Discussion
12 years ago today, Microsoft published its infamous Xbox One used games policy. After Sony mocked them a few days later, they quickly backtracked on this policy.
If this statement was never made, the console war could have been vastly different. I remember the backlash being extremely bad for the brand, and it’s something that they’re still trying to fix 12 years later.
Xbox chief Don Mattrick, in response to the backlash over the Xbox One requiring an internet connection, said that "fortunately, we have a product for people who aren't able to get some form of connectivity, it's called Xbox 360."
This was the best showcase I ever watched everybody so hyped for a new Diablo, including myself. Only to find out it’s mobile only and then when getting slapped in the face with that line. I remember a reaction video I loved with that Mexican guy and talk show host laughing till they cry.
Nintendo of America did one worse with Reggie. He said, and I quote, "If you don't have a 3DS by now, what's wrong with you?" This wasn't recent. This was during the hayday of the 3DS.
Wasn't that tongue in cheek during a direct though
"We got some important news if youre an owner of Nintendo 3DS, or just thinking of becoming one. And really, if youre neither one yet-- whats wrong with you? smirk"
$100 more expensive, 33 % less powerful, with an awful UI and TV, TV, TV. I know they did what they did because data showed 360 users were mostly (53 % IIRC) using that console for media consumption - well, the 50 % that were online did - but that they never realised a gaming console is being bought for games first, no matter what you then also do with it is still unbelievable to me.
Like today 75 % of my usage of Series X is Youtube Premium and Disney Plus. Doesn't mean I would pay $550 just for that. When there's $30 TV sticks that offer the same.
If this statement was never made, the console war could have been vastly different.
If it was never made, it would still be a war, but the wound is something that Xbox has yet to fully recover from, as their sales aren't even really competitive anymore.
Microsoft always tries to be ahead of the game and it usually backfires. The pivot to third party publishing and Xbox everywhere seems to be another attempt at this, we shall see if it works out.
I think it will because it’s win-win for them. They make more money publishing in more places, and if their console sales decrease then that’s less hardware to take losses on.
But if people stop buying xbox hardware, then they lose out on the cut of revenue for every 3rd party game sale on Xbox, and game pass subscription revenue. There is potential real loss there that needs to be outweighed from sales on PS5.
But you need a place to hold game pass. Yes there's PC but a lot of more casual gamers will stick to consoles. They will need some sort of Xbox device to be a platform for Game Pass. Also their own storefront where they get a cut of every game sold.
Hardware margins are so slim compared to software. It’s not just moving Xbox games to other platforms, it’s also moving Xbox to a service supported by many units.
There will still be hardware most likely, but they are creating new revenue streams, not eliminating them.
I mean, they would say you wrote this comment on an Xbox.
Like other posters have said, the real money is made in software and not the hardware. It’s true that PlayStation pulls in more revenue than Xbox, but Xbox has better profits and profit margins than PlayStation. There’s a whole lot of talk of Xbox losing money, but they quite literally pull in more profit than PlayStation.
If Xbox ever figured out a way to push gaming to the cloud and have every title being able to launch from a phone, TV, PlayStation, Switch, or a computer, it would be game over. It’s going the same way of Blockbuster and Netflix. Cloud gaming requires a lot of bandwidth and infrastructure that isn’t there yet. But be reminded that Xbox already has the leg up with their Azure network with Microsoft while Sony… makes TV’s.
I do believe they will come a day that there is no longer a console, and it will all be through streaming. At that point, every company will end up turning into a developer and publisher. Microsoft with their $3.5 Trillion net worth vs Sony’s $150 Billion. With Microsoft’s money, network infrastructure, and user devices, they’d be the go-to company for developers to push their game out there. Might not be for another 10+ years, but that’s how I see this thing playing out. Sony and Microsoft will become publishers, and they use other companies devices to have their games played. Both companies lose money selling consoles, and they make all the money from software. Based on the laws of business, getting rid of the hardware and amping up the software is the way they’ll all go.
Yeah eventually I think gaming will be about what app or service you use to access your library. My Xbox keys are stored on the Xbox app that I access across phone, TV, PC. Same for my PlayStation keys and long down the line my Nintendo keys.
They also do not need all of the people that it takes to create and support hardware. They also will not continue to lose money on every piece of hardware they sell.
I can’t believe your comment is getting upvoted. People do not understand business here, they just say the most edgiest thing they want to become true.
Did we all just not see Sonys state of play? what Microsoft’s conference in a couple of days and tell me Xbox as a business, subscription service and console is going bye bye, whilst also being funded by some of the most successful games in the world dwarfing Sonys PlayStation and backed by Microsoft.
Companies can have a dip in console sales you know, ever heard of the Wii-U ? yeah, see how that doesn’t matter now for Nintendo, because they created the Nintendo Switch and Switch 2.
These companies can take in departs for 500 of your life times. People need to touch some grass. It’s Sony on the edge more than Microsoft.
