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by sivam 4743 days ago
Reposting my earlier comment on the other thread that went off front page:

They should rename the Xbox One to the Xbox 180, it would be a perfect name!

On a more serious note, I don't like this rollback. It only goes to show how the witchhunt and echo chamber on Reddit worked. Even before the reveal, Microsoft was falsely accused of trying to game Reddit and everyone flew off the handle over someone pretty much lying to be a troll. Say the word "DRM" and you get bucketloads of Reddit karma and posts pointing out the facts(forget about posts taking the opposing view or opinion) were downvoted into oblivion by the angry mob.

And then there was the bad timing on the NSA leaks, which didn't help at all. Everyone has smartphones, laptops and tablets with cameras and mics which could be watching and listening and Apple/Google were part of the leak, but it was Microsoft that was singled out for proposing a device that could turn on itself, and had numerous safeguards to configure privacy if you wanted to.

All this doesn't excuse the fact that Microsoft utterly and totally failed in communicating their message in a proper manner in E3 and handed Sony an easy victory on a silver platter. For example, they failed to highlight how it fixes the problem of scratched and lost discs and how inconvenient it is to change discs to switch between games. I know a lot of people with huge DVD collections who watch the same movie on Netflix because they can't be bothered to put in a disc into the player.

They were touting the ability to play another game while waiting for people to join another multiplayer game, now that will be inconvenient with having to switch disks.

I guess it was easy to roll this back because it was not Microsoft but publishers and game developers that were going to reap the benefits of diskless gaming because Gamestop etc. skim off the value of older games and leave publishers with not much value. Once the public failed to see the advantages and blamed Microsoft for a power grab that was not going to really benefit them all that much, it was game over.

1 comments

>On a more serious note, I don't like this rollback. It only goes to show how the witchhunt and echo chamber on Reddit worked.

It seems like you haven't considered that the echo chamber is right on this one. DRM is a cancer on the industry and every attempt to fight it back is worth it. You make points that the DRM could lead to potential benefits, no one is disputing that. Simply put, with the way it was, I was never going to buy an Xbox, now I might consider it. I can't stand the trend these days where the consumer owns nothing and controls nothing. This is capitalism at work, nothing else. It seems like a win for consumer rights and a win for Microsoft. Your post seems like a reactionary post lambasting the reactionary posts on reddit.

In certain cases the "landscape" of a feature means that what we would see as DRM is simply just a part of that feature. Steam is effectively a DRM platform, but the convenience of my games being backed up for me (and being able to transfer those games across machines when e.g. upgrading) means that the DRM becomes a feature that actually helps me (a good example of DRM being a feature is MMOs). I guess that's where I draw the line - some types of DRM protect the rights of both the consumer and the developer.

Let me put it to you this way, if I were to ever buy a console, I might have considered the XBox One. Microsoft has a history of being partly a benefactor (especially with the 360 and XNA); and things can be changed and improved over time (just like Steam was). We might not have liked the first iteration of the DRM, but it could have been changed (require both devices to be connected to the internet when changing ownership? The horde would have still torn them apart for that).