Its been about a week since E3 wrapped up and Im still thinking about that Sony video. You know the one — "How To Share Games With Your Friends." A guy hands a disc to another guy. Thats the entire tutorial, no narration needed beyond the guy on screen deadpanning through it like hes reading a phone book. Four minutes, dry as a martini, and it did more damage to Microsoft in half a day than anything their own marketing team could've cooked up in a year.
For anyone who was off the internet on June 10th: Microsoft got up on stage at their E3 presser and confirmed the Xbox One would need to check in online at least once every 24 hours to keep working, that trading in or reselling a used game might involve some kind of publisher fee nobody's fully spelled out yet, and that games would install to the hard drive before you could play them. Then a day later Sony walked out, said the PS4 would be $399 (a hundred bucks cheaper than the Xbox One), said youd trade games "the same way you do now, disc to friend," and dropped that video.
I preordered a PS4 that same night. $399, no deposit fee, at the Best Buy on the way home from work. The guy behind the counter didnt even try to upsell me on a headset or an extra controller, which honestly felt like a small act of mercy given how long that line was.
Im not writing this to pile on Microsoft, plenty of people have already done that this week and my Twitter feed is basically nothing else right now. What actually bugs me is that none of the restrictions have been walked back. Its been a full week of bad press, a viral video getting passed around every gaming forum I read, and as of today, the 18th, Microsoft is still saying the policies stand as announced. Maybe that changes. I dont know. Im just telling you where things sit right now, because by the time anyone finds this post years from now itll read as either quaint or hilariously wrong.
the part that actually gets me
Its not really the DRM itself that bothers me most, its the confidence behind it. Someone in a room at Microsoft looked at "24 hour check-in requirement" and "used game fee" and decided that was a policy worth standing on stage and defending, in front of a room full of people whose entire job is writing about games for a living. Thats a specific kind of corporate nerve, and I sort of respect it even while it annoys me. Say what you want about Sony, but their pitch this week was basically "we didnt do the thing you were worried about," and it worked, because the bar had been set that low.
There was also that Family Sharing Plan thing Microsoft mentioned, letting you share your library with up to ten people, which sounds nice on paper until you remember it comes bundled with the same online check-in requirement thats causing all this noise in the first place. I dont have ten friends who'd even want to share a game library with me, so it wasnt exactly the selling point aimed at someone like me.
My PS4 preorder sits at that Best Buy now, filed somewhere behind whatever people are buying today, with no release date beyond "holiday 2013" on the receipt. Ive technically got months to change my mind. I probably wont, and if Im honest thats partly stubbornness at this point more than anything about the actual specs under the hood, which nobody outside Sony and Microsoft really knows in full yet anyway.
Small tangent because it wouldnt be a real post without one: my cat knocked my keyboard clean off the desk twice while I was writing this, so if theres a typo hiding in the used-games paragraph, blame her and not me. Shes currently asleep on the warm spot where my laptop usually sits, looking extremely pleased with herself about the whole thing.
Anyway. Console wars are dumb and Ive said that on here before and Ill probably say it again in a few months once actual hardware is in peoples hands and we can talk about something other than press conference slides.