. The version of it talked about in the OP is never happening.
 
If they had stuck with their original plan, they would be in an absolutely bigger hole than now.

The biggest issue is that no one knew what was going on. Microsoft didn't know, the press didn't know and the end user didn't know. It was ideas with no information on how they worked or what the plans were and everyone was just expected to accept it without question. The lack of information was astounding. You're trying to make a massive change in the base functionality of consoles, but you've no idea how it all works? Nah.

And what annoys me most is that Microsoft still insist we just didn't get it, we weren't ready for their glorious plans. For me, this is still their end game and I say "no" to them.
 
We 'know' in our gut that the original xb1 vision hurt it. But did it really? It's staying close to ps4 sales in the us/uk, and rotw was a pipe dream from the start. Of course, I wonder if it would be ahead in the us, but I kinda doubt the overall story would be much different if they did the 180 internally before the train wreck.

And of course a part of me would like to see it released with the original policies. It would have been epic. You wouldn't be able to give those things away.

-edit- As for the family share thing. Go back and read threads/pr of the time. While the train was crashing, they were throwing everything they could out there to see what stuck. The name 'family share plan' with no details was enough to make people dream. There were no details, and after the fact we knew that's because there were no details to be had. The fan base is who made the details up.
 
I think their plans did nothing to hurt sales. What killed them was launching 33 % slower hardware than the competitor for 25 % more money.

499 - 1.2 TFlops
399 - 1.8 TFlops

Any sane person can only make one decision (I am insane).

the famous xbox 180 was made for a reson,power was not the problem here.
also,power has never been a problem in the console war,playstation one and two were the worst consoles of their gens in that regard,and so were the wii and 360 compared to the ps3,and one won the gen and the other dominated the first part and ended up with pretty much the same installed base of sony's console.
 
Cboat said a lot of things



Why do people think Family sharing will never happen? Steam already does it and doesn't require publisher approval. What makes xbox so different in this case? If steam can do it without publisher approval, xbox should be able to aswell. On a smaller scale even xbox does it already with home gold sharing.

They've also said multiple times since launch they still want to do family sharing and it's in their plans, Mike Ybarra has said they have two things as big as backwards compatibility to announce at E3, family sharing and free online (not happening lol) are the only two things I can come up with.

There are (rather limited) ways to share games on both the XB1 and PS4. Steam isn't all that different.

What a lot of people believe MS was going to do would be equivalent to the PS3's PSN share system, which basically had no other restriction than 5 consoles max, and some games had a 24h cooldown period. It eventually dropped to 2, and didn't come back for the PS4 in the same way.
 
I initially wasn't going to purchase an Xbox One because of the used game and rental restrictions. I put a pre-order in after they backtracked. All of their plans were really shocking to me and I was thankful Sony didn't adopt the same. A lot of the policies OP mentions seems kind of like revisionist history to me.

This is what I remember about the Xbox One policies being unveiled.

If there were benefits from the digitally connected, always online Xbox One then Microsoft did a terrible job of explaining them. People rightly figured that the consumer rights we have with physical media today would be gone and it would be up to the publisher's discretion on which games could be resold. Also, having to check into the internet once a day was a big deal breaker for many people. They should've demoed these benefits on stage at E3, but they didn't and all Sony had to do was announce they were not doing what Microsoft was doing and was launching $100 cheaper (boxing in the Kinect was also a very bad idea) to win the show.

Microsoft had no choice but to reverse its DRM plans. Almost no one including myself would've bought the console.
 
the famous xbox 180 was made for a reson,power was not the problem here.
also,power has never been a problem in the console war,playstation one and two were the worst consoles of their gens in that regard,and so were the wii and 360 compared to the ps3,and one won the gen and the other dominated the first part and ended up with pretty much the same installed base of sony's console.

Power is the factor. Bang for the buck. Wii was cheap, 360 was cheap, PS2 was cheap, PS4 is cheap. All in terms of power per $.
 
There are (rather limited) ways to share games on both the XB1 and PS4. Steam isn't all that different.

