@chaser324 said:

You can't go 100% digital, it's not currently feasible. There is a reason hundreds of millions of CDs are still sold.

And it's not impossible to have a flexible digital pricing model. End of the day retailers still need your product, they're not going to stop selling games because consoles run a sale on digital games. When Steam has a sale a retailer like Amazon will react and match sale prices or run their own sales for both disc based games and digital games. That's the way it should be. Sony's been better with sales too, though most are hidden behind PS+(for example I just picked up Borderlands 2 for $20, thats a good deal.). And if hiding the sales behind the multiplayer paywall is what it takes to make flexible pricing work, for now, thats fine too. But for a few people at Microsoft to insinuate that DRM was the only way to get them to have better more adaptable pricing is nothing more than an excuse.

I feel that the statement that I'm quoting is the true problem that was found in all the discussions that happened over the past month. There was this idea that all the "internet rage" was coming from this insincere place and the people complaining really didn't know what they were talking about. You say that the policies would have only impacted a small portion of "those that were screaming."

Allow me to introduce myself as one of those people. I have a limited budget and most of the games I play come from Gamefly and Redbox. The games I do own I've lent out to friends and family and they in turn allow me to borrow their games. You can argue that because I am not able to pay the full retail price for a video games I shouldn't be allowed to play them. I'm the reason that developers don't get paid everything they are entitled to. That's fine. However, I don't understand why you attribute my situation to this so called "internet hivemind culture" or "sense of gamer entitlement."

Do you honestly believe that I arrived at my gaming situation because of things I read online? I had two people (my friend and cousin) directly ask me about the Xbox One's policies to confirm what they saw on TV. These are two dudes that don't read about video games online or anything like that. One of them buys COD every year and that's the only game he buys. My cousin on the other hand doesn't really play games that often, but he bought Gear of War 3 and Skyrim and he only purchased a few months of Gold to play Gears of War 3. He's been on Silver for a year now. Both of them heard the news and were very unhappy with what they heard. They said it was bullshit and that they wouldn't buy an Xbox One.

People like us who go to websites like Giant Bomb generally live in a bubble. We read and watch things online and everyone reacts in a public way in the forums, twitter, facebook, etc. There is a large group of people that play games, enjoy games, and never participate in any of that stuff. For you to claim that their concerns, the concerns of my friends, that their feelings should be lumped into whatever you feel is this "internet hivemind culture" is extremely insulting to our intelligence. That isn't really directed at you, but it's for everyone that thinks that people like me don't matter and shouldn't be part of this conversation.

@devilzrule27: To play the devil's advocate (which I guess is almost the entire premise of this thread after all), there is a pretty easy way to go 100% digital: flat-out abandon people that can't get on board with it. It's a drastic move that would piss off a lot of people, but at the very least the messaging would have been clearer. Microsoft's token attempts to keep retailers, discs, and offline users in the loop really just confused things.

Having said that, the once per day authorization was really their biggest stumbling point. As I mentioned earlier in this thread, I think they had options available to make it easier for offline users, but for whatever reason they didn't implement any of them. At this point, I guess they're better off for not having wasted the engineering man hours on any of those solutions.

With regard to digital pricing, the interplay between retailers, publishers, and platform holders is complex, and it's something that few people outside of top-level executives probably fully comprehend. For the time being, I'm content to wait and see how things shake out in the coming years. Day one digital is already a big step forward that I'm pretty excited about. The suits can just continue having knife fights on top of large round conference tables in opulent penthouse suites to determine the future.

@golguin: Let me be clear in saying that there are plenty of valid complaints to be made about the old Xbox One policies, and I certainly wouldn't count you, your friends, or anyone else with honest and legitimate complaints among the "internet hivemind" that has been raging against Microsoft. I'm referring more to the people with gaming habits and an economic and lifestyle situation that could have easily integrated the Xbox One policies that so violently and irrationally raged and screamed at Microsoft that calmer and more rational opinions like your's were muffled.

