So Microsoft did the thing everyone's been begging them to do since E3. Don Mattrick put up a post yesterday (the 19th) walking back basically every controversial Xbox One policy in one go: no more 24-hour check-in requirement, no more disc restrictions on used games, no region lock. You can now play Xbox One offline, resell your discs, and lend a game to a friend the exact same way you've been doing on the 360 for eight years. Congratulations, Xbox One, you have achieved parity with a console from 2005.
I want to be annoyed about this in the normal way everyone else is annoyed about it, the "they should never have tried this in the first place" way. And sure, fine, I agree with that too. But I've got a smaller complaint that I haven't seen anybody else bring up yet, so I'm going to use my little corner of the internet to say it: the family sharing plan they announced back in May is gone now too, and nobody's mourning it, and I think that's actually kind of a shame.
Remember that part of the reveal? Up to ten accounts on a single license, any of them could play the game whether or not the disc was in the drive, and I remember reading it and thinking, okay, that's the first genuinely new idea in this whole console generation. I've got a brother two states away and we used to split game costs back when we lived together. Something like that, formalized, sanctioned by Microsoft instead of us just sharing a login and hoping nobody got banned — that was actually interesting to me. It required the always-online stuff to work at all, obviously, which is exactly why it had to go. You can't have a feature that phones home to verify who's allowed to play if you've just promised people the console works fine unplugged.
So that's dead now. Killed by the same backlash that killed the DRM. Which I get! The DRM was worse, by a lot, and the internet was right to be furious about a $499 box that could get bricked by your Comcast connection dropping for a day. Sony spent their entire E3 press conference beating Microsoft over the head with exactly this, remember the video with the guy just handing a disc to his friend, "this is how you share games on PlayStation 4," dripping with contempt. It worked. It was one of the most savage twenty seconds of corporate messaging I've watched in years and I don't think Microsoft has recovered from it yet, a week and a half later.
But it does bug me a little that "everything works exactly like it always has" was apparently the only acceptable outcome. Nobody wanted a middle option. Nobody wanted, I don't know, an opt-in version of family sharing that didn't require mandatory always-online for every single game. Maybe that wasn't technically possible in the time they had, I have no idea how their licensing backend actually works. But the whole conversation went from "this is draconian and anti-consumer" straight to "fine, we'll just make it 2010 again," with nothing in between, and that's the part that feels like a missed opportunity to me rather than a straightforward win.
Anyway. I preordered a PS4 back in May and I'm not un-preordering it, the price alone settled that for me — $399 versus $499 for what's mostly the same hardware isn't a hard call. But I'll admit I was quietly curious what Microsoft's weirder ideas might have turned into if the rollout hadn't gone so badly that they had to nuke the whole thing in three weeks flat. Sometimes the bad idea and the interesting idea are tangled up in the same feature, and when you cut the bad one out you lose the interesting one along with it, and everybody just moves on like that's fine.
It probably is fine. I just wanted it on the record that I noticed.