Some day, far down the road, we'll be sitting with our grandchildren at our feet. As we rock in our holochairs watching the virtual sunset in our Googlezon immersi-room, we'll get all nostalgic. We'll look back on the period of May to June 2013 fondly, remembering all those memes we posted and those angry diatribes we wrote. We'll look down fondly at those tiny children, busy killing zombies in ActiBethesdaValve-Blizzard's Portal to World of Call of Fallout 6, and we'll say something like the following:

"Little Jimmy, did I ever tell you about the days when I fought and won in the great Microsoft used-game/Internet check-in battle of '13?"

It's a bit too easy to say that Microsoft's surprise reversal of its controversial game licensing policies today was just a reaction to the strident voices of a few on the Internet—that may have been how it started, though. In the high-pressure echo chamber of E3 last week, the unfortunate impression of Microsoft's next system started to leak into the mainstream, getting ink in big name newspapers and magazines and even getting an applause-grabbing negative mention on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon last night. When your system is on the verge of becoming a joke for a late night comedian, you know something must be done.

Of course, if Sony followed Microsoft's lead in pushing the same kinds of potential restrictions on game discs, Microsoft probably could have ridden out any negative reaction to its decision. If Microsoft and Sony united on these issues, gamers would be left with nowhere to turn. Mobile and tablet games aren't nearly mature enough, the Wii U is not powerful enough to offer a true alternative for a large block of gamers, and the PC never had used games (and often uses online checks for many titles). Instead, Sony loudly called Microsoft out at its E3 press conference, garnering a huge reaction from both the press and gamers and potentially accelerating Microsoft's reversal.

Many will see today's decision as a loss for the game publishers that are often quite vocal in their hatred for used game sales, which they see as taking money directly out of their pockets. But there are some indications that the publishers weren't really pushing for the kinds of restrictions Microsoft was planning to allow on Xbox One games. In fact, many publishers were seemingly caught flat-footed when the policy was announced. What's more, not a single publisher was willing to publicly say that it would take advantage of the new used-disc-blocking abilities Microsoft gave them, perhaps fearing the public reaction they had already seen Microsoft receive. Without more explicit support from publishers, Microsoft was left twisting in the wind.

A Pyrrhic victory?

Here's the thing, though: we may have all actually lost something in winning today. In his statement, Microsoft's Don Mattrick said the company "imagined a new set of benefits such as easier roaming, family sharing, and new ways to try and buy games" in crafting its original Xbox One licensing policy. It's not too hard to envision a number of benefits that were only really feasible in a world where all Xbox One games were installed to a hard drive and connected to a cloud-equipped Xbox Live account that checked in regularly.

Maybe Microsoft could have created a Netflix style "all-you-can-play" deal that gave players access to a large portion of the system's library for a set monthly price. Maybe a more limited, digital GameFly could allow for rotating, user-selected game downloads that changed every month. Maybe they could have allowed players to loan any of their digital games to anyone around the world for a limited, 12-hour test run as a way to spread the word about an excellent title. Maybe they could have announced a set pricing structure that encouraged downloadable games to drop down to a percentage of their original price months or years after their release.

Here's the problem: Microsoft didn't do any of those things. Any of these benefits remained "imagined," while the benefits that were actually announced were weak tea. Microsoft's "easier roaming" by downloading your games at a friend's house wasn't easier at all—these remote downloads would have actually been much less convenient than just bringing along a disc. The 10-member "family sharing" plan sounded intriguing, but Microsoft couldn't answer extremely basic questions about how it worked. Could two people play two different shared games in your library at the same time? No one at Microsoft seemed willing to say. Being able to play your entire library on your hard drive without having to get up and switch discs is nice, but it's hardly a "killer app" given the drawbacks.

The way Microsoft rolled out its vision of the brave new digital-focused future was full of concrete negatives and only fuzzy, imagined positives. If Microsoft announced some truly revolutionary (and value-adding) digital game sharing and renting policies alongside its online requirements and used game restrictions, maybe the medicine would have gone down better. As it stood, the massive backlash was practically inevitable.

When I got back from E3 last week, I called my mom for a regular check-in. Obviously, I brought up the show and the battle between Sony and Microsoft. When I described Microsoft's game licensing policies to her, she said they were "the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard."

When she asked incredulously why Microsoft did what it did, I found myself fumbling for an answer. Despite recently having a long sit down with Microsoft's marketing chief where he was tasked with answering this very question, I found myself struggling. I couldn't easily explain to my own mother why in the world she should see Microsoft's "digital future" as anything but stupid.

This was, in effect, the problem. Microsoft's moves to slowly strangle the life out of the disc-based game failed the "mom test" because there was nothing strong enough to counterbalance the obvious hassles and annoyances that it imposed. And that's a shame, because it's not that hard to envision the world that Microsoft apparently did, where purely digital game libraries actually let console makers and publishers offer new and interesting ways to get access to their games, in exchange for those disc-based and online-connected annoyances. But Microsoft utterly and completely failed to sell that vision, so here we are.

By the time the next generation of consoles rolls around, we may not be so lucky. High-speed Internet access will be nearly ubiquitous in many countries by then, and the cost and speed of bandwidth will have progressed enough that shipping discs to stores will seem like a costly and slow anachronism (see: record stores, Borders, Blockbuster video). Chances are, by then, the major console makers will finally be bold enough to eliminate physical media from their hardware plans altogether (see: iTunes, Kindle, Netflix, Hulu, et al.).

At that point, no amount of screaming by the principled faithful is going to convince a critical mass of people that they should be able to sell or loan out a product that exists only as bits in the cloud. The major players could easily see fit to just not enable any kind of digital sharing or resale features without too much backlash (see: Steam, iTunes).

So yes, the market has spoken and the Internet won today. The forces that would have changed the way your gaming discs worked were rebuffed and forced back by sheer will. But in another way, we all lost the potential to see whatever Microsoft's vision of the digital future actually was. Instead in all likelihood, we'll eventually get a digital future that looks a lot like the digital present—only without any discs at all.