Today, Microsoft's XBOX department kicked their most loyal supporters, their subscribers, directly in the teeth.
XBOX has a subscription option that offers some perks: Microsoft Points they can use to buy games, easy access to support, the ability to stream Netflix over their XBOX, those sorts of things.
Sony Playstation has a similar subscription option, but rather than setting up a system like Microsoft Points, Sony has been providing video games to its subscribers without additional charge. It's part of the package deal. Currently available for download is XCOM:Enemy Unknown, a squad based combat game where an elite international force fights off an alien invasion.
Not my style of game, but it's very, very popular.
Microsoft got cheers at E3 when they announced that they were going to start giving its subscribers games without additional charge too:
Yusuf Mehdi, a Senior VP with Microsoft, took the stage and said:
"We're also going to roll out a new program for Xbox Live gold members. Beginning July 1, up through the release of Xbox One, gold members new or existing, are going to receive two free game downloads [a month], yours to keep. To kick off that program, I'd like to share just two of the titles we're going to share over the next few months, Assassins Creed II, and Halo 3."
Now this announcement created some confusion. Does that mean, asked Subscribers, that Xbox was ready to kick off the "Games for Gold" program by giving them two, "free," old but still very highly rated AAA titles?!
Yes! Said multiple tweets from Xbox Support. Those games will both be available for download in June!
And so today, Subscribers waited, excited to download Halo 3 or Assassins Creed 2, and what did they find?
Defense Grid: Awakening.
Defense Grid Awakening is an escalator. What was once an amusement park ride is now, frankly, boring. At one point, I had two copies of Defense Grid:Awakening. Logitech was giving copies of that particular game away. I had trouble finding people who wanted my copies, so I posted an offer for someone to grab them on a message board. I only got two bites. And one response was a "Yeah, I guess I'll take it off your hands."
It felt like I was giving away a pair of used socks.
And the worst part is, they ran into technical difficulties, and the game wasn't available for download until just few minutes ago.
The internet is furious.
Anyone who wants to play Defense Grid:Awakening, already has Defense Grid:Awakening. It's called a "tower defense" game, and is one of the varieties of games that people play on phones and flash, it's not really adapted very well to consoles.
Yet this is the exciting launch of the new Xbox Games for Gold program?
To quote a friend of mine who's an Xbox Gold subscriber (that's how he watches Netflix):
If someone says that as part of the customer service I'm paying for, that they are going to give me a cake in a week, I'll be very happy. Hey! A cake! Cakes are awesome. I'll walk around, eagerly awaiting my cake. And then they walk up to me and I'll expect them to hand me a cake, the cake I have been waiting for.
If they hand me a half-eaten Payday then I'm going to kick them in the groin, because no one fucking likes paydays anyway and those assholes promised me a cake!
It feels like Microsoft just asked me if I wanted a Hertz Doughnut!
He's not the only one. Gamers have taken to Reddit, Twitter, and message boards to vent their rage today. Meanwhile, Microsoft seems genuinely stunned by the reaction. "Who said we were giving away Assassins Creed or Halo 3?" Asked one Microsoft Tweep, only to be bombarded with
screengrabs and
memes.
Microsoft said that as part of the Gold membership that its subscribers are paying for, they would receive a copy of Assassins Creed and Halo 3 in June. Instead, they're offering a game that no one particularly wants to play as the game to launch their new program.
This is really, really bad marketing and customer service. They really worked on hyping Games for Gold. No one would have cared, at all, if Defense Grid:Awakening was part of the packing peanuts to flesh out their 2-games a month plan. When deals like this come around, they expect packing peanuts.
But you don't launch a new program with packing peanuts.
And this isn't the first complete disaster for Microsoft in the past four weeks.
Now, Microsoft has been in some really hot water lately. TMservo433 has a great post here about how microsoft absolutely screwed the pooch at E3. He called it seppuku. That's not really hyperbole. They're facing a rebellion from their users over some of the announcements that they've made.