This sort of leads into the idea of "gamers' sense of entitlement". This is the feeling by some gamers out there that anything publishers, developers, or retailers do in the name of making money and/or that isn't 100% to their liking and benefit is some sort of personal slight against them. These are the sorts of people that think piracy is justifiable, that make violent verbal attacks against game designers or writers if they don't agree with their choices, that expect compensation if servers are down for an hour, that think all DLC should be free, that complain about a game being anything more than $0.99 on the iOS app store, or that do anything else that implies that they are somehow owed something. I wouldn't necessarily put your complaints in that category.

@chaser324: I do not understand why they did a FULL 180. They could have kept the download disk and play without disk if you are connected to the internet. But you can play offline if you have the disk in the tray. This would have eliminated a while bunch of the hate. Course I am no programmer and maybe it would have been harder to change all that stuff on their side.

The all-digital console is a cool but ultimately premature idea that I just can't get behind right now. In a few years time perhaps but not right now.

"gamer entitlement"

LOL.

No one forced Microsoft to do this. They could easily have let the market decide if their product tanked or not. They thought it would and hence there's a change of policy.

I think the word you're looking for is "manufacturer entitlement". Too many people in your line of work are quick to blame the state of the industry on gamers who don't buy everything on the market. Sorry, it's still a free market and people are free not to buy what they don't like. And they're still free to rage however much they like as long as they're not abusive about it.

It has to happen naturally. It can't be prematurely forced onto consumers.

I plan on buying a PS4 and I don't disagree with your arguments but it consists of blind faith that will "potentially" benefit consumers "at a certain point" somewhere down the road. However, people aren't buying consoles somewhere down the road, they are making their purchasing decisions at the end of this year and the console cycle will last five years. Maybe at that point people will be ready to move away from physical media, but not now.

Also trotting out millionaire loudmouths like David Jaffe, Cliff Bleszinski, and Mikey Neumann to back your arguments isn't convincing, those guys are not consumer advocates. They are developer advocates who work closely with the very people developing these policies, not the folks who are buying consoles.

I personally don't know if it would or it wouldn't, but Cliff is a guy that has worked in the industry for a while, talked to developers and publishers alike, and I assume generally has a good insight into why some of these decisions get made as he's privy to a lot of behind close doors conversations. So I'm not going to say he is 100% correct, but I would wager he knows what he's talking about a little more than a person like me or anyone else that basically plays a lot of games and posts on a forum about them.

A great insight and I agree with the OP that the old policies potentially hurt the industry more. I'm a big PC guy and may not get either of the consoles anyway, but I'm right pissed to see those console things on PC games. I would like to see a reshuffle in the industry and now I'm really disappointed.

Also now I'm just more curious how will the mystrious steam box work, anyone?

@humanity I object to CliffB's assertion that more "tacked on multiplayer, microransactions, preorder bonuses, and shitty DLC" are now going to come because of the reversal. There was nothing to indicate Microsoft was discouraging or even caring about this stuff where it had nothing to do with what they were trying to do with their original scheme.

Basically it didn't matter which scheme Microsoft went with. We would see a Battlefield 4 expensive/special edition with some digital and physical bonuses along with a season pass and map packs for the XBox One.

You would assume that the people that originally conceived of the Xbox One's DRM all digital plan also knew what they were doing. You would assume that they conducted research on how the public would react to their new anti consumer policies. Everyone assumed they had to have weighed the positives and negatives from their decisions on the Xbox One

How did that work out for them?

There is an inherent flaw in assuming that people making decision know what they are doing because they are the people making the decisions. Remember Netlix and their "Qwikster" plan? I'm sure it was assumed that the people who thought of that idea also knew what they were doing.

Let's not forget that Microsoft did not reverse their policy until after E3 and after their pre-order numbers started to come in. The bomb crew themselves said that they had to have changed their mind after E3 because they wouldn't have been pushing policies that they knew would no longer exist.

@golguin: You are assuming that you know better?

