The colloquial naming will probably settle something like this:
2001 console: Xbox, Original Xbox
2005 console: Xbox 360, 360
2013 console: Xbox1, X-bone
You will probably hear "Xbox" referring to the 2013 console in casual speech, but hopefully semi-formal and formal speech, e.g. articles, will distinguish.
Yeah, Microsoft really sucks at storytelling. All they had to say was something in the lines of...
"If you want to buy a disc, pay $59 for a game due to all non-digital crap the disc has to go through. And then do what you want with it. HOWEVER, if you download the game, it's like $29 (50% OFF!!!11), but then it's just yours, and yours alone, you can't sell or lend it - and we'd have to check every once in a while it's really you who's playing."
I wouldn't mind that at all since they'd be giving me a choice, and I'd gladly pay less, despite the 'lockdown'.
Dear Microsoft, all you have to do is ask your target audience what they think - you might be suprised.
>Dear Microsoft, all you have to do is ask your target audience what they think - you might be suprised.
I mean yes, don't introduce the Kin, but at the same time, if Apple'd asked what consumers want, we'd be thinking the RAZR is cool instead of the DROID RAZR.
I don't get that conclusion. Steam does it and they're applauded, even by many who "hate" DRM. Microsoft does it (and maybe doesn't detail the entire vision/value well) and gets shit on. Much like a lot of things that MS does.
Fair or not, reputation and corporate history allows different companies to get away with different things. Valve doesn't exactly have a reputation for turning off DRM servers, killing multiplayer servers for old games, and abandoning entire product lines and/or brands.
Conversely, nobody whines about Microsoft not releasing new versions of Halo, (or games in general with the number "3" in their title).
While I don't love that Steam has DRM, I don't hate their version of it either. What MS says they'll do (and what they'll probably end up doing) is nowhere close to what Valve has done. Valve has a history of listening to its customers about legitimate pain points with their DRM. Case in point: military personnel stationed abroad don't have the internet connection available to phone home every time they want to play a game, so Valve introduces an offline mode - authorize once before you deploy and freely play on that machine without an internet connection. Combine that with the fact that their DRM servers are pretty rock solid (I'm sure people have had problems with it but I've never encountered them in the years I've used steam) and the Gabe promise to unlock DRM if anything happens to Steam, and you get a lot of people comfortable trusting their game library to Steam.
I'm sure they thought of that. That's how they licensed software for decades (the OEM version of Office was much cheaper than the retail box, but it could only be used on that computer).
So we're going to have to pay more for multiplayer editions? o.O
Gaming used to be fun.. Whatever happened to creating something for the pure joy of it? Oh.. right.. capitalism.
The problem is that they still charge $59.99 for Games On Demand. When Black Ops 2 came out digitally, that's what it cost. Same with lots of the Games On Demand - many are $10-$15 more than I can get the disc for new. Not used, NEW. In the shrink wrap.
So you'll pardon me if I think this is full of crap. I want to see low priced games like on Steam. But until I see it from MS, I'll probably switch to full-time PC gaming again.
The games on demand pricing has to be that way though. If Games on Demand cost literally half the price Gamestop charged, the retailers would revolt, which would cause the publishers to revolt.
The only reason Valve has the power to charge what they charge is because they incrementally built that power - retailers at one point threatened to pull games from shelves for using Steam's authentication!
There's also a difference between Valve and Microsoft (or any other "platform" owners) that they still have to deal with retailers to push distribution of the console itself...
We have to believe that "all this time they wanted to charge less but their hands were tied". Sure. This has happened loads of times in history, where prices were high but kind hearted vendors dropped their prices whenever possible...
By the way; anyone working for one of those companies hit by the recession that has asked their staff to take a pay cut, "but we'll restore your salary when the good times return" ? Yeah, right.
I suspected as much as well. The family share feature of the new Xbox is pretty damn impressive and permissive. And they have to have you turn your damn xbox on and connect to the internet because they have to manage your access to those games. Otherwise I can just loan out the game to 10 people and they can play them forever offline without paying for them.
This guy is an awful writer. Even if I ignore that they don't know "its" from "it's", "then" from "than", this thing is hard to follow. Just an incoherent rant really, looks like it was written by a kid.
I thought the actual substance of what was said was pretty good, but I recognized the incorrect use of then/than and its it's as a possible signal for identifying the author, then again, it's possible they did this on purpose to make it harder to identify them. They were 100% consistent in never using than and never using its, which is interesting. They did misuse too/to once, but were not 100% consistent.
I like the option of selling my games and buying used games. If Microsoft makes my games less valuable to me by limiting my options then they should be cheaper. I've heard nothing alluding to this officially.
AAA games are still full price on Steam. There is no discount because you can't sell your used copy. What makes him think that games would somehow be cheaper on Xbox1 after you eliminate the used market? They won't be. The savings are not getting passed on to the consumers.
AAA games go from $60 to $30 to $7.50 over time on Steam; that hasn't happened as much for disc-based games. Maybe it will on Xbox One but I'm skeptical.
>that hasn't happened as much for disc-based games
This is EXACTLY what the used game market does for disk-based games. The only difference between the steam model and the disc-based model is that the producer doesn't get a cut of the game sales.
"Exactly?" Not at all. I don't mean to nitpick, but I think you're exaggerating.
Steam sales are a way of increasing profits by price discriminating to capture the long tail of the demand curve. Used games have nothing to do with earning the developers more money. Maybe they're similar from a consumer perspective, but that doesn't mean they're similar.
There's little if any used market for PC games, so not being able to resell a used Steam copy of a game doesn't differentiate it from a physical copy. The same isn't true for console games.
He seems to be suggesting that Xbox One games will be cheaper because of the lack of used sales. I don't see what their economic incentive would be to lower the prices (at least to below prices for a similar PS4 game), usually if there is less competition in a market and demand stays constant the price goes up.
In the case of Steam , they have to be cheap because their competition is TPB which is the cheapest game store out there.
A copy of a game is "inherently" less valuable if it cannot be resold by a consumer (many gamers buy games at $60 only because they know they can resell them once they are done with them). Therefore demand at a given price level would go down under a system where games are locked to a user.