The first thing they did, right out of the gate, was spit on our servicemembers. My generation is the generation serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than any other. In the same way that video games have become part of my generation's culture, Xbox has become part of the military's culture. Microsoft's treatment of servicemembers was called by one soldier a "sin" against not just the US military, but the militaries of the world.
Their announcements were blasted by soldiers speaking to the Army Times. While the original post has been removed, I've been able to reassemble much of the article that's been posted on forums around the internet.
When challenged by a servicemember saying "Hey, I'm on a nuclear submarine. I can't get a stable internet connection, like the XboxOne requires," Microsoft responded with condescension:
"We do have a product for people who don't have a stable internet connection. It's called the Xbox 360."
It wasn't just the internet connection issues. In order to play an XboxOne game, it had to be activated in the country it was purchased, and connected to an Xbox Live account. That meant that soldiers couldn't recieve Xbox games in care packages anymore. It meant that a soldier coming back from a day's leave in Bahrain couldn't pick up games for his buddies.
The Kinect Camera, which is required to use the XboxOne, is always physically on, even when the box is off. You can disable its responses, but you cannot unplug it. How many military commanders are going to be willing to let their bases and ships be filled with hackable listening devices?
They're also going after indie developers. They've "vowed" to support Indie Developers according to Kotaku, but they want the Indie folks to develop using their engine, on their terms, and work through big game houses.
While that may have been understandable in years past, that kind of top-down model just doesn't work anymore. Quoting Evan Narcisse at Kotaku:
Looking back on it now, the Xbox Live Indie Games space wound up becoming a neglected ghetto for creators trying to find an audience. The energy that that scene once held migrated to mobile and has blossomed PC, where platforms like Steam let creators chart their own way. One thing that’s enabled indie creations to find success has been the ability to set and change release windows and prices as they see fit. No need to charge more money to ensure multiple partners get a cut and no need to rush out a game that still needs polish because someone else says you have to. If you're an indie developer, chances are that Xbox One just became a lot less attractive to you.
And Microsoft isn't really backing down from their anti-Indie policies. Meanwhile, Nintendo and Playstation are doing
everything they canto help indie game houses develop titles for their platforms.
It's exactly the sort of heavy-handed policy that sent indie developers fleeing to Steam and Playstation, and they don't appear to have any intention to reverse that policy. One of the best pieces of Game Journalism on this issue comes from Polygon of all places.
Polygon has been blasted in the past for accepting funds from games houses in exchange for positive reviews. I don't know if it's the author, or if there's new management over there, but Chris Plante's reaction to the Xbox One is absolutely scathing: "Xbox One policy is a lovely marriage proposal to big corporations."
While Microsoft has quickly backpedaled on their attempt to make renting, trading, or reselling the games you purchased impossible, they've really shown their true colors. Microsoft sees consumers as giant walking wallets, not as people. Rather than focusing on providing better products and services, they're focusing on ways to trick their consumers out of their cash without providing much in return.
It's an antiquated, top-down vision of what the gaming industry looks like.
Some of the big gaming houses are in trouble right now. I've read a few articles predicting that some of the big houses are going to fail. I really doubt that. I think when the global economy gets booming again, things are going to pick up. I've also noticed that the games houses are being absolutely ruthless when it comes to keeping their costs down. They're firing people left and right. Entire award-winning studios have been axed recently by some of the bigger companies, sometimes immediately after finishing a game.
Microsoft doesn't seem to understand what's going on in the rest of the world. We live in a world where the Humble Bundle exists. Pay $4.91 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and you'll get nine video games, all of which work on Andriod phones, and eight of which work on Windows, Mac, or Linux. The current bundle is geared towards android, but they're usually geared towards PC and Macintosh gamers, and have included award-winning indie titles, like Thomas Was Alone, a very artistic platformer about AIs waking up and claiming their personhood.
We've gotten to the point that video games are like books. People are going to keep making them as a form of self expression. As a genre, it's a media that is in its infancy.
