Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Apologizes For Cavalier 'Always-Online' DRM Tweets
Adam Orth, creative director of Microsoft Studios, on Thursday tweeted that "doesn't get" objections to DRM schemes that require always-on internet connection to play console games. An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft on Friday released an official statement regarding the tweets: 'We apologize for the inappropriate comments made by an employee on Twitter yesterday. This person is not a spokesperson for Microsoft, and his personal views do not reflect the customer centric approach we take to our products or how we would communicate directly with our loyal consumers. We are very sorry if this offended anyone, however we have not made any announcements about our product roadmap, and have no further comment on this matter.'" I can't help reading those tweets in the voice of Sterling Archer.
"...but we're still making it always-on anyway. Fuck you. Sorry."
... that they made absolutely no effort to refute the rumor. At this point, I think it's pretty safe to say that their only objection is to how the guy said what he did, but they still are going to proceed with it.
That explains why we are all being pushed onto a schizophrenic mess that nobody wants called Windows 8.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
lol, that made me laugh. Customer Centric Approach. I think that means they didn't actually plan on telling anyone, you'd have to find it out for yourself when you buy the systems and the games. I'm sure on the back of the game box, in small letters, will say, "Requires an Always On Internet Connection".
Be seeing you...
Coming soon to a console/computer near me.
So the Microsoft Studios Creative Director's views have no impact on what he does at work? He has nothing to do with Microsoft. Wow. Then why is he a director? These Microsoft Corp. Comm. people are more disconnected from reality than I expected.
By the way, the new Windows 360 Office for 2013 ( or whatever it is called ) is moving towards always on cloud connectivity. And directors at Microsoft are actually idiots who have no impact on product direction. Give me a break. First, fire the Creative Director for speaking the truth. Next fire the Microsoft Corp. Comm. for regurgitating canned responses that makes the company look dumb.
average intelligence does not mean what you think it means. The autonomic nervous system is there to ensure stupidity's survival.
... Well, here's a thought: Not everybody has internet. I know this is shocking, but some people actually take their XBox, etc, on road trips, to friends houses, etc. Shocking, I know. So unless something really needs internet, it shouldn't have it because there are perfectly legitimate reasons beyond "zomg, piracy!" to not have internet. Secondly, always-on internet means when your servers crap, or you decide the game isn't popular enough, the people who paid for that game get screwed -- they can't play it anymore.
And for the second reason, I'll never buy a game that needs a DRM server to play. I play an MMO, and I can understand that the server is the game in that case, but unless you can make a compelling case that the game simply can't be played without it, I'm not buying it. Ever. And take a page from EA's playbook, Microsoft: Their stocks just took a big dive because of DRM and now one of your idiot employees is saying your company supports it. Do you want your stock prices to plunge too?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Maybe we should ask Dice.com, surely they know how many Creative Directos are out there.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
I absolutely agree with you. But I'm also not really sure what they need to apologize for. An employee stated an opinion on the net.
The opinion might have been stupid, and you might even be able to connect it to prevailing attitudes at Microsoft. That said, I'm not sure what Microsoft actually needs to apologize for, so this whole thing started off on a purely invented media vs. public relations theater footing. Nothing actually apology-worthy was done, so the "apology" being flaccid is unsurprising. At most they could say, "The opinions expressed on private Twitter accounts do not necessarily represent those of Microsoft." Although you kind of have to be fairly naive to think that a private twitter feed spoke for the company. If one employee spouting off in public dictated the official stance, then I can say from experience that Bank of America's corporate policy is that the moon landing was faked, and Burger King officially believes in ghosts.
