Stop complaining about the loss of the shared-library feature. It was a smoke-screen.

[FieryTrainwreck]

There's a difference between INFORMATION and assumption.
Your entire argument is based on assumption. Based on your assumption on how things will work, even when your assumptions contradict what has been revealed by Microsoft themselves. I'm not interested in your theories, I'm interested in an assessment of the known facts.

Your assertion about the hour-long demo is likewise based on unconfirmed information from an alleged insider, information which contradicts everything microsoft was saying.

What we know, is that the game sharing was described as both unlimited and not optional.
And what else we know is that the DRM was optional.

Again, if you want to take Microsoft at their word regarding features that have been a) contradicted by an anonymous but apparently quite reliable (in the past) source, b) make no financial sense and fly directly in the face of everything else built into the system, and c) have now been canceled entirely despite the fact that they could easily implement something similar with optional restrictions (which would give them a huge, much needed leg-up on Sony) for nebulous, head-scratching reasons... feel free.

This is the same company touting cloud computing as some future proofing processor booster when anyone with an ounce of sense knows it doesn't work that way (and isn't anything special). This is the same company claiming digital distribution is the future (and subsequently "trailblazing" that future) when DD has been around for almost a decade now, dominating PC sales and growing like wildfire on existing platforms. This is the same company directly named in the leaks regarding PRISM spying on basically the whole world... while trying to insert an always-on camera/microphone into every home. This is the same company repeatedly busted for anti-trust violations, screwing the little guy, and basically pissing in the open mouths of consumers every chance they get.

But take their PR releases as the god's honest, please.

And not only that but I haven't seen any indication that Family sharing was in any way optional. It was a gamer decision, not a publisher decision.

Why would it not be a publisher decision? Publishers ultimately own their work and decide how it is disseminated. You think MS can put a publisher's game up on XBL without their say so? You think MS can enable games to be shared between 11 people without publisher say so? If that "say so" takes the form of the original licensing agreement between MS and the publisher, what publisher in their right mind willingly signs off on that?

Find for me the quote about "family-share" that doesn't involve intentionally vague language? The bits I've seen all take the form of "MS enables publishers to do this". Better yet, explain to me why a feature like this wasn't the very center of their messaging at E3? It's the ONE good thing, in theory, about any of their bullshit, and it practically sells itself. So why weren't they talking up the potential to share your games with 10 friends over the internet? Probably because a little digging by any halfway intelligent journalist would have forced them to reveal it was a demo system.

It's called a trade off.
Game sharing was the trade off for the new DRM. With the DRM gone, so is game sharing.

Let's ignore for now the fact that they could implement a similar system with optional DRM while still allowing the existing model, giving consumers a legitimate choice in how they purchase media. A "trade off" is exactly how they were positioning this feature, yet they never focused on it. They never hammered it home. They never came out and said "you can't share a disc anymore, but that doesn't matter because you can just share the game over your friends list with 10 people!". Instead of connecting the dots for everyone wary about the changing model, in a way that would have alleviated basically all fears, they left these things separate and nebulous. Is their messaging that inept? Or were they being intentionally fuzzy about the details of a feature that flew in the face of everything else they were doing? A feature that made no sense for the publishers they were trying to appease, a feature that was never finalized or set in stone, a feature that wouldn't be available at launch... c'mon, man.

The difference is the Xbox is a closed system, my PC is not. Any game which forces my open system to become a closed system is invasive. The xbox is not invasive because you buy into that from the get go. If you don't want to subscribe to the Xbox routine you don't buy one.

But having a multi use device like a PC and having a game require you to install an unnecessary piece of software onto your computer is complete bullshit. Not only that but if Steam had their way, they would install their shit on every device I have INCLUDING my xbox.

Um, if ANY software maker had their way, they'd install every program they've ever created on every piece of hardware in existence. Your irrational Steam hatred is showing. So very bizarre that it coexists with blind Microsoft apologism. I'm legitimately confused by your principles.