Perhaps, this may be more the case for games with small amounts of content or mediocre reviews. I don't see significantly less people being willing to buy COD or whatever for $60 if they can't resell. Unless they move to PS4 at least.
You're right, but that could just mean that COD is priced too low even under the current system (where games are always $60 max not including DLC etc).
Or the effort spent to resell is valued more than the resale value of the game (whether it is true or not) or it's because COD has a higher resale value.
Although I'd guess that people's gaming budget isn't as simple as X number of games @ $Y max each and so-called blockbuster titles could easily start charging more without losing too much of their fan bases.
About DLC, those can't be resold, plus they're useless if you don't have the original game any more. So they are kind of a lock-in tool. Which is, by the way, why I abhor them.
They'll make the same money, if not more, charging $40 for the game downloaded via xbla than they will for charging $60 at retail. Retail stores are incredibly expensive compared to web anything and so they take a huge cut.
MS' long-term plans probably involve cutting the publishing middleman out of their dev relationships.
Right now, used games capture the low end of the market. If there are no used games, then there's nothing servicing the low end, and that's a lot of wasted money. If game prices come down a bit, you capture more of the low end, which makes up for the lost revenue on the high end. The trick is figuring out the price point that gets you the most revenue.
The typical way this is done is to sell at a high price initially and when sales drop start lowering the price. Or put a game on offer just before the sequal is released to drive sales for the new game.
I don't think digital goods / things that are very cheap on the margin really subscribe to the same laws of supply and demand.
For example, most people would probably agree piracy drives the price of photoshop up for the people that actually pay for it. In the eyes of supply and demand though what should happen is more piracy == less demand for legal copies -> lower prices.
That doesn't have much to do with supply/demand not applying to digital/low variable cost goods; the same phenomenon can be seen in, e.g., clothing. The concept that theft of clothing pushes up prices is pretty much as agreed upon as your example, but has nothing to do with the marginal cost of production.
Microsoft really did a terrible job at messaging on this. I'm even annoyed, and I don't play much, and everything I buy is digital download, not physical media, so the whole disc selling thing doesn't even affect me. Even so, it feels nasty. MS has basically said fuck you to gamers, without any justifiable reason.
Taking down Gamestop doesn't require anything but a better Gamestop replacement. This dev complains about how people dislike their new move, yet complain about Gamestop? Uh, this new move limits private sale by third parties. That's what's annoying.
The fact Xbox tosses ads in your face on every single home screen except settings is also extremely distasteful, and MS burned a lot of goodwill on that.
Comparing to Steam is nice, but MS's execution is yet to be seen. People I know with thousands of bucks into Steam don't love Steam. They are annoyed with the restrictions - but, it's just so easy (easier than pirating) that they tend not to care. Browsing and purchasing on the Xbox360 is such a PITA, so if the XB1 doesn't fix it, they have no hope of doing what Steam did.
The 24 hour thing is also retarded. It feels intrusive, and isn't necessary to prevent piracy. My guess is they'll probably "acquiesce" and move it to 3 days or a week - it was probably planned to spark outrage long before sales, so they can give in and ride the "see, MS isn't so bad" wave closer to launch.
> The fact Xbox tosses ads in your face on every single home screen except settings is also extremely distasteful, and MS burned a lot of goodwill on that.
This is the single biggest thing that puts a bad taste in my mouth from my Xbox. Am I a customer or a product? Companies should pick only one. If I pay money, I don't want to be sold.
...which is funny, since I remember a lot of commentary about how the point of paying for cable TV when you can get broadcast TV for free is that by paying for the content you don't have to watch ads. I wonder why that never happened...
Actually, in the early days of cable, many channels had no commercials. If you wanted to watch commercials, you'd flip over to the home shopping network and play the "guess the final" price game with your buds.
And cable providers are some of the most hated companies that people live with. Have you ever met even a single person who's a fan of their cable company?
The difference here is while cable has (for now) an iron grasp on content and monopoly in their coverage areas, gaming has competition.
> Have you ever met even a single person who's a fan of their cable company?
I am. I don't buy their TV or phone service, but they provide the best internet connection in every place I have lived. They have consistently been cheaper and faster than fios, uverse and any DSL. I can run a server, they don't block ports, and my IP is effectively static.
Clearly he's referring to cable company as in Cable TV company, not company that runs a cable in to your house while on division sells internet and another a TV package.
Despite that the US newspaper industry alone makes more revenue than the US video games industry. So you are indeed both the product and the consumer and will continue to be both far into the future.
It may be a convenience that many enjoy, myself included, but I'd argue that plenty of Netflix subscribers would have subscribed anyway even if ads were shown from the start. Personally, I signed up for the convenience of movies, so ads weren't even a consideration. I doubt I'm alone in that respect.
In addition, you can easily get the same ad-free content on iTunes, but I never see it compared as a replacement for Netflix. It's just not as convenient.
That is fairly wrong. Netflix is barely more convenient than pirating. I would gladly pay for Hulu+ as well if it had 0 ads, since Hulu+ happens to have a lot of content I would watch. However, with having to watch several ads each time, it simply becomes much easier to simply torrent what I want to see.
Netflix is only barely more convenient than pirating for tech-savvy individuals. I'm willing to bet if you were to ask the average person if they know where to get and how to use torrents, you'd find that pirating is not all that convenient for most.
I'd say having to pay Microsoft for a subscription to be able to use Netflix on the device is what killed it for me. My AppleTV pushed the Xbox 360 from the entertainment setup purely because of that(1): It wasn't the price, but the concept that made it so offensive.
(1) Though as a side benefit the AppleTV devices uses a small fraction of the power that the Xbox 360 used.
This comparison to steam is a bit of a false equivocation. I can run Steam on a variety of hardware configurations, which I can buy from a variety of vendors. Steam is better not because the DRM system is different, but because it's hardware agnostic.
Once the XB1 lifecycle is over, I have no guarantee I will be able to play the games I bought. As far as I'm aware XB1 is not backwards compatible at all. Once my 360 dies, if I can't find another one in working condition, or XBL stops offering services for the 360, my 360 XBLA games are gone forever.
