Game Designer Jesse Schell Says Microsoft Made A Mistake
For a good long while now, everybody seems to be saying that Microsoft has been making one mistake after another. The biggest one, at least as far as the Xbox One is concerned, is the fact that the console was originally slated to have what amounted to an always-online requirement, as the console would “phone home” every 24 hours. Not only that, but every game would require an installation to the console, and for all intents and purposes the used-game market on the Xbox One was going to be heavily restricted.
Of course, as most people are aware of right now, Microsoft pulled a 180 and are no longer abiding by those policies. But according to one game designer, Jesse Schell, that’s a mistake all on its own. According to him, the mistake is that Microsoft listened to their customers in the first place. He says that Microsoft tried to do something unique and different, but because of a “relatively small” group of people the company instead has to give out the same thing.
Here’s my problem with his viewpoint. It wasn’t that Microsoft was wanting to change things up a bit that people were mad, it was because the company did it in a way that was so blatantly screwing the consumer that the consumer had no choice but to say “no, I do not like where this is going!” By adding restrictions on what people could do with used games, and on adding a restriction that the console required some sort of internet to work, Microsoft essentially said to folks “we don’t care about you, but rather we care about what might make us the most amount of money.” To many folks, Microsoft was making a cash grab for itself and the major publishers by killing off the used game market. Microsoft’s mistake wasn’t listening to the customers. Their mistake was thinking the customer would just bend over and take it.
