Ol’ Rudi is the poster child for why people should retire.

That is in no way a fitting punishment for the crime of “hacking” companies that should already have had better systems in place. Does he not have any family, is house arrest not an option? 

100%. I don’t know what was worse, Microsoft’s terrible explanation or their poor response to the criticism. It’s one thing to attempt something new and have confusing messaging as to how it all works and why it’s necessary, it’s another issue to tell critics and potential customers to “deal with it” if they don’t…

Minor correction:

Being way ahead of its time at a shitty thing is one hell of a victory lap.

That’s exactly why I mentioned optics. The optics of the Xbone’s reveal was terrible, all around. The fact that, even today, the prevailing belief being that pre-owned titles wouldn’t work at all, is terrible. Those optics carried all the way through to the Xbone’s launch, and is probably what singlehandedly killed…

Exactly. I don’t care that how ubiquitous our internet connection is, the inability to play an offline game without the internet is unacceptable.

Agreed about that online check bullshit. I don’t buy stuff digitally because in the end it’s an expensive rental. But I had Xbox gift cards and Alan Wake 2 is annoyingly only available digitally. So I “bought” it. One night when I was playing the Comcast internet went out and I got a pop-up saying I can’t play without…

I love my Xbox One X but even today I would not buy a console that requires me to be always online. With the constant updates and patches needed nowadays this “Always Online” would be nothing more than a bad DRM Method, that makes my system into a useless brick whenever my Internet provider has some problems. Or a…

“Ahead of its time” is normally something I associate with a great idea that noone was ready for but always online DRM is a bad thing whether it becomes common place or not.

The Xbox One was designed from the ground up to make publishers happy, not the consumer

And let’s not forget that the mandatory Kinect, coupled with a mandatory always-on internet, was a major privacy issue.

It’s such a bizarre take when one of the more focused upon media features looked more backwards than forwards. Cable TV integration? HDMI pass through? I know it was cooked up prior to 2013 but even back then the writing was on the wall that streaming was going to become more and more prominent.

Yeah focusing on the always online aspect as the main issue and that it was simply “ahead of its time” really misses the point. The Xbone launch was bungled for a number of reasons but chief among them was an utter failure on Microsoft’s part to communicate what it was concisely or coherently. They just couldn’t…

That’s because it was never about convenience or sharing games, it was about either eliminating or making money off the secondary market. If publishers and platform holders had their way we wouldn’t be able to share, give away or sell games at all, or play offline, or play out of print/unlisted games. That’s why…

“It combined a console, streaming device, and Blu-Ray player into the original all-in-one media player. But like Marty McFly rocking out to “Johnny B Goode” in Back to the Future, people weren’t quite ready for that. Yet.”

These are the correct takes that everyone conveniently forgets, to which I’ll add a third:

Kinda missing the point here. You mention the Kinect, but the other big thing that really hurt its optics at its reveal, was its no pre-owned titles being able to be used with it. Microsoft’s focus on being an entertainment box, specifically trying to mesh TV/Movies/Whatever with games was the most minorest of…

This. I have several friends who are teachers and if they even have social media (most of them don’t because you never know what will piss people off), they post the absolute most innocent family and pet photos. All it takes is one pissed off parent to complain to the school and you’re in trouble. It’s pretty dumb to…