The Life and Times of Rutian

I’m currently a GameStop employee, and, as many of you know, the new XboxOne was announced yesterday. I had to go into work just after it launched but news continued to trickle in to us all day long. At first, I was a little excited but they didn’t show me everything I wanted to see and ignored a lot of the important stuff.

As the day went on, the devious truth was slowly reveal about the system. No used games or an excessive (Possibly full price) fee to play a used game. No backwards compatibility with the Xbox 360, a console that has been out for almost a decade and has over 1,000 titles. No backwards compatibility with Arcade content, so all DLC and downloaded games are gone. Always-online and a 24 hour DRM. That means that if your internet goes out for more than 24 hours or you don’t have internet service, you can’t play games, even single player games, or use most of the systems functionality. It also just recently came out and said “Screw Indie developers! They are gonna have to pay publishers if they want to release game on our console!”

After all this was announced, our DM was still sending us emails telling us to make sure we are telling every customer about the system and getting them to sign up for the First to Know lists. A system that was specifically designed to go after our business model. If the XB1 is successful then Gamestop as a company will cease to exist. It will show all other console developers that they can shove out the used game business and GameStop.

Let me add this, I’m not some hardcore GameStop fan that loves the company and would take a bullet for them. It’s a job. It pays me. To have it vanish means I lose my livelihood. I’m not about to support something that will lose me my job. But our DM, he’s just all, “Push it on everyone! Make everyone want it!”

No.

Nope.

Won’t.

I’l sell up the PS4. I’ll push it ‘til the cows come home. It supports used games. It supports Indie games. It supports gamers. It has all the media features of an Xbox minus the live TV and possibly the HBOGo (for now). And, Sony did something at their press conference that MS forgot. THEY SHOWED GAMES! Like real gameplay! Not CG trailers and not cross compatible games (Call of Duty, Madden, SPORTS! SPORTS! SPORTS!!!). They were like, “Want a reason to buy the PS4? We have GAMES!”

I will not sell the XboxOne. I refuse to. It directly conflicts with my job. Here’s something that GameStop probably hasn’t considered is, can the system even be traded in once someone is done with it? Or is it permanently locked to a profile forever? Questions that weren’t even addressed at all.

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Posted 2 days ago