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Customer Centric adj. Pertaining to any system in which the customer is trapped in the center and cannot easily remove himself. Originally this was accomplished through vendor lock-in and market share, due to changing market conditions it is now largely realized using various IP protection methods, including lawsuits against wayward users, DRM platforms, and DMCA crackdowns. If the newest legislation passes congress this month, we may should be able to add to our customer cenrtic portfolio by having over-zealous prosecutors press criminal charges on customers who stray beyond the bounds of the impenetrable EULA or any TOS we care to write. Currently customers are also kept centralized by the fact that there is no possible legal recourse to any malfeasance or negligence on our part due to the fact that all our customer-facing contracts specify that all disputes must be settled by arbitration, using arbitrators of our choosing.
See also: Coopetition, survival strategy.
Silence is a state of mime.
Some Microsoft guy made some comments thorugh personal channels
Not just "some Microsoft guy". He's creative director at Microsoft's video game division. If you think his opinion is irrelevant or atypical, you're delusional.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I read those tweets and felt the sheer contempt burning through the internet, as did many other people.
If the always-on thing is required for the Xbox720, effectively Microsoft are saying "we don't care if you can't use your product you purchased from us because of a hundred possible reasons". Moving house can mean a month of downtime to get internet connectivity back up, nope, can't play games during that month. Recently an Australian telephone exchange burned down in Warrnambool - the entire area had no internet connectivity for a few weeks - yep, no gaming during that time either. A tree took out my phone line and Telstra took 2 weeks to get it repaired - yep, no gaming during that time. These are just the examples I can quickly think of.
We currently own 67 Xbox 360 games in this house, and have two of the consoles (one for my wife and I and one for our kids). If having the internet permanently connected for the purposes of DRM is a requirement of the Xbox 720, I guarantee we will purchase exactly zero consoles and games for that generation.
... wait, what?
I absolutely agree with you. But I'm also not really sure what they need to apologize for. An employee stated an opinion on the net.
true, if said employee is a low level grunt, but when that employee is high level management, don't you think that changes things?
No idea why your comment is modded down. I read the tweets in the voice of Coach McGuirk.
Obviously someone cares, otherwise Valve wouldn't be throwing resources at an apparently dead market. Oh, and I care. That's at least one person.
As for the Dell-Alienwar announcement, ArsTechnica covered it. They're ultimately a far better tech site than Slashdot is, but I think Slashdot has a better selection of commenters.
Defending a business direction is one thing. Lashing out at customers is another. Guy deserves his career to be crucified because that's just stupid and unacceptable behaviour for a corporation to allow. The DRM issue is totally irrelevant to the problem.
.
Such a conundrum for Redmond.....
Creative director...
So he chooses what colour the led's will be?
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
I'm a game collector myself, I've bought 3 Xbox 360 consoles and over 150 games on that platform this generation. I will also buy exactly ZERO if the always on DRM is implemented.
For me the biggest problem is the the fact that the games have a finite time after which they will not work. The servers will not be available forever and if I'm spending money on game I want to know that I'll still be able to play them 10 years, 20 years or even further in the future. I have games that I bought in the late 80s and early 90s that I still play, it stands to reason that if I buy games next generation I will want to play them again in the distant future, but that's not going to happen if "Always on" becomes a reality. Given a long enough time frame my having an internet connection is more guaranteed than MS supporting their server for the remainder of my lifespan.
This doesn't even take into consideration people like my friends who serve in the military, and play games in their down time despite not having access to broadband while deployed, or those friends who lost their jobs due to the economy and had to cancel their internet and TV service but kept their gaming consoles as a meager source of entertainment in an otherwise shitty period in their life.
Microsoft earned the lions share of my gaming budget the last two generations and if I were to receive similar gaming experiences in the next generation I have no problem continuing to spend money that way, but if they required an internet connection I will not be giving them any money what-so-ever. I have no interest in purchasing games with an expiration date.
Collector's Edition
I saw the reactions to his posts, and felt the overwhelming overreaction and hypocrisy to his comments. Now, before slashdot votes this to -20, stop and think for a second. While he actually is correct, sadly that is the way things are moving, I think not being able to play games if your connection is down is stupid and bad to a insane degree. But stop and think about how the whole game playing internet reacted to him. They basically tried to destroy a persons career - someone who has no involvement in the not actually officially announced product - over a stated opinion with a friend.
