Anonymous Microsoft engineer on Xbox One DRM

i will say first off its very easy to say you are someone that you are not on the internet. So this may not be real, but he brings up some good points other people have been saying. apparently this was in a AMA on 4chan??

http://pastebin.com/uCmdh9jB

i've copied what he said here for ease:

>The thing is we suck at telling the story. The whole point of the DRM switch from disc based to cloud based is to kill disc swapping, scratched discs, bringing discs to friends house, trade-ins for shit value with nothign going back to developers, and high game costs. If you want games cheaper then 59.99, you have to limit used games somehow. Steam's model requires a limited used game model.

>The thing is, the DRM is really really similar to steam... You can login anywhere and play your games, anyone in your house can play with the family xbox. The only diff is steam you have to sign in before playing, and Xbox does it automatically at night for you (once per 24 hours)

>It's a long tail strategy, just like steam. Steam had it's growing pains at the beginning with all it's drm shit as well. [...] For digital downloads steam had no real competition at the time, they were competing against boxed sales. At the time people were pretty irate about steam, (on 4chan too...) It was only once they had a digital marketplace with DRM that was locked down to prevent sharing that they could do super discounted shit.

>Think about it, on steam you get a game for the true cost of the game, 5$-30$. On a console you have to pay for that PLUS any additional licenses for when you sell / trade / borrow / etc. If the developer / publisher can't get it on additional licenses (like steam), then they charge the first person more. [...] If we say "Hey publishers, you limit game to 39.99, we ensure every license transfer you get 10$, gamestop gets 20$" that is a decent model... Microsoft gets a license fee on first and subsequent game purchases, compared to just first now? That's a revenue increase.

>Competition is the best man, it helps drive both to new heights. See technology from the Cold War. If we had no USSR, we'd be way worse off today. TLDR: Bring it on Steam :)

2/4

>Yeah we passed that around the office at Xbox. Most of us were like "Well played Sony, Well played". That being said they are just riding the hype train of ZOMG THEY ARE TRYING TO FUCK US FOR NO REASON. Without actually thinking about how convienent it would be for the majority of the time to not find that disc your brother didn't put back... [...] just simpleminded people not seeing the bigger picture. Some PS4 viral team made them all "U TOOK R DISCS" and they hiveminded.

>Everyone and their mother complains about how gamestop fucks them on their trade ins, getting 5$ for their used games. We come in trying to find a way to take money out of gamestop, and put some in developers and get you possibly cheaper games and everyone bitches at MS. Well, if you want the @#$@ing from Gamestop, go play PS4.

>The goal is to move to digital downloads, but Gamestop, Walmart, Target, Amazon are KIND OF FUCKING ENTRENCHED in the industry. They have a lot of power, and the shift has to be gradual. Long term goal is steam for consoles. [...] If you always want to stay with what you have, then keep current consoles, or a PS4. We're TRYING to move the industry forwards towards digital distribution... it'sa bumpy road

>Publishers have enourmous power. Microsoft is trying to balance between consumer delight, and publisher wishes. If we cave to far in either direction you have a non-starting product. WiiU goes too far to consumer, you have no 3rd party support to shake a stick at. PS4 is status-quo. XB1 is trying to push some things, at the expense of others. We have a vision, we'll see if it works in the coming years

>Living room transformation. We want to own the living room. Every living room TV with an XBox on input one. It's the thing that gives the signal to your TV, everything is secondary. The future, where games, TV, internet telephony, all that shit happens magically on some huge ass screen with hand / voice gestures... That's our goal.

3/4

>Google TV + PS4 + Minority report level gestures, that combined with a sick second screen experience (which is really hot for TV, I know I know.. tv tv tv tv tv... but it's fucking sick when you have it). Games will be the same, there are more exclusives to MS then PS atm, and Kinect 2 makes Kinect 1 look like a childs toy.

>By default it's on, listening for "Xbox On". You can turn it off tho, and turn the console like OFF off. OFF off is required for Germany / other countries that require it (no vampire appliances) [...] It has to be plugged in for the console to post. You can turn off everything it does from the settings. Think of it like airplane mode for the iPhone. You can't just unplug the cellular radio, but you can turn it off.

>Instead of 10mins, is 24hrs for your console, and 1 or 2 at a friends house. Really the majority of people have a speck of internet at least once a day. And if you don't. Don't buy an Xbox 1. Just like if you didn't have a broadband connection don't get Live, and if you don't have an HDTV the 360 isn't that great for you either. New tech, new req. This allows us to do cool shit when we can assume things like you have a kinect, you have internet, etc.