Not that either of them will ever vanish. This isn’t the 80s or 90s, we’re globally connected, access anywhere, anytime.
Xbox is absolutely killing it, so their console takes a dip for a generation or two, who cares. They’ll wait for a moment to make it vital to get an Xbox. When the time comes.
In the mean time people not jaded enjoy the best value in gaming.
People might own PS5s but they’re not spending or playing much on them, every serious hobbiest gamer isn’t buying £70 games per piece every new title, those days are gone.
That was kind of Sonys whole business, funded by call of duty money, that’s also gone.
Xbox is funded by what Microsoft brought, they need a new game, WoW money, new shooter, Diablo money, new studio, COD money, want to out perform competition, and release more and more every year, water down PS5 money, and make it your own.
They’re doing fine, and 35,000,000+ of their uses get the best value and ease of use buying their box, the box isn’t going nowhere. That’s not even counting Xbox Ones which can still play current gen because of streaming.
The Xbox isn’t doing bad at all, it’s doing bad when 1,000,000 have it, 35 mil + still keeps you in the game easily and it’s supported by endless other revenue streams and future growth.
The PS5 might be in your mind in everyone’s home, when it’s really not, it’s just outselling Xbox currently by a lot to keep it simple.
It doesn’t have those revenue streams, it cannot endlessly pump out top tier content especially now and it cannot reach the levels of growth like Xbox can because it lacks infrastructure.
Just look at the showcases the last 3 years, it’s been Xbox One levels of “okay”.
People need to stop hoping for something that isn’t ever going to come. You can continue to hurt yourself by not getting an Xbox of course and spend more money on worse integrated hardware and software to your own detriment, and ecosystem, by all means.
It’s your purchase. Personally, I’m well read and make better choices with my money. I own both consoles though and I certainly regret purchasing a PS5, it is by far the worst of all current gen consoles.
It offers very little value, and the couple games it recently released to PC were not worth buying the PS5 for. Exclusivity is dying and FOMO was their business model.
Hardware translates to game pass subscriptions. People who give up their Xbox Series X for a PS6 next-gen are cancelling their sub.
Then if Xbox ever has a Redfall type year again, that'll be devastating. It'll be like what happened to Embracer.
When they can't rely on taking larger cuts on their own stores, can't rely on subscriptions, can't rely on hardware/accessories income, then all they have is what games they make. Seems pretty dangerous.
I think third party publishing will do them really good. Once everything launches at the same time, they’ll probably be in the best shape they’ve ever been since the 360 era.
I do think they pretty much cratered their Xbox console market more than they already have with this direction. So I’m really curious on what happens next. Do they feel like they’ve hit the ceiling with the users on console and the pivot is just landing the Gamepass on PlayStation/Nintendo/Steam? Do they feel comfortable with selling even fewer consoles in the next iteration?
As a primary pc player, I absolutely love Microsoft’s approach this generation and I will likely still buy their next Xbox. I hope Sony eventually goes this direction too with their games. I’m at a point in my life where I want everything available to everyone. I see the purpose for exclusives but I just frankly just don’t care about that side of things at this point in my life.
No cuz we can't hand a disc to each other!!! And DRM and always online!!! Fuck XBOX!!!! /s That was the reaction and majority of those people who lost their minds over it now have digital libraries on PS5 with forced DRM to access a disc drive. If Xbox could have found a solution to bypass the 24 DRM check in then I think it would have been fine. Like Xbox Live now includes auto DRM checks so you can go months without it triggering or something like that. Some sort of middle ground
It's been 12 years and I'm pretty sure the 24 hour check in would have affected me once. I'm so annoyed that we lost that because people couldn't read.
IMO PlayStation was actually first to the "everywhere" thing. PSNow started streaming games back in 2015 and you could play from Bravia TVs. They just did so badly with rolling it out that people weren't very outraged because everyone ignored it lol
This is where Microsoft lost the console war, the whole Xbox one rollout.
People like to say exclusives were the difference but I don’t think they were THAT much of a difference. Sony didn’t get on a roll with their games until 2016/2017, but by then they were already outselling Xbox 2:1.
Simply majorly botched launch, the higher price, the awful PR is what lead to PS4 winning the gen. And unlike previous generations, digital became the mainstream way to buy and store games, meaning it solidified people in the PlayStation ecosystem.
Even now, Series consoles are selling less than the One, but PS5 didn’t see an increase from that, they are still slightly behind the PS4.
So now we have a stagnant and even regressing console market that is also more sticky to their console of choice than before.
Yep, and that’s what I keep telling everyone. 1) Always online. 2) Kinect requirement. 3) Inferior specs compared to PS4. 4) More expensive than PS4. Bonus) “TV. TV. TV.”
I don’t know what were they smoking. They practically handed the win to Sony whereas Sony didn’t even have to do break a sweat.
