Xbox One chief product officer Marc Whitten has said that he regrets the back-and-forth messaging that has been happening since May, speaking in an interview with IGN.
“I think it’s pretty simple. We’ve just got to talk more,” he said. “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 expressed that he didn’t see the reversal of policy as removing features from the console, saying “I believe we’ve added on choice for people.”
Whitten also responded to a recent petition calling for the restoration of Xbox One’s original policies, saying that the dissonance comes directly from Microsoft’s inability to properly discuss the benefits of the policies.
“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, “They wanted what I call a bridge, sort of how they think about the world today using more digital stuff. What we did, we added to what the console can do by providing physical and offline modes in the console. It isn’t about moving away from what that digital vision is for the platform, It’s about adding that choice.”
It appears that Microsoft’s policy change isn’t about removing features, but is about providing a medium between a fully digital policy and the current delivery methods of consoles. Whitten seems to be leading the charge in communicating that Microsoft recognized that there was a problem with explaining the policy, and that now the company is striving for clarity in exactly what the benefits of a digital Xbox One means.
Source: IGN
