Why is it Either/Or?

We shouldn’t be blindly accepting Microsoft’s premise.

Prior to yesterday the Internet (or the subset of it where males age 12 to 48 frequent) was abuzz with how Microsoft had flubbed the new Xbox and Sony was going to ride it’s PS4 robo-raptor into a blazing victory in the next console generation.

Microsoft obviously recognized they were swimming against the tide and yesterday said, “Ok, ok we will return to Xbox 360 style handling of disc based games.”, dropping their proposed new digital sharing features in favor of the traditional hand your game to people sharing.

Last night and today the game pundits have universally declared that this is a shame and we have collectively forced Microsoft into giving up the future in favor of the past.

I call shenanigans. There’s no reason it had to be either/or except that Microsoft and the publishers say it has to be either/or.

The addition of digital sharing features should not preclude real world disc sharing. That’s the future I want to see, and I think the future everyone else wants to see. Microsoft and the publishers wanted people to give up their traditional disc sharing in favor of digital sharing and everybody said, “No thanks.”

That doesn’t mean we gave up the future. It means Microsoft proposed a deal we didn’t want.

Now if Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo decide to add on the digital sharing features on top of traditional disc based sharing, they will have a clear advantage over their competitors, which will make for an easy selling point for their platform.