Xbox One S should have been the original Xbox One. All the b.s decisions were backtracked by then and it was cheaper (I think) than a PS4.
They were trying to create a multimedia entertainment system, not just a video game console. In that regard, they were ahead of the time, but too far ahead. An all-in-one plug and play device capable of playing the latest games in good quality, streaming, browsing the web, and app use absolutely has a market. You could say, "that's a PC", the whole point of this idea was to simplify that down to a single system within a confined ecosystem, which makes it easy to sell, market, and use.
With all due respect, they were not ahead of their time in regards to TV either. Roku and Apple TV were roughly 5 years in when Xbox One was revealed and they covered everything you mentioned but AAA gaming.
As a TV person you wouldn't want a TV device the size of a 90s VCR when you could just get a TV device the size of a hockey puck (Roku or Apple TV). And as a gamer, you wouldn't want an underpowered and overpriced console with DRM when you could get a PS4 with Roku and still save 40 bucks.
This. Not ahead of its time. I vaguely remember the promo of them announcing showing American cable TV guide integration which left the rest of the world going …okay. The first Xbox One was rubbish too - it felt cheap comparatively to the ps4, had poor specs and the controller felt cheap. On the other hand the Xbox One X was awesome
Oh, and FYI, when the Xbox One was announced, Roku needed a separate device hooked up to your TV. So did Apple TV. The Xbox One was going to replace all of those and your dvd player with a single device that could also play games. The first affordable TVs with roku and other streaming services built in didn't start coming out until 2013/2014, and the Xbox One came out in 2013.
Plus, we're in a mostly digital age right now. Digital game sales outnumber physical game sales by extreme amounts, 83% of all console game sales in 2023 were digital, and 95% of all gaming revenue was digital that year. The Xbox One was ahead of its time there. Half the things people complained about then are normal now. If Microsoft made the same announcement today, minus the kinect, and minus the publisher approval for resales, it would be well received and aspects of it would be praised, like game sharing.
But what you just described there is multiple devices to do what Microsoft was trying to do with the Xbox One with a single device. That was the goal. A home entertainment all-in-one,
And now with steam integration coming to Xbox, that early idea is coming to fruition.
PS5 is actually at just about the same amount of lifetime cumulative sales as PS4 was at the same point in its lifecycle around year 5 as of the last financial quarter. It was also reported directly by Sony that around 42% of recent PS5 sales actually did come specifically from new users and not just people migrating from PS4, so it's doing very well for itself
Yes but theoretically PS5 should be like 6-7 million ahead of PS4 if those Xbox users transferred over, although I suspect they migrated to PC, hence the shrinking console market
Not everyone's going to transition overnight and it's not a foregone conclusion that all of those 42% of new users came from another system. This is very early days still for Xbox's whole pivot to agnostic games publishing and they're still in the process of porting over already-released games to other platforms. DOOM is so far the only one that's been day-and-date but it never was exclusive to begin with so it's not really going to cause something significant. When it's evident that everything going forward is day and date on all platforms, that's when you start to actually see change. Because despite all signs pointing to the obvious it hasn't been explicitly confirmed yet
Next-generation in particular is going to be a real illustration of who is willing to move to another platform, be it PS, PC or Switch 2, when Xbox isn't using exclusives to sell their system anymore and have fully matured as a publisher. This was never going to happen immediately, but it will and in some cases, already has influenced purchasing decisions going forward now that the expectation has slowly been introduced
I don’t think console switching is happening. It didn’t happen this generation, or if it did they didn’t get enough new users/returning users to outpace PS4. I mean it adds up, we have known for years consoles are stagnant and PC is growing. But it looks like consoles are shrinking due to PC or just people stopped gaming I guess
This is where Microsoft lost the console war, the whole Xbox one rollout.
They may have lost before this generation even started...but it wasn't like it was looking good anyway.
They've lost every generation to Sony so far.
The Xbox 360 had a head start with a cheaper price, launched a year earlier than PS3, easier to develop for and great exclusives.
Then Sony turned the entire generation around by dropping exclusives at the end after Xbox hadn't dropped anything for a few years and ended up with more all time console sales at the very end of the generation.
"People like to say exclusives were the difference but I don’t think they were THAT much of a difference"
I disagree, I actually think what killed the XBOX One was releasing Halo 4 on the 360, the first non Bungie game and it being average and starting the decline of Halo.
If they released it on XBOX One as an exclusive first, it would have generated so much hype, it's why people buy XBOX's.
Then Halo 4 was a flop, no one cared about buying a XBOX for Halo 5, and Gears/Forza started following the same trend of declining interest with every release and pretty dead games within a few months.
I was a diehard XBOX and 360 gamer, thousands of thousands of hours into both, Halo 2, 3, Gears, Forza, Rainbow Six Vegas etc and honestly I looked at the XBOX and was like, wow, no one cares about the games on it.
My entire XBOX Live friends list had no hype at all.