There are no assumptions. It's what happened. They were wrong. It was their job to know how to be right. They weren't a bit wrong. They were completely wrong.

EDIT: The point I'm making is that you can't make this right by citing people who should know what's right. Consumers decide what's right and wrong. Their decision was made clear and both Netflix and Microsoft had to deal with that reality.

We'll actually never know because we never experienced any of it. They had a plan, they presented it and the public didn't accept it. Had they stuck to their guns and toughed out initially lackluster sales we might have seen people come around to it and seen some interesting new innovations in console gaming from the purchasing side - we also could have seen it crash and burn in which case they would have done exactly the same thing as they're doing now.

The worst part is that we have no idea. You are speculating that it would have been terrible, but neither you nor I nor the millions of people that were outraged by these decisions actually know for sure.

Like I said earlier I'm not stating that Bleszisnki is spot on and we should listen to everything he says - but seeing regular people who have no interactions with the inside machinations of the gaming industry say he's an idiot and doesn't know a goddamn thing is ridiculous. I can guarantee that he knows more about these things than 99% of people posting on these forums - whether he's right about all of them is another matter.

@chibithor: I own about 50 xbla games (full retail and arcade). Half of these were bought at 50 or 75% off.

I got Sleeping Dogs a few moths after release for $10. Alan Wake, Dirt 2, grid, Tomb Raider, Mark of the Ninja, etc... All at discounts equal to or better than a Steam sale. I think Microsoft needs to make people more aware of their sales as I keep seeing everyone online say that they never have any.

We will never know the benefits that would have come from their plan, but we did know the negatives (several were an instant deal breaker because of my situation) and that was enough for people to say no. There were apparently enough people saying no that the pre-order projections forced their hand. That was the answer Microsoft was given and so they admitted defeat. They were not willing to risk the crash and burn for their decision.

It doesn't matter that we don't know as much about the industry as Cliffy. All that mattered in this case was the question of will people buy into Microsoft's new direction. Enough people answered no to force Microsoft to drop it all. In this particular case anyone advocating what would be best for the consumer doesn't need to say anything because they already got their answer and it was no.

Yah it's the biggest shame that they backed off. This story has been told many times but Steam was complete shit when it was first released. I elected to purchase a 5 -FIVE- disc copy of Half-Life 2 instead of purchasing it from Steam at the time. It was, by all means, a complete failure at launch. If Valve would have just called it quits back then we wouldn't have the excellent PC platform that it is today. I can't help but wonder what Microsoft could have potentially accomplished if they stuck with this plan and made minor adjustments along the way. You're ignoring the fact that sometimes the consumer doesn't know they want something until they try it. Microsoft basically extended a spoonful of veggies to the gaming public, which grimaced and turned away, and instead of forcing the issue they caved and just gave them the same old candybar instead.

I would say that IBM and not Gates delivered a system that allowed competitors to bring a price point that suited the masses.

I have posted in other instance that I feel that Microsoft should have went completely disk-less for the XBox One and avoided a lot of these specific PR issues (and picked up other ones but that is another thread). I don't object to a completely disk-less system as long as it is seamless, portable, and cheaper which are all issues with the XBox One and it still has the optical drive.

And you're ignoring the fact that Microsoft has historically failed at predicting what consumers wanted, and failed even harder at getting them to adopt what their engineers had devised. Zune? GFWL? Windows 8? Heck, for Windows 8 alone, Microsoft had their hand forced. Their engineers had devised this new UI for their OS designed to be driven by touch. But they made the mistake of designing a tablet OS for PCs and removed basic navigation functionality that had been in place since Windows 95. And Windows 8's struggles aren't because of a consumer-base that doesn't understand the benefits of what they refuse to adopt; it's because Microsoft is forcing a wholesale change that has no real benefit to a large portion of their existing audience, who instead of upgrading are content to remain with Windows 7 for as long as possible. Hence, they're going back and adding back in old UI functionality in Windows 8.1.

