So last week Microsoft finally did the thing everyone had been yelling at them to do since E3. On June 19th they put up a post on Xbox Wire from Don Mattrick basically saying: okay, fine, no more mandatory 24-hour check-ins, no more restrictions on trading in or lending your discs. Xbox One is going to work like every console before it. You buy a game, it's yours, you can sell it to your buddy or take it to GameStop for the two dollars they'll give you for it, whatever.
I should be happy about this. Everyone I know who was mad about the DRM stuff is treating it like a victory lap. And it is one, I guess. But I already put a deposit down on a PS4 back in May, right after Sony did that "here's how you share a disc-based game" video at their E3 press conference — the one where the Sony guy just hands a disc to another guy and says "that's it, that's the video" — and I'm not backing out of that now just because Microsoft caved a week later.
Here's my actual problem with it. This wasn't Microsoft doing the right thing because it was the right thing. This was Microsoft doing the right thing because preorders were reportedly ugly and the internet spent about ten days lighting them on fire. Sony didn't even have to try that hard. They just sat back at their own conference, watched Microsoft explain a really confusing system for how you'd be allowed to lend a friend a game once, and let the crowd do the work for them. The applause when they announced PS4 would be $399 with none of that stuff practically blew the roof off the venue. I watched the stream at like 6pm on a Monday and even through a laptop speaker it sounded like a football stadium.
So now Xbox One still requires Kinect to be plugged in at all times (as of last week anyway, who knows if that changes too eventually), still costs $499, a hundred bucks more than the PS4, and the big thing that made people mad is now off the table but the price gap is still sitting right there. That's not nothing, don't get me wrong. If you already own a stack of Xbox 360 games and you're staying in the family, this is genuinely good news and I'm not going to pretend it isn't. I just don't think "we walked back the anti-consumer thing after getting yelled at for two weeks straight" should earn anybody a ton of goodwill. It's the bare minimum wearing a trophy.
The bigger thing bugging me, and this is more of a tangent than anything, is how exhausting the whole E3 cycle has gotten. Every year it's a firehose of reveals, then a week of backlash, then a week of walkbacks and clarifications and "an update on X," and by the time the dust settles it's basically July and nobody remembers what half the actual games looked like. I used to watch E3 for the games. This year I couldn't tell you three titles that got shown off. I could tell you the entire timeline of Xbox One's DRM policy though, in order, with dates. That's not a great trade.
Also, unrelated, but Yahoo officially closed on Tumblr a few days ago too and I still don't know how I feel about that. Marissa Mayer wrote that whole "we promise not to screw it up" post back when the deal was announced in May, and I want to believe her, I really do, but "we promise not to screw it up" is such a strange thing to have to say out loud that it kind of makes you nervous by itself. Nobody says that about something that's actually fine.
Anyway. My PS4 preorder is staying put. Not because the Xbox reversal doesn't matter, it does, but because trust doesn't reset just because a company reversed course under pressure. If anything it just tells you what they were willing to try in the first place, and that's the part I keep thinking about more than the fix.