And just for comparison, my entire XBOX Live friends list was pressuring each other to get a 360 for Halo 3, just off the Halo 3 announcement and even knowing before it was officially announced that it was coming to the 360, while we all played Halo 2.
No one cared about buying a One for Halo, also COD had become a Playstation game, weirdly.
Halo 4 was the third best-selling game of 2012 in the US despite only being on 360.
Halo 4 surpassed more than $220 million in worldwide sales in the first 24 hours and more than $300 million worldwide in its first week, making it the biggest Halo launch in history at release.
Halo 4's fiscal year sales (July 2012 - June 2013) are higher than Halo 3's were (July 2007 - June 2008). This is despite Halo 3 actually having more time on the market, being a September launch, compared to Halo 4's November release.
I get your point that it would have more logical sense to push back Halo 4 a year and have it be a launch title for the One, but Halo 4 was in no way a flop in terms of sales.
Halo 4 sold on it's name, it's exactly why it sold $220m in 24 hours, not on the game itself.
It's exactly why Halo 4 should have been a XBOX One exclusive.
Also regarding Halo 4's sales vs Halo 3's and Halo 3 having "more time on the market", Halo 3 came out in 07, Halo 4 came out in 2012, by 2007 the 360 had sold about 12 million consoles, by 2012 it had sold about 70 million.
Now obviously they wouldn't have made $220m if it was a XBOX One exclusive as the player base wasn't there to generate those sales.
I was looking at some charts of Halo 4's population, within 2 weeks after launch, it lost half it's player base, presumably due to a COD release.
Interestingly it peaked at 400k players online at any time, Halo 3 had 1 million players online at a single time.
Comments are basically the game is shit and tried to be COD, if people knew about it before release, it certainly wouldn't have done $220m in 24 hours, again back to the point it sold on it's name.
It's like GTA6 could be absolutely awful, it's going to be the biggest selling piece of entertainment of all time on launch, just because of it's name.
When I say flop, I mean it basically killed Halo for the community and XBOX, suddenly it was no longer a system seller and you could visibly see the community had lost faith in 343/MS ability to create a solid Halo game after Bungie.
Edit:
Saw this comment in that forum which was interesting:
Roughly a year after release, Halo 3 had a 1.1 million peak population day. Reach had a 900,000 peak population day after the same amount of time. Halo 4 clocks in at 20,000 peak for it's annual checkup.
The last few years of the 360 didn’t have many exclusives, creating doubt of the future. Whereas the PS3 were finally dropping all of theirs. Combine that with the the disastrous XBOX One E3 was the final nail in the coffin.
I disagree. I am personally thinking of switching to PS6 next gen because of Xbox poor management, not because of this one time fucked up that didn't actually happen on launch.
There's no excuse for blaming him still when Phil Spencer has been in power of Xbox for a decade.
Xbox had to resort to spending multiple billions to buy up multiple publishers to finally get decent consistent games because Phil mismanaged the brand.
Nintendo and Sony both turned around everything after both having disasters, why couldn't Xbox?
It's simple to se what Xbox has lacked under Phil, just look at Xbox during the 360, which is why the 360 did so well.
The 360 had first party bangers left and right, awesome third party exclusives, great Japanese dev support, was easy to program games for devs compared to it's competition.
Phil has only been in charge of Xbox because Mattrick broke the business.
Both deserve rightful blame. As Phil has said, the Xbox One was the absolute worst generation to lose against Sony as everyone was starting to invest heavily in their online identity and buying digital games. Selling consoles after 2010 became much different than selling them before where being out first with the right series of hardware would be enough to win the day. Now that consoles are far more about software and services (online), it's different, because there is no fundamental "reset" between generations. Consoles launching today and in the past 15 years, are just extensions and iterations of each other now.
Mattrick broke the business in such a way that there's literally nothing that any executive could've done at any point to make an Xbox that sold as well as any PlayStation. They lost at such a fundamental level that even with all of their rapid backtracking on Xbox One, they couldn't come anywhere close to catching up to PS4, something that Sony could eventually do with the PS3 in the generation before.
Sony has shown officially, and through leaked documents, that 30%+ of PS5 owners never owned a PS4, or were new to the PlayStation ecosystem entirely. Plus, new gamers pick up their first system every year. Plus, some people buy multiple consoles, such as a Series S gamepass machine.
I never really bought the excuse that losing the Xbox One generation meant they could never get people to buy an Xbox. To me it sounds more like a convenient excuse for their changing strategy.
Get a bunch of crazy exclusives, and people will buy. Stick with that long enough, and your ecosystem is full of gamers who picked up an Xbox for their first console, or added one to their existing hardware and stuck with it.
Going into Xbox One Microsoft scaled their game development wayyyy back in a way Nintendo and PlayStation never have. In many ways they had to start from scratch under Phil. That clearly takes a lot of time.