We're also talking about a company that still forces Gold subscriptions upon XBL users if they wish to access anything meaningful on the service (including other subscription services). That hardly sounds like putting the consumer's best interests at heart.

"this is all your fault"

@hailinel: You're being very naive if you think there is anything apart from "profit" at the top of Sony's priorities.

@chaser324: Hey now I call my ISP every time my internet goes down and demand a refund for the time I didn't have service. I wouldn't call that entitlement at all I paid for that service I didn't get it I should get that money back. I entered into a contract I give them so and so much money for internet service and they give me said service they break their end of the deal I make sure I get refunded. If developers and publishers want to switch from a product to a service that is the kind of thing they are going to have to deal with. When you pay for a service you are paying to have it when it's not there you are all of a sudden paying for nothing and for the vast majority of people that will not fly.

@humanity: I wasn't talking about Sony. This conversation is about Microsoft. But if you want to go down that road, then of course Sony is profit-driven. But in this case, they also forced Microsoft's hand because they were the first to offer something that more closely matches what the majority know they want.

I think it's better to hope that companies have some sense of morality and decency than throw them all into the pits of capitalistic amoral hell from the outset. Fact is, long term growth and success depends on treating your consumer base well and expressing care for them. Sony realized that after acting like pricks and MS is realizing it now.

Don't assume corporations are evil giants and maybe, sometimes, they will surprise you. If they are evil giants, like every fossil fuel energy company, then shout it from the hill tops!

@kierkegaard: Not evil giants, but they are still corporations responsible mainly for turning out profit, no matter how much they smile and tell you they understand the common gamer. Sony isn't evil but a lot of their marketing strategies are a direct result of their competition.

@chaser324: Earlier i said i disagreed with almost everything you said but upon further reflection it's not so much the business model and goals Microsoft was pursuing that i'm against but rather the way they were trying to achieve these goals. I think the destination has a lot of merits but Microsoft is taking the worst possible path to get there.

You like many others drew some comparisons to Steam but there is a few key differences that most people fail to see between Steam and Microsoft's approach and how that approach impacts the consumers. The first and most important for me is the impact on consumer rights. Used games, online requiring a unique key, renting games, lending games etc. Steam definitely took away some of those rights but not all of them. Some like online and the need for a unique CD key and renting games were already either gone or extremely limited in ways that when looking at Steam you wouldn't hear people complaining about loosing these avenue to play games because of Steam itself, they were already gone anyway and they slowly disappeared over many years. The Xbox One as initially revealed was going to take all of this away or at least severely limit options in one fell swoop. The first of those 2 scenarios is bad, the second one is worst.

The second really important difference is in each platform's respective market. Steam impacted no one other than those who had to play Half-Life 2 or Counter-Strike at all cost. Even a couple years later when they eventually built a substantial library of games available most of them were available outside the platform itself. One of the key to Steam's success is how people willingly came to the platform over time after years of hard work showing how the system is better. So if you look at the situation of consumer rights and how many are potentially affected, Steam was affecting a smaller number of people, on a smaller number of specific issues and compensated people with a vastly more convenient ways to play games on PC.

Microsoft has a huge install base of potential customers and up until yesterday's news they were telling these 70-something millions Xbox 360 owners and 70-something millions PS3 owners they are trying to court that all these rights are gone and with a message regarding how things will actually become better that is at it's best extremely vague and at it's worst non-existent. Instead of showing how the system is better they would lock people out of a system they like with no way for anyone to actually see said system at work and see what the big deal is, if there is a big deal to begin with. If they want people to adopt a new system they have to show in which ways it's better. Things like until very recently seeing Gears of War 1 still going for 40$ on games on demand isn't exactly reassuring of Microsoft having any will to offer the one thing that will make such a system work, better pricing.

All of this to say that Steam was facing an uphill battle and all it was really facing was a niche market that had already lost a number of those consumer rights anyway. Microsoft is facing a tougher battle, in a larger market and is going at it with the worst messaging i have ever seen in this industry... I think it is a great decision from them to do this complete 180 until they have actually figured out why people are upset and why it worked for Steam and then figured out all the other problems they are facing that are unique to their situation.

