Microsoft Xbox head Don Mattrick leaving Microsoft, report says

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I still think that it'll take a long time for Microsoft to recover from this. The fact that Nelson is still there doesn't help much, he might be the nicest guy in the world, but him strong arming Angry Joe and acting like he did for the press really stuck with me.

Microsoft might make it through this generation, but if they make another console, they're really going to have to rethink their policies very carefully. Yes, Mattrick did the most damage, but he had help along the way. The wounds aren't going to heal overnight, there's going to be a lot of people refusing to buy the console even with Mattrick gone and the wounds are going to remain open because of his actions and honestly...

Microsoft's lack of action during all this. Orth was fired for a few tweets, Mattrick insulted the gaming base, our armed forces defending our country and drove away millions of customers in droves and most likely hired the people who are still in Microsoft like Nelson and other people who helped make this train wreck happen and made it worse. Even AFTER Mattrick finally was shut up, Nelson still opened his mouth and insulted people and insisted the One was the best console and Sony had "no chance". Even AFTER it was publicly announced Mattrick would no longer be doing press releases there was bad publicity going around because others weren't learning from what Mattrick was doing. They are not fired, hell, Nelson is probably going to work there until he's retired. Microsoft should've stopped this a lot faster, it's not as simple as firing one person, they're not going to recover as quickly as people predict even with the celebration because of everything that happened.

Mattrick was someone who needed to be removed, but it won't help Microsoft in the long run. The wounds won't heal that fast and they're still in deep trouble for his actions and the people he couldn't control and/or Microsoft couldn't control are not going to repair this quickly.

 

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I think it's changed to a different world.

Nintendo number one was a MASSIVE power house during it's time. It had 90% of the market a lot during the 80's and 90's. It dominated for a long time, and a lot of the fans love their products because they grew up with them. Even now Nintendo is showing signs of strain, though admittedly that's not from bad publicity mostly.

Microsoft has a huge competitor from Sony and doesn't have the same power and influence as Nintendo. Yes, granted, it has Halo, and maybe the exclusives will knock the customers out of the park. But I don't see it not being severely hurt from this.

Also, while Microsoft was floundering about with this fiasco, Sony has been plugging away without a word. They have been KILLING sales with the PS4 without two words about their product and/or anything else ever since E3 because they don't NEED to. They have been open and honest and there have been no rumors going around. If there are, it's been sure as hell well hidden if there's any loopholes to their product while Microsoft has been leaking all over the place with barely any damage control.

Microsoft has ****ed up big time, and it's no longer like the 90's when Nintendo was a monopoly practically. They are going to suffer dearly for it because of their mistakes and the customers have already made their choice. Also with all this bad publicity, they don't trust Microsoft after all this time to NOT take back their word and have this happen in the future.

It's not as fast as you think it is, Atlas.

 

Agreed

Microsoft is being stubborn in my opinion. See, it's fine to make mistakes as long as you learn from them and fix them. The problem here is that Mic will not accept the fact that THEY made a mistake. Instead, they point the finger at US gamers, saying we are to blame for the mess they are in. So not only are they dumb for even THINKING of the ways they were gonna show the console, but they don't want to admit that they caused the mistakes. What person would want to look at ic with a good impression? NO ONE. I'm pretty sure even XBone exclusives will pull a Ubisoft on some of the games (make them multi instead of exclusive).

 

Also, Microsoft doesn't have a public figure that is powerful right now to help them. Nintendo has Shigeru Miyamoto (sorry for any misspellings.) for God sakes, the God of gaming himself. The ONLY memorable E3 event as of late from Nintendo was that Miyamoto stepped on stage with a shield and a sword from the Legend of Zelda. That stuck in gamers minds long after the event happened, Miyamoto is like the Steve Jobs of gaming.He can make mistakes, but he's such a legend that there's a lot of leeway for him.

Sony doesn't have as much as a powerhouse behind them public figure wise, but their company is tight knit. You can see it when they're on E3 and making jokes to each other and talking about going to Indie developers houses and playing with them on the PS4. The last conference they brought out the creator of the PS4 on stage and gave him full credit for the design of the product. That brings their own charm and power that attracts people to their product. Not many companies can freely admit to doing it. They might have ****ed up with the 3, but they came back as a powerhouse and learned from their mistakes with the 4 and are a viable threat in this round of the console wars because they are doing everything in their power to show that they care about the consumers and will do anything to please not only the developers, but the consumers to show that they're like family.