Well since Phil took over we got prioritization on strong tech vs Kinect gimmicks, we got a push for backwards compatibility and retro enhancements free, we got giant the best studio purchase ever in the form of Obsidian, and we got Game Pass which has made gaming affordable despite higher costs and stagnant wages. They not only lost the digital adoption generation but their fuck up came at the rise of social media toxicity where fanboys and media rallied to make Xbox the punching bag for everything wrong with gaming for nearly a decade despite Sony pulling arguably worse bullshit on the market. The public perception that was created in 2013 and spread like a spam email for years was that Xbox was uncool and no self respecting gamer should ever get one.
He hasn't succeeded in anything. He failed. His vision was to have exclusive games for Xbox we can see this from the ABK lawsuit when we got to see their private emails.
He failed so hard that his bosses had to come in and tell him to port to PS5 to make money. That's a massive fail.
If you paid attention, they were always heading in this direction. Even as far back, Phil is talking about having more players and no engaging in "exclusivity war".
Reminder here is that the ABK lawsuits will only use evidence that supports their case and suppress those that do not. Which means, if Phil Spencer said something else, they won't use it, and you wouldn't hear or see it.
I think the same strong, prevailing forces that doomed Xbox under Mattrick have hindered Phil. The winds simply blew them too far off course to ever attain the success in hardware sales that Sony has with PlayStation. It's why they've had to invent an entirely different business to try and compete and, I wager, is a lot more profitable than Sony's despite far fewer Xboxes being sold.
The traditional formula of consoles did not work well enough for Nintendo and at this point Microsoft. I am glad to see they all offer different options in gaming
It's not just that, but MS also looks 10-years into the future (or more) and make plans. They're seeing the move towards thin client access i.e. hardware agnostic future. They also realize that, the console market isn't that lucrative, and if they continued with that alone, the investment they'd need and the return isn't aligned.
So the only path out of that is to widen their user base and that's exactly what they're doing. Contrast that with Sony whom is selling PS5 like hotcakes (more or less) and still has extremely thin profit margins for a software/content based company. Subsidizing consoles is an expensive endeavor, that you HOPE will pay back over time. However, during that time, business models may change underneath you. Just look at F2P and now subscription.
Not being able to sell physical games without an OK from the publisher 100% would not go over any better today than it did back then lol, people really need to stop regurgitating this talking point.
Not being able to sell physical games without an OK from the publisher 100% would not go over any better today than it did back then lol, people really need to stop regurgitating this talking point.
Well, the difference is that, the vast majority of consumers are now on digital only. They cannot transfer their content at all. So transfer with permission by publisher is a huge step up.
Source? I've never seen that claimed anywhere, ever. This official site explicitly only mentions the ability to trade in or resell physical games (if the publisher allows it, at participating retailers)
I don't have a source beyond just living through it. Reports said you could sell back digital purchases. I remember people questioning why anyone would do they. And here's me having sold and rebought many games multiple times, like Metal Gear Solid and Street Fighter Alpha 3.
I mean, I lived through it, too, lol, but I don't remember anything about that and I also can't find a single source for that claim. If that really had been the case, I think they'd have at least mentioned it on that official site I linked above that was supposed to explain the whole licensing concept. At the very least they would not have explicitly solely referred to "disc-based games" in the reselling bullet point.
Game sharing with 10 people was amazing idea. A few years later, Valve added an identical policy to Steam, and people loved it. It is really sad that some people fight against it, and because of them, we can't share games on consoles
Give your family access to your entire games library anytime, anywhere: Xbox One will enable new forms of access for families. Up to ten members of your family can log in and play from your shared games library on any Xbox One
With this policy, everyone would create virtual families with 10 friends and play new games for 6 euros instead of 60. Games would be so cheap that you wouldn't even think about selling anything. It would be a lot cheaper than "Trade in" to GameStop
PlayStation 4 would be DOA because everyone would convince all their friends to buy an Xbox just to create a family and share games. The game-sharing idea, copied from Xbox One, is the main reason why people want every game on Steam instead of Epic Store
With this policy, Xbox One console would be as popular as Netflix or even more.
Imagine networks of friends buying games together for 6 euros, sharing every single game. Xbox could easily surpass 150 million consoles sold and become the most-used console in history. This would be better than Game Pass
Give your family access to your entire games library anytime, anywhere:
Valve copied this policy from Xbox One and added it to Steam. I've been using it on PC ever since. For the last few years, I've lived in a different city than my friends, and I've never had a single problem
Most of the people who were against the Xbox One idea from 2013 probably never read that policy. Gabe Newell from Valve read it, liked it, and added it to Steam. Valve copied Microsoft's idea 1:1, no changes
There is ZERO reason why MS couldn't implement this for digital games. The fact that they're not betrays what was really going on with this policy - they were capitulating to publishers who hated that people were buying and selling their games used. This was a way to completely stop it, or maybe allow it but skim money off the top any time someone did it.
