Yet as it turns out now, and as some of us were saying back then, it is exactly what people would be wanting in the future. Before the end of the generation gamers were overwhelmingly buying digital over physical, only thanks to their initial "concerns" and all the FUD that was spread at the time, they then lost all of the benefits that the initial Xbox One plans would have given them.
Uh I wouldn't say people were overwhelmingly buying digital by the end of PS360, in fact IIRC the ratio of digital back then was quite small. Unless they were XBLA/PSN indie games, digital was not really a factor back then.
For other industries like music, yes digital was far and away the biggest volume of sales, but for consoles that wasn't the case. If you mean by the end of PS4/XBO gen, however, then yes things had been shifting ever more to digital, though more so for Xbox than PlayStation, and it still leaned in favor of physical. Honestly it was the lockdowns from the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 that accelerated the volume of digital sales as much as they've grown, for obvious reasons.
Microsoft were giving gamers what they wanted, the gamers just didn't realise it yet because time and time again "GaMeRz" have proven to be a pretty dumb and reactionary bunch.
Let's be fair here; MS's messaging at the time was absolutely
terrible. It doesn't matter how "right" they were at the end of the day about the trends of digital purchasing and whatnot; they simply dropped the ball in the lead-up and the stories making the news at the time about NSA and other hacks (and Sony's own 2012 PSN hack adding onto that) did Microsoft's messaging at the time no favors.
That's fine, but that's not what was being discussed and argued. The person I was trying to have a discussion with, in vain, was adamant that the Xbox One was unveiled at E3 and their entire E3 was TVTVTVTV.
Yeah, they are wrong on both counts if that's what they were doing. It's pretty easy to find the May reveal and the E3 presentation on Youtube; one definitely came before the other and there was definitely a tonal adjustment by them once the E3 presentation came.