Let's just take a moment to mourn the advancements in gaming technology that have just been silenced by the calls of the internet.
I think the saddest part of this story is that it's only after we lose some of the coolest advancements in console gaming that I'm starting to see people come out and say that the Xbox One was what they were interested in buying because of what the DRM enabled. Thanks for fighting against the hivemind earlier, guys. The gaming community on the internet was spouting the same misinterpreted data over and over, clogging news articles with ignorant phrases like "draconian DRM" and "Microsoft hates its consumers and only want money" while they ignored the advances that the Xbox One was bringing to them. Now that Microsoft is trying to change the fickle opinion of the internet, we are left with only a few of the advancements we could have had.
With the original, single ping needed every 24 hours to check if you were still who you said you are, people were able to have ten people play ANY of your games on their consoles. They wouldn't even have to spend time downloading the games because they could stream them from the cloud network. We could have played games without having the disc in the console which not only helped with the lazy, but allowed us to keep our games on the harddrive and not worry about losing/breaking a technology that is slowly going out the door. When was the last time some of us bought a physical CD for music, but we're still buying video games on them? I'm sure DVD/BluRays will eventually fade away too, I mean, just look how popular Netflix and other streaming companies are. The Xbox One was a good transition between physical discs and digital copies, but now you'll HAVE to have the disc in to play. I feel like that's a bit of a step backwards.
There were some good outcomes possible with this new digital gaming paradigm, but it doesn't seem like many people saw them. If we switched to the way games worked on the Xbox One before the change, we could have eventually had cheaper games that don't have to include the price of creating physical copies and shipping it all over the world. More money could go to the creators, who surely deserve the money, if games sold back were given to dealers that agreed with the gaming companies and the rules for their games. This means cheaper games, more money to creators to make better games, easier ways to obtain the games, and trading games in for credit to buy more games available at the press of a button. Yes, this change would probably have an impact on places like GameStop, but do we have stores where we trade in and buy used copies of PC games? Besides, we wouldn't have to deal with the low trade in prices that Gamestop has. The console war is leading consoles to become more PCesque, and I feel that looking at that market shows what the future of console gaming may look like. And it's nice that PC gaming industry has already gone through this change that the Xbox One was trying to start. The last PC game I bought on a physical disk was Diablo 3, and before that... Starcraft, actually, the battlechest with BroodWar when we played back in high school. With computer programs like Steam, players buy, download, and play the games through the same platform, with no trading or selling back used games. This is what the Xbox One was transitioning to, but with the ability to give games to friends (though yeah, only once was a bit of a let down), play friends' games from their library, and trade in old games for credit to buy more. Sadly, this great change got stopped by the squeakiest wheels on the internet that were complaining about things that weren't even true (like having to always be connected to the internet to play games).
If people hadn't over reacted to having a check to see if their game library is up to date, we might have gotten something like Netflix for video games, digitally obtaining games for a time before turning them back in and receiving a new game to play. The DRM of the Xbox One before the change would have allowed that to happen because Microsoft could be sure it was a paying customer playing the games. Now we can't even play our own games on the console without having the disc in the machine. That statement almost sounds archaic to me since we've been playing games with no discs for years on PC, but when we try that for console gaming, it gets stopped because the requirements are "draconian." What's draconian about a split-second check once a day and specified dealers for trade-ins? With the trade-off of disc-less playing on multiple consoles near instantly as well as allowing ten people to play your entire game library, I thought it sounded pretty good. Now we're left with cloud computing, which is still pretty cool, but we could have advanced gaming so much more.
So I thought the Xbox One sounded like great advancement to video games, and I've convinced some people to check the facts before they think the new console was the worst thing to ever come to gaming, but then they usually try to hit me with the always plugged in Kinect and the fear of being spied on. Guys. Let's just take a moment to think about how silly that is. Microsoft has over a billion people using products that they've created, many of them with cameras and microphones. In fact, there's probably some device close to you that could tell the government where you are, what you're saying, and what you look like, but you didn't think about those until I pointed it out. Your phone has so many ways to track you, but you probably didn't fear that too much, if at all. The Kinect can be shut off and not allowed to record anything, audio or visual, and can also be specified as to what, if any, information that it picks up from you can be given to others. It's completely under your control.
Ah, but what about the fact that it always has to be connected to the Xbox One? It could still record you if someone wanted it to since it's still connected to the console! Well, yeah, but so could the cameras on our phones, laptops, and tablets. You could have been tracked and listened to for years now, but since the whole NSA thing got picked up by the media around the launch of this console, the Kinect must be a surveillance device! I think part of the reason it needs to be connected is so that companies will want to look into innovative ways to use it since everyone will have one. On the 360, not everyone had one, probably not even a majority of people had one, but now that more people do, we can look forward to amazing new features that people will and probably already have created (the new Kinect is pretty cool, allowing 1080p recording at 30 frames a second, as well as many new upgrades). And like I've said before, if you still think someone is spying on you, just turn it around and put some blankets over it.
This whole "console war" is just making me think of witch burnings and ostracizing simply because something new is proposed. Proposing that the earth rotates around the sun? Laughter. The gaming industry should leave behind an extraneous format to further the abilities of gamers and ask for just a few things in return? It's the worst console ever and proof that the company only wants money and no happiness for their consumers. I hated getting online for awhile because all I saw was Xbox One is the worst thing ever, PS4 is the best console ever, Microsoft has draconian DRM, and a bunch of other misinformed titles. I found a single article that praised the Xbox One, though not the console itself, but the fact that the games for it were worthy E3 winners, if winning E3 was based on the games announced and not the consoles they run on. I couldn't find any articles that said anything positive about it until this change. Under all this crazy shouting about over-hyped possibilities, there was some real change happening. Now I'm just sad it'll probably be a while before I see these changes come back to help the gaming industry evolve.
Xbox One, I'm sorry you were ahead of your time.
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