In what may very well be the most embarrassing turn of events the Xbox brand has ever suffered, Microsoft today officially announced that they have no clue what they’re doing, are running around with their head cut off, and can hardly believe they weren’t able to casually screw over everyone and get away with it.
Weasel-faced shithead and President of Interactive Entertainment Business division of Microsoft, Don Mattrick, posted the 180 on their official site.
We have listened and we have heard loud and clear from your feedback that you want the best of both worlds.
Umm, yes, we want the “best of both worlds”, Mattrick. Why would we want anything other than that?
Who knows whether this will be enough to save face, considering the staggeringly disproportionate number of pre-orders the PS4 has already enjoyed, and the amount of cancelled Xbox Live subscriptions. I’m guessing most loyal Xbox fans will return to their evil master following this. But let me point out a few things:
- [NEW] The “family sharing” was always going to be bullshit. People don’t even understand what that ‘library’ was supposed to be, imagining that it would allow 10 people to play simultaneously for free, or some other bullshit. Meanwhile, we already know it only allows one person to play at a time, and disables the game for anyone else trying to play. This also assumes that Microsoft would have a convenient system for handling all of this, which couldn’t be hacked or flooded. It’s all smoke and mirrors to get people’s imaginations running wild, just like Kinect and the “cloud”. Sad how easily manipulated people are.
- They’re selling something less evil than before, not something good. They still don’t have good ideas, or a vision of a better world. That bullshit about “the future is online” is so irrelevant it hurts. Sony has Gaikai — that’s a future that feels futuristic. Valve has the “Summer Sale” — that’s massive value. Microsoft simply failed to be as evil as they hoped they could be. They tried their best to screw us over, and clearly still have no intention of jumping in the other direction by beating Sony (or Valve) with quality or value.
- Xbox One games at E3 were running on high-end PC’s, not the Xbox One development kits. I suggest you read the article to find out why this is actually misleading and not standard practice, thanks to some flip-flopping about what counts as a “development kits”. If you don’t care about that, read this to see Jonathon Blow set things straight and explain that real PS4 hardware was being used for Sony. Hell, I’ll just post the quote here because you might be too lazy to look:
“It is not true as the article says that “all E3 demos run on hi-end PCs”… The Witness was running on PS4 dev hardware, and it looked to me like all the other PS4 games were running on dev kits as well.”
Dev hardware is the hardware that will be in the final retail box, but in a less consumer-oriented package.
All the indies I know were running on the PS4.
- There are serious doubts about the effective output of the Xbox One. It’s running 3 operating systems simultaneously, which consumes a lot of the hardware’s power, and apparently Microsoft is having a hard time tuning it. Combined with the suspiciously similar specs and hardware (Same graphics card as the PS4? Really?) there is reason to believe Microsoft literally copied Sony’s hardware plan after the PS4 announcement and is now scrambling to make a box that actually works. They’ve never been a good hardware manufacturer (Red Ring of Death, anyone?), so this isn’t a surprise.
This might put EA in an awkward position, considering they were obviously in bed together from the start on this. Their promise to never use “online passes” again was surely founded on the assumption that they’d have something even more evil in the works.
As this console war unfolds, I’ll be interested to see how it aligns with my “Next Gen Hopes“. In a way, it’s better than I imagined already.