@S0lidSnake said:

@Shame-usBlackley: lol i came here to gloat but you have already gloated enough for the both of us.

I think this is a step in the right direction though. Yeah, they fucked up, but they did 180 on nearly everything last year and now they've done a 180 on Kinect and XBL Gold. It's may not be enough to win the generation, but little things like offering XBL Gold refunds to those who bought it just for Netflix and other apps go a long way towards repairing the brand. If you read GAF and other gaming sites, they've already started to come around. All that's left for MS to do is have a strong outing at E3 and all will be forgotten. Just like it was with Sony last gen.

As for the analysts. The same firm, IDC, predicted this last gen. lol

I still don't think it's fair for people to conflate Sony's PS3 and Microsoft's intentions with the Xbone.

Sony made a terrible mistake and recovered from it somewhat, but only when one disregards how far they fell from the PS2. That's what Areez fails to realize -- brand damage can be tough to wash away. Sony mitigated some of the damage with the PS3, but when you compare how far they fell from the PS2, it was a bad fall for the brand.

What Microsoft did with the Xbone was not just a colossal mistake, it was a fist, intended to be rammed up the ass of the gaming community, forcing them to bend to Microsoft's will. The public told them not to do this, but they did anyway, making a myriad of other mistakes on top of the first. And then their attitude was "**** off if you don't like it." And now they're in trouble and all of a sudden, they're "listening."

Sony made a dumb move, Microsoft tried to kill video gaming as we know it. If some people are willing to let a hundred dollars make them forget that, then they deserve what they get. I don't care if they give the fucking thing away at $5 car washes, I wouldn't buy one. It was a device born of ill-intentions and bad ideas. Now it's a less powerful, slightly cheaper, slightly less-offensive collection of bad ideas.

I referred to Titanfall as Microsoft did, however, it's laughable for you to try to damage control the fact that the game hurt rather than helped the Xbone. The press, serving as surrogate mouthpieces for Microsoft, had already decreed the game to be a game changer, and as a result, everyone expected the game to be the second coming by the time it came out. I mean, one preview stated that his poor widdle heart couldn't take the awesome of Titanfall. It was fucking ridiculous and embarrassing. Further, you can argue that strong February sales hurt March sales, but you'd be dead wrong; for many reasons, but primarily because the game came packed in with the system and the system was sold at a reduced price.

As to brand damage, you honestly feel that a complete lack of vision regarding what the product is (something that has NEVER happened before with a console) and what it will be still being unsettled isn't having an effect on it? What the Xbone is this week may not be next week. They have reversed positions after proclaiming they'd NEVER reverse positions. People like yourself bought into this bullshit and went on forums and tried to sell it, and now you're trying to backpedal when it failed (and it DID fail, you'd have to be blind and ignorant to think all these changes were brought on by anything BUT failure). The 360 was still supply constrained at this point in its life. In a few days, NPD is going to come out, and you're going to see some disastrous figures for the system, and those numbers are going to get even worse while the few who were going to buy wait for the drop to hit in June. You can keep Baghdad Bobbing this thing all you want. I don't have to expend energy beating on you when your own predictions and bulging biases are doing a fine job on their own.

Price is a big factor, but strangely enough, hearing you try to sell that now seems oddly ironic. Should I post some of the things you said about price prior to and around launch? Just say the word. The common thread between your facts and theories is that they've both been consistently wrong. You claimed Kinect was essential to the system. You were wrong. You claimed the price would not be a big factor. Now you're backing off on that. You claimed the market was trending towards tertiary devices based on flimsy logic pulled from the mobile market. You were wrong on that, too. Seeing a trend here, Henry? You need to stop being so focused on defending the Xbox and take a step back and assess what is really happening here.

Finally, I'm not talking about Lewis Ward, I'm talking about you, and if there's one thing I can bank on, it's that you're going to be wrong on just about every assessment of this industry you make, simply because you're forcing yourself to side with a company that is on the wrong side of history.

@Areez: Just like I was jumping the gun about the evolution of the marketplace and Kinect, eh, Henry? Just like Microsoft's "vision"? Speaking of jumping the gun, did gamers forget about all the other awful moves Microsoft has made so easily? If so, explain why the tremendous dropoff when their biggest game of the year had come out? And really, your dismissal of the RROD is myopic as well; the RROD might be a reason they are experiencing difficulties right now. Even with the absence of polling data, it's foolish to believe that product recalls and massive consumer failures leading (or nearly leading) to class action suits doesn't hurt the brand of any product; it only calls into question the timeframe on when such damage occurs.

Sorry, if you feel the events of the last year haven't damaged the brand, you've got your head in the sand (or elsewhere). You have continued to espouse theories that simply don't hold water and stand in stark contrast to the realities of the market, and that, really, has been Microsoft's problem all along -- too many fellows like yourself within the division, Henry. Too many guys who knew in their hearts things were very bad but were too blind or scared to speak up. The bottom line is this: the 360 dominated in North America and the UK and it is losing in both those territories now. And nearly a year after the unveiling, Microsoft is still trying to figure out just what the Xbone is. If you don't believe that has hurt the brand, then you're smoking something.

As for analysts with wild predictions, well, we saw plenty of those declaring North America would be won handily by the PS3, and we can see how that turned out. Microsoft is desperate. They dropped the price by $50 and bundled Titanfall in and it didn't do anything. In fact, the number of consoles sold went down. Their problems are far more pandemic than simply price. I applaud your devotion though. :)

@mattykovax: Thanks, it's good to see you are still posting here as well!

