The emergence of a petition that calls for Microsoft to reinstate its recently removed DRM and online check-in policies needed to be addressed. Even if half of the people who have signed the online document aren’t really serious about it all, the Xbox maker knew that something had to be said to the public before things got out of hand. Xbox One chief product officer Marc Whitten has done just that today, blaming the company’s poor messaging for the community’s actions.
“I think it’s pretty simple. We’ve got to just talk more, get people understanding what our system is,” Whitten said to IGN. “The thing that’s really gratifying is that people are excited about the types of features that are possible, and it’s sort of shame on us that we haven’t done as good of a job as we can to make people feel like that’s where we’re headed.”
Whitten would love to release the product right now so that people could understand exactly what it can do, but instead of wishing for the impossible, he hopes that Microsoft can continue to elaborate on the console’s unique features.
“What it tells me is we need to do more work to talk about what we’re doing because I think that we did something different than maybe how people are perceiving it,” he said. “When I read some of the things like that petition, from my perspective we took a lot of the feedback and, while Xbox One is built to be digital native, to have this amazing online experience, we realized people wanted some choice.”
Still, Microsoft knows how special Xbox Live is. When the Xbox One launches, Whitten is sure it’ll have the best online infrastructure out there.
“I feel like we have the best online gaming story that’s ever existed,” Whitten said. “When I look at how we built a system that’s built from the ground up to be amazing from a digital perspective, from being able to get updates and what we can do with the cloud and the cloud powering the experiences, to the way that you can switch between experiences, the way you can snap things together, what we’re doing with cloud achievements and challenges, I think people are going to really enjoy the experience.”
The Xbox One's rocky start is likely something the company will have to deal with until the next-generation console launches in November. Hopefully, people will at least know what it does by that time.