Now, the part about poor publishers and developers suffering is complete and utter bullshit. In another thread i said that AAA development is the video game industry equivalent to natural selection. The smart developers/publishers will shine and the stupid will shut down.

If you were in charge of a company who would you appoint to lead a team making a AAA game? Cliff Bleszinski or the people at Square that said that selling 3.4 millions copies of Tomb Raider in a month was not enough and who's only solution to making AAA games is to throw more money and people at the project until something works or the people at CD Projekt Red who made The Witcher 2, a bigger, longer, better looking game, a game for which they gave a ton of additional content for free and were seemingly stoked after selling a million copies?

Better management is what this industry needs, not for the consumers to keep pouring money in and help keeping failed management and businessmen going.

Edit: Oh yeah, i guess i should add what i'd like to see from these consoles. They have to make sure 100% of games are available digitally and start competing for real with used game. It's not that hard really. Steam had to compete with free (piracy being much more rampant on PC) and they managed to do pretty well. Consoles have it easy, they have to compete with used games. They're cheaper but still not free and really not that cheaper anyway.

If they do that, people will naturally move towards that all digital all the time library of games.

I don't understand where people are getting all this insight into Microsoft's proposed DRM. They're messaging was so bad. They hardly did anything to explain why it might be beneficial. And what they did let out was never followed up on.

But somehow Microsoft was bringing us to the promised land.

"A lot of publishers and developers are really struggling out there right now. If we want video games to be a healthy industry, something has to be done."

People don't really understand capitalism. No, nothing has to be done. Keep buying the games you like, the way you like. Publishers and developers that are really struggling are doing something wrong. They are spending too much money or making products that nobody really care about.

Also I'm a bit unclear about that point: If "developers are really struggling" how does the average gamer embracing the original XBox One DRM scheme help? In their mind do they think people will be more eager to buy games under a system that is more convoluted and puts more burden on someone who is supposed to be doing some leisure time activity?

@pr1mus: I'll admit that a lot of my defense is built around the potential of a digital-centric home console. Microsoft certainly could've failed to deliver on that promise, but I suppose I was willing and able to take the leap. In spite of the fact that it may have been a total failure, they were making an attempt to thrust things forward, and I guess I admired that to some extent.

Unfortunately, "even the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry," and in the case of the Xbox One, the plans weren't all that well laid out. The failure of that original proposal and any of its potential benefits to come to fruition falls solely at the feet of Microsoft. I put no fault on the consumer for not buying into it.

At the very least though, we will be getting a far more substantial digital storefront than what we have now. Hopefully, the platform holders and publishers will make proper use of it and try to make an aggressive push to sell gamers on the potential benefits. Microsoft tried to skip over all of the trials, tribulations, and missteps that Steam made along the way. Maybe it would've worked, maybe it wouldn't. Now, Microsoft and the publishers are going to have to put in the effort to prove the potential.

@skooky: A lot of the defense is based on the potential of being more focused on digital and the potential of ideas like the shared library. You're totally spot on to call out Microsoft for not elaborating enough on those possible benefits. This sudden policy reversal represents a massive failure of their strategy team to create a solid plan and their PR team for failing to properly market any upside.

@crcruz3: I understand the realities of capitalism and survival of the fittest, but I stand by the fact that doing something to reduce the massive risk associated with making a game would be beneficial. The current market forces most publishers and developers to be largely risk-averse by sticking strictly with proven sellers. Anything that can relax the risk/reward margins a bit could allow for some more experimentation with the same potential reward but less potential for a studio closure from a single failure.

DRM, publisher/developer financials aside; What was the actual benefit of being a connected device for consumers? I am still not really grasping what their all digital future really meant. I mean, I have several hundred songs offline synched to my phone on Spotify. Netflix is instant streaming movie library for a small cost per month. What was it about making the console less convenient for consumers that actually benefitted anyone on the consumer side? And are any of your benefits actually linked to any of the restrictions? Or are the restrictions they had linked to features that simply ends up as "take it or leave it" value features.

