Actually, I think they could have done it 'their way' had they orchestrated a roll out that had semblance of, you know, competence. Replying flippantly to people concerns and essentially saying 'sucks to be you' to a number of people is what put them in the corner they're in now.
It's marketing 101, sell the virtues/positives of what your selling. They chose to somehow highlight everything people won't like. The whole PR department should be dumped. Just a horrific job.
Agreed. Sell the benefits of the console, not the limitations. I think the problem, again, goes back to the brand name and, indeed, even calling the XB1 a "console." It should've been the MS Media Home or something. Oh, and cool! It plays games too! Instead, they called it the XboxOne and gamers lost it. Not without reason, because it was basically a gaming console with a whole lot of other crap gamers don't really care about that much. They sold to the wrong market the wrong way.
The system is already prepped for this to happen. I'll bet you a million bucks they will enact it in less than 2 years. Then what?? Who ever has one already will have no choice because they have everything already set up. You will see bricked Xbox ones in a couple years because they WILL change their policies. IT'S A TRAP!! Mark my words..
Unlikely. It's possible they'll do it incrementally in terms of how XBL works. Adding functionality but requiring you to be logged into your XBL Gold account to do it. Which, I'd say, is actually the smarter way to go. Want to play your coaster offline? Go for it. Want all our extra benefits from cloud gaming? Sign in with your XBL Gold account. That way the changes are optional and offered alongside a bunch of other additional content. But I really don't think they'll say "Thanks for buying it. Now SIGN IN OR WE BRICK YOUR BOX!! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"
Same here. I don't stream movies, i don't buy music from anywhere other than amazon. Most of those features offer nothing to folks who just want to game.
That's fine. I think, again, the issue was that MS' marketing strategy was screwy. They split their focus. They tried to sell a console that did more by emphasizing the more, assuming that their baseline market of gamers would stick around because it's a new console with prettier graphics. What they should've done is sold the thing as a media center device to non-gamers, but talked about how cool it is that it does all these other things.
Or, honestly, sell two products built on the same architecture. The Xbox720, which is basically the same as a 360 but with snazzier graphics, or the XboxOne with all the additional media center capabilities and bundled Kinect. Assuming the manufacturing costs can be made to work, that'd seem the best approach. I think they underestimated the gamer demand (and what it'd cost their gamer market to accept the new features) and overestimated (or undersold to) the non-gamers.
The real failure, as I see it, is of marketing strategy and understanding the marketplace itself. That's where the arrogance comes in.
I agree i'd rather have the disc. EA just shut down their facebook sims and tons of folks spent a lot of cash on it so now they alienated fans of sims, mass effect, dead space, and dragon age.
I tend to think that the issue with that is one of price point and the marketplace, again. MMOs deal with this all the time. The perpetual world model of gaming is attractive for developers and publishers because it can generate a nearly endless revenue stream. But if there aren't enough players, then the revenue stream isn't enough to keep things going, and they shut down. People complain because they've invested so much time and money, but really, they got what they paid for.
Teh marketplace is going to gradually shift to a more temporary-minded model when it comes to gaming. Ownership as a key concept will disappear over time, or at least long-term ownership will. The gaming industry ultimately will want to get people to think about it the way they do with Netflix. You pay your money, get access to stuff, and if we turn the servers off tomorrow, as long as tomorrow is the 31st day of your billing cycle, you've got nothing to complain about. Why? BEcause you got access to the service you paid for and...that's it. It's where they make the game "yours" somehow that people get pissy. What the need to do is stop selling people games, and start offering people things like subscriptions.
I don't believe for one second that thier attempted DRM would have dropped game prices by 1 cent. EAs not going to suddenly be happy to take less money on sales because they are suddenly getting a cut of used sales. They would see that as losing money.
That's still BS. Microsoft and all the game publishers are NEVER going to sell you the game cheaper when they already get you to pay $60 for it. Steam has been around for 10 years on the PC and they have never sold a game cheaper when it first comes out. They may sell a game cheaper eventually when they have sales, but not on average. If they did game sales would be completely digital by now.
I'm sure that, initially, it wouldn't have made a difference. But look at Amazon. They basically broke the back of the brick-and-mortar bookstore and music store industry. My recollection is that they started off a couple bucks cheaper than the stores, but gradually ratcheted down the price to the point where they fundamentally shifted the cost of things like CDs and DVDs across the industry. My point is that when you don't have as much overhead for things like pressing discs and shipping boxes, you don't have to charge as much, and -- more to the point -- you can't justify charging as much. Plus, MS would've been in competition with all the other streaming/downloadable retailers like Amazon, Steam, Gamestop, Gamersgate, not to mention the publishers like EA, Ubisoft, etc.
MS wouldn't see it as "losing" money if they're making considerably more profit. Think of it this way. If you sell to console gamers at an average of $50 per game, but only see about 15% profit per sale, what if you could eliminate enough overhead to drop the price to $30 per game and see 45% profit? You'd be pocketing almost double the money, and might even increase your volume because of the perception among consumers that they're getting the game for dramatically cheaper.
Sure, some older guys would see it as leaving money on the table, but once you figure out the price point taht'll move the product, you just have to tell them "You can sell zero games at $60, or you can sell a bajillion at $45. What'll it be?"