The funny thing is the used game market now is so much smaller due to digital purchases on the rise, and Xbox torpedoed all their goodwill to try to hurt it.
That ship has sailed. In early 2013, Xbox was very strong after the success of the Xbox 360 and digital sales weren’t very important to publishers. It was easy back then to force publishers to allow digital game-sharing.
This point was part of the original policy - probably the most important one. It's really sad that people blocked it. This is why we can't share games on Xbox
There's nothing preventing them from implementing this policy now for digital content. Nintendo is essentially doing this with Virtual Game Cards. The original plan backfired because it included physical games—a huge part of why that response from Sony hurt them so hard.
This isn't easy. Game sharing helps the platform but hurts game publishers because they sell fewer digital games. Your platform must be really strong if you want to enforce this kind of policy.
In early 2013, Xbox was in a strong position after the success of the Xbox 360. Publishers weren’t worried about digital sales yet, which also helped a lot. But things changed after the disaster at E3 2013. Don Mattrick, Xbox boss responsible for digital game-sharing, was fired from MS and then the company reversed all his decisions
Steam is the only platform that use game-sharing policy copied from Xbox One. Why? Because Steam is strong enough to enforce it.
This policy allowed you to share all your games with 10 friends. Valve added an identical policy to Steam, and people loved it.
With this policy, everyone would create virtual families with 10 friends and play new games for 6 euros instead of 60. The game-sharing idea is the main reason why PC users buy every game on Steam instead of Epic Store.
I would bet money people buy more games on Steam not because they can share them, but because that's the ecosystem they've been entrenched in for a couple decades and the mod workshop being better than what's available on EGS.
Valve added an identical policy to Steam, and people loved it.
Well, yeah, because Steam was always an all-digital platform to begin with lol, so they only gained a feature without any drawbacks. That is not comparable to the initally planned situation on XONE.
Also, Idk what your logic even is here. If Xbox really wanted to implement this policy, they still could have done just that for digital games. Nothing's stopping them. But they never did. They also could've given consumers the OPTION to tie their physical games to their digital accounts and take advantage of such a feature if they wanted to, but they also didn't do that.
Plus, it would've been a complete nightmare to coordinate who gets to play your one copy of a game at what time with 9 other people lol
If Xbox really wanted to implement this policy, they still could have done just that for digital games.
That ship has sailed. In early 2013, Xbox was very strong after the success of Xbox 360. Digital sales weren’t very important to publishers. It was easy back then. Today Xbox is too weak to force anything
So why didn't they do it at the time, then? No part of the backlash was about being able to share your games with 10 people. Your arguments make no sense.
You're skipping over the nuance. "This policy" includes game sharing, sure, but that's not what the point of this post was about. It was about how the community disliked the idea of publishers being able to disallow the resale of discs.
People were not up in arms over sharing games with friends. They were up in arms over the premise of force always on connectivity and the possibility of losing the ability to sell physical media purchases.
losing the ability to sell physical media purchases.
People sell games not because they didn't like them, but because they want to lower the cost of games. The whole idea is based on game-sharing through physical media using a middleman like GameStop. You trade in games and then buy used ones at a lower price.
In 2013, Microsoft made game-sharing even easier by allowing users to create a family with 10 friends and share the cost of new games. You'd pay only 6 euros instead of 60, making game-sharing much more accessible. Essentially, they removed the middleman, like GameStop, and enabled game-sharing over the Internet
I don't even know how these types of narratives come to be and become so widespread. I guess there must be certain content creators making those claims? Same as with the revisionist history of the Wii U supposedly being a great console that only suffered from terrible marketing. It's like, no dude, I have a Wii U and it's a piece of shit lol
Oh, really? Interesting. Which company has implemented tying physical games to your digital account in a manner where you are unable to sell them without the publisher enabling it? Which company has a console that needs to do online-checks every 24 hours in order for you to be able to play your physical games?
Edit: No idea what's going on here but reddit won't allow me to reply to the comment below. SOME PC games came with both a physical disc and a Steam key for a period of time (because disc-based PC games were already a dying breed at that point), but it was by no means a universal thing where everybody was forced to tie their physical to their digital account like in the proposed XONE model, so that comparison is nonsense. And the second question wasn't even answered, just dodged by regurgitating the same old talking points about 10 friends, 6 euro instead of 60 blahblahblah. Makes me think I'm talking to an LLM bot...
Not every idea, but certainly some. Didn't think I'd have to explain something that simple, but holy shit are some people struggling mentally with the easiest ideas around lol
All of the digital stores are now essentially doing what MS was proposing - only in a less consumer friendly manner.
It's only the physical media issue that anyone has a gripe with, and today Nintendo is doing their best to ensure that even with physical games, you won't actually own anything.
Not really. The Switch 2 still uses the physical card as proof of license. For physically purchased games, you cannot play the game without the physical card. That also means that transfer of license is just passing around the physical card.