All non-mathematical/non-logical/etc. equivocations are false if you're enough of a dick about it. The dude is trying to make a legitimate point about disc-based vs. cloud-based storage, and there's exactly one player in that area. Give him a freakin' break.
> Once the XB1 lifecycle is over, I have no guarantee I will be able to play the games I bought.
Sooner than that though, right? Weren't they shutting off Halo servers when new Halo games came out during the same console lifecycle?
Of course that is a problem you'll have with multiplayer on all the consoles I guess. Maybe gamers are okay with that. I would be bummed as hell if I couldn't play the occasional quake match anymore though.
Halo: CE (i.e, Halo 1) didn't support online play, as it was released before Xbox Live was available.
Halo 2 was released in 2004 (on the Xbox!), and the online play servers were just shut down earlier this year. Given that the platform it was released on has nearly been superseded twice by now (first by the Xbox 360, and soon by the Xbox One), I think they've given it a fair run.
As far as I'm aware, all of the other Halo games are still playable online.
Wikipedia has Halo 2 multiplayer on the xbox being shut down in April of 2010 (while on the PC it lived until this year). That is not the sort of lifecycle I expect from a game that I enjoy (I still play Doom on occasion, and that was released two whole decades ago. Half-Life, from 1998, is still played online as well. Halo 2 was only from 2004, was massively successful, and is dead.)
My apologies if you're not particularly bothered by diction, but I believe you mean "false equivalence" rather than "false equivocation". Equivocation means "beating around the bush" or "refusing to give a straight answer".
Microsoft thought they had a dominant market position and tried to stretch a little. They miscalculated.
Sony were concerned they were heading towards irrelevance - they upped their game to win share back.
I'd say it was a perfectly efficient market - and then I remember we're talking about kids being able to swap games like I did in the 80s as if it's a revolution ... the boomers heading these companies right now should be ashamed of what they've created.
The problem isn't that it's boomers heading these companies. It's that they're 1%'s who have either lost or never had the pressures that their customers are feeling.
Maybe Microsoft thought Sony would just follow their lead since there wasn't a DRM scheme that Sony didn't like or try (before).
True enough.. I haven't bought a Sony product since the CD rootkit fiasco... I may just get a PS4... though, kind of perterbed at the removal of "other os" option from PS3.
Did you read the link? Your post sounds like every other one discussing MS's strategy without taking into account anything the linked page said. I'm not saying it's true or that it'll succeed, but it doesn't describe MS trying to "stretch" at all.
To be honest, the only thing that annoys me is the 24 hour check-in thing, and here's why...
On average I've moved house once a year for every year since I moved to London in 2007. There was one place I stayed in for 18 months, but everything else was 12 months. In all these moves except one I've had to wait 3-4 weeks (sometimes more) to get my broadband connected, so essentially for 1/13th of a year the only internet I have is through my mobile phone.
These 4 weeks a year are also the times when I get most of my single-player gaming done (I'm not saying I play hours of games every night, but for a couple of nights a week for a few weeks a year I'll settle down with a good RPG or similar).
The 24 hour check-in will make this impossible, thereby probably making me play less games overall (or I could just buy a PS4...).
And yet the 24 hour checkin doesn't make sense in the case of digital downloads, the other app stores dont require it. If a digitally signed receipt for the game is on your system, who cares if the next time you validate against MS servers is in 24 hours or 24 years.
It makes sense when you take into account the ability to sell your digital copies, which current solutions do not allow. Otherwise, nothing is preventing you from selling your copy of Halo 5, unplugging your XBO and playing it offline for 1-2 weeks before the next mandatory check-in.
It's annoying, but the 24-hour checkin is a requirement to have used game sales for the system. You can remove it if you want to get rid of any chance of reselling your games, but that'd cause even more outrage.
I would argue those scenarios aren't really all that important to check against. If someone is going to sell their game it doesn't really matter much if they sell it and play for 2 more weeks, or play for 2 more weeks then sell it. People will find their way online eventually and those that don't will be a very small minority.
I am a Microsoft Engineer so take what I am about to say as gospel: There's no way to know when someone claims to be something on the internet that they are that thing unless the company itself corroborates it.
The pastebin was posted on 4chan... 4chan... And all of the information in it could have been gleaned from publicly available sources. We should at best discuss it like it is rumour, and much more realistically just ignore it as trolling.
PS - I am not a Microsoft Engineer, I was making a point.
>"It's not worth my time to prove it, or risk my Job. I work in Studio A, 40th ave in Redmond, Wa. The thai place in the studio cafeteria has double punch wednesdays. Go ahead and call them and verify if you want."
That actually is kinda suspicious he picked the one piece of information that was on the Facebook page. I changed my stance and now more agree with wutbrodo that it doesn't really matter if he's an engineer or not. Just pretend he didn't say that if you don't believe him.
It's a terrible thing when somebody (Microsoft Engineer or not) tries to make sense of all the fact'less back n' forth about how much Microsoft sucks and they can't do anything right.
If more people stopped to think what the Master plan here might be, we would all be better off.
Instead we're entrenched in cold-war-like mentality of Apple-FRIEND, GOOGLE-FRIEND, SONY-BEST-FRIEND, ... Microsoft-ENEMY.
Microsoft stopped being a monopoly long, long time ago (in internet time), yet everybody still continues to hate.
It's so strange. I don't think I could name a single company or even product that I'm not ambivalent about. I may prefer X over Y, but everything has irritating flaws.
I don't pretend to be some emotionless paragon of objectivity. It's just...criticism is good. I try to even highlight my own flaws, so they can be addressed. It's far more useful than trying to ignore problems.
His post was (largely) free of any supposed inside knowledge. It seemed like it was just an attempt at a possible justifications of the choices made for the Xbox one. It really doesn't make much of a difference whether he is a Microsoft engineer or just a canny outsider playing devil's advocate to all the (seemingly) blind rage flowing around consoles these days (and most days...).
He claims to be a Microsoft Engineer, but talks like a Microsoft PR. "Consumer delight"? "Sick second screen"? I don't know any technical person who uses this kind of doublespeak.