What a lot of people believe MS was going to do would be equivalent to the PS3's PSN share system, which basically had no other restriction than 5 consoles max, and some games had a 24h cooldown period. It eventually dropped to 2, and didn't come back for the PS4 in the same way.

You can already sort of do the Steam version of family sharing on Xbox. The version of it talked about in the OP is never happening.


I've never used steam family sharing so maybe I'm way off base but this doesn't sound anything like xbox home sharing.

http://store.steampowered.com/promotion/familysharing

From what I can make out, this has a section where you can enter up to 5 other users & 10 other computers, and anyone on this list can play any of your games, one at a time?

The one at a time bit is limiting (compared to xbox home sharing at least, where both people can play at same time) but not a big deal just requires some planning with the people you're sharing with and hopefully the original owner has priority.

Idk.. I'd be happy if they copied steam sharing, that sounds good to me. The main problem I have with the current xbox home sharing thing is you have to give the person your user/pass which is risky and I think even against xbox ToS even if they don't fully enforce it and this would remove that need.. so I'd be fine with something like steam sharing at least (if I'm understanding it correctly)
 
After the 180 the end product was basically all the bad features of the original plan without all the massive benefits that the model had. In the end everyone was a loser, from Microsoft to the consumer to the developer to the publisher.
 
This thread is funny. You have diehard XBOX people defending the original plan to their deaths and you think it would have sold much less. You greatly undervalue how some people would not have switched no matter what which is funny coming from a message board. Do you not read some of the posts made by diehard console warriors? Phil Spencer could shit in their mouths and they would ask for seconds. These are the people who did buy an XB1, they bought it anyway, they would have bought it like I said short of it giving you cancer. Then there are the uninformed consumers that had a 360 last generation so they were going to buy whatever the successor was. They don't hang out on message boards they don't know the ins and outs of what makes the XB1 a good or bad product. Oh it has a new Halo game...purchase. Not everyone is jacked into our little bubble.
 
In some ways I think they should have stuck with some of their original plans -- particularly the focus on Kinect and stuff.

Maybe I'm being unfair, but I really struggle to shake the feeling that what they've got now is quite simply an inferior PS4.

At least they had an identity with their original vision -- they've been following the leader way too hard this gen, and they always feel one step behind.
 
After the 180 the end product was basically all the bad features of the original plan without all the massive benefits that the model had. In the end everyone was a loser, from Microsoft to the consumer to the developer to the publisher.
The main issue people had was the loss of control over their physical purchases. That was reversed, so I don't know what you mean by us still having "all the bad features."
 
This thread is funny. You have diehard XBOX people defending the original plan to their deaths and you think it would have sold much less. You greatly undervalue how some people would not have switched no matter what which is funny coming from a message board. Do you not read some of the posts made by diehard console warriors? Phil Spencer could shit in their mouths and they would ask for seconds. These are the people who did buy an XB1, they bought it anyway, they would have bought it like I said short of it giving you cancer. Then there are the uninformed consumers that had a 360 last generation so they were going to buy whatever the successor was. They don't hang out on message boards they don't know the ins and outs of what makes the XB1 a good or bad product. Oh it has a new Halo game...purchase. Not everyone is jacked into our little bubble.
This is really, really wrong. The plan was having a massive negative impact on sales. That's why they reversed it.
 
Re-selling the license to the game was NOT part of the original plan. It was not, or else all this fuss would not have been made. That's bollocks. The original plan was to have NO resale value and purchased discs would be pretty useless coasters as soon as you've used one. THAT was the plan.

No it wasn't. This why they wanted retailers to be on board, to have the infrastructure to enable accounts to be de-licensed.

The situation you are describing is the direction that all consoles are now heading in (or steam in 2004)

Install disc in box and code to add to your account.
 
the famous xbox 180 was made for a reson,power was not the problem here.
also,power has never been a problem in the console war,playstation one and two were the worst consoles of their gens in that regard,and so were the wii and 360 compared to the ps3,and one won the gen and the other dominated the first part and ended up with pretty much the same installed base of sony's console.