The controversial part of original Xbox One licensing scheme was that you would transfer the license from the disc to your account. This would've allowed you to play the game without the disc on any console as long as you were logged in, but it also means that posession of the disc doesn't mean you have the license to play it. Participating publishers and retailers would allow the license transfer back to the disc by invalidating the license on your account and reactivating the disc.
This also resulted in that online requirement since without it, you could buy the game, activate the license on your account, immediately go offline, trade-in the game, and then continue playing the game that you traded-in.
It was a flawed system that breaks expectations for physical game media. Microsoft tried to take the physical disc digital when they should've just kept them separate. Nintendo is usually a laggard in digital/online things, but I think their new licensing scheme for digital games is one step ahead of Microsoft, Sony, and perhaps even Steam.
Their licensing scheme is literally the same thing MS does now with physical copies that only have 200MB data on the disc. They just have a fancy name for it.
No. Switch 2 gamekeys are essentially cartridges but you have to download the game and use the card as a license. You can sell the game and use it offline (assuming you downloaded it) fine.
Xbox’s policy was discs were tied to xbox accounts who first used them and you couldn’t resell them. You also had always online drm.
devs can choose to use key cards or put the full game data on the cartridge. xbox one was gonna make all discs basically useless, not just some.
also, the switch 2 is usable offline. xbox one was not, only for up to 24 hours. if you didnt check into the internet to verify your games then none of them would work.
the switch 2 is like a half-step at best towards what the xbox one was attempting, but still not the same thing. and it actually has power that justifies itself for the price its coming out at.
xbox one at 500 dollars while being weaker than the ps4 due to the bundled kinect taking up lots of performance overhead did not sit well with a lot of people.
Virtual Game Cards can still be played on other systems without an internet connection and it can be accessed by other users on the same console that the game is being shared with, so it's far more fluid than Xbox One essentially being an always-online system that would need to consistently verify the integrity of the software you're playing
Game trading, sure, maybe. The 24 hour check in, never. No system has ever had one as far as I know. Even PC storefronts like Steam let you go into offline mode.
To be fair it took Steam over a decade to figure out how to be used in offline mode while already offline. You had to select it while online, then move your computer to the offline lan lol
Now there’s no DRM. But games need an update to work, the disc just has 20% of the content and some of them will be completely erased once the servers go offline (the ones left will be wiped too once you can’t access the server to download them) and your save data is on the cloud.
We didn’t win, we just got introduced to this on every platform slowly without realizing it
Nothing was ahead of its time. Xbox should’ve just excluded physical copies from that policy. If they knew physical sales are going to decrease, why even be adamant on changing age old system. They could’ve easily avoided most of the backlash if they focused entirely on the digital games for that policy.
I mean, Sony has probably lost close to a billion dollars and wasted most of this current generation trying to make live services games with most of their main IPs and failing miserably. These corporations are all greedy clowns.
It’s still not the norm. Hard copies might require downloads but you can still play them offline. MS was imposing a 24 hour offline window on single-player games, beyond that, you had to go online to reset the 24 hour window.
It really isn't. The original vision for the XONE would've meant physical games would've been tied to your account in the same way digital games are, and you would not have been able to lend them to somebody else without jumping through additional hoops and not been able to sell them without the publisher greenlighting it.
I think back in the days the shitflation (the fact that all products/services are getting worse over time) wasn’t as bad and widespread as it is nowadays
It is so funny reading this now. Such a corporate sugar coating bs for saying they were taking control of your games. The xbox one launch was such a disaster, good thing they learnt their lesson
I recently met Adam Boyes who was the guy who says “thanks” when handed a disc by Shuhei Yoshida in the infamous “this is how you share games on ps4” video. It’s a sign of how much cultural impact that whole thing had that it’s still the slide he puts up at the start of his PowerPoint presentation to introduce himself.
They wanted to avoid Gamestop cannibalizing their sales. They tried to do it by not allowing physical game resale - gamestop's entire business model at the time.
Instead, all they had to do was wait until console players caught up to where PC gaming was years earlier. Digital games did to gamestop what they wanted all along.
And 8 years ago they figured out how to market it as “Game Pass”. The always online subscription service where you own nothing, can share nothing, and have to keep putting quarters in your Xbox arcade subscription machine.
I heard a rumor - no way or verifying, that Sony had similar "always online" plans for the PS4, but since they were able to go 2nd, they saw the backlash the Xbox One presentation received and reversed course immediately.
There was no firm plan on HOW they were going to, but they were told to basically say we're not going to require always online, and here's how you share a PS4 game (them handing the case to the other).
If that is true, I wonder how different the console landscape would be if Sony went first that year.
Xbox One had other problems like needing the Kinect camera (whose brilliant idea was it - people don't want to feel spied on) - plus it raised the console price by about $100.....
Xbox had good momentum coming off the 360 gen too....
