I couldn't care less for how the Xbox one sells, I'm not a great fan of either console, I don't care about "Console wars"
What I do like to see though, is companies trying different things and innovating on products.
Innovating is always a risk though, whenever you suggest something people do not understand there will be immediate backlash, that much is guaranteed. The whole reasoning behind the DRM was that there was a sharing feature that could be used and you could install the game on your hard drive and play without the disk.
Now that the DRM is not there, so we lose out on those features, I guess it's not really a big deal, but I would have been interested in seeing how it turned out.
After all, no one complains about Steam anymore.
The Xbox One is now just an upgraded xbox 360
The PS4 is just an upgraded PS3
I may as well stick with PC.

That's bullshit for a start.

The main reason why the backlash about Steam died down was because everyone moved over to the consoles.

What Microsoft was proposing was not innovation for the benefit of gamers. It was innovation for the benefit of publishers.

Ah, right, remind me of that when the next thread is started for Steam sales.

The Xbox One still requires a one-time on-line activation, the Xbox One still is a piece of stinky shit from my perspective.

Many other modern devices require one-time activation. We're far past the point where consoles are simply "game boxes" that do that one thing and do it very well. This also reduces reliability; Sony couldn't brick your PS2 with a bad firmware update, as with the recent PS3 problem. Console makers are obsessed with adding all the features of the PC but they've also absorbed its downsides in the process.

A lot of the silent acceptance of Steam's intrusion into PC gaming is due to a sense of futility. If you want to play the latest shiny games you inevitably have to use Steam (or sometimes Origin/Uplay... same thing). Even those that do voice dissent are drowned out by the droves of fanboys chanting "no Steam, no sale" who are only making things even worse for everyone else by removing choice from customers.

Yeah, because exclusively console gamers spend their time surfing PC gaming forums, don't they?

It really does astonish me how people think that because something is a majority opinion on a PC gaming forum, that it must be the majority opinion among the general population.

Oh, I forgot. PC gamers are the master race, so we have to be right, don't we? Our opinion has to be the deciding one, doesn't it?

I know many families with young kids that do not even have internet access. If Microsoft does decide to use DRM, it will only serve to blow up in their faces and seriously hurt sales.

Great post.

Microsoft has officially retracted the continual DRM plan, although it still needs a one-time connection to the internet for unexplained reasons.

No argument from me there. Pretty much hit the nail on the head.

I'm not saying that at all, I'm saying that consumers have been given a choice, they can still decide to purchase the PS4 instead of the Xbox One, that's not a problem at all.
If you have a problem with a console, you just don't buy it. There's no need to cause an uproar. Vote with your money.
Half of the crap I've seen on the internet is just silly, I would almost say unnecessary if my console purchase wasn't ultimately decided by exclusives on each console.
If I feel the need to not purchase a console, I simply will not purchase it.
There's no need to dwell on details beyond that.

I remember when Steam first launched, they bragged about how much developers could save over retail to use their service. In the beginning, games were often cheaper than retail. That's not the case anymore. The games are the same price as retail "most of the time" and Steam takes a huge 40 percent chunk of each sale.

Their prices were never lower than boxed retail on day one, to my recollection. The retailers do not let publishers charge less for digital. This won't change until the consoles go digital enough that publishers could tell Gamestop and the rest to piss off.

See, if I hadn't been a PC gamer, ordinarily I'd agree with you.

The problem is that I doubt that Sony had really excluded the used game issue entirely. I think that if this uproar hadn't have been, both consoles would have had similar lock-out systems. The uproar was necessary to keep the manufacturers and publishers in line. Without the uproar, we probably wouldn't have had the choice of the PS4. It would have been a choice between the Wii U (a low-powered, but still fine console in its own right), two DRM'd consoles and DRM-infested PC gaming. If you want to kill innovation, that's the ideal petri dish for it.

The uproar likely stopped the matter escalating any further. It started with Steam, and if Steam had not been, I doubt Microsoft would have had the balls to try something like this. Everyone warned that it was the start of a slippery slope, and they were right.

true false false

1 for 3 there my friend. Lending was not a once only thing that was giving away your copy of a game without trading it in not a loan(for loans you could choose 10 people to be in your "family" they could access your games as much as they liked aslong as only 1 of you played it at a time. You know like valve is now rumoured to be adding to steam?) and your games travelled with you, you could play them as long as you liked ANYWHERE as long as you were logged in. Seriously where did you get these 2 from FUDpeddlers'r'us?

The 24 hour connection allowed them to do a lot of things we're now losing, discless play (now the disc is required in the drive), game sharing with people in different countries! (those 10 people could be anywhere!), not having to take the discs with you everywhere... and so on. This is actually a HUGE step back in terms of features.