The point isn't that weak systems succeed, and powerful consoles fail, it's that cheap consoles succeed. (edit: Had the Gamecube been marketed more effectively, beat the PS2 to market and/or not had another few issues, it would have been far stiffer competition for the PS2. It's also important not to understate the importance of DVD-Video support for the PS2).

The Xbox One launched alongside competition that was both cheaper and more powerful.

I'm amazed that they have managed to do so well, even with all the backtracks, the change in leadership, and the massive bags of money spent on acquiring ip and some form of exclusivity on games.

Xbox still isn't in a great place, but between the original reveal and launch, I couldn't really see it doing this well.

MS made far more blunders with the Xbox One than Sony did with the PS3, and due to the nature of the issues the PS3 had, and the importance of Playstation for Sony as a company, Sony were far better positioned to recover over time.

The situation you are describing is the direction that all consoles are now heading in (or steam in 2004)

Install disc in box and code to add to your account.

Steam has never kicked me out of a single player offline game I am in the middle of playing just because either my internet connection or Steam servers have gone offline.

Any reliance on internet for DRM or other functionality is optional for devs on Steam. Microsoft weren't giving any devs the option to release Xbox One games that didn't use the always online DRM. Hell, they weren't even going to let CD Projekt release an Xbox version of The Witcher 3 that was playable in Poland, because Poland wasn't a supported country.
 
Power is the factor. Bang for the buck. Wii was cheap, 360 was cheap, PS2 was cheap, PS4 is cheap. All in terms of power per $.

You almost got away with that argument if it wasn't for mentioning the PS2. As it wasn't cheap, nor was it particularly powerful.

The GameCube was significantly more powerful and significantly cheaper, so by your definition that should have been the most successful console.

The Xbox also significantly more powerful again
 
Power is a factor, and it actually has been a rather significant one this gen. It is nowhere close to the only factor though.
 
This thread is funny. You have diehard XBOX people defending the original plan to their deaths and you think it would have sold much less. You greatly undervalue how some people would not have switched no matter what which is funny coming from a message board. Do you not read some of the posts made by diehard console warriors? Phil Spencer could shit in their mouths and they would ask for seconds. These are the people who did buy an XB1, they bought it anyway, they would have bought it like I said short of it giving you cancer. Then there are the uninformed consumers that had a 360 last generation so they were going to buy whatever the successor was. They don't hang out on message boards they don't know the ins and outs of what makes the XB1 a good or bad product. Oh it has a new Halo game...purchase. Not everyone is jacked into our little bubble.
The Xbox 360 was my favorite console, and I was prepared to only buy PS4 because of Microsoft's initial plans. I think consumers are a lot smarter than you give them credit for. Most people that spend hundreds of dollars on a gaming console will do at least a little bit of basic research. Brand loyalties do not matter much these days. People will switch to the better console. PS2 sold a lot of consoles but the PS3 initially was a disappointment because Sony got a bit arrogant. Microsoft made the same mistake with the Xbox One after the success they experienced with the 360. Don't even get me started on Nintendo and the Wii U. Bad business decisions will have repercussions.
 
You almost got away with that argument if it wasn't for mentioning the PS2. As it wasn't cheap, nor was it particularly powerful.

The GameCube was significantly more powerful and significantly cheaper, so by your definition that should have been the most successful console.

The Xbox also significantly more powerful again

Although not "power" as we think of it, DVD playback was the killer hardware advantage. Xbox had it, but a full year later. Even coming off the PS1, if believe if Xbox launched day-and-date with Halo in 2000, it may have had a legit chance to beat PS2.
 
Although not "power" as we think of it, DVD playback was the killer hardware advantage. Xbox had it, but a full year later. Even coming off the PS1, if believe if Xbox launched day-and-date with Halo in 2000, it may have had a legit chance to beat PS2.

It might have. Although, keep in mind that the feature was much more accesible on PS2.

For DVD playback on the og Xbox you had to have a special receiver that came with a remote which were sold seperately. With the PS2 however, it played DVDs without needing an additional accessory
 
The machine is still underpowered regardless of their plans. I think it would've been even worse power wise since the Kinect was required, and at that point Devs would've never had access to squeeze that 10% from the GPU for their games.
 