>Current plan is basically you're fucked after 24 hours. Yeah... I know. Kind of sucks. I believe they will probably revist the time period and / or find a diff way to "call in" to ensure you haven't sold your license to gamestop or something... but there is no plan YET. I'm hoping the change it, but I don't work on that so I don't have much influence there /sigh

>If the power goes out you ain't playing shit. I'm assuming you mean the internet goes out but you have power for TV and Xbox. Yes, You're fucked for single player games. Again, that's the PoR (Plan of record), but I expect it to change after the e3 clusterfuck

>What fee? There is no fee to play your games at your friends house. Never has, never will. Even x360 digital downloads could do that.

4/4

>The cloud capabilities is the shit they like the most. We basically made a huge cloud compute shit and made it free. What people are doing with it is kind of cool. THe original intention was to get all the Multiplayer servers not requiring 3rd party costs (Like EA shutting down game servers to cut costs), as well as taking all the games that servers hosted by the clients (Halo, etc), and have all that compute done in the cloud allowing more CPU cycles for gameplay. That will really expand what developers can do. Anything that doesn't need per frame calculation and can handle 100ms delays can be shifted to the cloud. That's huge.

>SmartGlass + IE is going to be pretty freaking sweet. 1 finger cursor, 2 finger direct manip. Basically if you think of a laptop trackpad where your phone/ slate is the trackpad and the monitor is your TV... it's that. The tech is there, just needs to be applied. There is some really cool shit going on with Petra + controllers that pairs people with controllers. So if person with controller two trades controlers with controller 1, their profiles magically switch. It's sick. What does this matter? Now if you lean left/right it knows which person is leaning, even if 4 people are all int he same room. It's awesome.

>New service using Azure for cloud compute. Allows developers to not use clients for hosting multiplayer servers, or other tasks that do not require per frame calcuations. It's pretty sweet.

>Honestly, if you care about anything other then pure games AT ALL. Xbox 1 > PS4. If all you do is play games, and nothing else, PS4.

This was all from the Microsoft engineer that was on /b/ last night.

>It's not worth my time to prove it, or risk my Job. I work in Studio A, 40th ave in Redmond, Wa. The thai place in the studio cafeteria has double punch wednesdays. Go ahead and call them and verify if you want.

Microsoft fans mad right now.

One guy who said they worked at MS said ''homefront 2 is being developed'' i hate being lied to :(

This sounds like an engineer who has drank the kool-aid of their own division. They see a completely different side the higher ups do and it is borked. They think they are competing with Steam with the design they came up with and aren't even close and blame it on upper management for not explaining it to everyone correctly.

Originally posted on /b/
So that's enough for me to call Bullshit

They can complain all they want about people not understanding the message but that isn't down to the consumer, it's on Microsoft to explain their policies and why they benefit the consumer.

hmm, i don't disagree that everyone will eventually move toward a steam model, but Sony has been handling that much better with the playstation plus service thus far. Microsoft's message about eventually saving the consumer money would've swayed a lot of opinions regarding their DRM if they had bothered to share that with the consumer following the backlash. This back channel post from an "insider" seems like a strange way for that potentially pleasing info to get out. Will probably own a Xbone at some point but until they reach the status of being able to offer amazing sales like steam has been praised for, PS4 will likely be my preferred platform next go round.

So basically "Hey guys we're visionaries and we're trying to change the way things work for your benefit, and you're all just too small minded to see it!"

I get that Microsoft has some irate fans, but the desperation is a bit pathetic now.

Listen, I worked on the PS4 with Cerny in his garage and we made this amazing gpu shit that is fucking sick. He lives next to a Taco Bell that throws out their stale burritos at 10 pm - call them up and ask if you don't believe me.

Pretty much although whoever wrote that up has a minor point on the long tail strategy approach that is similar to Steam. Of course the problem with that is that you have to trust MS completely to not fuck up in the future because you don't have any other options like one would have on the PC.

Oh yeah, the person has a minor point.

But once you read it a second time through it just sounds like someone copy/pasted what others have written down as suggestions in blog posts, or said in videos on youtube or on twitter and then edited them to sound like an "Insider" saying what people want to hear.

This because whenever they have their Xbox Live Gold subscriber deals, they're hardly ever worth mentioning. They don't understand how to make money off of digital sales the way valve has. there's no reason i should be able to consistently find a physical disc for a game at gamestop for cheaper than the digital download on XBL.

I wish Halo 2 servers were still up. WHERE'S UR CLOUD THEN MS?

Can you blame them? I'd be panicking if something I had such irrational loyalty to was being so soundingly rejected by nearly the entire world. Sony is large, in charge, and hungry, and Microsoft, who for eight years has been a predator, is now the prey. The Xbox is no longer the king of the gaming space, and has been rejected by most gamers. Between this, Surface and Windows 8, we're seeing the decline of a once-great American company, and we've no one but Steve Ballmer to thank for that.