The reaction to his posts, however, are skin to the Christian conservatives reactions to Cesar Chavez on Google. The people fucking bitching the loudest.. NEVER FUCKING LOG OFF. It doesn't make their core point wrong, but assigning "burning contempt" to a guy fucking around with his friend in twitter is hubris, hyperbole, and hyprocrisy that only normally comes from people with an extreme politcal agenda.
Seriously. People need to fucking GROW UP. IF, and I state again, IF, Microsoft is stupid enough to require an always on connection, guess what? Flame the hell out of them. Frankly, they'll deserve it. But the shit I saw made up about a guy on Reddit and random other sites.. because a bunch of self righteous, outrage point seeking entitled assholes wanted to burn down someone that.. they FUCKING DISAGREED WITH. Makes me goddamn sick.
Awesome to hear Dell and Alienware getting behind linux gaming... I love my dell u2311h monitor, but there's no way in hell I'd buy an alienware system, I'll just build my own. As for Slashdot not covering it... well they have lagged behind getting tech news out for quite a while now.
... wait, what?
(3) Slashdot's advertising money comes from Microsoft, Apple, Facebook et al, and they see the Linux aricles purely as an opportunity to smear competition.
It's not like there's ever much positive said here about FOSS. It's all just sly astroturfing and FUD.
This wasn't some random drone, some low level programmer, whose input and decision plays no role whatsoever. This was the creative director. If ANYONE'S input in stuff like that is important, it is his.
The mere fact that this was NOT some "official" fart but actually a decision maker making a (from a purely company politically point of view) "stupid" remark says 100 times more than any "official" press release.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I didn't see the following tweets until Major Nelson put out the apology, and I was rather horrified by the way Adam Orth expresses himself to a potential customer. Still, I am not sure kicking someone is the right way to go, but I do think they need to give at least the management some media training and make sure that everyone is aware of a company media policy. So many people are ignorant of how the internet ecosystem works and how things spread.
Personally, I refrain myself from publicly commenting on matters regarding the organization where I work. We have people whose job is to take care of these matters. When I see something I can tell them, say what I think and let them decide the correct course of action. I am entitled to my opinion, but that doesn't mean that I need to express it at all times. I know that my word might be taken for the official position and that might not be true, anyway I am not paid to comment on my employers decisions.
Yesterday I summed up some of my thoughts in the matter: http://mzomborszki.wordpress.com/2013/04/05/how-to-be-an-insensitive-clod/.
I wasn't aware that Slashdot had an obligation to proselytise for Linux or anything else.
Welcome to Slashdot. We're here because we're here, and because we want to be here.
If you are not here, you are not reading this.
If you are here, and you would prefer to be somewhere else, you are welcome to go there.
It's all good, mate.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
If a Creative Director, a corporate officer of a subsidary isn't considered to be a spokesmutant for said subsidary, who the fuck is?????
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
If you are not here, you are not reading this.
Wait - we need to rename the site Schrödingerdot. Who do I yell at to get this done?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I agree about the need for folks to do a head-check before reacting to something said off-the-cuff, but there's one sticking point... ...why did he use Twitter to verbally horse around with a buddy on such a touchy-assed subject? I mean, there are many, many less public means of doing that.
I play Devil's Advocate on a lot of subjects. I work with fellow sysadmins and developers, and I often say some incredibly crazy/provocative things (err, even at work) - usually to force someone into thinking through a blockage. But, what I don't do is use a publicly-viewable means to do any of that.
One other bit I should mention; it's not that the loudest gripers are bitching about the always-on aspect per se, but the unstated-yet obvious reason it torques them is that they want to retain control over the stuff they paid for. The always-on requirement implies that they won't have that control. When I was younger (I know...) I'd play Quake (1, 2 and 3, usually a CTF mod) at all hours, and between that plus goofing off on USENET, I practically never logged off.
