So Microsoft blinked. Three days ago, on the 19th, Don Mattrick put up a post on Xbox Wire walking back basically every controversial policy they'd spent the last month defending: no more mandatory 24-hour check-ins, no more restrictions on trading in or reselling used games, no region locking. Xbox One will now just work like the 360 does. You buy a disc, you play it, you lend it to your buddy, nobody phones home to ask permission.
I should be happy. Everybody online is acting like this is a total victory, and in the "corporations shouldn't get to tell me what I can do with a game I paid $60 for" sense, sure, it is. But I've been sitting with this for a few days now and I keep landing somewhere more annoyed than relieved, which I realize is not the popular opinion to have this week.
Here's the thing nobody wants to talk about: the family sharing plan is dead too. That was the one part of the original Xbox One pitch that actually sounded interesting to me — up to ten people on your "family," all with access to your entire digital library, no disc-swapping required, log into any console anywhere and your games and saves just follow you. I dont even own an Xbox 360 right now (my roommate has one, I mostly just borrow it for Rock Band) but that feature alone had me half convinced to preorder. It was the first console feature in years that felt like it was actually designed around how people share games in real life instead of around stopping them from sharing games.
And it's gone. Not paused, not "we'll revisit it" — gone, because it can't work without the always-online backbone they just ripped out. So what we're left with is a $499 box that does the same disc-in-disc-out thing the $399 PS4 does, except the PS4 doesn't also require a Kinect sensor plugged in and doesn't have the baggage of everyone still remembering the DRM fight from three weeks ago.
Sony's E3 conference on the 10th was brutal, by the way, if you havent watched the clip going around. They put up a slide, deadpan, showing how to "share" a PS4 game: hand a friend the disc. That's the whole joke. Didnt even need to say Xbox's name. The room lost it. Genuinely one of the more savage things I've seen a company do to a competitor on stage without technically saying anything false.
What gets me is the timeline. Xbox One got revealed May 21st with none of this policy stuff spelled out clearly. Then E3 happens June 10th-13th and it becomes THE story of the show, more than any actual game. Sony spends the whole week hammering it. And now, nine days after E3 wraps, Microsoft caves completely. Nine days! That's not "we listened to your feedback," that's "we watched the preorder numbers and panicked." I dont blame them exactly, panicking is a rational response to that particular graph, but let's not pretend this was some thoughtful design pivot.
The used-games thing I get why people are thrilled about, and fair enough, GameStop trade-in credit is basically how a lot of people afford new releases in the first place. I'm not going to pretend restricting that wasn't going to hurt real people's budgets. But I do think we lost something by defaulting back to "physical disc, ownership model unchanged since 2005" instead of anyone actually trying to build something better around digital licenses. The execution was bad. The privacy and always-online implications were legitimately concerning for anyone without solid internet (my connection here drops for a few minutes basically every time it rains hard, so believe me, the 24-hour thing scared me too). But "the whole idea was bad" and "this specific implementation was bad" are different arguments and I feel like everyone's collapsed them into one.
Anyway. I'm still getting a PS4 at launch, mostly because that's where the games I want are going, and I'll probably end up with an Xbox eventually anyway once the price comes down like it always does. Just wanted to write down that I think the internet declared victory a little too fast on this one.