Microsoft's original idea was not meant to be intentionally malicious....

[fordy]

badgenome said:

Of course it's not entirely malicious. It's not like they said, "Let's just fuck everyone over!"

But they did look at how much money Halo launches bring in. And they did think about how nice it would be if they got to keep all that loot and retailers got exactly $0. And they did think that was a future they should try to make a reality sooner rather than later. But they did not think for two seconds about how to make this in any way, shape, or form beneficial to the consumer. And they learned a valuable lesson, at least for now.

I think they get enough money from Halo to say "Hey, lets be greedy fuckers and get more!". The original issue was companies who were saying that they were struggling to meet financial ends, which is the exact opposite of what Halo was doing. I'd say it was more about their vision having potential to alienate those struggling companies by them saying "Hey guess what, we're going to make consumers make copies of your game on their hard drive for convenience", and said 3rd parties having this horrible thought of unrestricted copying of the same licensed title. It's that fine balance between consumer wants/rights and developer needs...