I feel as though it is a marketing strategy for Microsoft to say "See! We are listening to our customers! This is the system you helped make into what it is now! Because of all of your suggestions!" I don't see any logical reason for them to state all of these policies that would obviously get tons of backlash, then suddenly change everything completely.

Why would Microsoft even do this? Have you seen the absolutely insane amount of bad PR and word of mouth they've been getting over the past several months?

Yes that is the more sensible explanation.

If true, it completely backfired. A lot of people are still wary over the whole mess and it couldn't possibly help sales in the long run

Wasn't it Microsoft who planned 9/11?

These policies were never implemented and never directly affected anyone's gameplay experience. Now we can all pretend like they were never even mentioned.

Why would Microsoft want everyone to hate them during E3 when they're trying to get everyone to like them?

I don't think anyone could possibly see that being a good idea. With a huge marketing and PR department, someone would of had to have gone "Um, hey guys. This is dumb."

A huge amount of damage has been done to the Xbox brand because of these policies. They're in a better position than they were yesterday but they still have a ton of ground to make up. This was not on purpose.

So you came up with a completely illogical one instead! Nice one.

They didn't realize that the backlash would be as severe as it was, and they were more than likely expecting Sony to take the same DRM tactic, which would have made it a bitter pill to swallow for consumers, but still required if they wanted to play games on either platform. It didn't work out that way, Microsoft was left dangling in a PR nightmare, and they backpedaled. Tinfoil hats not required.

Forza 5 is essentially built on the fact that this is always connected to the internet, without it the game will perform differently if you're not constantly connected and downloading more user data to change the behaviour of the AI. You could, of course, do this idea without DRM, but DRM would've made it flawless.

But as for used games and digital rights yeah it was probably always there because of how much money companies made off of online passes or some nonsense like that.

Well, the Xbox 1 didn't.

<rimshot>

No way man, no company would put themselves through the E3 that Microsoft had willingly. Sure there are a lot of happy enthusiasts out there right now but Xbox just isn't the brand they used to be to a lot of people. although that will probably all go away when Halo 5 comes out.

Microsoft shot JFK