oh yeah no doubt about it MS really should have aimed to be second on stage tbh their price is now waaaay too high and they definately could have made some changes that need to be made in the hours before their announcement.

I can see MS pulling off this gen off but only if they...
a)quickly to drop the price to PS4 levels maybe upto $40 more since it includes kinect while PS4 nolonger has the new eye.
b)change the check in time for discless play to 1-2weeks
c)announce that disc in drive will always play the game

They could easily allow stores to add the disc back into the system on trade in which allows discless play for rebuyers (but say that using the disc will block discless play on other consoles till the disc is used by the account holder) and this would allow people to still buy on ebay and play. Sure people would be still complain but it would be a lot less than it is now most likely...

Wow, what a beautiful comment from the master of PR disaster. I know another product for people who aren't able to get some form of connectivity, it's called Playstation 4. XD

Here you go. Not very sick at all.

Seems pretty sick to me.

I think they will offer a subsidy program to cover "a," and I think "b" had a very strong chance of happening exactly as you wrote it. I don't think "c" is in the cards at all though, it goes too hard against their stated goals.

No matter what they do however MS has a great chance of winning this generation. Let's not confuse some bad press in June as a death announcement. All they have to do is sell the benefits of the console and release a game or two people REALLY want to play and they're on the road to winning.

What's the reasoning behind the 24-hour home calling?

Apparently, there's a sequel to Fez being developed:

-'Fez 2' announced at E3, see the first teaser trailer (The Verge)
-Fez 2 announced (GameSpot)
-Fez 2 in development at Polytron (Polygon)

My guess on the release date: June 2018 :P

I would buy that on PC, but only if Clippy is a playable character

In all honesty I would probably only buy the soundtrack to Fez 2. I had more fun listening to Disasterpeace's stuff than actually playing the game (don't get me wrong, I thought the game itself was decent, but I really didn't think it was that great).

The games run diskless the 24 hour phone home is to stop you playing a game you traded in upping it to a week or 2 will let people do this but stops them just installing them offline then trading in the same day and playing for ever

More Shadow Warrior footage, with a look at the new Lo Wang:
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/cb-7bkQog_KXKRh/shadow_warrior_gameplay_demo/

Aha. Wouldn't it have been "better" to just require activation on installation, thus locking a game to an account, and then designing some kind of system that would allow people to transfer the games to other people's accounts (with say a max activations per license (each new activation rendering the old one useless)... 3 or 5 or whatever)?

A buys a game. = 1 activation.
A sells the game to GameSpot (called B). = 2 activations.
B sells the game to C = 3 activations.

Enabling users to trade in their games, only a limited number of times, without requiring the console to call home.

It's calling home to verify the games installed on your machine have not been traded or sold. Your method would not remove that concern for them, they would still want to check every 24 hours to make sure your activations are not used up and such.

You literally cannot emulate Steam's offline mode if you also do used game sales or trading. It's impossible, unless you go DRM free, which none of them will do.

Well, you can always validate the licenses when the console comes back online. And since you cannot install games without being online, one would either have to keep playing the games he has installed forever or go online to install another game that he would want to play.

Its a small trade-off, but at least the rage about the console calling home / needing a connection would go away.