This feels a lot like the government telling me PRISM has stopped terrorists plots. Sure, I don't like money going to Gamestop. Although, I'd rather it go to Gamestop than fuck myself over.
The comparison to Steam is false to begin with. PC gaming has NEVER been a trade with your friends (legally) culture. Console gaming has ALWAYS been a trade with your friends culture (legally). When was the last time you saw a used PC game store?
Second, there is no evidence that companies who's job is to maximize profit will have any incentive to lower their prices for disc-less games. For this, we CAN look at Steam (and other services). AAA titles are full retail when they are released. The price degrades over time, but the same thing happens with disc releases.
This is a one-sided win for Microsoft (and game publishers for XB1) and is yet another reason to avoid the XBox 1 like the plague. That is the market feedback that Microsoft should receive.
There used to be a lot of stores selling used PC games in the late 90s / early 2000s.
What killed it (I think) was that people would sell a used boxed PC game and then download the pirate version but re-use the legitimate CD key for multiplayer.
So you would buy a used game and try to play it online but get "Your CD key is already in use" messages half the time.
I got burned by this a few times.
This is also one of the reasons that stores stopped accepting returns of PC games. People would buy a game , copy down the CD key and then return it for refund claiming that it didn't work.
My usual supermarket used to have a video rental section, and during the mid-90s they also rented PC games on CD-ROM.
They stopped doing before the days of CD keys being required for multiplayer, but right around the time that hard disks got big and cheap enough that you could just copy the contents of the CD to your HD and then bring back the CD.
"Some PS4 viral team made them all "U TOOK R DISCS" and they hiveminded."
I'm not sure how delusional you have to be to believe that the reason your customers hate your DRM is because your competitors had a "viral team" that persuaded them to be.
The amount of delusion necessary to create this massive of a failure is beyond comprehension:
- "Scratched discs" and my "little brother" messing with my games are two use cases I have never encountered in my entire gaming life. For those who have encountered those issues? Bummer! Life goes on. In fact, props to PS3 for using Blu-Ray, which has extra protection against scratches by design.
- How in the world is GameStop the enemy? Forget the War on Drugs -- this War on Trade-Ins is perhaps the most absurd thing I've ever heard. The fact that publishers, developers, etc. feel entitled to a cut of that $5 most people get for trade-ins says a lot about how up-their-own-asses this industry has become.
- I don't want Microsoft OWNING any part of my house, thank you very much.
- Any "savings" Microsoft will give customers for new games (which will never happen anyway) will be made up with the cost of XBox Live.
- The "phone home" model is shit. Absolute shit. Stop keeping tabs on me.
- Lack of indie dev access? How can a gaming system that's marketing itself as 'ahead of the curve' be so ridiculously out-of-touch with what's successful in the market?
- The ONLY TIME the 100% digital model works for me is when the convenience of information transfer outweighs the cost of the game itself. Steam is great because whenever I have to reinstall Windows, all of my games just automagically re-download. In iOS, I'm purchasing new devices (iPads, new iPhones, etc.) on an almost-yearly cycle. All I have to do is enter my credentials, and all of my apps and data are right there. Not too shabby considering most apps are $10 or less, not freaking $70!
I don't think it's the cut of the $5 that the consumer gets that the publisher wants, it's the $30 that gamestop slaps onto that to resell. I don't know what way gamestop prices things everywhere else, but in Ireland it's a rip off to all parties.
You buy a AAA title for €60, don't like it, trade it back in again a few days later. You get €10 - €20 for it. This then goes back on the used shelf at the €50 - €55 price point, just enough to make it slightly more attractive than purchasing at the rrp.
As someone that used to work in a game resell shop (not Gamestop), I can't sympathize with the Gamestop comments. Particularly the ones about buyback value. We paid our customers about 60% of what we were going to sell the game for. I've never understood how people can think that the game they spent $60 for is going to sell for anywhere near that after a year or two.
To use the example in here, a $5 buyback value game would sell for about $10 where I worked. I don't know about Gamestop's percentages, but I imagine it would sell for closer to $15 there.
Moving on to Steam, my library is clogged full of shit I'd love to sell back or give to someone else. I still, to this day, hate Steam. It's convenient, sure, but I still often shop at the alternative instant download providers and I'm not talking about Origin or Amazon.
Beyond that, and back to actual gripes about the XBone, the only thing that has my friends and I completely against it is the always on Kinect. I don't like the idea of having a device in my home that can be used to monitor everything I do or say at any time. If it's proven you can turn that functionality off, it takes away about half of the reason I give people to not buy it. Even then, I'm paranoid enough that I won't be getting one. That aside, I don't need a media center, so the XBone doesn't appeal to me. My console is for playing video games; I have a computer for Internet shit (e.g. Netflix).
The real misstep here is that Microsoft is still selling physical media.
Nobody (well, almost nobody) gets mad when they can't resell their iPhone games or mp3s or Kindle books; compare that to the outpouring of anger when a company puts limitations on used optical media games or CDs or books.
Humans are wired to see a physical item (disks, etc.) and think mine.
I think the problem here is how important physical retailers are as partners in actually selling the console. You don't want to piss off Walmart/Best Buy/Game Stop too much or they might not stock your device.
There's obviously that, good point. I also think we can't forget the price point.
I buy my iPhone games for $5 at most. Steam usually has a lot of promotions and discounts, so I get lots of games for under, say, 15 bucks. Physical media games are usually way above these prices.
Humans are wired to see a physical item (disks, etc.) and think *mine.*
Well, yes, but you oversimplify. There is a long-established doctrine of first-sale in the US, and it's not just part of case law, it's part of the culture. The non-resaleability of Kindle books or anything else digital is still new to the popular mind, and carries with it a certain implicit devaluation.
Even though most people at least abstractly understand the non-resaleability of bits (whether due to the infinite duplicability of DRM-free media, or the practical inflexibility of DRM systems), a big reason they don't complain about iPhone apps or Steam games is likely the frequently low prices they pay.
