Dear Microsoft, OK, so you’ve changed your tune on XBone and the crazy DRM stuff. Good for you. No sarcasm there, that was a good move. Really. Now, let’s talk about home sharing, and the digital features that you removed. I get why you did this. You see it as too exploitable, too easy for people to pirate games. I also have a hard time *not* thinking that on some level, you were also saying “that’ll show you; you don’t want to move to digital? Fine. You don’t get *any* new goodies.” Here’s why you’re wrong, and what I think you should do. It’s painfully clear that you wanted to transition the Xbox service to digital as much as possible. Installed games, digital rights management, sharing, the hole 9 yards. You strongly believe that it’s the way of the future, and you clearly believed that if we gave it a shot, whether we initially wanted it or not; we’d come to love it. So, I say here’s your chance to prove it. One of the key things that you and the people online that supported your digital approach and compared it to Steam don’t seem to understand is that our object was not to any of the things you wanted to do with digital content. It was that you wanted to treat the content that we purchased *physical* copies of the same way. So, the solution is simple: give us home sharing, but make it an OPTIONAL feature of DIGITAL purchases. The mechanism would be simple: when you buy a game from Xbox Live, you would be given the *option* of adding it to your home share library. If we decide to do this, it would be understood that all games in said library would require a check-in every 24 hours, and be subject to the same trade restrictions you originally had planned. Games bought on disc would continue to function just like they do on the 360. The result? Your “if they tried it, they’d love it” philosophy would be put to the test. Many gamers would no doubt give it a shot. Particularly if you offered some steep discounts (at least at first) to reel people in. If the service is really as great as you think it is, word of mouth would spread, and more people would use it. Even better (for you): if you’re right and the service would be a loved feature, it would incentivize people to purchase games digitally; because they’d get the benefits of the service, which they couldn’t get with discs. Who knows? If it really caught on fire, perhaps you could slowly start shifting Xbox to an increasingly digital platform, and then make the NEXT version of the console what you wanted to do with THIS one. Regardless, even if your belief was correct, your decision to suddenly drop it on us all at once had no chance of being received well.
Posted on: Thu, 25 Jul 2013 23:34:01 +0000
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