For the rest of human history, we will be living with electronic devices. In a world with youtube and blogs, where we're about to see the total democratization of the media, Microsoft has tried to take a stand for the big, lumbering, dinosaurs of the past. The open source movement, and my generation's understanding of computer programming, have made computing technology the biggest event in human communication since the creation of the printing press.
In a world that is changing and growing, Microsoft isn't innovating. From Windows 8's metro interface, to the XboxOne, they're proving themselves to be a backward-looking company, fighting to preserve what was. They want to have control over the way that people use their products, and that's just not how computing technology works anymore.
Now the XboxOne does make use of the internet and cloud computing, but they're trying to take the whole internet in a different direction. Rather than opening up to a world where the line between a company and its consumers is starting to blur a bit with interaction and co-creation, they're running away from the community model back towards the old, authoritarian, top-down capitalist model.
It's a shame. What they're doing is going in the direction that Apple is going in, and they're way behind Apple.
Democratization of media happened in part because of Bill Gates and Microsoft. The kind of culture that Steve Jobs built, the Apple ecosystem, is unique. The people outside of that ecosystem are outside of it because they don't want to deal with the level of control that apple has over its users. And I need to be clear that I'm not trashing apple users. Apple users just want their equipment to work, and they don't want to have to put up with a bunch of BS in the process. Apple users want their equipment to be partially run by Apple. They like the relationship they have with Apple, and the customer service they get from Apple. And that's okay. There's absolutely place for Apple in the future, and anyone who says otherwise is so wrong that you should point at them and laugh.
But there's no room for anyone that wants to offer some similar version of Apple's ecosystem. No one but Apple can be Apple. Apple has already cornered the marketplace on Apple products. But rather than looking towards the future, Microsoft is looking at Apple's business model and trying to slap a Windows logo on it.
That's the tactic with the controlled, closed, XboxOne ecosystem.
And it could be so much better. Take a look at an indie game like Minecraft, or any new PC game title. Through the power of the internet, individual users are becoming part of a video game's community. They interact with the producer of the game, and help provide bug reporting and testing in exchange for goodies.
That's great, because rather than having to fund a bunch of public research studies about what people think about your video games, you can release an alpha version or a demo, and ask the users themselves. You get direct feedback on what's working as far as stories and fun are concerned. You also get direct technical feedback about bugs and errors. Best of all for a video-game house, you can convince your die-hard fans to pay for the privilege of testing your games.
To pull out one example of the blurring of lines, MechWarrior Online offered a founder's package to people who bought the Beta version. The users who participated got their name in the video game's credits, as well as getting a number of exclusive in-game goodies. Gamers paid $120 a pop for the privilege. Microsoft's internet-enabled XboxOne could offer the Xbox community that same level of participation, and it could mean big bucks for the houses they're partnering with, but they're intentionally choosing not to go in that direction.
In a world moving every day towards the democratization of video games and the rest of our electronic media, Microsoft is looking backwards, and trying to preserve the old way.
That's not a model for success.
To be clear, I'm not predicting that Microsoft is somehow going to fail, or that their stock prices are going to drop. They'll still have plenty of business to keep their doors open. Halo, Call of Duty, Assassins Creed, and the other AAA titles will keep them afloat, especially now that they're in bed with the big gaming houses. The EA Sports lineup alone could keep Xbox in the black.
I'm arguing that you cannot fight the internet marketplace, even if you're Microsoft. Microsoft is acting like a guy in a whitewater raft trying to make his way upstream. They announced that you wouldn't be able to share, trade, or rent XBone games, and then they were swept downstream. They announced that indie developers wouldn't be able to self-publish on Xbox Live, and then they were swept downstream again. They announced that their first Xbox Gold video game was something that everyone has already played, and that nobody actually wants, and they... well... I don't know what they're doing about the reaction, but it certainly isn't standing strong against the tide of hatred being heaped on them from their subscribers.
Microsoft is going to be dragged, kicking and screaming, towards a democratized internet-based, business model. They haven't even released the Xbox One, and we've already seen them try to fight the current, and fail, three times.
I don't know how many times they're going to try and row up Niagra falls, but it should be fun to watch. I'm already breaking out the popcorn.