Microsoft so far has had it's public figures bully the press, harass customers, insult quite a good deal of the fanbase not including the armed forces, flat-out lie, delete and censore a lot of their bad press, and even pay people to make their product look good. Their public figures SPEARHEADED this without even trying to censor themselves or the people below them. They refuse a lot of the small publishers with their policies and haven't tried to communicate with their buyers at all. They were great with the 360, but now their public figure has destroyed them and they are looking for a new one or maybe even not doing that and replacing him with a man who drove Bill Gates nuts if his profile is right to represent the product and the company.

A good public figure despite the blows, apologizes, tries to reacquaint himself with his fans, and tries to make sure it doesn't happen again. This hasn't happened at all with Microsoft.

 

A lot of people have said this or something like this already - Jim Sterling and Miles923 jump to mind - but I think an equally big part of MS's abysmal performance before and during E3 has to do with the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing. A famous-overnight example is Xbox Support being totally baffled by the absence of a power button on the One and not knowing what to tell people asking about it, but there are many others. Too many people making statements, too many scandals on and off the show floor across all days... It smacks of a panic in the Microsoft ranks. Maybe they didn't know what was going on, maybe nobody could give the PR people instructions fast enough, maybe everyone just disagreed on which features needed to stay or go and what should be said about the system. The sad part is that this probably isn't going to stop with Don Mattrick jumping ship; it'll naturally calm down since the conference is over and everyone's gone home, but will it vanish completely? Doubt it. And I sincerely doubt the new games division head has the werewithal and leadership qualities to wrangle the confusion. Microsoft just got caught looking terribly unprofessional for a matter of weeks, and that's not an easy wound to mend.

Just the same, in times like this we have to be thankful for baby steps, and Mattrick's behavior was poisonous for the company. I maintain that I don't want to see MS's games division go under, for the sheer fact that there are nice, affable people who love the Xbox and all the games on it, and they deserve a good gaming experience. Hel, I retain some love for early Xbox; it was host to a couple of Dreamcast IPs, including one of my favorite games of all time. I don't want a whole console to drop, even if I hate the people making it. I just wish those people would get the f#%& out of the way and let it breathe. As far as I'm concerned, any whole or half-step in that direction is worth the celebration.

 

I have to agree with you Nova on the train wreck of the whole Support issue. I put it like a wildfire myself: There was a wildfire blazing along the countryside that was the One and they have no way of stopping it or not having it cause damage.

I remember one person posted a question to support that was simple: If you get banned from your live account, would you lose all your licenses for your games? Support said yes, and within an hour, the story was all over the Internet. People were panicking for good reason and leaving faster than ever before because of the fact that they would have to pay the fee for something they couldn't control. It was only about a day later that it was finally cleared that it WOULD NOT be a problem. But the damage was already too late to say otherwise.

Hell, there was a rumor from a "former employee" after everything was changed that family sharing was going to be just DEMOS of the games that the family had to purchase after a set time. This was around for DAYS and it was all over the press within the first day and people were getting more and more pissed. The press finally contacted a higher up in Microsoft and he flat out denied it, but it's something that is still sticking in gamers minds along with the shitstorm of everything else that happened that this was blazing so far out of control and they tried to pull this off.

The next leader has to be a gamer, he has to be someone who is a strong leader who understands business. I have a bachelors in economics and I look at this as a course of business 101. I have read articles like Forbes and other companies defending the policies of the One saying it's the most brilliant move that has ever been made and will make them a ton of money. Here's the thing, though: They're not looking at it from a gamers perspective. I note, these companies are not gamers, they are people who look at a company and how much money they'd make from a product. They don't realize that all the errors behind it are causing massive damage because of all the bad publicity and the fact that people DON'T WANT THIS KIND OF PRODUCT. There's a simple thing called demand and breaking even, this was something that wasn't happening with the One.

