The Xbox One “always on” statement released quite a backlash, which Microsoft says they are surprised at.
Yes, the heads at Microsoft were actually surprised that the gamers didn’t want their console to be “always on,” so much so that when former creative director Adam Orth started poking fun at the backlash, he ended up turning the situation nuclear.
Looking back, Microsoft says they shouldn’t have released that information so soon. Microsoft’s director of product planning, Albert Penello, has stated that they will eventually bring the function back, but sometime in the future . He said that the biggest regret he has about the Xbox One “always on” internet functionality is that he announced it so early in today’s market.
Microsoft had looked at other gaming trends and noticed the success of iOS, Android, and Steam, and figured they could make the function work even better with Xbox One. What they didn’t anticipate was the fact that gamers on a budget depend on physical used game sales to be able to afford new titles, and the “always on” function would have introduced DRM issues that would have eliminated the cost-effective used games market altogether.
Albert Panello stated about the Xbox One policies, “I think with time, people have understood what we were trying to do, and I’m sure you’ve seen it with the fans. They’ve been saying ‘God, I wish some of this stuff would come back.’ I think the problem was that people got in their minds that what we were trying to do was somehow evil or anti-customer.”
What it doesn’t seem Microsoft understands is that when that petition came along on Change.org asking for those things to come back, a lot of the people who signed it were Sony fanboys taking advantage of the situation to keep their console on top, as previously reported by The Inquisitr .
@gamasutra they claim they wanted to be like Steam w “always online”, but hey, Steam has offline mode ? ? Xbox DRM is the real reason
— Nekware (@nekware) September 5, 2013
Albert Panello says that eventually, the digital market will be the norm and physical discs will be gone.
It looks like all that fighting we did to make the Xbox One usable by gamers on a budget could end up dooming Microsoft as they plan to eventually bring back those policies we hated. The Xbox One “always on” functionality will be back eventually.