Kinect was what failed it at the start, more than the digital plan. 100 dollars more for less performance was all it took.

I am in the minority, I don't sell my games and I buy digital. I understand though being forced into something you don't want, and not supporting it.

Honestly if they had a cheaper digital only xbox, people could choose and many would probably go with the cheaper disc less version.
 
Although not "power" as we think of it, DVD playback was the killer hardware advantage. Xbox had it, but a full year later. Even coming off the PS1, if believe if Xbox launched day-and-date with Halo in 2000, it may have had a legit chance to beat PS2.

You've also got to factor in that the PS2 continued to sell well for about 9 years, meaning the majority of PS2s were not sold at full price.
 
I am a Sony fan, and had no intention of buying an Xbox 1. However - I do own a windows phone and a surface so I am not completely ignorant to some of their hardware. Anyways - Original Xbox one always struck me as Microsoft saying " just try it we promise not to fuck you over."


Also- I thought this leaked but didn't Microsoft go down this road because they whole heartedly believed that Sony was doing the exact same thing based on patents that had been granted / etc?
 
Ignoring everything else, 30 million units would have been a massive failure.

No it wouldn't, they would have done $30 at a higher profit since they were originally charging a good deal more than production, and once sales went up as opinions changed that would have set them up for the next one to do better though there plans would cap how much they could grow world wide unlike now.
 
Too early and too restrictive. Really they could have had a hit if they just let people have the choice of doing it that way it always has been done and then highlighted the benefits of buying digital. Right now I buy digital because my home xbox is with someone else and when I buy a game they get the game for free and vice versa. Digital games have 2 licenses and if they find a way to exploit this in the future then people would buy in.
 
Revisionist history isn't a bad thing. It is good to re-examine data and look for biases in earlier conclusions.

OP isn't revisionist history. It's bad history.
 
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.

There original plan made perfect sense given the opinions on pc store fronts and the market for digital. I'd have been just as surprised as ms at the nearly 100% backlash across almost every category.

Half their plans people want now, people act like "what was ms thinking" when they actually were. If the original XO and PS4 were released now the reaction would likely be different in a few areas.
 
Also- I thought this leaked but didn't Microsoft go down this road because they whole heartedly believed that Sony was doing the exact same thing based on patents that had been granted / etc?

Microsoft are complete morons if they did that. Sony and Nintendo patent stupid shit all the time. *shouts MC DONALDS at TV*
 
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.

They talked about family sharing before the firestorm why would that have been a lie from the start? They clearly weren't expecting the heavy backlash.

I almost feel people realized they overeacted a bit (not that I liked their plans) and are trying to change things to make excuses.
 
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.

You sign in on another's Xbox you could play your games on it for like 6 hours or something.
 
They talked about family sharing before the firestorm why would that have been a lie from the start? They clearly weren't expecting the heavy backlash.

I almost feel people realized they overeacted a bit (not that I liked their plans) and are trying to change things to make excuses.

I'm pretty sure this is false, I can remember family sharing coming out well after e3 and the backlash.. it's one of the reasons people are still to this day skeptical it even existed in the first place.. it felt more like something they threw against the wall in hopes to convince people their idea was good for consumers.
 
It would've been a disaster for them. There was already a huge gap in preorders between the XB1 and PS4 before the 180 happened, and Gamestop was already doing stuff like having employees pass out pamphlets on how the DRM affects used games. Nobody outside of an incredibly small niche found the original plans appealing.
 
It has done MS a lot of damage, brand-wise. Everything they built from 2006 onwards with the success of arguably the greatest console ever had been utterly ruined in the span of a week. I don't think it's something they'll recover from unless Sony do another 599 moment.

What? There brand is fine. The thing sold over 3 million by the end of 2013. The things selling more than the 360. Likely over 20 million, and the near 2:1 has more to do with the PS4s much faster sales in Europe other wise it'd likely be 1.5 or less.
 
The reaction was so poor that it would have been a huge swing and miss, but truthfully liked some of those features especially digital focus and family sharing.
 
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