Steven Ballmer might be a good CEO, he might be a good leader. But he has to listen to the people around him, and not Nelson, for God's sakes along with the other people in the fiasco that caused this. He needs to either remake the structure of the gaming branch or he needs to find someone very competent and someone with the balls to really put the people who did this fiasco in line or fire them without remorse at the same time have enough charm to represent the company, even BEFORE this started, I heard a lot of people saying how much they hated Mattrick and MS's top gaming execs, while Sony was getting a lot of the good light because of the way that the execs handled themselves even BEFORE this became an issue. They need someone like that.

 

I disagree. MS wasn't being stubborn with its policies for always online, they were trying to shift the market into the eventual reliance and dependence of digital sales, much like iTunes did for music and Netflix has done for Tvs/Movies in terms of spearheading mainstream consumers to online sales and services. It's the gamers who have been stubborn and don't want this to occur, some still want a physical copy, and many have said always online is impossible for them, which for people who post on twitter, forums, FB and play online multiplayer is just total rubbish. They obviously have access to internet and wouldn't have been affected by this. You only needed internet once 24 hours and you could even do it on your phone reception. It's not perfect by any means, but for an emerging new service, it wasn't going to be perfect at all, over time it would've changed and altered to be better and more accessible. Steam's service at launch was hated by gamers for needing to be online, to download the games and unable to trade them in, etc. Yet it's grown into a service loved by gamers, when initially it was a terrible services in gamer's eyes, yet now we accept it as on e of the best. Sony WILL go down the digital and online route eventually, it's an inevitable piece of tech advancement that we will always be online, since today in developed countries, we already are.

MS was just not explaining thing right, and that's what led to the backlash, because it sounded exploitative and difficult, however by all accounts it was fairly simple and easy to use. I never heard them blaming us particularly, but they are right, we are what caused the always online and features to go away. We, as consumers, demanded a product that wasn't online, and received that, yet were still not happy with the service given to them. Basic economics, we demand a product and it will be supplied.

Now, on to Mattrick, since this topic is about him leaving. I don't usually link videos but I think this is very poignant to people who hate Mattrick, and will give you something to think about.

It's true, leaving a company for a higher up isn't instant, it's a LONG process and isn't like working as a cashier or in an office as an admin, where you can pack your bags after a few weeks. It's like Matt says, it's surprising that it comes at such a time when Mattrick is getting a lot of fire, and him leaving leaves MS in a stronger position than before, because he's likely the scapegoat for things. Whether it was an overarching plan or one of opportunity is hard to fathom, but it's clear that Mattrick was leaving before we even knew about the Xbox One's official features. He left because he wanted to.

 

Incorrect. Sustaining a console's internet connection is harder than sustaining a computer's internet connection, not to mention each one eats its own amount of bandwidth, which makes it difficult to keep every device online. Some people access the internet from free wi-fi, or from phone services, in absence of a stable connection, and they wouldn't be able to connect to Xbox Live every day. And I don't know how many times it needs to be brought up, maybe people are just desensitized to the issue or what, but I know a great handful of friends who serve in the military, and they assuredly don't have an internet connection to begin with and can't use a system that forces you to connect every single day. A big point you seem to be missing is that we are not all barred from basic functions on our computers if we decide not to - or, for whatever reason, can't - connect to the net on a particular day.

But forcing it at a time when a large swath of people cannot sustain it is out-and-out a bad business decision. As always, companies are trying to advance in technology well before the world is ready, and Microsoft paid for it - duly so. Not to mention part of the reason we can accept having our music, videos, documents, and even Steam games all-digital is because (1) we can back these things up to actual hardware, making it more difficult to lose them; and (2) much of our all-digital media is backed up in cloud storage by the companies who sell it, in a way we can access without jumping through a dozen blasted DRM hoops.

MS does not deserve defense for their actions, nor can they blame anyone but themselves, regardless if any other companies were going to go down the same route in the end. They jumped the gun, and deliberately saddled their service with consumer-unfriendly features, which no one should ever have to deal with at any stage in the evolution of a product.

They explained that, because their DRM measures were removed, they would also have to remove other "awesome" features (which were mostly dull and useless tbh). The problem being, the PS3 has a couple of those features already - installing your games to the console, off the top of my head. So we've caught MS talking out of their asses for the umpteenth time, big shocker there. If they are forcing us to choose between the lesser of two evils, that is their fault, not ours; they're reacting like spoiled brats, and at this point it's only due justice if they lose their hordes of gold for it.