@pezen: Admittedly, almost all of the potential consumer benefits were hypothetical. The shared library and flexible pricing models had potential upside in the eyes of many, but in order for those sorts of ideas to work, some tradeoffs do have to be made in the form of stricter licensing. Even with stricter licensing though, there was certainly still no guarantee of those hypothetical benefits coming to fruition.

I'm not sure that MS original policies for the Xbox One would have change the situation of these struggling studios that you talk about. I think this all digital future is going to happen anyway and that nobody has to enforce it and that nobody can stop it. We'll see...

@crcruz3: Yeah, it is pretty much a wait and see sort of thing at this point. Even with Microsoft retreating to a more traditional disc-based release model, I think the beefing up on the digital side for both the Xbox One and PS4 still has the potential to drastically shift the market over the course of the next several years. It's definitely going to be interesting to see how the industry, both on the producer and consumer side, evolves and adapts to the changing landscape.

I think it was SE's fault for putting them into unreasonable positions, profit-wise. All of their other games supposedly did just fine, and we never hear about poor sales. All of a sudden, two Western-developed games come out and "underperform", and they get blamed for poor sales figures. I think they were trying to find a scapegoat, and by golly, they found it.

@humanity said:

The big difference is that Valve isn't beholden to shareholders. Microsoft is legally obligated to make a return for it's investors. They don't have the same flexibility that Valve has to stick with something and make adjustments over time.

@chaser324: I'm sorry but i just don't think it is fair to call gamer entitled when many of us have supported this industry buying new and supporting all games and not just AAA stuff. I also don't think it is fair to force this on consumers when no console has shown a compete progressive push for a digital future. All consoles parties need work on that front so i don't see why we should just have blind faith to will be for the better and the benefit will at some point fall to us.

@phantomzxro: I'll admit that this certainly isn't the most egregious form of gamers' sense of entitlement that I've seen. There are perfectly legitimate criticisms to be made about the original Xbox One policies and Microsoft's delivery. However, there were certainly quite a few critiques being leveled that seemed to not accept the realities of the industry and the conflicting influences of forces like Valve and GameStop that are actively shifting the playing field.

Rest assured though that the platform holders and publishers still have used games in their crosshairs, and now that attempts to immediately bring about their end have failed, they're going to be doing everything they can to push digital purchases and build a solid consumer base in that market.

One way to push digital purchases is to reduce the price of them compared to physical copies. Sony, not Microsoft, has tried this. Unfortunately, they've left the decision up to publishers.

@sergio: I agree that better pricing will help, and I think that will probably get better on Xbox One and PS4. However, I don't think you're going to see anything all that aggressive until there's a certain critical mass of users that are actively buying their console games digitally. As long as publishers and developers are still relying primarily on disc sales and need shelf space and in-store marketing, I don't see them being willing to poison that relationship with traditional retailers.

@chaser324: I agree to an extent.

Sony's policies have embraced digital distribution, while maintaining a physical channel, for a long time.They've allowed for Vita downloads to be priced less than physical copies. I only own one physical game for that device. But this pricing model hasn't caught on with all (if any) publishers.

Sony's stance on indie developers is that they can self-publish and set their own price. So there's at least some hope from indie developers on PS4 setting reasonable prices, and possibly sales. One thing mentioned on the latest Bombcast was if the Witcher 3 could have free DLC on consoles like on the PC, and hopefully Sony's position will extend to this - or at least pricing them low, like a dollar.

I'm surprised Microsoft didn't adopt this last part with their recent changes.

@sergio: Yeah, Sony definitely has a decent head start with some of the stuff they've been doing with PS+ discounts and the Vita. Although, I would argue that there's more of a precedent for people buying things digitally on mobile platforms, so the Vita is probably an easier place to make a transition like that. Even Nintendo is actually doing pretty well with sales on the 3DS eShop.

