Yes, honestly. Sony dropped the ball hard on that and I was severely disappointed when I heard I couldn’t play my old games. It didn’t affect me as much personally – I still have my original 60GB PS3 that runs as smooth as a dream – but I had friends who were infuriated by the change when they needed to trade in their original models for the Slim, and I was upset right along with them because I felt Sony pulled an unneeded 180 on a selling feature. That being said, they were losing the race at that point so they needed to change tack and I understand that from a business perspective.
What truly enrages me about how Microsoft approached this reveal was that they didn’t do their homework beforehand. The product as announced at reveal was a joke, a blatant money-grab and had some fairly totalitarian measures in it. Microsoft as a company has proved themselves somewhat untrustworthy (with the government security issue) and arrogant (with the initial belief that they had a good product worth the asking price). I think if they had done this market research before the reveal – if they had asked groups of people what they thought, gotten feedback that way and then made decisions before revealing the product to the public – I would have no problem with the Xbox One. At all. This is obviously what Sony did for the PS4 – they took their past experiences, obviously did some networking with developers and the like – and came out with a product that fit the demand from the get-go.
Sony has had more experience with embarrassment in the industry (see: the life of the PS3, from birth to present) so maybe they were a bit more accepting of input in that regard. In contrast, Microsoft was a victim to their own hubris, trying to blaze a trail they figured everyone would follow but no one wanted to. It’s fantastic – seriously, I’m very glad – that MS is backtracking and listening to what their consumers want now. But it’s after the fact. The damage has been done and they are trying to control the spread; and they keep shooting themselves in the foot. Instead of asking, “So we were thinking of forcing you to buy a brand-new headset; thoughts?”, they stated it as fact, got negative press, and decided to reverse course and make it free in-box. After the fact.
They are trying to see how much they can get away with and that’s what makes me sick. They aren’t listening to their consumers; they’re reacting to bad press. If they were truly listening – or maybe a better statement would be “if they cared about what their consumers thought” – they would listen before they announced a product. QA, product testing, focus groups; it’s like Microsoft has never heard of these things! Maybe they figured that, after the huge success of the 360, consumers would rank brand loyalty higher than product comparison. Turns out that’s not the case; who knew?
Fair cop, my friend. I think Sony is the more competent company in this instance, specifically because they are pandering to their audience much better than Microsoft, but that doesn’t mean I think the corporation as a whole is any better. If they could get away it, both Sony and MS would gouge us out of all our sense of ownership and force us to pay for every little thing. At the moment, though, Sony seems to have the wherewithal to understand that they can’t get away with – not right now, at least – and so MS appears to be worse by comparison.
It’s the same way Activision and EA alternate between being the worst publishers; they’re both the same style of company, looking at the bottom line, but the perceived notion of which one is more “evil” changes with every turn of the moon.
