When a creative director at Microsoft Studios, Adam Orth, decided to weigh in about always-on requirements, he managed to reveal two things: One, the next Xbox is almost certainly an always-on device, and two, Adam Orth is a wee bit insensitive.
Orth’s Twitter feed is, unsurprisingly, completely locked down but unfortunately for him, screencaps live forever.
NeoGAF collected a whole bunch of tweets from Orth, including a back-and-forth between him and Manveer Heir, an employee at Bioware, that started with… well, here’s the chain:
Orth continued to lay on the charm with other tweets:
As you might have guessed, Orth’s opinion was not greeted with high praise from the peanut gallery.
It’s not safe to assume that the opinions of one employee reflect the opinions of an entire corporation, and Orth himself notes that this is a personal opinion, but always-on is likely on Orth’s mind for a specific reason.
It’s also a bit troubling, honestly. It’s not just that Orth is being, well, rude to pretty much everybody who doesn’t live in a metropolitan area, it’s the fact that he seems completely unaware that getting the Internet to operate at the speeds a console demands can be too expensive or just too Herculean a task for many people around the country.
It’s likely the majority of Xbox 360 owners have some form of Internet. That’s not the problem. As Manveer Heir noted, games that have required always-on Internet have been consistently disastrous at launch. Even Blizzard, a company that operates a game that has millions of people logged on at peak hours, had serious problems with Diablo III‘s server load.
Microsoft will likely reveal the next Xbox at E3. It’s equally likely they will claim to have solved the problems surrounding making a console always on. And they might have! One way or the other, it looks like we’re going to find out.