As for things like self-publishing and DLC pricing restrictions, but I don't think a lot of that stuff has been set in stone yet. I feel like with the ubiquity of "the cloud" that it wouldn't be a big deal to allow some DLC to be freely distributed, but who the hell knows at this point.

I was actually pretty excited about some of the benefits of the Xbone as well. The family sharing and no disc required sounded awesome to me and the the negatives (used games, always online) do not affect me. I'm still interested to see how things pan out in the end, but it's slightly less exciting now.

@chaser324: The way you put it sounds very much like entitlement on the other side. All that is required from a consumer is to put money in the industry. Its really not our place to work this out for them. Its all on publishers and people in the industry to make changes that work for everyone. People here spend a ton of money that goes into this industry, so i find it a slap in the face to say we have to do more or give up freedoms we have enjoyed for many console life cycles.

The Industry has the power to change all this but they have to put in the work first and not just make the choice that benefits them the most and that hurts consumers. The end result is consumers voted with their wallet and you cant call them entitled because thats the one thing consumers have all the say in. You want to bring in a new future than make sure consumers are on broad and that their input is included and weighted. Then you wont look like a joke like microsoft does right now.

I'm sure people will embrace a digital future but this was not the way. i dont give them any points for trying or any support in the idea because it was bad from the start. lets learn some lessons from steam and not have a message of deal with it. I'm sorry no other business treats consumers that way, and if I'm spending $1000s of dollars a year you have to come better than what microsoft did.

@phantomzxro said:

The industry does have the power to change, but changes and transitions can be pretty tough, especially when there's so much inertia in certain parts of the industry. Microsoft maybe tried to jump ahead in the story, but this freight train is starting to go off the tracks a bit and eventually it will get turned around.

Also keep in mind that transitions can be pretty painful, for people both producing and consuming content. People will continue to be laid off and more developers and publishers are going to go out of business. However, the pain of transitioning to newer business models probably won't fall solely on the production side. Some users probably are going to have some tough realities to face, too. I hate to say it, but the bottom line is that companies don't really have to "make changes that work for everyone." All they really have to do is make changes that work for enough people to sustain business. Content production and distribution changes over time, but so do user bases. Some new segments are probably going to join the gaming audience, but some people probably are going to end up not coming along for the ride.

Microsoft messed up. They scrambled and threw together a confusing and poorly organized plan, and they did an even worse job of expressing the details of that plan. The rest of the industry didn't support their plan and neither did consumers. So, the plan changed, but I think the same end point is still in sight. It's just been pushed a little bit farther back, and companies are maybe going to have work a little harder to get there.

Apparently the "family share plan" was just a glorified demo service if the stuff coming out today is to be believed.

@chaser324: Yeah but with the bloated budgets of triple a games now days these developers and publishers can't afford to alienate anyone period when they need to sell 10 million copies of a game to even start making a profit they simple have to make changes that work for everyone. The only other option is to deflate and drop the budgets of these games to realistic levels that don't require what would have been considered a completely and utter smash hit in generations past just to make some money.

Yes world of warcraft has 12 million subscribers and halo and call of duty sell 11.2 million copies in there first week but that kinda success is not easily obtained and certainly not what you should be planing for when you budget something.

I have a hard time feeling bad about used games when you see publishers like Activision sending out great games like Singularity to die while overspending to put Jimmy Kimmel in their Call of Duty Super Bowl ad for a game that's going to sell millions of copies even if they just had a homeless guy with a piece of cardboard that said "New Call of Duty Iz Out, Get Now!"

Gaming industries problems are much larger than anyone's desire to trade in their copy of Need For Speed to go toward the new Need For Speed, it's just an easy target and it manages to put all of the supposed responsibility on gamers while publishers keep riding the same train. And while we all derive great pleasure in talking shit about Gamestop, Gamestop was going to be one of the few retailers that would actually get to participate in Microsoft's grand used game re-imagining plans, while smaller 1-off businesses would likely get left out in the cold.