The Internet will never be short of drama and I'm guessing that no-one realises that more, this morning, than Adam Orth, Creative Director for Microsoft Studios.

With a lot of people already up in arms over the renewed rumours that the new Xbox will need to be constantly connected to the Internet (aka "Always-on"), he fired off a couple of Tweets suggesting that he didn't "get the drama around having an "always on" console." and that he wants "every device to be "always on"" so just #DealWithIt.  If that wasn't lighting the blue touch paper, I don't know what is.

And the Internet went crazy...What followed was a number of rather silly Tweets discussing "non-cities" and how he wouldn't buy a device if it's supply wasn't reliable (see below).

With Reddit and NeoGAF leading the way, Adam has become an overnight Internet celebrity.

Of course, as a top level employee of Microsoft Studios, a lot of people have taken this as confirmation that the new Xbox will, indeed, require a constant Internet connection... and I'm sure there will be a few words exchanged in the office today.

Personally I'm not convinced that this wasn't an attempt at Trolling the Internet that has horribly backfired.  Several of the Tweets were exchanged with Manveer Heir, Senior Gameplay Designer at Bioware and good friend of Adam's.  Needless to say, Adam's Twitter account is now set to private but the fire rages on without him...

Of course, should it turn out that the new Xbox does require an always-on connection, I think it's safe to say Microsoft should have a good idea of the sort of response they'll get from the world (and that's just the ones with an Internet connection).  The stupid thing is, Microsoft have won the current console generation race and if they simply released a more powerful Xbox with backwards compatability, people would throw money at them.  We don't always need new 'features'.  Take a look at how PC gaming has evolved over the years... how I play my games now isn't much different from how I first started playing them.  The graphics and sound are infinitely better, and the number of ways I can buy games has expanded.  But I still play them with a keyboard and mouse, in front of a screen, all of my choosing. Sure, these days a lot of games require at least online activation... but I can still buy and them on a disk and install them without needing a massive download.  And the online activation means I don't need to carry the disks around when I want to play (although I still have a few like that).  Steam has an offline mode so I can still play my games when I'm away from the Internet... even UPlay has an offline mode.  I can only hope that Adam's experiences filter into Microsoft and they understand the mistake they would be making...

UPDATE: It would seem that this is going to go on for a while... the NeaGAF thread is now 75 pages long and almost every major gaming site has picked up the story.  I can't imagine Adam Orth will be showing his (digital) face for a while...

UPDATE 2: Microsoft issued the following statement in relation to the whole incident:

"We apologize for the inappropriate comments made by an employee on Twitter yesterday. This person is not a spokesperson for Microsoft, and his personal views do not reflect the customer centric approach we take to our products or how we would communicate directly with our loyal consumers.  We are very sorry if this offended anyone, however we have not made any announcements about our product roadmap, and have no further comment on this matter."

Basically a whole lot of words to say... not very much!

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