So are we watching the resurgence of a former champion in Sony?
Or a total collapse of another company in the gaming industry in Microsoft?
It is like the eternal sports question, is it a comeback or is it a collapse?
Sony’s return to prominence has been happening for the past couple of years, as the PS3 has cranked out a variety of gems and allowed itself to leapfrog the Xbox 360 into second place in the seventh generation market share. Although the Vita is still a mess, the PS3 has remained relevant, and the former ugly image associated with Sony is slowly drifting away.
On the other hand: Microsoft is in major trouble.
They may not even see it yet.
The 360 hasn’t come up with a major original hit in quite some time. The Halo appeal has drifted, the other major Microsoft franchises has seemingly disappeared, third-party games are beginning to do better on the PS3, and Japan is still positively avoiding the company like the plague (The 360 has already been outsold by the Vita in lifetime sales over in the Japanese gamespace). But none of this can possibly prepare you for the potential backlash of the Xbox One.
Required Online.
Think about this for a second. They want your Xbox One to be online---at least once a day or your game will experience issues. So this pretty much ruins your Xbox experience if you are overseas fighting, if you are in a cruise ship, if you are on vacation in a hotel, in an area with very poor online reception, in an area that had just been hit by a disaster, or if you had just moved to a new place and await for cable to arrive. There are dozens of other scenarios in which this new requirement would make for gaming to become an absolute chore on the new Microsoft machine, but then I would drift off-topic.
And wait…what if Microsoft’s servers went down?
What if Xbox Live got attacked?
The fact is this: Microsoft is alienating its entire audience and fanbase: hardcore and casual. Casual gamers would have absolutely no idea how to maneuver around life with the Xbox One restricting your damn game from playing if it didn’t touch the internet in 24 hours, and the hardcore most likely won’t appreciate the fact that you can’t share the games at launch, can’t re-sell the games at launch (and possibly beyond), you have to wait 30 days just to share certain content with someone else, and can’t even play Xbox 360 games in this new machine.
Gaming is supposed to be simple.
Gaming is supposed to unite people together.
United gaming is essential, which is why the SNES remains one of the best systems ever (the slew of excellent 2-player games), why the N64 survived (Became the ultimate party system until the invention of the Xbox Live), why the PS2 won the war while the Gamecube faltered (Online gaming was best here, and Nintendo didn’t embrace the internet—leading to a last-place finish), why the Nintendo Wii was at one point on pace to shatter every sales record known to man (I had pretty much declared the Wii the winner two years ago because of how freakin' big a sales lead it had) and why the Xbox 360 was able to survive in 1st/2nd for so long with the weakest 1st-party lineup (Xbox Live was wonderful in recent years).
Connectivity is what makes Microsoft’s systems—why on Earth would you damage this?
Xbox Live is usually synonymous with good online gaming. All we want is a next-generation system with good games, good third-party support, and good online capabilities. It is such a simple formula. Nintendo doesn’t follow this because they don’t have the Sony/Microsoft budget so they do a smoke-and-mirrors technique of trying to change the rules. The Playstation 3 learned that great games push great hardware sales. The Last of Us is the latest example of Sony truly digging deep into its first-party weapons to continue the positive upswing.
It is so obscenely simple. We want games. Games. Games. Games. The WiiU would not have been such a disaster if it weren't for the total lack of games. No television/gaming connections, no extra random features, and especially no pointless and irritating restrictions that makes a simple hobby known as gaming become a fight for justifiable expensive entertainment. And what are the chances that with these constraints Microsoft can quietly jack the price of the games themselves? Up to this point, anything is possible.
Microsoft managed to shatter any momentum it could have had at the expense of the flailing Nintendo WiiU and the also-questionable Playstation 4 (Sony, don’t think that I have forgotten that your stance on DRM remains ho-hum). Now, the WiiU doesn’t look that bad because you can actually share the games, while Sony isn’t pushing for the stupid daily online requirement.
Microsoft, you are ridiculous. You lost a potential buyer this year.
And I am pretty sure you are going to lose many more if you continue down this path.
No comments:
Post a Comment