[potatolicious]

With what little info we have, this seems actually like a good move. Part of Zynga's core problem is that their games are frequently more psycological tweakery than legitimately rewarding or fun.

Importing someone who comes from "real" gaming seems like a good move in this regard. Hopefully this means Zynga intends to move towards "fun games with microtransactions" and away from "pretty one-armed bandits with microtransactions".

[asb]

They have tried importing people from "real gaming" before, e.g. Brian Reynolds http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Reynolds_(game_designer) who worked on Civ2 and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.

[pwf]

What does the head of the Xbox division have to do with the fun factor of the games? I would understand this comment if we were talking about the head of Bioware or Blizzard, but this guy seems pretty far removed the actual games.

[potatolicious]

Before being head of Xbox he was head of EA - he's not a stranger to the gaming industry from the dev side.

[pwf]

Even then I find myself asking how much fun games that EA was heavily involved in were...

[sgk284]

If MSFT and EA don't do it for you, he was an exec at EA through an acquisition of his game company, Distinctive Software.

[dgallagher]

Part of Zynga's core problem is that their games are frequently more psycological tweakery than legitimately rewarding or fun.

Gamasutra has an interesting article up about that very subject: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130626/1949...

[beaumartinez]

Xbox One, real gaming? A machine that was going to lock all your gaming purchases down, so you couldn't even share your physical discs with friends? A company that charged $10,000 for patches—even trivial ones fixing serious, game-breaking bugs?

Microsoft's gaming division has become the definition a "pretty one-armed bandit with microtransactions", and no doubt thanks to Mattrick.

[jgross206]

I think the parent was talking about the content of the games, not ancillary business practices.

[jfb]

This damn car is too ugly -- where's my new horse?

[drivebyacct2]

>so you couldn't even share your physical discs with friends?

Yeah, what assholes, instead they made it so you don't have to screw around with physical media and can instead share your games with 10 of your friends around the world without having to deal with a disc.

Also, they just removed that update fee.

Besides, bitching about the Xbox One's distribution model is kinda overdone at this point.

[Goronmon]

Yeah, what assholes, instead they made it so you don't have to screw around with physical media and can instead share your games with 10 of your friends around the world without having to deal with a disc.

Well, to be fair, there was nothing really concrete about their plans. And now that they've changed their minds they can talk big about how awesome it would have been. But I seriously doubt the end result would have amazing as everyone claimed it would have been.

[drivebyacct2]

Those details (that I mentioned) were fully disclosed before they changed their policies, obviously.

It's not Microsoft's fault that reddit blew up in a circle-jerk of misinformation. Granted, they could have marketed it better and made that story clearer.

[pharrington]

fully disclosed

reddit circle-jerk of misinformation

I'll post this again, from an interview taken on June 10th.

[Phil] Spencer: But we're also trying to launch and we understand feature sets. We've got partners and publishers [we] want to talk to about how lending is going to work. We don't dictate pricing to our partners on our platform. We want to give them capabilities to support content and business models that they want to support with their content. It sounds like Sony is trying to do the same thing. How do we support what our partners want to do? We want to have the conversations with them and land on a plan.

We understand lending and the benefits of lending, so, funny videos aside, we get it. We want to make sure we land on the right solution that fits a digital ecosystem moving forward.

If you think about lending in digital ecosystems, it's not something a lot of other people have supported. We're going to commit... gifting, we said we're going to support that, secondary market we're going to support that even though the license is digital and it's not as trivial as just handing a disc to someone else. Lending, we want to do it, we want to work with our partners to make it possible.

Kotaku: You understand, obviously, that because these things exist on discs, it's why it seems so odd that—you're not launching until November—since I would think I can lend you this notebook and discs, surely I could do the same, but you guys are saying that you won't have the lending solution.

Spencer: We don't have a lending solution today.

Kotaku: You might have one?

Spencer: We don't have a path... I don't want to make a commitment to somebody without a plan of record on how that lands. I could over-promise, under-deliver on the features. I don't want to do that. I want to make sure. I understand how gifting is going to work. I understand how the secondary market is going to work.

From Phil Spencer's own mouth, sharing was never an actual feature of the XBox One.

http://kotaku.com/the-xbox-one-believers-513819282

[drivebyacct2]

That whole article that you link to is about the Share with 10 Family Members feature, leading me to conclude that "lending" in that sentence is explicitly physical lending and... you know... from the context directly around it, reselling used games.

>Xbox One will enable new forms of access for families. Up to ten members of your family can log in and play from your shared games library on any Xbox One.

That's a concrete statement from MS and one they made numerous times. And they more or less say "yes, we don't care who the 10 people actually are".

I mean, come on, did we both read the same block of text? It is extremely explicit at the end about being physical lending.