Well, now I think this makes it much more obvious why MS was in disarray. Like the guy said, it still makes Mattrick a dick, but now he's an amusing dick and not just an infuriating one.

 

I disagree with you, Peace...

Even when my Internet goes down, yes, I can still go online. Like I can still go online when my computer crashes. There's Wifi hot spots, the library and other places, hell, in my college town the whole COLLEGE was a hot spot for the Internet. Here's the issue though with people connecting with One instead of computers:

This is from a remote location. This is somewhere where it's easy to carry your laptop to. Laptops were essentially made for this, to make it easy to use places other than your home. Even IF and this is a big if, you can make it to a hotspot and connect to the Internet every 24 hours with the One, who wants to lug around a console the size of a VCR around with them. It would be like lugging around your desktop to find a Wifi spot.

For the cell phone, the coverage is TERRIBLE in my area, worse than the Internet. Sometimes, if you're lucky you have two or three spots up North where you can get coverage outside of a college town. I know places up North where the Internet is good, but to get a cell phone bar you have to walk to the middle of a bridge in town and for two feet you can have enough bars to call someone. I'm dead serious, me and my mom tried it once. She also complains a lot after the capital there's no coverage at all for the cell phone service.

Then you have storms like Superstorm Sandy. The Internet was down for WEEKS along with cell phone coverage. What are people supposed to do during that time? Wait until they get their connection back to play games to get away from the hell that just happened?

For the armed forces, Afghanistan has no Internet. Period. I have a friend who was serving overseas. He openly admitted his Internet was really ****** there and he couldn't do anything about it. He couldn't even hook up to Live if he wanted to try. He used the Internet to visit some forums, that's pretty much it. As down time and played Halo without Internet to get away from the war. I have a friend who has Live, a good Internet connection and we can even chat via webcam. But he's studying to be a Navy officer on a sub. He is a HUGE fan of Halo and couldn't even get the system because of the fact that when he gets deployed, he couldn't play it due to the fact there's no internet on the sub or in the middle of the ocean.

Lets even detract from that, lets say you live in Brazil. I have someone who lives there and he had dial-up to the point where he could only post on forums and chat before going to college where it's............ Semi-stable. He couldn't play videos, he couldn't do webcam. The One was going to be launched at the same time as the U.S. and they expect Brazil with dial-up to be able to check in every 24 hours and download automatically for their updates on dial-up? Is that even possible?

The reason why steam works because from what I heard, they detracted the always online policy. They also sold their games dirt cheap. Ranging from 40-50 dollars and I've seen their sales and have heard gamers go into great detail about WHY steam works and the One wouldn't about the sales, and now they're even making it so you can sell your games USED which are making more people flock to Steam.

One was going to sell their games at 60 bucks a ticket, not sell their games used, and make it so it was mostly digital. I haven't even taken into account the fact you're looking at a system that is 500 gb of memory when blu-ray which the games are made from can go up to fifty gigs per disc. That is 10 games in total you can have on your system at once this doesn't include extras including save points, then you have to delete one and make space for more. Yes, you can reload it back into the system later on, but it would take about an hour or two for it to happen. I don't see that happening a lot of the time when a friend is over.

As for Apple, the reason why it worked was because Apple saw an opportunity. Pirating was a million times worse than it is today because it cost 16 bucks for a cd with a bunch of songs if you just wanted one song from it. The consumers were getting sick of it and Apple decided to make it on Itunes and the Ipod, I still say it's one of the most brilliant moves in business ever done because they took a massive problem that was going on, took advantage of two developing things rapidly growing in popularity: The Internet and technology including portable devices, and merged them together for Itunes and the Ipod. Itunes revolutionized music because it gave control back to the consumer offering them 99 cents to 2 bucks a song that before was 16 dollars to buy. The music industry was drowning and it saved their asses along with the music community. At the same time, they granted enough freedom to the consumer to let them get the songs from other sources so they didn't feel restricted.

I can go and get a song Itunes doesn't offer and I can mostly guarantee that it will play on my Ipod. You can't do that with a system like the One used to be right now, maybe never.