A $60 game demands at least a bit of fungibility for most consumers. A $0.99 one doesn't, regardless of whether it came from a disc or an app store. If, as the supposed insider claims, XBO games can actually retail for half what a resale-friendly game would, then that offsets the implicit devaluation of non-resaleable media.
If Call of Duty 8 retails for $59.99 on the PS4 and $29.99 on the XBO, that suddenly makes the DRM a very appealing tradeoff. If they're both $59.99, Xbox is dead in the water.
>If Call of Duty 8 retails for $59.99 on the PS4 and $29.99 on the XBO, that suddenly makes the DRM a very appealing tradeoff. If they're both $59.99, Xbox is dead in the water.
Exactly, if MS had been thinking this all along, they could have proved it with a low price game option announced with the DRM. That would have been really appealing to a lot of people.
That doesn't really work. The game is still supposed to be $60 at launch, that's when games make the most money, they really are worth that much (and more) as evidenced by the many people who pay that much for them, even on DRM-laden platforms like Steam.
The point is to let the price fall faster after launch. Xbox can't exactly promise "Our games' prices will fall faster than the other guys" because the market will determine that -- in aggregate they will, but there's a reason Skyrim is still $30 on Steam.
Microsoft wants a world where you have account-locked games tied to disks, because it gives them the benefits of Steam-like DRM but also the game conveniently on a disk to take to a friend's so he doesn't have to download it, and to let the poor schmuck in rural Nebraska with 25 kb/s to play the game some time in the next week.
Honestly, Sony can take the same pricing strategies as Microsoft on their digital downloads -- Microsoft just wants to have more convenient digital downloads, while Sony just wants more convenient disks.
My guess is that long-term Microsoft will prove to be on the right side of history (the success of Steam is evidence). Sony can probably do just fine for now, they can always transition in later generations when the downsides are no longer breaking news stories.
The poor schmuck in rural Nebraska with 25kb service won't be able to play the Xbox One period- MS has already proposed a min speed of 1.5mbps. And if you are in an area (like pretty much most of the US and the majority of the rest of the world) where your service goes down periodically for more than 24 hours, you will be locked out of playing any games while it is offline. Or if MS gets hacked like Sony and their network goes down for an extended period (at least PS3 owners could still play offline!). Or when MS decides to abandon the platform ad turn off the servers... no pulling out your old Xbox One to play some classic games (I still have an old Atari I like to play occasionally!). Or if you have to cancel your Internet for a few months to catch up on the bills or while moving you have to wait a few days to get you Internet turned on- there are so many points of failure in this fiasco. As a (former) Xbox fan and advocate, I won't be going anywhere near this one.
Wow. There's this whole rest of the world that would kill to get that speeds. I'm confused as to why MS would try to alienate basically everyone not in NA, EU with that kind of a minimum requirement. People in Asia and Africa can pay up that kind of money for the console, but there aren't infrastructure to get you that kind of internet speeds in a budget.
There are PS1's being sold until today for people who can't afford the other version. My point is: I doubt XBOX360 will disappear. Got fast internet, crazy TV and can afford it? Get XBOX1. Your internet is really bad, XBOX360 just like always.
AKA: Microsoft does not have a competitive next-gen product for those without good internet connections.
Like Soldiers, 35% of America... and even then, the larger part of Europe won't have servers for the XBox One launch. So even if you do have a good connection in say... Poland or Japan... you can't play XBox One at all.
I don't know, my 4G/LTE phone gets vastly superior upload (though expected)/download speeds to my cable connection, far better than any wired internet package I can get.
I remember how Blizzard servers would often lag or go down for maintenance and there would be no LAN option to play SC2 with friends. It sounds good in theory to some people (just be online all the time!), but it's placing blind trust into a third party. I did not buy the SC2 expansion. I literally went back to playing Brood War over LAN with coworkers. (I beat them 1v3)
The thing is I really don't see Sony as being on the "wrong side of history" though since they are still having day-one downloads of all titles. They are just fully supporting both models (traditional discs and one-copy-per-user digital downloads) rather than forcing everyone into one. They are literally doing everything that MS is doing with digital, yet still having discs (and therefore offline play) as an option.
Not only that, they went a step forward and made downloads even more appealing by allowing you to download the minimum possible to play the game, and just do the rest while you play.
Sony will have digital sales too. But that doesn't mean they will neet to put restrictions on Disc Based transactions. If steam selled Disc Based games I very much doubt they would adopt the same model.
The reality is that nobody cares about the poor schmuck in rural Nebraska.
80% of the US population is urbanized. Most of the ones that aren't still have access to DSL, cable modems, or fixed wireless of at least a few megabits.
Of the remaining population, a lot of them don't want to play video games or can't afford them anyway. Some (probably large) portion of those that are viable gaming customers will simply make do with satellite connections.
The "poor schmuck in rural Nebraska with 25kb/s" market segment is just too small to economically justify catering to.
That isn't actually the reality. For example, if nothing else, it's clear that Sony does care about the poor schmuck in rural Nebraska.
But more generally, why are you only talking about the United States? What you are saying might be true of the US, but plenty of places across the wider world are home to people who play video games but don't have an internet connection. Or have a spotty internet connection. Or have a connection with restrictive data caps (meaning digital download only would be impossible).
Much of the first world is better connected than the US. If you're talking about gamers with both money and poor connections, they're far more likely to be in the US than anywhere else.
South Africa and many countries in Latin America can afford to pay $400 for the console. But they certainly can't count on a >1.5mb/s reliable internet connection.
So yeah, MS screwed the pooch on this one and that will now all be Sony territory.
I'm not going to canvass all Latin American countries, but the median per-capita income for South Africa is about US$500.
Are you unwittingly basing your comment on the standards of the still-privileged White minority, comprising less than 9% of a country of just 53 million?
Maybe, but Microsoft/Xbox One was not the relevant subject, Steam was.
Am I the only one who actually read the comment I originally replied to?
By the way, even the top 10% of South African households have an average income of just US$15,000, so the actual potential customer base is still smaller than you think.
Having just arrived back from South Africa from visiting my relatives on vacation, I was shocked to find a few highly computer-literate cousins over there who only had a 3G dongle to provide Internet for their entire homes. Another relative had a bandwidth-capped DSL line that was barely faster than ISDN basic rate. Income was not the issue.