With PC, you can make a case-by-case decision as to whether or not you support a platform. Don't like Steam? Try to get the game on GoG or direct from the publisher. Not an option? Don't buy the game. The Xbone was exactly what Jim Sterling said it was: a closed system adopting additional restrictions/limitations of an open one without providing the same benefits. The preorders (or lack thereof) for Xbone were a referendum on Microsoft's overarching ideology. The majority said "no, you're not giving us good reasons to go down this road so we're not going to sacrifice any of our existing flexibility for your gain". It wasn't a failure to communicate because there was *nothing positive to communicate*.

Disc-based games could still be sold, unlike Steam-tied games.
Distribution is there but not sharing.

You may not be savvy to the ways of the world but all-in-one devices with social media built in is the going trend. So the Xbox aiming to be all-inclusive device with the ability to share games between family members or to loan games to another friend etcetera anywhere in the world WAS going to be a step in that direction.

So I'm the one who isn't savvy to the ways of the world, but yours was the bullshit that just got shot down with such force as to make one of the most powerful and traditionally tone-deaf corporations in the entire world pull a complete fucking 180 and redesign their entire policy/feature set very near the 11th hour of a major product release? You're going to paint me as the one who doesn't know what I'm talking about here?

INSTEAD

We have a 360 with updated graphics.

Big fucking deal.

Gamers are so short-sighted.

Maybe it is short-sighted when you stand up for your rights as a consumer. Maybe we are invariably headed for an age where everything is rewritten from the ground up to favor billion dollar corporations. In the end, you might be completely right about what's going to happen to us. I don't think that means you're on the right side, though.

Also, why in the world are shallow, unrelated social media features the next evolution in gaming? Why isn't AI or alternative design or even the hyper-realism of vastly improved graphics 1000x more important than twitter integration and video sharing and all the other nonsense they're trying to force on us? You think it's the fault of gamers that video games aren't moving forward? Well you're right there, but it has nothing to do with our refusal to bend over for MS and everything to do with the fact that we buy the same shitty games nonstop. Excellent job conflating the two completely separate issues, though.

 

[devilkingx]

hey, Akalabeth and everyone else who bought into the smokescreen

sources have told me that the family share thing is on the PS3 with digital games but less people

so you can share/lend your digital games to 1 or 2 people, I don't know much about it, I own a PS3 and had no idea that even existed(granted I have no digital games) but supposedly its true

so your imaginary future of gaming for the incredibly lazy(OMG I have to ACTUALLY GO to my friend's house to hang out/spend time/play with them, life sure is inconvenient, especially since I am litterally the one person on planet earth whose friends don't live within convenient traveling distance of them) has already come to pass... several years ago

OT: yeah, its either the whole thing was smoke and mirrors, and now that microsoft has stopped screwing us they don't need to soften the blow, or that the feature was real and gone out of spite because we wouldn't let MS screw us

 

[FieryTrainwreck]

You claim I have an irrational hatred of Steam after that diatribe? Hahaha.

The point was that Microsoft has given us every reason in the world not to trust them based on both their long and storied past of misbehavior and their recent rash of tone-deaf PR disasters. If ever a company hadn't earned the benefit of the doubt, it's Microsoft. You seem to be equating Steam, a generally well-liked platform from a company with a comparatively sterling reputation, to Microsoft. I think that's hilarious, and I'll say as much.

Yes. Named in prism, just like Apple, Google, Skype, etcetera. Ie every major american IT corporation there is.

And which of these other companies was trying to put an always-on camera/microphone into every home? I think the PRISM thing stinks to high hell for everyone involved, and I wouldn't dream of suggesting Microsoft is somehow the primary culprit. It's just another in a long list of seemingly voluntary anti-consumer actions undertaken by a company with enough monopoly money to withstand a constant string of self-inflicted PR nightmares.

Nice theory, but that's all it is, like everything else you're saying.

A sensible theory goes a long way towards explaining what just happened to the family-share feature.

