As you have surely already heard, Microsoft just finished up with maybe the most epic policy climbdown the videogame industry has ever witnessed.
After pitching the Xbox One as an all-digital platform in which games are installed to the hard drive and tied to an account, then spending almost one entire month vociferously defending its position to players and critics, it gave up on the whole damn thing this afternoon. Xbox game sharing, Microsoft now says, will work exactly as it does on your 360, for better or worse: You can trade and sell your discs but the "family sharing" plan for digital content and the ability to play games without the disc in the drive are gone.
Nearly lost in the Internet's collective high-fiving over Microsoft's stunning reversal was the fact that the official announcement contains probably the most hilarious passive-aggressive statement ever to show up on Xbox.com. "We imagined a new set of benefits such as easier roaming, family sharing, and new ways to try and buy games," wrote Xbox executive Don Mattrick.
We dreamed such big dreams. We did it all for you. And you killed our dreams.
We've talked a lot here on Game|Life about used games, specifically the arguments over whether or not they do harm to the console game business or support it. Some game developers said that used games drive down sales of new ones.
Microsoft was not planning on outlawing used games entirely – you could sell them back to a "participating retailer." But that's not what we mean when we say "used games;" we mean the ability to sell them privately, lend them out or rent them.
It can be argued that such a system is a boon overall to the industry. Or that maybe everything cancels out and there is no effect in the end. An economic study of the market was inconclusive, saying that eliminating used games could cause overall sales to fall or rise depending on whether or not new game software was priced "optimally."
Gears of War designer Cliff Bleszinski was the latest high-profile developer to weigh in. "You cannot have game and marketing budgets this high while also having used and rental games existing. The numbers do NOT work people," he wrote on Twitter.
For the sake of argument, let's postulate that Bleszinski and his ilk are correct. Well, that doesn't seem to have gotten them anywhere. Even if used games are taking money away from game developers, look what happens when you try to take the ability to share games away from players: They get really, really, really mad. So mad that the force of their combined rage explodes beyond even the boundaries of Internet messageboards. So mad that when they say they're not going to buy an Xbox One and Microsoft can get stuffed forever, Microsoft actually believes it, and they actually cause a corporate goliath to engage in a lightning-quick, remarkably humbling turnaround of the policies that it had spent so much energy developing, explaining and defending.
Used games are killing sales of new ones? Looks more like used games were the only reason they were spending that much money in the first place: Pray tell, exactly how many new games will you sell if nobody buys the console?
Gamers are not per se opposed to restrictions on game ownership: Look at sales of games on Steam and iOS, both of which are extremely restrictive, even more so than Microsoft had proposed to be for Xbox One.
So you can, actually, mess with used games. But you have to do it the right way. These digital platforms feature greatly reduced prices for game software, which Microsoft was apparently not going to embrace.
So for players, the Xbox One tradeoff didn't appear to be as good as what Steam et al. offered. And Microsoft did not have the conviction that it was going to offer such a good tradeoff that taking used games off the table was worth doing after all.
Sometimes people have a plan, and sometimes they have no idea what they are doing. Had Microsoft driven full-steam ahead with Xbox One as pitched, confident that the tradeoff would prove to be worth it, that would have been one thing. But now it shows itself to be without a rudder, finger in the wind, hoping it's being blown the right way. Perhaps it is.
One thing's for sure: The next time a game developer wants to rant about the evils of used games, they may want to consider what happened when someone tried to take them away.