As once a poor schmuck in not-even-that-rural Alabama, we never could and still cannot get decent anything there. Best I could come up with when I still lived there and what my mother still uses is mobile internet with a small cap.
I say this as a former customer... Hughesnet is an absolute joke. Looking past their incompetent installers (who provided me with a major leak in the roof over my kitchen) and their horrible uptime (clouds in the sky = service outage), at it's best the internet service could only be described as painfully slow. Super high latency, constant dropped connections, poor throughput and to top it all off customer service that I'd rate as equivalent to cell phone providers.
The technology has gone through an iteration or two, with the latest coming in the last year. Your judgement may have been valid in the past (though you're providing a far worse perspective than I've heard from anyone else), but if you haven't been a customer for a while, your past experience is not a predictor of current performance.
As for the incompetent installers, they're probably the exact same local contractors working for Dish Network or DirecTV. Results will vary by area.
Did you read the link? The point is that they AREN'T really worth that much. My brother buys his xbox games (I stick with PC/Steam mostly) from gamestop and trades them in within a week or two if the multiplayer isn't exciting.
So, to him, a game is NOT worth 60 bucks. The 60 dollar price point has nothing to do with him. He pays between 30 and 40 max, usually only playing B rated single player games years after the fact.
Adding DRM isn't going to magically increase the value of a game to the customer. That's not how a market works. The market currently has decided that a video game is worth something per person, on average. Let's call that $40 per game (just an example). So, with the DRM, you sell two $60 games for every three $40 games. Still the same $120 except it all goes to you instead of the first sale to you and the next two to Gamestop.
If MS can assume (or predict, or hope, or whatever) that more of their sales will go directly to them, then they have an incentive to drop the price of their copies of the game because they know that a gamer probably has a fixed budget for gaming and they want to maximize their value.
I don't have numbers but I would be interested in seeing what the average price per console game actually paid by a customer is. My hunch is that the DRM isn't expected to increase the overall sales, in fact they might decrease BY DESIGN. But MS doesn't care about overall game sales. They care about 1st sales. So they might get a bigger piece of a smaller pie and still make out in the end.
Sidenote, Steam's success came from no legit competition, better prices (allowable, in part, by their DRM) and great marketing but I agree that Microsoft's strategy is more likely long term.
....all in all, though, it just feels shitty to have something physical in my hand that I can't really sell to someone if I want.
This is price discrimination at work. It's basic economics 101 that monopolists or duopolists (such as Steam in PC games, or Microsoft and Sony in consoles) in a market will price their goods above the actual marginal cost of their goods, thus undersupplying the market. They would like to charge lower prices to some customers -- they are happy to sell to your brother for $30 because it's certainly well above their marginal costs. Unfortunately, it takes an awful lot of market power to be able to charge different prices to different consumers. Otherwise you will just have people arbitraging away all your profits (case in point, the folks who do a thriving business buying Steam games in the US region and trading them to folks in Australia and Germany).
Anyways, long story short, it's really hard to price discriminate in typical markets, because it's both really hard to figure out which of your customers will pay full price, and it's really hard to stop the people who get discounts from reselling to the full price folks.
But, if your market is digital, flash-in-the-pan pop culture items, then you have a market that's pretty much tailor-made for price discrimination. Who will pay $60 for a game? Well, the ones who buy it on launch, or pre-order for nominal bonuses. How do you stop the the people who buy at a discount from selling to those who pay full price? Two ways -- you attach the game via DRM to an account that is inconvenient to transfer, and you only sell the discounted copies 2 years later. Sales are also a good way to do this -- many people who buy games in sales either were waiting for a sale because the price was too expensive, or heard about the game because of the sale and wouldn't have bought the game otherwise.
The current status quo is that all the profit from the $30 customers is going to GameStop. Microsoft would rather it go to themselves and their developers, so they would rather have digital downloads. Not so they can stop games from being sold at $30, just so that they can sell games themselves at that price without killing their market.
We'll see how the story plays out leading up to launch, but Amazon pre-orders for Destiny[1] are currently running $59 (give or take a few $) for all supported platforms (XBox One, XBox 360, PS4, PS3).
I dunno if price is really the issue. People pay much more for downloads of desktop software and at equal prices with the physical counterparts. You rarely see anyone arguing that they should be able to resell Photoshop or Word.
Those kind of apps don't have the same purchase cycle as entertainment items like games, movies or books. They don't grow less valuable the more hours you spend using them (in fact, they generally become more valuable the more you've invested in learning them.)
Folks either want to rent entertainment , or buy it knowing they can resell it, because they know that the act of consumption will devalue that item for them but it will retain greater value for others who have not yet consumed its entertainment.
With Steam I am in control of the hardware. I can build a new, faster, better PC at any time and still play my games.
When Xbox Two comes out and they discontinue production of Xbox One what happens to my games? What happens when the servers are shut down? Are they stuck in the cloud or a computer recycling center someplace? When my Xbox One stops working (I'm sure it will) can I buy a used one on eBay, plug it in and continue to play my games?
At least with my PC I can build a new one if it breaks. With my NES I don't need to rely on a server some where in a data center still operating. Also, I still have more faith in my NES lasting and working longer than any console put out in recent years, including the Xbox One (or any Playstation model) even though it's over 20 years old now.
Your analogy doesn't really make sense. Your Xbox account is similar to a Steam account works on PC/360/One and you control the hardware if your One breaks, buy a new one and authenticate it with your account. All your games would now be accessible.
The problem is that the One isn't backwards compatible with any of the 360 games I already bought and are stored in the cloud, which leads me to believe they'll do the same with the Two.
There's no way any of this will reasonably apply if we stick to this seven year cycle. By 2020, this will all be so obsolete, nobody will care about backward compatibility. Do you care that your PS4 is backward compatible with an abacus?
Do you care that your PS4 is backward compatible with an abacus?
I find it handy that different iterations of abacuses tend to be cross-compatible. There may occasionally be minor architectural variations, but it usually isn't too difficult to port your abacus drivers.
