Everyone is saying the Xbox DRM turnaround is a consumer outrage victory, however I see something different. The gaming media stoked the fires considerably, and were outraged themselves. This, in my opinion, is what really forced Microsoft's hand... the endless bad press, urged on by the media themselves.

I always say "the people" are in charge. If they really cared about bad consumer policy X or political issue Y all they would need to do is truly band together and say so and they would win. I'm wondering though... are they truly capable of doing it without the media's blessing?

We're told day in, day out by the gaming press how amazing Steam is, despite it carrying a lot of the Xbox One DRM that outraged so many. The media have shaped every equal rights victory in America's history, despite populations usually being against those changes at the time they started.

Anyway enough rambling... question is, do you think "the people" can win without the media backing them? Is "the media" actually "the people" in any reliable way?

Discuss!

The media is needed to inform the public and without information the public cannot act. The media can also spur action when none would've been taken or encourage indolence when there would've been action - however, if the public never acts, a media campaign can be of only limited success. I think if the media were to have come out for this, people would have still reacted negatively and pre-orders and so forth would have still suffered. Not buying a product when there is a competitor that is both cheaper with the same or better quality and doesn't carry restrictions is easier than when there is only version of a product sold with one business model. That the media was as outraged as the consumers probably exacerbated the problem and pushed the information to a lot more people than who would've otherwise known about it and those then either chose not to pre-order a console at all or chose the PS4.

Steam was really the first of its kind and represented a totally new way of delivering games such that people didn't associate having the same rights. Since the product had changed from physical to digital, it seemed like something simply new. Please understand, personally, I think if Steam is to have account-based DRM then it should also allow the same rights we have with physical media in that we should be allowed to resale, trade, and loan games (note there is some evidence in the code-base that Steam is going to allow loaning digital games http://www.gamespot.com/news/steam-may-allow-game-sharing-report-6410433). The outrage wasn't present because the whole business model/product was so different. The Xbox 1 tried to apply that same model to a familiar product category where people understood they had these rights and thus the outrage.

That's my take on it :)

I don't want this to become another Xbox One thread, it was meant to have a broader scope than that, but I have to reply to this. It was the same exact situation when Steam started. The vast majority bought PC games on disc, Half Life 2 introduced Steam through making a disc purchase tie to it, and there was a resale market for PC games which subsequently died.

Same exact thing. The only real differences were Xbox One requiring a once every 24 hours check-in online, and of course the weird backroom deal made with Gamestop and others to allow license selling.

That's why kickstarter, indie games and other things are becoming so popular, people want to be in charge again. It's not only you who wants this, otherwise kickstarter would have never took off.

The media is probably the most important part, if you wanna change things, yes. But there is of course a high amount of synergy between the media and "the people". The media tells a news story, the people get outraged, the media report about that, and then there's a back and forth between them. If nobody would have cared about the Xbone DRM, then the media wouldn't have had anything to report about.
And if the media didn't report about the outrage, less people would have known about it and MS wouldn't have changed their policies.

Btw., I think many people just didn't understand what DRM or Steam was when Half-Life 2 came out. At least I didn't. I had a friend who always bought a lot of games, and I would of course be a cheapskate and borrow them. When I asked to borrow HL2, he explained to me that it wasn't possible, but I can remember that I was a bit baffled by the concept of online activation.
To this day, I haven't bought a single Half-Life game.
But he did lend me Gothic 2. And to this day, I bought every game in the series several times.

I think it is part and parcel of why does "X generate outrage and Y doesn't" which seemed to be another part of your post.

When Steam started it was one game and DRM-solutions on the PC had been around for a lot longer - and Steam was just another DRM system and less onerous than most. When it became a full-fledged store selling digital copies of Valve and every other company's game it created the first digital game marketplace. Since people were used to not selling digital goods because of iTunes and other marketplaces (many of which also had DRM-initially) people accepted it because that was who digital goods were being done.

That's the rub, it was both how thing were done and set the standards for something new (digital gaming). The Xbox One tried to change the standards for something well understood, thus outrage. Don't misunderstand I was highly amused by people saying they were going to switch over to gaming on the PC after the Xbox fiasco since Steam is as bad as what they were complaining about for the Xbox. I think though some were also concerned that there wouldn't be the same drop in prices after launch like in digital gaming for physical games without a used games market.

The real question is why didn't we get outrage over the first DRM systems (well beyond the worst of them)? Because people bought into the idea that piracy was killing the games market and DRM was necessary to save it.

I think that some things generate outrage because they change something known. People know it shouldn't be like that and dislike it. Overcoming that requires a slow, long, expensive PR battle where all members of the industry are onboard (DRM on PC). Creating something new however let's you set the standards; they can be anything you want and people will be much more likely to accept it.

