Xbox One Launch Woes Were Preventable, Next Console Likely Digital Download Only

MojoKid writes: Microsoft's Xbox One launch didn't go off exactly as planned in late 2013. Before the console's release, the company was dogged over DRM restrictions with the console and concerns over its high price tag compared to its counterpart, the Sony PlayStation 4. Microsoft would attribute the higher price tag to the included Kinect camera — a peripheral that many gamers didn't particularly care for. Former Xbox Chief Robbie Bach offered his two cents recently on the Xbox One — a console that launched years after he announced he retired from the company in 2010. Bach noted, regarding the Xbox One's rocky launch, "...gosh, I think some of that was predictable and preventable." As for the future of physical game media, Bach doesn't think that the future will be so bright when it comes to DRM and always-connected requirements in the next generation of gaming consoles. He said that the next Xbox would "probably not" have physical media to speak of, with consoles adopting digital-only distribution.

Comments

90% of the titles are actually download only now

[Lumpy]

you get a disc that tells it to download a 20gb "update" that is actually the whole freaking game.

The problem is obvious

[dackroyd]

The guy who was in charge of the Xbox team for these 'woes' was a guy named Don Mattrick.

During the run up to the horrible E3 where most of these poor decisions were revealed, he had been negotiating and then accepted a job running Zynga.

To put it mildly, he had completely checked out and didn't appear to care about what happened to the Xbox at that E3, as he knew he was going to be out the door a few weeks later.

This is one of the larger straight mistakes that Ballmer (as opposed to reasonable but poor decisions) made during his role as CEO of Microsoft - leaving a guy who just didn't give a shit in charge of a major project.

Re:The problem is obvious

[Xest]

I think letting him off by saying it's just because he was leaving understates the issue. Let's be clear, Don Mattrick was an anti-consumer arsehole who simply had no idea what he was doing.

Since he left Microsoft's Xbox division has done a complete u-turn, they're actually incredibly responsive to user demands now, and seem genuinely sensitive to gamers concerns going so far as to ditch their previous pet project Kinect from the majority of console bundles a while ago and providing dashboard changes and functionality people actually asked for, usually within short order.

I suspect the reason Mattrick was looking for a new job in the first place was because no one else at Microsoft liked or trusted him either, it's pretty obvious the whole culture at the Xbox division changed when he fucked off, and that couldn't happen if many other people there agreed with his direction, the fact the change happened so quickly and was night and day suggests he was using his position of authority to make a lot of staff implement a lot of things they didn't actually want to implement.

The problem is that the damage Mattrick did is lasting, people still parrot a lot of myths about the X1 based on things that were, once, in the product development plan under Mattrick but ditched even before the console was released and thankfully never came to fruition (e.g. you could always disable the Kinect camera and unplug it and stuff worked fine, right from day 1). Similarly console sales have really struggled to recover because of this early damage and it's still lagging against the PS4.

I think it's safe to say that Mattrick is the biggest failure in the world of gaming in the last decade. He's the Stephen Elop of the video game world. He should probably be relegated to something like sweeping the streets with a brush or something where he can't do as much financial damage as he did to the X1 programme.

Always On Sucks

[Idimmu Xul]

I've got an XBox One and currently a really shit internet connection (digital nomad in Spain sharing wifi across 3 different flats).

When the internet goes dodgy and the XBox One loses access, I can't save my game and the games start missing features.

Sure my predicament is a bit odd, but I can't be the only person with flakey Internet. Not being able to save a single player game just because you aren't online is a bit off imo.