It makes sense for the publishers to support it, because even if your insider was correct, at worst it would be akin to a facebook app.

You call it a glorified demo mode, but it's not a demo mode, it's a timed-play mode (if true).
So someone plays a game for a half hour, then gets booted out. Then they can't play it for another day.

Remind you of anything?

I'll give you a hint. Farmville.

That is likewise a game where you need to wait, to continue playing the game, or pay money.
So someone shares their games, their friends play it for an hour, love it, but get frustrated by being booted out every 30-60 minutes, so they just say "fuck it, let's buy this game".

Publisher wins.
Gamers win.

Why? Because a patient gamer could finish the game in short intervals, it just would not be very fun.

So THIS was their replacement for our ability to swap discs with friends? And you're 100% okay with that? A feature that simply compels your friends to buy their own copies of the game? A demo that saves your progress to a point? You're actually turning around and ADVOCATING for this dumbass feature? I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here because I can't imagine someone taking up that position. Not willingly. Marching out Farmville? Are you in danger? Type "I'm fine" if someone has a gun to your head right now.

My principles are simple. It's about choice.
I chose to buy a 360.
I never chose to install steam. I chose to buy a game and was forced to install steam to play it. Essentially, Valve lied to me. Small print or no, but selling a person a game, seeing the counter from the disk stop at 95% and having to download the last 5% off of internet is a lie. They're selling me a product which doesn't function.

If you bought a product that didn't explicitly state it required Steam, then that's bullshit and you should be able to get your money back. If you know a game requires Steam, you have every right not to buy it. If everyone fled Steam, it would cease to exist as a viable platform. Valve does what they can, in the form of good deals and service, to prevent such an exodus - because they have competition. They have to worry about Origin, GoG, and others. Microsoft, as sole owner and operator of XBL, has no competition. Closing the circle, so to speak, with a strict license-based model was an enormous power grab. Customers vetoed it. Not enough of them were willing to enter into a license-based model with a vendor holding all the cards. I see that as a good thing.

Earlier you asked a rhetorical question, now you suggest a factual answer to that?
The fact is you don't know, and we wont know, because the Xbox One policy has reverted to the same old shit.

What we know, based on your theory (aka Microsoft's vague descriptions) is that they had a killer feature made possible by some of the DRM/licensing involved with Xbone, but they canceled that feature entirely after switching back to the old (vastly preferred, apparently) model... because why? They could have implemented specific checks or optional DRM/licenses for consumers who still wanted access to this "killer family-share plan". I mean if it was financially viable for their entire user base, why wouldn't it continue to be just as viable for a subsection? And why wouldn't they use this amazing 10-friend sharing plan to grow digital distribution legitimately instead of forcing it down our throats? I mean if they'd already put work into it, why not go ahead with it in a modified form? Why not grab an extra leg up on Sony?

It makes a lot more sense to me that the feature wasn't what people were making it out to be, and there was no reason to go forward with it because the smokescreen became unnecessary when they had to backtrack on everything else.

The only side I'm on is my own.

That's not an admirable quality.

Because MICROSOFT IS DESIGNING A CONSOLE? NOT A FUCKING GAME?

AI and alternative design? That's fucking game design.
Twitter integration, video sharing is platform design.

AI and alternative design are examples of actually pushing games forward.

Twitter integration and video sharing are examples of games being exactly the fucking same only you can better share them over revenue-generating social platforms.

If I'm confusing the two, it's because Microsoft (and Sony, too) are confusing the two.

You know where Microsoft really failed? Kinect 2.0. As an alternative control device, this thing actually does present certain opportunities for pushing gaming in new directions. They did fuck all with it at E3, and they've shown almost no interest in integrating the device into anything other than Kinect 1.0 revisits and television viewing. Personally, I'm skeptical of motion/voice controls - but I would have appreciated an attempt to prove me wrong. Maybe Microsoft will trend that direction in the future, and I'm very much willing to be repositioned on the basis of a killer app or two.