In the future, yes, you are going to have all the games digital. But MS really jumped the gun on the system before they put all the factors in mind. Yes, there's piracy, and yes, it is a problem in the community. But that doesn't mean that people who buy the games fairly should be punished for others actions. Even if it's the "future of gaming" we're not ready for it, much like systems before it that failed and burned in flames for being ahead of it's time.

I had a feeling that was true from the video, but I wonder if he did it to go with a bang. He knew he was going to get a better job and he most likely was like: "I don't give a ****." about the whole console and MS's MSS Titanic problems. It doesn't really explain Nelson's actions and PR's stupidity unless the guy was right and they decided: "Lets just throw this guy under the bus more before he leaves." But he has a point Zynga is a trainwreck and it's going to be a skeleton in the closet that's not going to leave when he moves and he tries to represent Zynga later in the future for things, people won't be so happy about it I'm guessing.

 

I could sustain an Xbox One. same as you or any other user on this forum, because we have internet. Anyone with an internet provider can. They said you needed to log in ONCE every 24 hours, AND could b done using a mobile phone connection as well if your internet wasn't working properly. It's not difficult, as much as MS made it sound like Always Online meant it literally, which it meant in the sense that they were moving to a primarily online console.
I still don't see this whole military issue being brought up, since it's clear cut that they wouldn't have been able to use an XboxO when it was always online, then they still had the choice of the PS4 to buy. It's not like they were unable to play games, or that their 360 was going to be confiscated or that they couldn't buy a PS4. If I didn't have internet I would've moved to the PS4, simple. Why people discuss this as a point of insulting patriotism I just don't get.
If you had a computer and no internet, you'd miss out on almost all the features available from it. The PC market has gradually moved from physical copies to digital download now, because internet is readily available to people with computers. Most people who own game consoles now have internet, though not everyone uses the capability (specifically on the Xbox because of the paying to play online multiplayer) but with this they would be made to finally make that transition.
And you say people have bad internet, well that's not MS's fault, that's our internet providers, who should be improving our service with the amount we pay, especially with the size of downloads and uploads improving by a staggering amount that they will have to keep up with the times.

And, again, I said the policies currently aren't perfect, but over time, like with Steam and Origin and Uplay, things can change and evolve from where they began. Looking at the 360 and PS3, the online services they provided at launch compared to this day is vastly different and improved, with most all of the problems of both ironed out as much as possible. I expected the same with the XboxO.

We don't know this, nor never will, because we never got the chance to experience the product they intended to sell. I'm not 'defending' them for their actions, i'm stating that to every argument there are two sides, pros and cons, goods and bads. Everyone saying the product is terrible because of this or that feature is only seeing the cons and not the pros, which is all i'm trying to do. Inform of both sides and reach an equality for people to come to a more knowledgeable conclusion of their own.

MS picked the 'worser' of two evils as many people would put it, but it was the 'lesser' of two evils that people demanded. MS are not perfect and like they've said, they purposefully designed the console to be an Always Online device, which means getting rid of that has pros and cons to it.
All I know is, people demanded a better hardware Xbox 360 and not the new generation of console Xbox wanted to put forward. And we now have a race between two machines that work almost exactly the same, with little to distinguish between them. That's not how innovation works, homogenous goods lead to a stagnation in development, and it's why I don't respect MS for back pedalling and caving in to the demands of the public, because the public weren't well informed enough about the console (MS's fault admittedly) and really gamers are complainers to the point they curse and swear and hate and throw dung without looking with some degree of objectivity or attempt to see the product more. NeoGaf is ripe with this. It's a shame this new generation now bores me incredibly.

MS was in disarray from bad PR and explanations, Mattick was part of the problem, but he by himself didn't create the disarray in question jsut because he simply was leaving.

 

You take the smoothness of your connection for granted, friend.

...Ok, you must be arguing a totally different point right now, because people switching to PS4 is the last thing Microsoft wants. I'm talking about why the Xbox One is bad as a system, why it's going to get crap sales, and why MS is to blame for all of it; not how every gamer can continue in their hobby in the next generation. I'm not a patriot, we're just having two totally different discussions.

...That's... not true in the slightest. In fact I'm considering getting a second, far less powerful computer almost exclusively for non-internet functions, to paint a picture of how many there are.

Yeah, with the features they cut that they had absolutely no need to cut. So whose fault is that?