I was just playing a steam games from 2004... in fact i have games from the 90s on steam. And they still work almost perfectly, on any windows computer.
So personally, I imagine there are plenty of people who care about it.
Some games even more recent than that don't run well on modern versions of Windows. Wine functions better than Windows in these cases, just like ports of old games are often done with DOSBox. It's very easy to emulate the hardware specs needed back then.
Accessible computing power is growing much faster than it has been in the last few decades thanks to networking. In just a few seconds, I can start as many cloud servers as I want and stream data directly to myself. I can easily run emulators of every past or present video game console right now on a phone. Sony is vocal about moving their infrastructure to the cloud as well.
This next generation is running on traditional AMD processors, and by 2020, I'm sure that emulating the correct environment for their software will not be a problem. Whether you stream your data from Sony or yourself, accessing it and your games will not be a problem. The console itself will eventually be just a DRM device to get you to the servers. The power or compatibility of the machine means very little in that case.
People like you have accepted the fact that they don't own anything they buy. If you are happy to buy a game today, and not being able to play it in a few years because the editor/console manufacturer have decided so, then good for you. On my side, I just want to enjoy what I bought, for as long as I can, and in 2020, I will for sure play 2013 games.
Oh for fuck's sake the 360 was a PowerPC arch, and the new Xbox is x86. This is so dumb.
You know how PS3 used to support old games? It had the old Emotion Engine (PS2 cpu) built directly into their system--it was a turducken of processing.
"wah wah wah i cant run my games from a different processor architecture wah wah wah" this is dumb anyone thinking this is dumb
They seem to be getting along quite well without my wit and charm. :|
This particular category of complaint is very, very common to people that don't understand the technology that they use past the "push shiny buttan on the ui" level. Anybody who has ever touched native code in their life knows that porting applications from different operating system versions--much less processor families!--is non-trivial. But to gamers, oh no, they need to be able to play an old game that technology has passed by--and yet, they specifically went out and bought a goddamned information appliance instead of an engine of computation that they could own and maintain themselves. They brought this on themselves.
Gamers are always "me me me, i want this, wah wah wah". There is not a single customer demographic I can think of that is less interested in understanding their tools and more vocal about the slightest inconvenience, real or otherwise. The worst of them are the ones that have nothing to do but pass of hatred and vitriol online to other gamers, sometimes even passing it off as "games criticism", like they're fucking Ebert or something.
And honestly, we caused this. We catered to gamers, we made their lives so simple and carefree and priced things so low that they are literally the worst customers on earth.
My friends in the web business? Look at this. Look at what these people have become, and expect the same sort of shitty behavior from your users in five-ten years.
What processor architecture is printed on the box? There isn't one. It is irrelevant. Backwards compatibility is a feature; it can be accomplished through a number of means. The Xbox One, as a product, either offers that feature, or it does not. Consumers, possessing the power of the purse, either accept the available features or they do not. The technical details, while very important to the engineers building the system, are irrelevant to the consumer.
> Oh for fuck's sake the 360 was a PowerPC arch, and the new Xbox is x86.
And who's fault is that? The consumers? Microsoft is the one that's being "so dumb". People obviously care about backwards compat. and then they did this stupid bullshit.
> You know how PS3 used to support old games?
Ummm, the right fucking way? You know...by doing what it takes and giving the customers what they obviously fucking want?
Why don't you get your head out of your fucking asshole, asshole?
Where Microsoft and Valve differ is that, while Valve's Steam service is known for its quality of service, Microsoft is known for shutting products down whenever they decide they're no longer in the interest of the company. Oh, right, and without any PR or customer service to quell concerns (see: Kin, Zune, Silverlight, Microsoft Broadband Networking).
Totally agree that it's a completely different market, a $60 game vs. a $1 game, and anyone comparing digital iPhone and Android downloads to X1 downloads should stop.
I will, however, guarantee we will never see $30 release-day games of the quality of GTA or COD. If anyone was willing to do that, they would have done it on Steam, XBox Live, or Playstation Store already--they all have DRM'd digital downloads, and it would immediately switch all of their users to that distribution platform. If I could buy GTA5 for $60 physical or $30 digital, there's no contest.
If anything, my bet is some of the new games will be $69.99 for X1 and $59.99 for X360, justified by the additional graphics and "extra" content. See DVD vs. Blu-ray.
The entire original post is wishful thinking from an engineer. As an engineer myself, the first thing I ever learned was that management, sales, and marketing aren't just blowing smoke at the public. The point of always on confirmation is to shut down used sales and stop piracy. That's it. There's no noble endeavor to save us from scratched disks. They love scratched disks; it means you have to buy another copy.
unfortunatley, CS:GO is not a AAA, high production value game (think far cry 3). It is a multiplayer only game, and i m certain its production costs are vastly lower.
I don't see how the possibility of a revenue stream they have never depended on is going to encourage to decrease the price. I predict they will just take advantage of people's willingness to pay $60 and collect on it.
I imagine we will see $29.99 (or even less.. I would say even some as far as free if they were digitally distributed) release day games, but that the proportion of the game that will be included will be significantly reduced.. like you get the demo for free and $5 per level thereafter for example. All sorts of possibilities for pricing and making money in new ways for consoles.
I agree the use of discs seems a silly move, especially WRT new pricing models and the implications. IMO they should be optional; 50GB (?) is an infeasibly large download for a lot of places in the world today, but this is not the case everywhere nor forever. Digital distribution allows for more possibilities.
The problem with the reduced cost argument is that I really can't see cross platform developers pricing the Xbox version lower, so long as they believe it to be the equal to the PS4 version (which might not be the case, the PS4 seems it should have a little more graphics power). And as a consequence I can't see Xbox exclusives selling for less than those-- they won't want to appear inferior.
Add into that the fact that the PS4 will be cheaper too- I think who 'wins' in the upcoming generation may depend on how magic MS can make the kinect sensor-related software with media/TV control. If they can make it awesome and polished enough to make people forget about the fact they are putting an always connected '3d' camera into your home with an always-on internet connection in a device from one of the companies which has most-cooperated with the NSA (I wonder if they might justify the depth camera data as 'metadata'?), then I think MS could be on to a winner. If not, it seems advantage Sony so far.