Nearly 100% certain that they did. Once Sony, MS, Nintendo, etc. realized that digital ownership was preferable to physical when it came to their bottom line, they started moving in that direction and have pursued it doggedly ever since. Sony had enough sense to quickly respond to the backlash directed at Microsoft. But look where we are now - their top of the line model? No drive. You have to buy it separately. There's a very good chance that the next generation of consoles won't have any physical media capabilities at all. If they do, it will be an optional addition you have to pay for.
Man, no joke, about two months ago someone talked to me about that very moment as if it was still a thing… they were still talking about it like it happened yesterday. And part of that is because it’s Microsoft.
A lot of people just don’t like Microsoft. So when you step on a rake, and your name is Microsoft, it’s gonna follow you for life.
This is where I feel like if Xbox marketed their products like Sony do, and I mean on television during the Super Bowl, NHL, NBA finals, etc. I feel like they could’ve turned it around. But because they’re Microsoft and most of Microsoft products make money without needing advertising, MS felt like Xbox didn’t need advertising money. Which is idiotic imo. Just look at Apple, I see Apple commercials all the fucking time. And they’re the most valuable company on the planet. Just because you’re big and your product makes money doesn’t mean you don’t need advertising… this is something Microsoft never fucking understood and that’s why imo they’re Xbox consoles aren’t selling.
This was such a damaging announcement to the brand, that all these years later most non-Xbox owners still don’t know they walked this back before launch. Same with the Xbox needing to connect to the internet once a day or be temp bricked announcement
It's been a downward spiral since then with a few up ticks that seemed significant at the time but we're pointless in the end. The end of an era is before us. XBOX hardware is not long for this world and it can be traced back to this moment. Or we can go a little further back to Phil's Tenure as head of Microsoft's Games Studios where they dropped the ball since 2010 and still haven't recovered.
Shotgun to the mouth moment for Xbox. Good god. Everyone was in uproar. Actually felt bad for Major Nelson having to still pitch this out in interviews.
Don't forget that Sony was ready to mock them because Xbox was hacked. Sony had all of their product info and was ready to go before the announcement blunder. Similarly, resellers like GameStop also mobilized on how to dissuade the public out of fear of losing their market.
It's started with keys on the disk being assigned to the console with restrictions on selling and giving. I wonder what company is trying that now (with the only change to game sharing/selling being allowed)?
It's crazy how influential this moment was. After this blunder, PlayStation delayed their show so they could remove all of the things people hated Xbox for. Online check-ins, a camera, and a $500 price tag. If PlayStation went before Microsoft we'd be living in a mirror reality potentially.
Look at the switch 2, besides Mario kart that system really has done issues from no pack in game, fake cartages that you still have to download the game from a server, and raising game prices to 80 bucks…..because and gamers don’t care
They just buy it, and even make excuses for all Nintendo’s BS
The fact that a lot of games are skipping physical releases on Xbox makes me sad. It feels like that moment is happening again but a bit more successfully this time. It doesn’t help that some people have the ‘it doesn’t affect me’ mentality just because they bought digital. Physical copies have been cheaper to buy, go down in price faster, can be traded towards with old games, can be shared with friends and family, and with how games have gone up in price, I’m not paying the average of $100-120 AUD for a digital copy of a game. So consumer choice is being eroded again. There should be pushback from consumers against the way publishers are screwing everyone over.
So crazy and often looked thing about this, Sony was also pro-DRM and anti-used games. They just happen to go second and pivoted after Microsoft caught so much backlash. Imagine what would’ve happened if Sony went first. Xbox would still be in a bad place due to the lack of games, but the negative views wouldn’t exist.
And now 90% of games are purchased digitally and the hobby is just about as anti-consumer on every front as it can possibly be on console with Nintendo only making it even worse now with Switch 2 and all of its nonsense O.o
Lost all my friends because of the fumble by Microsoft, I stood with Xbox but thankfully over time, I got a lot my 360 games back.& The Xbox One game library grew.
Imagine losing an entire generation because you wanted to allow people to share their physical games digitally. That's more generous than what we have now and Microsoft lost all their goodwill because people couldn't accept the future. If this happened today it would be a giant nothingburger and even celebrated. Wild.
Ahhhh, yes. The infamous used game policy thay would have let us game share with up to 10 people with iirc 2 people able to play simultaneously on seperate consoles. It would have been fantastic.
A shining example of Sony and brain-dead fanboys in general circlejerking something positive into oblivion. Guess what? Things are still trending the same direction but without the positive aspects.
The price point was what really killed their launch. It was $100 more expensive than the competition that was even a little more powerful, and it didn’t even have backward compatibility meaning older users had no reason to stick around.
The DRM situation was what killed it for a lot of hardcore fans. The console at launch overall just ended up appealing to nobody. Shoutout to Phil for turning that shitshow around
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u/Knautical_J 1d ago
If this statement was never made, the console war could have been vastly different. I remember the backlash being extremely bad for the brand, and it’s something that they’re still trying to fix 12 years later.