Ms could have released a version without a disc drive for those who prefer digital.It would have been a bit cheaper too and while i wasnt totally sold on the idea, i know a few friends of mine who were.

Going full digital imo is something ms should have done gradually cos internet availability and bandwith speeds are some of the most important factors to be considered and right now broadband services are still very unreliable in many countries and that alone would have crippled and alienated the console in many markets.

But do you really think MS would give you steam like sales?

Absolutely not. They would be the only distributor so they would set the prices at what ever they wanted.

I honestly wish MS kept they original DRM so that the people defending them would get what they deserved.

What's stopping them from doing it now?

No one told them NOT to do Steam-like sales after the policy reversal. MS decided they weren't going to do Steam-like sales at all.

Even with the suppression of DRM, why is the OS still crap? No one told MS to undo all the good they did with the Xbox 360 dashboard and turn the XB1 into a Windows 8 tablet.

I don't understand fanboy logic. All the reversals did was remove the DRM and the unnecessary chokepoints on consumers. It had nothing to do with Microsoft not being able to model a digital distribution method after Steam.

Heck, no one told Microsoft to have digital games available at the same price as retail games. THEY chose to do that.

And for anyone saying "In the old method it would have been different!" no it wouldn't have because they were still working with Gamestop, Walmart, Best Buy and other big retailers to distribute games via physical copies that would be tied to the Azure network. So literally, NOTHING would have changed other than that you would have more roadblocks, checkpoints and DRM in your way.

And before anyone brings up the Family Share Plan, just remember that even in their old policies it wasn't going to be available at launch anyway. So again, NOTHING would have changed.

It's gonna be a while... a long while.

"Digital is the future, one way or the other gamers will embrace it later on."

People always say that like we don't have a choice in the matter. Things like this are only "the future" if we let them be. Otherwise, they fail and are not the future.

If ISP's succeed in bringing in tiered Internet (I've noticed time Warner Cable trying and have heard of Verizon doing the same) an all digital future may simply be to expensive for many gamers.

It may be the future if the current ecosystem stays the same but companies are going to profiteer where they can. Don't expect Internet usage costs to stay so affordable.

You're halfway right. Nevertheless, Phil is lying and so are the other executives that echo this talking point. Lawrence Hryb aka "Major Nelson", the Director of Programming for Microsoft's Xbox Live didn't know that his corporation, Microsoft, could flip a switch to turn off their DRM in his interview with AngryJoe, a popular YouTube videogame reviewer/interviewer.

Nonetheless, there is no better place than the Microsoft 2013 E3 stage to demonstrate any of the features I wrote in the first paragraph.

It was their policy that was a disaster, not their PR.

Ken, you're seriously naive if you think that Microsoft's original vision is A)Gone forever because it's not, and B)Anything even remotely like Steam, and Steam is already DRM anyway.

Microsoft weren't interested in sales, cheaper prices for gamers, B.C. for older titles. Microsoft were interested in partnering with larger publishers like EA to destroy the used games market out of sheer greed.

Pubs like MS and EA are under the misconception that used games are costing them money and they spread that lie every chance they can get. It was the same thing with the excuse that there were too many consoles on the market, demos were costing sales, rentals were costing sales, piracy costs sales. They just don't want to admit that they make bad games and charge too much for them so people don't buy them.

MS' DRM was good for MS and MS' partners only, not the gamer. Steam itself is DRM that people have come to accept because it's better than the alternative of never having games at all. PC games floundered when you could only buy physical copies.

Nothing about MS' DRM was pro-gamer or Steam like.

These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse

Contractual agreements are not the same as “gentlemen” agreements. If you think that they work with their distributors a month before production then their entire business model is trash. They work with companies like nvidia constantly for building the graphics cards they need. They work with companies that build motherboards years in advance. This is what proper business planning does.

They are not buying components on a whim like a consumer. So again, considering the ram isn’t a singular module and is integrated into the motherboard I highly doubt they wouldn’t have a final schematic that they are supposed to be building around.

If they are delaying production another 3 years then it’s obvious again this is an after though project and is just trying to be responsive to their bad execution they had the last 14 years.

It also isn’t far fetched to use their failure to produce first party titles the last 7 years including the highly anticipated games I mentioned all being cancelled. That they would continue to you know… lie

Yeah with FSR 5 they should be able to offer a much cheaper version of Helix.

Series S is what has killed Xbox Series so... Will they dare?

The factors are largely external. Covid and Russia-Ukraine war causing inflation led to the first price increase in 2022.

Then we get Trump's tariffs increasing hardware prices, AI boom causing a RAM crisis, war on Iran causing a worldwide fuel crisis which impacts the cost of everything.

Gaming doesn't exist in a vacuum. The last few years have been a shitshow and lot of it was definitely avoidable.

LucasRuinedChildhood,

For sure. No disagreement on the external factors doing a lot of this. Where I have to gently push back however is on two fronts:

1. The pandemic definitely caused some issues: asynchronous development was a big issue and really complicated timelines and affected game quality. At the same time, when it comes to price hikes, it's really difficult to know what was genuine necessity and what was taking consumers for a ride. The pandemic brought about "stag-flation" which was increasing prices and stagnant wages, which was a problem caused by supply chain constraints. There was also "Greed-flation", where companies that were slightly affected or had no issues took advantage of the situation and squeezed everyone citing supply chain issues when there were none.

2. It's definitely true that the tariffs, AI boom, and RAM crisis were all things enabled by tech broligarchs throwing money at this caricature of a world leader, one of them being Satya Nadella. I don't think Sony and Nintendo have contributed much to this problem if at all, but Microsoft's Nadella I feel was instrumental in causing every one of those issues. Microsoft as a company contributed to both candidates (though they gave Harris 4x as much if I recall), but Nadella was all in on letting AI run wild. He paid for unregulated AI, and got a war that's not a war (even though Trump called it that at least five times on television) that screwed up helium access. So for me, I feel that one of the players in the gaming industry is a key architect of these issues, and for that reason I struggle a bit to think of it as "external".