So dear reader, when was the last time you were on Live? Now, when was the last time you were on Live and did not encounter some form of asshat? However long ago it was, it was definitely too recent, and word is starting to really get around. In an article at Gamasutra, Fulton, a Microsoft employee who worked on Shadowrun, writes that: "the online behavior of our customers is dramatically reducing our sales."
And that's just the beginning of an excellent four page article on social design and the future of online gaming with regard to social interaction. The assertion that Live is generally filled with annoying idiots has been widely held among the more hardcore gaming community since the inception of the service, but this is the first that we've ever heard anything out of Microsoft about it affecting them in any manner. In the article Fulton posits that we know and love games so we're willing to work around it or put up with it, but for newcomers to the medium, the fun/annoyance ratio could just be too high. Readers, what do you think?
