Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.So goes the famous quote from Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, known in English simply as George Santayana. He wasn't talking about Microsoft apologists, but OMFG, he may as well have been.
So, I was doing some simple YouTube searches, trying to gauge the reaction to the XBox E3 presser, when I came across this bit of revisionist history.
It's a lovely little think piece about how visionary Microsoft were the only ones preparing for a world of connected, online gaming; about how everyone saw it coming, but only Microsoft acted on that vision. They've suffered unjustly, is the clear implication here, for being such visionaries, and the gaming industry would be a better and healthier place if they'd just done a better job of selling their vision to consumers.
This is 100% bullshit. It quite simply isn't what happened. At all.
When Microsoft first announced the XBox One, they were not at all coy about their intentions. Although the XBOne would live in your living room, and it would play games, it was not intended to primarily be a gaming console; the XBOne was intended to be the nerve centre of your living room. That's why Microsoft's original press conference focused on the XBOne's "broad multimedia and social capabilities." Games were peripheral; they were not the point.
Microsoft's vision was that every HDMI device you owned would be plugged into, and controlled by, your XBox One. This included your PlayStation consoles, should you be gauche enough to own any; you would literally be able to use your XBOne controllers to play the games on your PlayStation. There were demos of this happening; Microsoft truly thought that this was a feature.
But that's not all; oh, no, not by a long shot. Because the XBOne would also come with Kinect 2, the second generation of the Kinect motion control system that nobody had been remotely interested in when Microsoft released it for the XB360. And the use of those Kinect 2's would be mandatory; you would not be able to turn the console on unless there were attached, and active. The reason? Because they were intended to constantly see and hear everything you did the privacy of your home, of course.
The explanation for this was that the Kinect would be able to activate your XBOne in response to gestures or voice commands at any time, which would have been a great optional feature... except that it wasn't optional -- it was mandatory. Your XBOne would spy on you, all the time, by default, with no option for the consumer to turn Big Brother off.
Oh, and did we mention that this intrusive surveillance setup would also be connected to the Internet, and thus to Microsoft's servers, at all times? Meaning that Microsoft were in a position to harvest all manner of intimate information about you, your family, and your life, with you having no control over the process at all. Even before you consider the potential damage that a hacker could do, if they should compromise this device's security, the original XBOne was still, quite literally, an Orwellian surveillance device, whose ability to play games was clearly an afterthought.
And when I say that games were an afterthought, I mean that the XBOne was also less powerful than the PS4. It couldn't even export games natively in 1080p, originally -- it rendered in 720p instead, and then upscaled, them, which meant a significant hit to already-lacklustre performance. Cross-platform titles had to be nerfed on the PS4 in order to make them play the same as their XBOne versions, which always ran poorly by comparison because Microsoft's console was underpowered compared to its rival.
Yes, Sony had the savvy to market their gaming console as a gaming console, and not say grandiose things about how they were moving beyond gaming to dominate the world's living rooms, as Microsoft did. And yes, the fact that the PS4 didn't come bundled with Kinect 2's that nobody wanted also allowed Sony to sell their gaming box, with its superior performance, for $100 less than Microsoft could. But to say that Microsoft were prepared for a future of connected gaming, while Sony wasn't, is just nonsense.
The PS4 connects to the Internet, and always has done. You can't turn your PS4 on and play a damn Blu-Ray without first downloading two hours' worth of software and firmware updates and creating a fucking PSN account. That's not a recent change; it's not something that Sony added in later. It was always the design; the PS4 was built with the capability to download and install games from the cloud. People just hadn't started calling it the cloud yet.
So this narrative of visionary Microsoft, who alone had foreseen the connected future on online gaming, and prepared for it while others waited, is pure manure. Sony won this gaming console generation by building a clearly better gaming console, and then marketing it to gamers. Sony was every bit as ready for a connected gaming future as Microsoft were; they just weren't assholes about it, is all.
Don't be an asshole. So endeth the lesson.