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Microsoft Game Director Adam Orth Resigns Following Xbox Comments
DavidGilbert99 writes "According to anonymous sources, Microsoft's game director Adam Orth has left the company following a series of comments on Twitter about the rumoured always-on aspect of the next generation Xbox console. It is still unclear if Orth left voluntarily or was pushed out but either way it's not good news for Microsoft." If you'd prefer your news without obnoxious auto-playing video ads (with sound!), IGN reports Orth's departure, too.
This is one appropriate course of action for someone in that position that made those comments. However it should have been treated publicly as a firing offence though instead of a graceful exit, as most companies I know would have seen these communications as an example of gross incompetence and would have treated accordingly.
- This sig deliberately left blank. Nothing to see, move along.
That's what I thought, I don't see how "either way it's not good news for Microsoft". If the employee was incompetent because he caused harm to the company then getting rid of him is damn good news because it means he can't do it again.
I somewhat wonder if Microsoft have been having the always-on DRM debate internally and Adam Orth was in fact on the losing side of that internal discussion and took to Twitter to bitch about consumers who don't like always-on DRM simply because he lost the internal debate on the topic to the argument that consumers will fucking hate it.
I say this because I'd be surprised if Microsoft do go the always on DRM route, I don't think even MS is that stupid, but time will tell I guess.
Either way, good fucking riddance. This is one of those few things every once in a while Microsoft does that is absolutely right and that they absolutely shouldn't be faulted for. This guy was an idiot.
ranting and bitching about Steve Ballmer for almost a decade with no results. Turns out the correct method is twitter?
Good people go to bed earlier.
Lost your job? Deal with it.
The comments cited by TFA weren't the problem in my opinion. He has a unpopular viewpoint on a subject that a lot of his former employer's customer base feels strongly about but the other comments basically insulting people who don't live in large metro areas are the firing offence to me.
I can't find the quotation so this is from memory but someone responded to his tweet by saying "sometimes the internet is spotty in other areas of the country like Kansas and that's why always on would suck" and Orth responded "why would anyone live there". That's pretty much a big fuck you to a large part of the country. Not a wise move to disparage millions of potential customers. I think that comment and the attitude it conveys is a bigger problem than him stating his opinion about "always on".
Why do anon cowards make these demands but then provide no method of means of complying? Maybe if you provided a location and a method of contacting you, I could comply. But simply demanding something in the fashion you have is just silly.
You should write it something like:
Then, assuming I could make it to Washington DC, I could, if I was interested, come around and knock on your door. If I liked your looks, and you didn't smell, and your place was not to messy, and you offered me a decent drink, etc., I might well, "shut up and suck your dick". But you know, just making random demands on the Internet isn't enough. You've got to put effort into it.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
FWIW I started with a 360 and bought a PS3 later on, I was an XBox fanboy originally, but nowadays I could care less who "wins" a console battle (I guess I'm getting old).
But now I do have both, now I am apathetic to fanboyism I do feel that objectively the 360 feels more polished, the controllers not only feel better to hold and use, but the PS3 buttons even just outright feel like they don't respond sometimes. There's a lot of awkward inconsistencies such as sometimes when you download a game from the store you get an unlock file, and others you get the full game, and other times you get random extra downloads on top, then it's non-obvious what files you can delete so you end up with these files that do nothing but you're unsure if it's safe to delete them. Patching is horrendous, I had to download many 10s of gigabytes of patches for the handful of games I bought such that on my connection (a mere 4mbps, but still double the recommended 2mbps minimum for modern consoles) I ended up spending my first two to three days of owning the system patching games. The sign up process to Sony online was brutal, the site kept going down and I desperately tried to recover an SOE account from years ago but apparently that's a different Sony online thing to the Playstation one and that made it all a bit of a pain. It's still not a bad console, and yes Microsoft's advertising on the 360 UI after you've paid £40 a year is annoying, and yes it costs £40 a year, but the 360 is just so much more of a pleasure to use, it's so much more polished, and you spend so much less time patching.
All that ignores Sony's arrogance towards it's customers, but I bought mine after the Linux debacle, the removal of backwards compat. etc. so I knew exactly what I was buying (though that's subject to change given their history I guess).
If the 360 never existed the PS3 would still be a decent console, and even with the 360 I've had many hours of enjoyment out of my PS3 as both a Bluray player and on games like the Little Big Planet series, the Killzone series, and the Uncharted series. But if I was doing it all again knowing what I know now, even with the RROD debacle, I'd most definitely still have bought the 360 first.
Oh, horseshit. People have all sorts of reasons for living in rural areas (cost of living, lower crime, because they want to, because that's where their job is). Are you suggesting everyone should move out of every rural area for the cities and leave the rest deserted just so they can have access to the internet?
The internet isn't the be all and end all of the world, and lots of people still want to be able to play games without the need for an internet connection.
My XBox no longer connects to the network, because once they started putting ads into both the home screen and the games they crossed the line into "absolutely not". I don't play games on-line, I have no interest in playing games on-line, and it's none of their fscking business when I play, what games I play, or for how long. And I'm certainly not giving them a platform to show me ads.
Always-on internet and DRM is meant to give them control over the consumer, as well as making sure to get some extra revenue from ads, and maybe garner information about your gaming habits.
Being required to do this is more like choosing to eat at a restaurant which serves bad food, because you're being told "eat shit, if you want to play you have no choice".
Well, there is a choice, and that's to simply not buy the next XBox. If they require always-on internet, that's the choice I'll be exercising.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.