So that's what happened! *OT*

by kapowaz, Wednesday, July 03, 2013, 01:32 (3963 days ago) @ Ragashingo

Funnyily enough, it kinda does make sense, and yeah, things really did work out that way a good bit. The Xbox 180 is now see as as the console that might be a bit less powerful, but whew, at least we got them to reverse the plans on that check in thing.

Whilst I think the conspiracy theory angle is amusing and obviously not even remotely true, I have always believed that the gaming public is sufficiently fickle and short-of-memory that the furore over the Xbox One will be all but forgotten within a year of launch. History has showed us that so long as they course-correct somewhat they'll be fine. Think about all the other problems major consoles have had:

• Xbox 360 RRODs (yeah, that went on for years, but does anyone give a damn now?)
  
• PlayStation 3 launch price and lack of good titles (for a good 2 years post-release); getting rid of backwards compatibility in later models
  
• PlayStation 2 launch price and lack of good titles at launch (noticing a pattern here?)

All of these consoles were ultimately deemed successful (in fact, the PS2 arguably was the most successful modern era console ever). If you look back at the history of consoles, the ones that have tended to do badly in the longterm were those that were ahead of the pack in terms of hardware, but released out of step; the Dreamcast, the N64, the Saturn, the 3DO. They all succumbed to either the generation before (which had momentum) or the generation after (which rendered it obsolete before it could gain momentum). The only real exception to the rule was the Wii, which is seeming increasingly like a blip.

As I wrote on Twitter — my prediction is that in a year's time gamers will have forgiven Microsoft and Sony will still be releasing half-baked software updates.