He already lost me.

If he's talking about new games that see proper official disc based releases that aren't indie titles or whatever that are marked at the 10-20$ range, then he's wrong. Companies already know that people are willing to pay 60$ for a brand new game and that that is now the standard. Companies have no reason to *ever* drop that price lower now. If they limit used game sales so that more brand new copies are bought by people and fewer used copies which the companies see no profit from, the only thing that will happen is that companies will make more money off of those 60$ titles. They won't lower the cost to be 'friendly to the consumers' or some bullshit. They'll keep the price where it is so they make more profit.

I just don't think people believe Microsoft or Sony would ever actually lower game prices, even if game sales went 100% digital, because they have closed platforms; killing Gamestop/Walmart/Amazon physical sales actually reduces competition for the digital stores and would make them less inclined to lower prices.

Steam never had to be trusted to make this decision, mostly because they are the ones that started and popularized it, and the fact that they have major competitors in the PC digital distribution space.

I'd like to see Sony and Microsoft start selling digital games for $39.99 or less and see what happens, if things really are going 100% digital and that will benefit the customer in the long run, just do it.

@zeforgotten: oh yeah, no doubt about that.

Oh yeah, the Games on Demand stuff for the 360 was funny as hell.
To think that not a single person at Microsoft, not once, just said "Don't you think those games are a little overpriced?"

I wanted to get Dead Rising 1 so I looked it up on there once and saw that it was still like 300 DKK(Like $55)
And I could go into a local store and buy it there new, not a used copy, for 90 DKK($16)

Edit: Had to write DKK. not DKR.. what the hell is a DKR.. too tired.

That is also the same thinking that went into Win8. It isn't that they were wrong that there are fundamental problems with the way the generic Windows UI works but they went about "solving" them with the stance "We will redo this with an eye on the future and everyone will love it" without actually finding out if the customer cares either way.

The bit about cloud computing made me think this might actually have been real.

The issue with cloud computing is that in most games -unless we're simply talking multiplayer which would be on a remote server anyway- the response time would be too inhibitive.

And the transition to a steam-like service would be far smoother if MS made their digital storefront as appealing as Steam, rather than trying to simply gimp physical copies.

What I dont get is that you can still do the same (moving to a steam model) without crippeling disc based games. Use the old model for the disc and that steamy model for downloaded games. Make download games 20% cheaper. Done. No one will complain.

Does anyone really believe games will be cheaper because of Microsofts DRM?

It was only once they had a digital marketplace with DRM that was locked down to prevent sharing that they could do super discounted shit.

That's BS.

Games are cheaper already on places like Amazon and thats without any bullshit DRM. And amazon is in the business of buying an selling used games too. Games get cheaper because retailers(both physical and digital retailers) want your business, thats how it works.

I get sick of trying to explain how their policies are dumb, but here it goes again (I keep getting it down in length, so that's a good thing for repeated use).

Digital games are the future, there's no doubt about that, but they have to PROVE to us that it's better. Giving the handy cap to digital games by crippling physical media is not the way to go, it'll just makes the consumer bitter.

My perspective: Leave physical media alone (for now) while continuing to improve upon digital games; digital release same day as physical one, pre-installs/midnight unlock, cheaper prices. When they prove digital is better, the market will shift and no one will give a fuck when they do away with disc drives, because no one will be using them as much as they are now.

The fact that their engineers hang out on 4chan sounds like Microsoft's first problem.

I don't think a Microsoft employee would bring up Steam thirty times. This sounds very much like the kinds of things people are saying on forums when they defend the Xbox.

">Think about it, on steam you get a game for the true cost of the game, 5$-30$. On a console you have to pay for that PLUS any additional licenses for when you sell / trade / borrow / etc. If the developer / publisher can't get it on additional licenses (like steam), then they charge the first person more. [...] If we say "Hey publishers, you limit game to 39.99, we ensure every license transfer you get 10$, gamestop gets 20$" that is a decent model... Microsoft gets a license fee on first and subsequent game purchases, compared to just first now? That's a revenue increase."

If microsoft's DRM is the only way they are going to put a 18 month old digital game on sale then that's pretty sad. PSN is already offering pretty impressive sale prices for their digital store. Especially for plus members.

I'm sorry that I'm too stupid to realize the benefits of having my consumer rights taken away, but it sounds like the whole internet is too stupid to realize the brilliance of Microsoft's plan. Then again, maybe it's not us. Maybe it's actually the shitty Xbox One anti consumer policies and people have a right to be upset by that.

If the goal is "steam prices with steam DRM", why not just sell downloads at steam prices and discs at full price? There's no way a second price is more complicated or harder to implement than these crazy sharing policies.