I don't game anymore (well, almost never), but the very thought of keeping a connection open just to get permission to use a product I paid for? Hell, my skin crawls at the thought.
Little wonder the more passionate gamers are up in arms at the idea.
Just food for thought.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
But stop and think about how the whole game playing internet reacted to him. They basically tried to destroy a persons career - someone who has no involvement in the not actually officially announced product - over a stated opinion with a friend.
That guy is the fucking Creative Director of Microsoft, if he has no involvement with the direction the XBox at all, he is not doing his fucking job and he deserved to be fucking fired.
What he said publicly (yes, those tweets are public, even though he might have intended otherwise) does reflect on his company. This may be news to kids living the basement, but many companies have code of conducts for employees that have explicit clause for disciplinary action or even termination for employees behaving badly in public and damaging the company's image.
The phrase is "Film at 11", or if you're a Brit, "Pictures at 11".
(Yes, Grasshopper, I do know what I'm talking about, as I worked in the industry for some years.)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
>Recently an Australian telephone exchange burned down in Warrnambool
Move.
-Xbox Creative Director
For me the biggest problem is the the fact that the games have a finite time after which they will not work.
Here Here! Only a few days ago we pulled out our PS2 to play Burnout during a party. That didn't even had retro appeal, but the game was simply damn fun. I was just prompted by your post to look it up. It's more than 12 years old now!
Any DRM scheme which requires some activation from a server whether it be always-on or just a check at first install is an instant no-no for me.
Fuck you, dumbass. You're a player in a high profile outfit like MS, especially in a noisy arena of computer games, and you shoot your mouth off in public with tweeter and god-knows-what-else, you deserve to get fired. Twice.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
The most important thing I've noticed, in this whole charade, is this:
"loyal consumers"
You are not citizens anymore. Or customers.
You are consumers, please get used to it.
"I have no interest in purchasing games with an expiration date."
Although in reality you always have. Any game constructed for a specific platform has a limited lifespan. And that's all games.
With the brilliant advances in emulation recently, I find it hard to believe that an always on server couldn't be emulated just as easily as the hardware of an 80s arcade machine. Just saying.
I get the feeling that you seem to be engaging in a from of double-think.
Just so I get it right: You say that all games have an expiration date, as the hardware/software they run on will not be available permanently. You equate that to the identical impermanence of the remote servers in always-on games. Then you say that the latter can be emulated quite easily, just like the old hardware is.
But does that not mean that your first point is totally moot? Because as long as you have reliable emulation, offline games do not have an expiration date; especially if the emulators are Open-Source and thus easily (depending in the code) convertible between platforms.
I for one strictly believe that one of the very first software tools that is going to be written for the first off-the-shelf quantum computer will be an SNES emulator.
Always-on-games are a different beast though. Because instead of writing an emulator for a whole platform, thus covering almost all titles for it at the same time; you need to write a completely new emulator for every single always-on game, since they're all fundamentally different.
The XBox720 will not function if an internet connection is not found within 3 minutes. I don't give a damn how 'great' their games might be, as a consumer I've been turned off to Microsoft altogether, and won't be contributing my dollars to this company in any of their product line.
He's part of the same division that gave us such "greats" as Games For Windows Live or as i like to call it "attack of the really fucking dumb UI" since you can search in it ON a PC for specifically PC GAMES and it'll give you 4 pages of Xbox games, so do we REALLY care if MSFT is gonna do something fucking retarded? Hell isn't "We're fucking retarded" practically the company logo now?
Lets face it folks, from Zune to Windows 8, from killing PlaysForSure (which was actually GAINING decent share at the time) for the DOA Zune Market, hell I could go on all day just listing fucking DUMB moves by that company in the past few years so would anybody be REALLY surprised if they embraced a bad idea that other companies like Ubisoft already saw kills sales worse than putting a Goatse on the cover, would it REALLY shock you to see MSFT yet again embracing ideas from 2 years ago that were flops?
