Adam Orth has saved us all. Every Microsoft fan and XBOX lover should wright Adam letters thanking him. Thanking him for what exactly? For making the next XBOX work offline.
Before his twitter comments almost every article and rumor was bad for the 720 confirming online drm, no used games, mandatory kinect, yada yada yada. http://kotaku.com/5982986/we-know-all-about-the-next-xbox-from-someone-who-says-theyve-got-one http://kotaku.com/the-next-xbox-will-require-an-internet-connection-to-st-470062456
Then on 4/4 something magical happened. Adam Orth had a freak out moment on twitter trying to express how always online was a good thing. This included insulting other twitter users who commented and apparently just joking around with a game developer. The internet exploded about this. Mainstream news even reported it. Adam Orth was also turned into a meme. The backlash about this was incredible!
Then everything went silent. Soon Microsoft released a statement merely saying his opinions do not represent the company. However, behind the scenes a lot was going on. They had some damage control to do. Paul Thurrott only days later announced the following on his podcast.
"The next Xbox is code-named Durango. And we have talked for a while about this notion that there might be another version of the Xbox that was just aimed at entertainment—a non-gaming device. That device was code-named 'Yumo' and they're not making it. They may make one in the future, but it's not happening this year.
So the new Xbox that comes out this year will just be the Xbox. And I mentioned before they're also going to sell a new Xbox 360 code-named 'Stingray' that will be $99. And you might look at that as two things: backwards compatibility, obviously, suggesting—I don't actually know this for a fact, but based on the fact that they're making one—I don't think that the new Xbox will play 360 games. But that I don't actually know, that I'm guessing. But, the other one is that, $99, that's a real coo price. And so we know that the Xbox 360 does Netflix, Hulu Plus, yada yada yada, and you can make the argument that's kind of a low cost entertainment device, too.
Durango is going to be expensive [laughs], you know $500, $300 for the subscription, that kind of thing, but you know, Blu-ray, blah blah blah, but the thing that interest me, going back and looking at some of the stuff I got a long time ago, it actually says 'must be internet-connected to use' in the notes. And that's all I have, but it does say that.
Originally, they were going to announce this thing in April—April 24—now they're going to announce it May 21. We know there are events occuring this year where we're going to learn more about Durango.
So I think there's a lot information to come, but I look at all this stuff that I've seen about Durango and I think, 'it's all positive.' I don't really see any bad news here at all. Like to me, everything I've seen about this is really positive. It's amazing to me that, based on like no information at all, everyone is like freaking out about everything."
All of a sudden we get a positive peace about 720. Interestingly enough he confirms that it used to have allways on. Shortly after that we get a controlled leak on vgleaks. The whole article is Microsoft trying to fix this clusterfuck. http://www.vgleaks.com/microsoft-xbox-roadmap-2013/ The article uses the "Stingray" XBOX as a scapegoat and transitions all the bad rumors to it. In reality it is Microsoft doing some emergency replanning and changing their 720 plans. Thanks to Adam Orth, the next XBOX will work offline.
