Luddite

@sephirm87: You go to business with the audience you have, not the audience you wish you had.

Ultimately, Microsoft demanded a lot of concessions in exchange for fairy dust and magic beans. Whether it was a failure of messaging or actual policy is indeterminable at this point, as they never concretely stated what we would be getting in exchange for those concessions. Their allusions were not bankable, I don't care about sports, or tv, or kinect, and thus I was clearly not a customer that they wanted.

Does that make me backwards? Not my problem. I am part of the potential audience, and I don't give up my consumer rights unless there is some quid fuckin' pro quo.

I think they're throttling the experience too hard. It won't be long before online matches become impenetrable for new players, who will leave out of frustration rather than spend all their tokens on constantly losing. I'd bet a cosmetic selling model would have generated more revenue in the long run.

The Steam model works because Steam is way way looser with its pricing. It will regularly and consistently downshift price to match consumer demand, rather than insist that demand match its price. They also reliably have big sales for patient gamers. While I can't share my games, I also nearly never pay full price for a game. Add in several other features and functions of Steam, and you have a value package. Yes, you have a type of DRM, but Valve has made it a value proposition.

Microsoft's problem is that they have failed to make it a value proposition. In exchange for DRM, they're offering the 'infinite power of the cloud'. I know bullshit when I hear it, thank you very much. And the day that changing the disc represents an onerous task is the day I put down the controller and get some more damn exercise. What Microsoft needs to do, and I don't think they will because they have a captive audience, is an aggressive pricing approach for their digital media.

We would also have accepted aficionados.

As someone who plays a lot of games, doesn't care about sports, and doesn't care about cable TV, I'm not seeing a lot of draw here. Given the US-centric nature of these features, are they ceding the international audience to the other consoles? That seems like a mistake.

But perhaps they are targeting a difference audience that I am not simply a part of, and that's ok.

I also fail to comprehend why people would care what the PS4 looks like. Are they going to not purchase it solely on the grounds that it does not fit with their decor? That's called missing the god damn point.

They had me with Overstrike.

They lost me with Fuse.

@FierceDeity said:

No, marketing and advertisement are simply a means of disseminating information. Surely people are not so weak willed as to have their opinions, their very thoughts, shaped by such messages?

Disseminating image, not information. Marketing has lied to me plenty of times, I just happen to usually ignore it.

Trying to express any sort of nuanced opinion on the subject matter in this trainwreck appears to be a lost cause.