So you agree it's a team effort, "the people" cannot overcome blatant media disagreement? I ask because I think assuming the media will always bend to the majority of their audience is a little dangerous, since they are a) owned by corporations, and b) tend to go against the majority when they feel it is the right thing to do.

Yeah, that's essentially right I think.
I don't think the media will always bend to the majority. What I see it very often with political movement: sometimes the media fully jump on the bandwagon, and it becomes a huge issue, while almost the same thing didn't gain any traction a few months prior. It feels kinda arbitrary, like there has to be the right journalist at the right time writing the right thing, for a movement to become popular.

Also, even negative media coverage will give the movement an audience. "No such thing as bad publicity". As long as there are any reports, it will have a chance to achieve something. If the media really want to kill something, they don't cover it at all.

I would, in some cases at least, disagree with how the media "informs" us...

I live in the USA, and quite frankly I am more likely to try and find news stories I am interested in from outside the country rather than trust our media. Or, if I want to know what Sony or Microsoft are doing, I go to their website directly and see for myself what's going on rather than trust a so-called unbiased 3rd party to tell me.

A classic example of our media here would be when a certain "news" ( I use the term loosely) station whose name begins with an F covered Mass Effect when it first came out. Hey, did you guys know that it was like straight up cyber porn? And, you could customize how big you made your female characters breasts? Seems like they also claimed you could have a 3-way with an alien. You know, after the couple games I put in, probably about 80 or so hours total, I could still only customize my characters FACE and I only got ONE sex scene that was about 15 seconds and had it been in a movie it would have ranked somewhere closer to PG13 than XXX...AND it was near the end of the game....so even if I blew through 15 hours of gameplay just to see *that*...errr, yeah, there's more risqué stuff on youtube than this....

In short, it was pretty damn obvious they'd never made it as far as taking the disc out of the case, let alone actually PLAYING the game.

Now, while not all stories are this far off the mark, its happened often enough that I just don't bother with them anymore.

I think this can be very true, and perhaps is why we romanticize historical figures like our "founding fathers." A few people with the right message can change how the public reacts. A massive negative example is, of course, Adolf Hitler. This is true as well. It makes me think everything in life is one big example of selling something, though.

Allow me to restate: the role of media is to inform - how well certain media outlets fulfill that role is different :)

Right, which basically comes down to them being a business. Fear and outrage raise ratings.

Do you think a non-profit media outlet like the BBC does a better job, despite ties to the government it is reporting on?

I think sometimes it is a good thing that the media (though I think it is wrong to believe the media to be monolithic) not to bend to the majority. Popular opinion doesn't get to decide what is true. Tyranny of the majority, the condemnation of democracy by a certain classical philosopher, is still tyranny. Journalists should hold to journalistic standards which should be set regardless of the issue. It still requires a subjectivity in the application that is inescapable, but if ethical standards are being held to it should be mitigated.

On the other hand I disagree that people won't act without the blessing of established media outlets. It takes something truly outrageous typically, but it can happen. The Arab spring comes to mind - Al Jeezera not withstanding much of that was driven by popular sentiment spread through social media or traditional word of mouth. That's an extreme example and may be the exception that proves the rule, but it can happen.
The BBC has often in the past shown a remarkable independence of the government (can't speak to today since I am not often a watcher) and pissed it off considerably. In a famous case, the BBC told the Thatcher government to go fuck themselves ... and won.

Of course not all government-run media is so independent.

I can't tell you about the BBC, but in my country, while there is definitely a big political influence in the state TV, the journalists are very independent and also vocal about their unhappiness with this state.

But the best journalist in Austria is probably the anchorman of the news program of the state TV, and he always says he's completely free in his decisions what to put into his show.

And I guess it's probably true with private media as well - the main articles may come from big news agencies, but comments and columns, where they can express their opinions, are barely regulated.

And least that's what I like to think.

I guess a healthy mix between private and state sponsored media should create a proper balance.

(Sorry for the chopped post, I just wrote every thought that came into my mind, without caring much about a proper structure or cohesiveness.)

The media today is not actually what it used to be. You have the youtubers like TB, AngryJoe, Jim Sterling , etc. Those guys get more views than some TV shows. That is actually a good thing. They are more dependent on the people that watch them than traditional media. They have communities that follow them and usually resonate with them. They express the voice of those communities. They are the new media. The old media mostly defends the big companies against the people that they should be protecting from anti-consumer behaviour.

So yeah, bad "press" and probably pre-orders that were not going well is what made this happen. However, the press that mattered expressed the voice of the consumers not that of the companies. People voted with their wallets by not pre-ordering.

Cliff B was downplaying this saying "it was the playstation that did this". Seriously? Why the fuck does he think that Sony did what they did? If they knew that they would get away with it, they would have done what MS did, but they saw what happened, they saw the outcry and decided to stick it to MS in the process. in the end, the consumers won. They managed to keep what they already had.