That's a whole other barrel of monkeys, but inciting change in many things at once to create balance is impractical when the only thing one needs to maintain it is to... well, stay the course. There's nothing wrong with the state of it as it is. I mean, do you really understand what you're suggesting? Basically, Microsoft should go around and demand that ISPs start charging less for better service, and provide service to areas with poor internet, just to accommodate the needs of their system. Do you understand how ludicrous that is? Microsoft has unrealistic expectations for what the consumers can handle.

Except that the Xbone was about to launch with features it did not need that did nothing but harm the consumer for no foreseeable benefit. And when the consumers asked that they be removed, Microsoft did so, but in so doing it also removed a lot of features that it would have benefited from, that could have been improved over time, and that, once again, have been proven to work just fine as stand-alone features, then tried to make it seem like an unavoidable loss that they were forced into. Steam didn't launch with a sensor that detected when someone was playing a game besides the one who purchased it and then forcibly ejected them from their seat unless they paid full price. One of the great things about console gaming and hard copies of games is that you can share them with whoever you want, and MS was asking us to live without that. When we decided we didn't want to, they started to act like we'd have to, or else we'd miss out on all this cool new stuff over here! Stuff which, call me a broken record as long as it sinks in, they did not have to remove. That's bullshit.

You're a little late. The pros and cons of anti-used policies, always-on Kinect, and daily check-in validation were debated to death in the first week of this fiasco, that's what led to the stripping of a majority of those features. At this point it's just beating a dead horse.

They imagined those to make people feel guilty. That's what seems most likely, considering, one more time everybody!, the features they claim couldn't make the cut without all the loathsome stipulations attached already exist on other systems without those stipulations.

Do you know what else leads to stagnation in development? Getting ahead of yourself. PS2 hardware was a piece of crap compared to the stuff computers were running, and it produced the best goddamn games of its generation. It didn't need an internet connection. It didn't need motion controls. It didn't need check-ins or family sharing or all-digital or console installation or any of that. It just needed to be gripping and fun. Somewhere along the line these systems got featuritis, and that's when the industry suffered - not before, not after, and scarcely for any other reason.

I find it ironic that you're preaching the evils of homogeny to me, when you would have everything work like Steam. Aren't you really just promoting the system you like best? Consoles are not PCs, they do not belong to Valve, they do not sell their games on GoG, they do not require an Origin login (...well, unless they didn't survive the EA season pass purge from a while ago), and whether or not they would benefit from introducing features similar to these services, they do not need to become these services. Gamers deserve the right to choice. If you're so in love with always-online and all-digital, hey, I hear Rogue Legacy just dropped for fifteen bucks.

We are not tapping these systems' potential. That is the problem here. One of the things that is causing this industry to stagnate is the needless piling on of superfluous gadgets and features instead of focusing on the freaking game. Who cares how it's delivered to us? Some of us still play Pong, for godsake. Companies are too excited about the systems and not enough about the game. The game that takes millions of dollars to make and expects to sell as many copies as the population of China, the game that looks the same as the game that came out two weeks ago, the game that sells based on apathy and animal impulse. If you wanna talk to me about homogeny, let's talk about what matters most. Let's discuss the launch titles. Let's talk about what games are in development for these systems. Let's not talk about whether or not you can get them on disc.

If you're really trying to be devil's advocate, you could stand to do it without the condescension. If you just wanna be bored with the state of the industry? Go right ahead. But don't act high and mighty about it, like everything sucks now and you know the reason, and everybody else is a blind idiot for not seeing it. Getting Microsoft to buckle on these absurd system specs - and frankly it concerns me that their absurdity is even a subject of debate! - was an achievement. The only one this generation that's really worth any points.

 

You can also bring up the PS3 in that comparison, except the fact they didn't really HAVE that many exclusives except Heavy Rain which I grant was one of the best games ever made for a long time when the less power house 360 was bringing out exclusives at least once a year.

You don't need power and shiny stuff to sell a system. You only need great games for a system to work. Lets take Nintendo again, it was in the Dark Ages for a very long time, it was comparably behind Sega Genesis for god sakes in the 90's when it was dominating the war at 90%. A lot of people today look at games like: "Ohh, shiny..." Hell, look at the frigging promo for CoD Ghosts other than the dog. They spent A TON OF TIME bragging about how great the graphics and the AI were compared to what it was before. I don't give a **** about that, some of my favorite games are from the 16 bit era.

