[drivingmenuts]

A friend posited the theory that all of this was a calculated move on Microsoft's part.

First, they throw up the idea of some draconian DRM, which they then later retract. The first move gets them tons of publicity and tongue-wagging, the second move starts to make that positive publicity. They're banking on gamers being so addicted, they won't really care that they've been played for idiot chumps.

If the market for the new XBox was 12-year old children, they wouldn't even have bothered. But, since they're really marketing to adults 20-35 or so, they have to look like good guys to the people they're talking out of their money.

This was calculated. Reddit and everyone else got played. Hard and dry.

[clavalle]

That would be a valid theory if they didn't have a very similar competing product released at about the same time. A competitor that captured the lion's share of positive publicity by merely maintaining the status quo.

As it stands, I will be surprised if XBox One captures 25% of the latest gen console market when it is all said and done.

[Radix_]

I like this theory a bit but I don't think the part about getting positive publicity works out. They don't really look good here and, though I haven't read Reddit's response yet, I don't think they're going to look good to hardly anyone. At least not the 20-35 year olds who were aware of the snafu.

I think I cleaner interpretation is that they were aware that the push might fail but figured going back on the setup as they've done wouldn't set them back too far. And the move, even if it failed, would set them up for basically the same change in the future of the consoles life. Remember they changed the Xbox dashboard a lot. They can still add the planned sharing features to download only games. At first only to developer opt-in games then just the MS published games will have the additional features. After that other publishers will need to have their games use the extra features for licensed download games.

So everyone saying they ought to have done both may be right but maybe it wasn't ideal and they reached a bit too far. So they've fallen back and are retooling. I just wish they'd let me take off adverts on the damned main dashboard! I never buy anything and they know it.

[jonny_eh]

Microsoft is not that clever, and regardless, I don't see how this 180 will turn out in their favour. They have clearly lost momentum to this.

[warfangle]

Gonna have to invoke Hanlon's razor here.