This is coming from somebody that has sold and serviced MSFT products since the days of Win 3.x but even I can see the company has come off the rails, anybody with eyes can see any guys that had any kind of vision have bailed for Google or Apple and now everything is designed by a committee of PHBs using PPT slides and Excel sheets that focus more on what it'll do to the stock price than whether it'll be a great product. As I have pointed out MANY times before the entire history of MSFT can be summed up as "Then the other guy did something fucking DUMB and MSFT took advantage", from the revolving CEOs and mess of products in the late 80s Apple to Sony adopting a "fuck you peasants" attitude and pricing the PS3 double what the market would bear it all comes down to the other guy doing something really fucking stupid which gives MSFT a free shot.
But now we are seeing what happens when their competition is run by people who are NOT Forest Gump levels of stupid and the answer is simple: a fucking mess. Behind the times, stupid move after stupid move, Ballmer's MSFT snatches defeat from the jaws of victory better than any company out there and from the sound of the 720 or whatever they end up calling it is gonna be another fuckup thanks to bad calls made by the suits.Again is ANYBODY really shocked by this?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I agree about the need for folks to do a head-check before reacting to something said off-the-cuff, but there's one sticking point... ...why did he use Twitter to verbally horse around with a buddy on such a touchy-assed subject? I mean, there are many, many less public means of doing that.
...
Because people fuck up sometimes?
FYI It's "Hear Hear" not "here here". You're asking the audience to take note, you are not befriending a cat.
Actually all the ad money comes from Google. Turn off adblock, hover over an ad, right click, hit "inspect element".
MS, Apple, etc might pay Google for advertising, but I don't think I've ever seen an Apple or MS banner ad on Google (probably because as a general rule businesses don't pay for their rival's services if the don't have to).
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
Sadly OUYA does not ship with any meaningful hardware in it. Already-obsolete Tegra 3 that has OpenGL ES 2.0 level hardware (ie. DX9 in PC terms) paired with far too little RAM and Android OS...
It competes with cell phones and tablets in performance. And crappy ones at that. I'm sure it'll run Angry Birds but people will be up for a disappointment when they notice that ten year old real consoles trounce it in performance and there are already a veritable army of tablets and phones(!) that do graphics a lot better.
A nice toy, priced somewhat fairly considering the performance, incapable of running any real games.
Do you *want* someone who so despises the end-users to have a management career in software?
He expressed the desire to injure an extremely large number of people, and when he was called on it he expressed not remorse. It's true that this is an attempt to injure him more severely, but the attempt is spread over a vastly smaller number of people.
Someone who intentionally injures a large number of people to a small amount deserves a punishment equal to the sum of the injuries done, plus a bit added, because it was intentional. If he would have injured 100,000 people an injury of, say $10 (we're talking about a purchased product, so dollars seems a reasonable measure), then he deserved a punishmen of, say, $1,500,000. I realize that this won't happen, and there is no judicial system means to cause it to happen, but he has no grounds for complaint unless he is injured unreasonably in return. Having his career damaged not only seems reasonable, it may get him out of management in software development, where he clearly doesn't belong.
Now this is a bit more difficult, because he hasn't yet done the $10 worth of damage to 100,000 people. He has just clearly indicated that he would intentionally do so if he had the chance. That, however, is sufficient to show that he should be OUT of any management position in software development. Maybe he would be a good manager in accounting.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
That may be so, but he expressed a clear intention to injure a large number of customers. And no remorse when challenged on the point. This is not someone that we want in even a low-level management position.
OTOH, as I wouldn't buy any Microsoft product anyway, my standing to take action on this matter is dubious. But then I *didn't* take any action. I'm merely defending the actions of those that did as being reasonable (the actions I heard about, anyway).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.