thismeintiel said:
Lol, the DRM situation was WAY worse, yet they remained silent. Does the PS4 have console-wide DRM, now? Nope. So, quite using the "Sony won't say anything" to dream up the worst, just because you're hoping for the worse.
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Microsoft wasn't silent on the DRM issue.
They never said "No comment", they said "We're not prepared to talk about this now. We'll have more on that at E3." Then once E3 came it became a trickle of information.
I'm going to be completely honest. Everything, to me, is adding up that Microsoft is in a desperate rush to get the features they want in the OS. I received some confirmation to this effect last week in an e-mail conversation I had with someone inside the Xbox Team. My impression is that Microsoft is literally trying to hammer out the deliverable features as quickly as it can finish them. Why was the TV feature front and center? Because I think Microsoft had been working on it the longest. In fact, I would even hedge bets that originally that was planned for MediaRoom and Microsoft at some point decided to double-down and make it a feature of the Xbox One. The stuff talked about at E3 was App snapping, a feature of the OS that had to be hammered out early on. Everything else except the games was discussed from a 10,000 ft perspective. It was just an overview.
Contrast that to the Xbox 360's reveal and E3 presentation and you see these huge, glaring omissions about features and services. The hardware specs were known long before the PS3 and Xbox 360 ever hit the show floor. Not speculative numbers, solid, confirmed numbers. The performance of each machine had been caclulated so that you could actually figure out before either console was released which one was actually going to offer better performance.
The lack of information this time around is glaring, epsecially on Microsoft's part. I've personally never see Microsoft so far back on their heels. I don't think hardware was the setback, as had been rumored. I honestly think Microsoft thought they had another year before Sony would launch the PS4 so they hadn't earnestly begun the software development. Because what I see being behind is the feature set of the software, not the hardware.
And just to be clear, since Sony gets to clarify terminology, the issue was never DRM. The DRM was and always has been essentially the same as with the Xbox 360. If Microsoft wanted to, it could, enable sharing on the Xbox 360 of the digital content. However, in order to do so it would also have to force the Xbox 360 to connect to Xbox LIVE periodically. The challenge for Microsoft was if you are borrowing content, do you still have the rights to it and if you don't, I need to do something with that content. For that, they needed the periodic connection to Xbox LIVE.
Anyone who uses the One Guide (TV) will need routine connection to the Internet as well, as the guide gets updated on a 24 hour basis.
DRM was not a real issue. The connectivity that sharing/lending in a digital library required was the issue. I kept up on the patents. A required connection was never a requirement of any of Microsoft's DRM/licensing patents. Like this issue for Sony though, Microsoft did not get in front of it, and it did not control the issue. Once it got away from Microsoft it was too late. I don't think this issue is serious enough to get away from Sony, but as I said they could easily kill it by just saying once and for all what it is.
I think for the most part, everyone on both sides of the debate (Big deal/not a big deal) have come to the conclusion that whatever it ends up being it isn't a serious issue. If they both have the same 5GB available to them, games will essentially be the same. If one has more and another has less, then more than likely multiplatform games will use the smaller amount to base their games on.
The secretive nature of such mundane things after the consoles have been revealed is absurd. That criticism is lobbed against Microsoft as much as it is against Sony.
