Just read this news today from Edge Online:
Simply put, are they crazy? We don’t even know what their
console looks like or what games it has, and this is the best news that they
can “leak” out there? It’s not as if they are not making any money from selling
games. This just reeks of greed.
Also, requiring people to be online all the time is
ridiculous. Do they at Redmond never lose connectivity every so often? It’s as
if Microsoft was Maria Antoinette saying, “Let them eat cake!” They seem so
oblivious to the lifestyle of gamers around the world. Players don’t always
have internet connection, and sometimes they don’t want to bother setting it
up. It’s way too optimistic to expect players to find a way to connect all the
time. It’s just anti-consumer. While they have the tech to do this sort of
draconian measure, it doesn’t mean that they should implement it.
Does this mean Sony is not going to do this? The original
story was that Sony ‘invented’ this technology. So if Microsoft is doing it,
Sony MIGHT be doing it later on as well. If Sony does NOT do this, they will be
the landslide victor of this upcoming ‘console war’ even before it has started.
If Microsoft was smart, and if they still want to do this really stupid
business practice, they would do this later in the next generation, maybe in
their second or third year. NOT at launch. This is just giving them bad press.
It’s not like they don’t have enough bad press already, with the failures of
Windows Phone and Windows 8. Microsoft needs a positive story this time. And
doing these business moves, while looking more profitable for their
stockholders, is not going to be good for them in the long run.
The only seeming beneficiary of all this is Nintendo. Lucky
for gamers, they haven’t discovered DRM yet,…well, sorta. But at least they
didn’t put this in their cartridges for 3DS or in their games for Wii or Wii U.
This might be the key weakness in both their opponents for them to stay
relevant. All they need now are solid games…since they released earlier than
Sony or MS, it gives them a small advantage.