Xbox One evening the playing field? Still don’t think so

Now that Microsoft has decided to drop the DRM and online activation, does it stand a chance against the Playstation 4? Honestly I don’t think it will, and it’s too little too late for Microsoft to really capture their audience again like they once did in the short term. Yes bad press can be good press at times but I don’t think this press did Microsoft any good, afterall you only get one chance to really wow your initial core customers. Sony has pretty much done it correctly from the get go with the PS4, but is it because it’s been through so many rough patches that it’s finally learning to listen to customers?

Sony had plenty of problems with the PS3 and they still persist. The inability to cross chat, constant firmware updates, the last of which are bricking consoles and performance issues have all held them back from being on top. Much of the reason people deal with/accepted these problems from the start was the wave/high brought from the PS2 which gave them the momentum but that same momentum is what led them to believe the PS3 was the master of all systems. From the start Sony wanted to make it up to gamers in the best way they could, build a machine for them and solely them. It only benefited them to be the heroes after Microsoft was clearly looking like the enemies with all there restrictions as well.

Microsoft is in a similar situation that Sony was 8 years ago. Riding the Xbox 360 wave Microsoft believed from the start that the new Xbox One would be the console everyone would flock too and accept no matter what was in it, what it costs or what was being taken away and they are now starting to realize it doesn’t work that way.

While this announcement to change the DRM, internet connection and region policies should be nothing but good news, it does remove some features that were first touted from the Xbox One’s reveal. People will no longer have the ability to access their games anywhere from the cloud. You can now only take the physical disc with you to actually share or play anywhere. Sharing amongst a network of friends is also not available for physical or digital games of any kind. What people should look at however is that these new policies can be revisited later on as the market, technology and knowledge of it changes. A small example is digital games or games installed on the console from the disk could theoretically be accessed from your account signed into another console but to do so there could be a internet check every so often.

At the end of the day both consoles will have great games at release, and they both look great but there is $100 price difference between the two, the higher being Xbox One which comes with a camera. So which console will you be buying now that the playing field has been slightly leveled? What makes you want to buy one over the other?