Look, its okay we're getting your metadata, we're not actually reading your emails alright? Plus we can totally catch all the terrorists and cool shit.

It all comes down to trust. Frankly I don't trust Sony, Microsoft or Steam to really do the right thing when it comes to our consumer rights, but I trust Microsoft the least. So, I will stick with Steam and maybe get a PS4.

Why wouldn't they if Steam is the gold standard for digital game content? The only reason i would rather Microsoft succeed is to compete with Steam and motivate valve into more creative ways to entice their customers.

Sony definitely wants a digital future as well but they seem to be the smarter ones in this scenario as they will entice the digital sales over time rather than brutally force it. Do you think those indie games will see retail disk releases? Sony's marketing is far smarter, Microsoft's marketing is damn near non existent, but they both want the exact same thing and i want Steam to have stronger competition.

@oldmanlight: Seriously! What kind of bullshit point was that anyway. How in the hell does that make sense to them? If they're so concerned with undercutting the used game market and Gamestop as a result, then there is no reason that full games on XBL should cost so much months after release.

First warning sign right there.

@jediknight00719: I think it's about time Giant Bomb put a moratorium on starting topics based on quotes from random internet guy.

This dude doesn't write like any engineer I have ever talked to. Is there actually any new information in there? It just seems like he was sitting at his keyboard with a couple of search tabs open. Maybe he'd done his research? I don't know, it would have been more "revealing" before E3.

So, blaming the publishers didn't work, as they've since denied that they pressured Microsoft into ball-and-chain DRM policies... Let's blame the retailers instead! And try to justify it by suggesting that their goal was to make games cheaper in the long run. *sigh*

This is bullshit.

@hunkulese: I tried to reiterate in the beginning that this could most likely be fake. But parts of it made me believe it was real, specifically the cloud computing aspects and my personal experience of being in a similar situation of not being able to say anything. But if mods deem these to not help the conversation i'm fine with not starting similar topics.

It's just not how they talk though. A company doesn't compare itself to the gold standard, because it won't look favorable, and repeatedly talking about a competing product isn't in their best interest. It's why whenever they reference other companies they do it with a wink and nod.

Steam's DRM isn't every 24 hours. For some games, you can be offline indefinitely after installing and running it online once.

This argument is like the internet version of eyeball licking. You all should know better.

If you want to limit games to 59.99, you should lower production costs you dimwit, not limit used game sales.

This 'engineer' gives other engineers a bad name with his lack of economics knowledge.

@reisz: you're right. He sounds exactly like a Product Manager / Producer to me, though.

I feel like I am the only person who doesn't care that it has to connect to the internet once a day. Everyone seems to immediately get up in arms, proclaim "CONNECTING TO THE INTERNET ONCE A DAY, ON MY XBOX ONE!?", and then grab their pitchfork.

I think its safe to say that most people who have 360 or a PS3 probably have broadband internet, so who really cares if the thing has to connect once every 24 hours to the internet? It serves the legitimate purpose of making sure games aren't just being passed around and installed on everyone and their grandma's xbone. Everyone wants to have these knee jerk reactions and act like its the end of the world.

I even say this as someone who is planning on getting a PS4 over an xbox when they both release.

Yeah, if this so called "insider" at Microsoft has any clue about the whole story, he'd have known that there are more factors than just "Hey, we're doing DRM to make it like Steam, guys". It's not nearly the same thing, and they're too full of pride to see that. Digital is not the same as retail on consoles, consoles are closed systems as opposed to PCs, and Microsoft has not clarified anything about Sales or benefits through all of this.

Furthermore, a new service cannot come out and use the excuse of Steam not being liked when it was released (especially when it's on a different platform). Shouldn't the release of Steam be informative to the higher ups about how to take that backlash, find the problems with it, and fix it?

TL,DR: You can't just take DRM, make it stricter, and use Steam or Steam's launch as an excuse. Also, state the benefits clearly to the consumers. I mean, this is just common sense.

DRM will lead to cheaper games? Bullshit.

@jediknight00719: I will say it again. They say they are doing one thing then do another. Here is the special sales from both console for the week:

XBL http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Promotion/Special-Sales

PSN http://www.psnstores.com/2013/05/psnstores-weekly-deals-circular-8/

You see which one is going the steam route? yea i thought so.

Not really, it's up to them to prove that their vision of an online, purely digital future is worth it (And worth 100$ more than the PS4)

If they do manage to do that, then hey, I'll show up on day one.

But I don't trust that they will.

What if my brother threw my console out the window? Then I'd have to re-download everything. Discs rock, bro.

You would think an engineer Microsoft would be able to talk about this a bit more elegantly. This guy sounds like a marketing bro, not an engineer.