@MjnE @ernelson1976 I can't take this sort of comment seriously- we know NOTHING about the next Xbox yet. You have no idea what you're even talking about. You've already made up your mind, without knowing anything about the console.

Some of the comments here are amusing, though. "Microsoft is going to have an online connection required! I'm going to buy the PS4!" And now, "Microsoft is not going to have an online connection required! I'm still going to buy a PS4!" Sorry, I don't believe this for a moment.

@rolla020980 People making decisions about which console to buy based on unconfirmed speculation are being idiots. What matters isn't what they considered doing, but what the console actually is. I have no doubt Sony thought about an always-on connection. It's Sony, after all. The only difference is that MS's internal discussion of the issue bubbled over into public. But the same conversations almost certainly happened at Sony as well.

@cephas90 You're deluding yourself if you think Sony didn't consider exactly the same thing. It's pretty obvious that they did. There's no date on this memo, so there's no evidence that what you're suggesting is true. It's just as possible (more possible, actually) that the memo was written before this whole thing started.

Now that we know that MS is doing the right thing, you still will go with Sony? Makes me doubt you really were a loyal Xbox fan at all.

@MoronGotMyName I think this report make's Orth's obvious aggressiveness in his pro-connection tweets make more sense. Rather than just being arrogant, now it seems that the tweets were likely bitterness over having lost the internal debate at MS over whether such a requirement was wise.

I tend to think this report is correct, rather than Thurrott's, if for no other reason than that it makes a hell of a lot more sense. I have little doubt that MS investigated an always-on requirement, and even tried very hard to make it make sense. But the company isn't suicidal. I suspect there probably is a contingent of people at MS who would like a constant-connection to be required--and perhaps other reports we've seen might be nothing more than the bubbling over of heated internal disagreement.

There's still no scientific evidence that violent games lead to real-world violence. In fact, since video games became popular in the early 1980s, violent crime in the US has been steadily declining--to the point where it's the lowest since rates have been recorded. I'm not saying games are responsible for the decline, but if they were responsible for an increase in violence, we'd have seen it by now. It's simply not there.

Everyone plays video games. So the chances that any particular violent criminal played a violent game is nearly 100%. But it's also nearly 100% among those who *didn't* commit violent crime that day. You can say that "Nearly all violent criminals played violent video games," but you can also say, "Nearly all violent criminals ate breakfast that morning," or "Nearly all violent criminals own cell phones." But no one could creditably say that either eating breakfast or owning a cell phone causes violence. And yet that's the sum total of the scientific evidence about violence and games--basic correlation, nothing more. Not terribly convincing.

There is a general unwillingness these days to hold *people* accountable for their actions. Instead, there is a tendency to want to blame things instead--games, or guns, or whatever. We don't want to believe that people actually do the evil things they do. It's much easier to believe that some external force made them do it. And it makes government do all sorts of nutty things to try to "stop" violence by regulating "things." Often, things that are perfectly safe, fun things to do. It's much easier to ban things or regulate them, then to deal with the actual problem--mentally unstable people who want to do violence, or can't stop themselves.

@Stonecutters908 @ernelson1976 My cynicism regarding Nintendo and "quality" has more to do with the piles and piles of shovelware they had no problem with for the Wii. If they hadn't demonstrated a willingness to let devs make absolute shit games for their console, maybe I could take him seriously.

And I'm hardly a new gamer--I started on the Atari. I've seen some bad times in gaming, and this is starting to feel like 1983 all over again.

@PinkSpider79 @ernelson1976 Wii sales have been in the shitter for a few years now, while both the PS3 and Xbox continue to sell well. The Wii U on the other hand ... not selling well at all, despite being new. Sales aren't going to go up from this point. Traditionally, consoles sell at their highest rates in the first few months of release. If that's the case, then the Wii U is going to look more like the Jaguar than the NES or Wii. It's silly to deny it.

@PinkSpider79 @suprastaruk @Arab_Spring The quick replacement of the Wii with the Wii U had more to do with softening software sales, shovelware, and general platform malaise. Wii sales were tanking late. Wii did well early, then faded fast--generally what happens with a fad.