(Image courtesy of Christopher Ott and London 1888)
Reaction to DRM Removal by Micro$oft
It is easy to say Microsoft’s removal of DRM or digital rights management from the XBOX One is a good thing. Essentially under the infrastructure that Microsoft was building or had built for the XBOX One people would only be renting games from them. For whatever reason if you could not have gotten an internet connection within the 24 hour check-in cycle the XBOX One as I have stated and many other sources have stated would become a cable box and you would not be able to play any of your games. I know that many of us have internet and we are moving into a more digital era every day.
Just the other day though my internet actually did go out. It was out for maybe an hour and a half tops. Not very long really I didn’t regress into some sort of fire worshiping cave man or anything like that but it got me thinking what if I had the XBOX One and that hour and a half was at the end of my 24 hour window? Most people have routines that they are committed to whether they like it or not, jobs, kids activities, AA meetings, and what have you, the point is most people game at similar times each day.Therefore the incident I recently had with the hour and a half of internet darkness is a relatively short time in the grand scheme of things but if I had to go to work the next day, maybe that was my window for gaming that day. It isn’t that uncommon for anyone’s internet to go down here or there and if you are gaming around the same time every day suddenly any hiccup in your service could be potentially fatal to your gaming schedule. My point is this, with the busy lives we lead, an hour and a half of no internet could mean 24 hours of no gaming for even single player games. That is just plain unacceptable. Penalizing your customers because they can’t get internet is pretty harsh.
I totally understand that the online features of the XBOX One could have been, and still could be really cool but to treat your fans like common criminals is pretty unforgivable. Twenty four hour check-ins to make sure that no one is modding an XBOX or region locking the console to even further restrict consumers is not OK. Oh yeah and the XBOX One still comes with the Kinect which can monitor your heart beat in the dark and is you know, programmed to listen and watch you at all times! They say the Kinect now has a sleep function but its still listening for certain keywords to activate your XBOX One.
Lets reflect shall we? It is good that seemingly all the militant restrictions the new XBOX One were going to have are being removed. I find it hard though to trust anything Microsoft is doing right now. We all know the changes were made because pre-sales for the XBOX One were abysmal not because they cared what people were saying about the new XBOX One. Let’s be honest, the original version of the XBOX One might as well have been the puzzle-box from the Hellraiser movie and when you turned it on you were sucked inside to meet Pinhead and his Cenobyte friends and he just laughed as hooks attached to chains ripped your flesh while Pinhead said to you “Oh, the sights you will see!” Because the original version of the XBOX One sounded like an absolute nightmare. Don’t buy that line about Microsoft having to take away family sharing too because its not true. That’s Microsoft acting like the snobby rich kids they seem to be lately. It turned out the consumers were smarter than Microsoft anticipated and rejected their absurd proposal to actually buy their insanely restrictive machine, so Microsoft took everything away instead of just the things they should have removed.
At this time Micro$oft appears to be floating in the abyss. The fact that no one seemed able to adequately explain the purpose or function of any part of the XBOX One except of course for the Kinect and its eye of Sauron is wholly disheartening. How could no one really explain the functions of things like family sharing? Especially at E3! Where they promised to admonish any reservations people may have had about the infrastructure the XBOX One was going to have. The arrogance towards people who can’t get internet. Its just how? How I ask you? Can one company be so out of touch with the world around them? Did they really think people would want something that required 24 hour internet check-ins to work? Its like Microsoft completely ignored a good portion of the Earth with this internet policy, DRM and region locking the system. Both Germany and Australia have condemned the XBOX One as a monitoring device designed to spy on people.
Microsoft is an entity without a country right now and that is how it should be. A lot of bridges have been burned by sheer arrogance and ignorance. I don’t believe for a second that the people at Microsoft are stupid. You don’t become as big as Microsoft by being stupid. Too much of the XBOX One’s release was based on assumptions that clearly should have had more testing with the actual demographic. Their is a lot to prove now. The XBOX brand has been severely damaged by this mess. Microsoft’s abandonment of DRM is good but the fact that they were willing to drop all the features the XBOX One was going to have raises a lot of questions. The explanations of the different XBOX One features by anyone from Microsoft were inept. For example family sharing still hasn’t been fully explained. How could no one from Microsoft who addressed the public be able to fully explain the functionality and reasoning for the XBOX One’s features? Basically, what was the point of making the XBOX One the way it was? A lot of research and development as well as millions of dollars had to go into developing the XBOX One. Now that Microsoft has flipped on a lot of the things they were implementing as integral to how the new system would operate, do they even have a plan? That is the big question.
Microsoft’s rescindment is a victory for the gamers. Getting a corporation to change their mind about anything is pretty impressive. Ultimately Microsoft’s success with the XBOX One is up to the gamers. It is hard to forget though that Microsoft was willing to unleash the XBOX One like Hellraiser’s puzzle box on its millions of fans. Sort of like if you caught Pinhead trying to pass off his puzzle box as the new XBOX One but you caught him so he was like, “OK you got me, here’s the real XBOX One instead. Don’t you want it? I swear its completely fine.” I don’t know about you but I am a bit sketched out that Microsoft would try to implement such harsh rules on its own fans. The people who built the XBOX brand. Its kind of hard to trust anyone who would try such a thing, especially with a device that will be used in your own home for the better half of the next decade.
-Z3R0TH3RT33N