Quote: "Second off, what on earth does the next-next-gen have anything to do with buying one of the next-gen consoles?"
This is my point. If it's to boycott anything Microsoft
might do, then I don't see why other MS products aren't being boycotted. If it's to send a message that MS have done something wrong, then they've already got the message, they admitted they were wrong and listened to what people wanted.
I just get the feeling rather than taking some kind of moral stance or to send some kind of message it's more of a grudge. If MS does this again, we'll cross that bridge when we get there and perhaps even boycott the offending product. The only damage the XBox One did was to its reputation and perhaps offend some people. But I see it as no reason to hold a grudge. People make mistakes and unintentially offend people all of the time. I'm pretty sure MS attitude wasn't "screw the military", but of course I can see why people of a military background might feel snubbed.
But boycotting the XBox One seems about as useful as boycotting Windows, Microsoft Office, Windows Phone or the XBox 360, which makes sense if you're boycotting MS as a company, but none if you're boycotting the restrictive features of the XBox One, because it hasn't happened.
Quote: "Again, I feel the damage is done because it took so much negative outrage from fans for them to reverse it. A Herculean amount..."
I wouldn't expect a business to change their position over night because it annoyed many fans. I think it makes sense for them to not to cave in at people's initial reactions, people are frequently closed minded but can learn to like things once they start to look at things from a different perspective and accept change. Perhaps the people would come to see it different once it had been left to stew. If MS's motivation was to support the developers, it wouldn't say much about their integrity if they backed down at the first sight of disapproval.
As an MMO gamer, when a developer releases big changes in a game (heck, even small ones), it often results in a lot of rage, because people are angry they've messed with a working system, some may rage quit, others may vent directly in that game's forums, but once they start using it they actually find that "hey this is no as bad as I thought" or "well, maybe these were sensible changes after all". People generally react bad to change and this is how I might have seen it if I was on the other side of the fence.
Remember when people had a bad reaction to DRM on PC games and this put companies like EA in a really bad light, but it has improved and people have learned to accept it. DRM is there to help protect developers after all. I hate it myself, but there are DRMs that work and I can get along with, most notably, Steam.
This probably wasn't going to be the case for the XBox One, but that's probably why they've changed it.