The other thing I find myself thinking is the devastation this will wreak on the Xbox division's bottom line, and how they will chase Sony on price this entire generation. And let's face it -- Microsoft was never keen on dropping price even when they were competitive; the 360 went for top dollar for the better part of 6 years, poor sales be damned, and most times, we saw "added value" bundles rather than true drops. Microsoft needs to get over that shit, pronto -- it worked fine when they were up against a Sony that was hamstrung by a super-expensive console, but that isn't the case this time. I also think this generation is going to go with a more conventional curve of around 5 years, which means consistent price drops to reach the mass market. I expect a $299 PS4 by next Spring, at which point Microsoft will be faced with two decisions: chase Sony further down the price rabbit hole, or continue to hemorrhage marketshare.

I think perhaps Microsoft's biggest issue right now is that they still have never truly led a console generation. I don't think they have any clue what is necessary to win a generation, and simply doing the opposite when customers cry foul is not any kind of sound strategy, although it certainly looks better given how awful Microsoft has run their division in the last three years or so.

#collectionofbadideas.

Been to busy with school and other life happenings to post in a while, but I couldn't resist...

It's good to see the industry reject Kinect. I'd always believed and hoped that the device would die a miserable death and now it has, because it has brought no good to conventional gaming in any appreciable way. Controls became less responsive instead of more as a result of this abysmal device, and this decision will now put it on life support so Microsoft can quietly pull the plug in a few years.

Is it also mean that I find this news humorous to console warriors who defended the device's inclusion as a necessary evolution of the market? The market purged a tertiary device that didn't work well for the most important thing -- games. And that's a good thing at the end of the day. The sooner Kinect gets flushed like the turd it is (and flushed it will be, despite Yusef Mehdi's protestations to the contrary), the sooner the market can move forward.

As for Microsoft, I have to wonder where this leaves them... Their brand is damaged, perhaps badly. They came along with this ill-conceived device that was supposed to control how and when the player could play games, and a controller that played games badly. They then boasted about how the Kinect was central to their vision and could never be removed. They spent God knows how much on a worthless NFL deal, then spent God knows how much more buying exclusivity on an online-only shooter that actually caused hardware sales to drop instead of go up, leading them to drop the price on hardware and pack-in said "best game of the generation" (Microsoft's words, not mine), and sales went down even more. They've spent the better part of a year trying to unfuck the Xbone, but is it really worth it? I suppose I'll have to shelve the "Expect Less, Pay More" motto, but is "Expect Less, Pay the Same" any better?

Is another $50 off and the removal of the motion control detritus going to change the inertia? I say no, but I've long given up on Microsoft. It's obvious they have no viable vision of the future of the hobby, and I guess that's the worst thing of all -- when I heard the news today, I really didn't care one way or the other. The Microsoft that came out guns blazing with the 360 is dead, and in its place is some disfigured, confused sycophant that has come crawling back on its knees like an unfaithful spouse.

What a disaster this system has been. What an absolute, unmitigated disaster. I'm just surprised people are surprised that they dumped the device (Hello, Pedro!)

Wow, free maps!? Nice to see a developer without their goddamn hand out. Makes me realize there are still very fundamental differences between Microsoft and Sony.

I am a huge fan of Remedy, but this idea sounds shitty. The live action stuff in Alan Wake was a nice diversion, but as a primary ingredient they would have sucked.

I played the hell out of PD0, and while the bots worked well as filler for single-plyer deathmatch type games, they are not going to be well-suited to team play because they are not unpredictable and cunning as humans are. In PD0, you had bot types with certain overriding tendencies and difficulties, but that wouldn't work in a team-based scenario where you are relying on strategic shifts to adjust to different enemy tactics.

Aside from that, I still don't see why they would limit the "real" players to 6v6, and then have 36 AI players running around in a team based game that you can't strategize or communicate with. It just sounds like a bullshit excuse to me. Not just the 6v6, but the whole idea of saying each and every game has X players. All maps are different and faciltate different types of play and varying numbers of players. It's not a one size fits all type of deal.

Really? I'd heard that was the game's MO from pretty much everyone.

But that's where I disagree and have all along, whether they are players or bots -- having an arbitrary, our-game-supports-this-many number is ridiculous unless every map is the same size, which would be boring. One of the best things about shooters are the varieties in the map sizes leading to more frenetic, instant clashes or more tactical, planned-out fights.

Like I said, I don't care really either way, but the hype coming off of this game has been ridiculous when no one really knew what they **** they were hyping, the press included. And like Carnage pointed out, a lot of competitive players aren't going to want to have a map populated with Ai enemies that are there as window dressing and only 6 real life opponents. If anything, I can see that amplifying the stupidity of the AI (something Respawn was never good at, hello Price). In other words, if the AI isn't absolutely stellar, it's going to stand out like a sore thumb, and I've no reason to believe it will be seeing as the mindset is for the AI enemies to be time wasters. And that's another issue -- in a team-based game like this, there are always going to be complaints about people bot camping now; exploiting stupid bot AI to up kill counts. I don't know, the thing sounds like a hot mess waiting to happen to me, we'll see. The Left 4 Dead knockoff mode should at least be fun.