LogFAQs > #963386071

MrMallard posted...

I disagree that this can't be a blunder because the Xbone was still successful, because its eventual success was at the expense of what made the Xbone reveal so dogshit.

You had to have a camera hooked up to your console all the time, your console had to be connected to the internet for you to use it, and physical game discs were one-time purchase keys that became bound to your console. The most pervasive thing out of all that is the online requirements - the NSO game collections work on a similar principle, for example. But the Kinect was a fucking terrible idea, because A) it was an external peripheral that had to be plugged in, meaning that if it was damaged in some way you would be fucked out of using your $400 game console because necessary features would become locked off, and B) the combination of "necessary camera peripheral" and "always online connection" garnered a lot of criticism over surveillance. And as evidenced by the final product not having any of this, this wasn't a hardware limitation - there was no physical reason why a Kinect was physically necessary to use the console. They developed software that hamstrung the console based on a bunch of restrictive, anti-consumer protocols, and they sold it as a necessary and inevitable future.

And nothing sums up the petty, short-sighted, anti-consumer greed like single-use game activation discs - game discs that didn't contain the game and would install the game from an online server (which unfortunately did become a standard), but which would also become locked to your Xbox profile or console. So if you got sick of the game and wanted to sell it, or if you wanted to let a friend borrow it? You couldn't. The second you put it in your Xbox One, the second you used it, it became useless to every other person on the planet - like a condom. It would only ever work with your profile or console.

They tried to kill the secondhand game market (which is already a pretty volatile niche, as seen with GameStop and their shift towards nerd culture merchandise) as a way of potentially shifting more units, but which made gaming as a whole unnecessarily restrictive for the everyman who doesn't hoard this nerd shit and who can't drop hundreds of dollars on retail-priced game releases every year.

It made physical games obsolete not by offering a better solution, but by hobbling the physical medium artificially to force more financial engagement from the market. The Xbox One launch was the biggest load of horseshit of its time, and it was a low point for gaming.

With that being said: I would refer to the Xbone launch as one of the most significant, high profile blunders in recent history. Because if we're talking about all of history, the Xbone has to contend with the Atari Jaguar. It has to contend with the failure of the Saturn and Dreamcast, which had their strong suits but which bled so much money that they ended a prominent game company's hardware division. It has to contend with the Virtual Boy. Let's face it, the world of gaming have seen worse flops - the N-gage and the Ouya, even.

What I think makes the Xbox One debacle so bad is how unnecessary, scummy and hostile it was. None of it was necessary. The Kinect didn't need to be there, they didn't have to hobble functionality based on internet access and they didn't have to make game discs as useless as they were already shaping up to be. And there was no physical reason for any of this - it was all dependent on hardware. Microsoft just wanted that level of control. And Sony had a field day with it, releasing the most smug, shitposty video about how to share your PS4 games with friends - it was one guy handing his copy of the game to another guy. It was a slam dunk.

The Xbone launch wasn't a disaster on the level of the Ouya. Though frankly? If Microsoft had charged headlong into this horseshit without changing something, it could have been the most high profile disaster in the gaming industry to date and it could have sunk the Xbox brand. Microsoft would have continued, sure. But this could have been the final nail in the coffin for the Xbox, which had a ridiculously low market share in Japan for all of its iterations and which ultimately did the worst business in its first two outings.

Firing the dumb fuck who oversaw the Xbox One development cycle and replacing him with Phil Spencer is what got the Xbox brand out of the toilet, because without that guy pivoting hard back into games and recognising where the backlash was coming from? We would have an unnecessarily necessary camera peripheral and any physical games we had would have been worthless slabs of plastic. We wouldn't have Game Pass, and we wouldn't have had that short-lived Nintendo synergy. You can't fake brand awareness, and Phil Spencer is dripping with it every time he makes a public statement. The guy who launched the Xbone, on the other hand, was dripping with brand poison. It was a monumental fuck-up that's worth remembering.

But again - it was a monumental fuck-up that got its shit together and arguably became one of the best gaming platforms of the modern age, if not ever. And because we've seen how well Xbox has done for itself, it seems ridiculous to say it's the worst gaming blunder in history next to the N-Gage, the Atari Jaguar or Sega releasing a brand new gaming console the same day they announced it. It was one of the biggest modern fuck-ups for sure, heads justifiably rolled over it. But can we really say it was the worst blunder of all time, considering how it turned out and how it compares to some of the most unplayable pieces of shit from the 8-bit era to the 128-bit era?

Also good timing that it happened close to the NSA Edward Snowden leaks about surveillance. And also remember one of the tweets from the consoles lead developers saying that how the always online feature was a problem since everybody had internet.