And granted, I do play Portal, Halo, AC, and other games. I even tried The Last of Us and I hate horror. Granted, I didn't go far because I don't like getting the crap scared out of me every two seconds, but I gave it a shot. Hell, BRAID, a 16 bit graphic game which has been out for two years has gotten critical acclaim. There's still a ton of people debating about the game and what the ending really means. The NC who recently did a editorial about games being art got BLASTED for not mentioning it along with Shadow of the Colossus and other such games.

On the other side, you look at Square, I love Kingdom Hearts, and I think they're doing better. But the last generation they REALLY hurt themselves with their two main series. Kingdom Hearts without even showing a hint towards III and yes, I know they fixed that with showing it for the PS4, and FFXIII. I know people liked FFXIII, but they depended on linearity and a lot of pretty graphics to make it through. And it bit them hard, badly. I know there's other things, but when it came out and I read the reviews, people loved the graphics but complained about everything else in the series of games called FFXIII.

It doesn't matter how "shiny" and "pretty" a game is. I don't look at beauty unless it's a moment where I can. If it's a cutscene and it's designed to impress me, I love it. AC when I see the leap of faith orientation, I take a moment to admire the beauty of the area. But on the other side, Portal is one of the dreariest, darkest, poorly lit games that you sometimes have problems seeing where you're going and firing at that I've played in a very long time. And it is one of my favorite games in a long time. Portal 2 is a very close second if not beating out One. That was a game where developers made it out of a demo of another game and decided: "The hell with it, we'll make it a game in itself."

It was so popular within hours that there were memes popping all over the place and they not only decided to make it a multiplatformer, but a sequel also. With a demo that at the most runs four hours. It's the games, it's the creativity, it's the passion and love you see in games that make consoles sell. It is when you sit down and weep ten minutes into a game for a character death of someone you barely knew that will bring you in. That is what gaming is about, it's not about graphics, it's not about sports, it's not about tv or cable or Internet or cell phone. It's about something that you can sit down and enjoy. Whether it's stress relief, whether it's just getting into a good story, whether it's just getting on with your friends and trying to kill each other while making jokes and chatting about life whether if they're next to you or halfway around the world.

When people try to take that away from you so you can't sit down and enjoy the series that you love anymore, it angers people. It causes them to refuse to buy your product. The people who supported the One mostly did not because: "Oh, we have all this shiny stuff added." They supported it because they loved Halo, they loved the exclusives coming out. I've seen a lot of people saying: "One has great exclusives." Great, but we can't play it, I can't go to a friend and ask to borrow their copy if they borrowed it before, which is as big as a part of gaming as sitting down with your friend and goofing off while going through a game. I can't play a system if I don't have a cell service or Internet for 24 hours if something's going on that I need to relax to get away from a hellish part of my life. I can no longer be what defines me and makes me enjoy gaming along with millions of others.

Mattrick tried to restrict the gaming community because he saw the future in maybe 20 to fifty years. Hell, maybe even ten, but you can't force change to happen. You can't sit down and say: "Everyone get good Internet, everyone have enough money to buy our games. Everyone not mind having a microphone in your room listening in to you." Though I admit, you can turn it off, maybe. Life doesn't work that way, cable companies don't work that way, if it did, I wouldn't be cursing Springboard to hell because my Internet provider refuses to acknowledge that frigging player and won't let me watch videos on the damned thing.

It's a part of life, and Mattrick was too brash to realize that life isn't a multimillion dollar home in ideal conditions like his life. Orth did the same thing and it bit him hard to the point where he was fired. He actually got off easily for his comments.

 

To reiterate the video posted before and stay on topic, listen to this podcast from 46:20 till 57:

They talk about at the core, Mattrick being a cocky businessman who cares about games, is good at his job as a CEO, terrible as a spokesperson, and ultimately didn't give a **** about defending Xbox decisions because he was ultimately a guy leaving his job because he had a better position with more money for him. And when you leave your job, you rarely give a **** about your last days there, which is why he was acting apathetic, and uncaring, like was said in the last vid I posted.

I agree with them completely, so please have a listen.