Yeah of the traditional consoles Sony will win for the hardcore market. I just wonder if Apple, Google, or Roku have any surprises this Fall as well. In my opinion, those companies are going to cause the most disruption in the video game market. Then there's the Oculus and Omni...
Online purchases would be great, now how about an ISP that sells me the bandwidth to do it at a reasonable price that isn't Comcast/Cox/Time Warner/At&t? There's a reason I buy physical media.
Still selling physical discs is pretty important because broadband access in the US is still pretty dismal so if they went pure digital their market would be unnaturally limited by customer's ability to download games in reasonable times.
OR I rarely pay more than $1 for a phone game, and get a lot more cynical when I'm forking out +$50 for something that often has less replay-ability to the $1 game...
And by mine you mean 'ours' right? because a huge issue being discussed here is people sharing games, its not a individual issue, its a community issue.
I was a dev lead at xbox when they first implemented "Games on Demand" or direct purchase and digital download of full games. My team implemented the feature on xbox.com back in 2009 I think.
As I recall it, the main reason we didn't do a wholesale switch over to digital distribution was because that would have upset the retailers who sell games. We relied on these same retailers to sell our xbox consoles. We were afraid that if we took a way the game revenue they would stop selling xboxes. We thought it would be best to make the transition gradual. So we took the first step back in 2009. This appears to be another step.
Couldnt just have been the risk of not selling hardware, selling games at retails must have been just as important? Store shelves, lots of exposure, impulse buyers, etc.
I'm wired to think that I'm the only one responsible of my games. I like to think that in 36 years we will still be able to play our games, like with an Atari 2600. Does I want to still be able to play iPhone games in 36 years? No. You could argue that Microsoft want that too but they have no control over that. They can go bankrupt or they could simply decide that the cost of the infrastructure is higher than the revenue (which will probably be $0 in 36 years because they will probably use a new architecture). Halo 2 is about 6 years old and they already shutdown the multiplayer servers.
Like in the pastebin, you can say it's the same for Steam and you would be right. However in 36 years, I will still have backups, or some competitors will still be in business (Amazon, GOG or any competitor) so I will always be able to find a way to buy it (or even download it on a website like http://www.myabandonware.com/ ).
Also when I buy a game, I always expect to be able to get at least the resell value on it, if needed. It's not possible on a digital market so when I buy it I expect it to cost less. Which is also not the case.
EDIT: Don't you love to be able to read books much older than you? Don't you would love to know that in 100 years, XboxOne game would still be playable?
"Think about it, on steam you get a game for the true cost of the game, 5$-30$. On a console you have to pay for that PLUS any additional licenses for when you sell / trade / borrow / etc."
That's a neat theory, but if you listen to virtually any publisher or developer talk about used games and game pricing it is abundantly clear that they view $60 as the game price (and as far as they are concerned, you're getting a huge bargain), and used sales beyond that as virtually akin to theft. They absolutely do not view it from the angle of the game being worth $30 and the rest being money they're forced to charge to make up the losses.
On the PC with Steam the publishers are willing to drop the price to compete with piracy, but assuming the Xbox One is not cracked to the point of a Dreamcast, I can't imagine them ever allowing Steam-like prices.
>On the PC with Steam the publishers are willing to drop the price to compete with piracy, but assuming the Xbox One is not cracked to the point of a Dreamcast, I can't imagine them ever allowing Steam-like prices.
Yup.
Prices are lower on Steam mostly competition provides downward price pressure.
If Microsoft opens up their system to self-publishing and lets devs set their own low prices, including offering steam like sales, then that would maybe produce lower costs. Used games is a red herring.
Large publishers probably don't want downward price pressure on the platform. Look at IOS where even 3 dollars is considered expensive. To them, restricting pricing and availability to keep prices high is a feature that may encourage them to go with one platform or another.
I'm not totally averse to that argument either -- I hate what the f2p model has done to game design on IOS. Right now Steam is a great middle ground and I hope they can maintain that.
It's certainly possible to have an interesting conversation about the changes to the way markets will work when the cost of reproduction falls to zero; it's ridiculous to think, however, that the place to start this conversation is at the introduction of a new gaming console.
That is all well and good, anonymous MS guy can claim that the games will be cheaper in the long run, citing steam as the model that works and drives prices down.
Not in Australia.
In Australia we pay 89.95 / 99.95 for a AAA game released on Steam, versus the USD price of 39.95 / 49.95 / whatever. It must be the shipping of the bits over the pacific that jacks the price up right?
Yes, eventually the prices drop, and you can buy a game that originally retailed for almost $100 for under $20, but that takes a long time. I just gave up on buying big studio games on steam. I only buy indie stuff now.
I was really excited about the xbone (day one owner of original xbox and 360), then the official word came out about it, and I decided I would buy the ps4 instead.
Actually, I saw recently that the reason for the price difference is because Aussi minimum wage is around $17/hr where as in the US it's around $8, so your pricing is inflation adjusted against common wages. I still think the pricing is inflated on digital content across the board though.
Even here in the states, the cheaper games line feels empty. So much of these decisions the result of pressure coming from the big publishers who are in trouble. Historically their idea of a sale for a console game is like 54.99 instead of 59.99. The only reason we saw steep cuts from Steam is because PC piracy was at an all-time high and is so much more accessible since you don't have to hard-mod anything.
Also, it's worrisome how little MS is supporting the indie scene while they tout digital distribution as the future. With our current Internet infrastructure, they should be going after the indies first! Right now it just makes way more sense to download a bite size game over your connection than a full AAA title.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 289 ms ] thread2001 console: Xbox, Original Xbox
2005 console: Xbox 360, 360
2013 console: Xbox1, X-bone
You will probably hear "Xbox" referring to the 2013 console in casual speech, but hopefully semi-formal and formal speech, e.g. articles, will distinguish.
That is fantastic. Pronounced like the word "bone" I assume?
"If you want to buy a disc, pay $59 for a game due to all non-digital crap the disc has to go through. And then do what you want with it. HOWEVER, if you download the game, it's like $29 (50% OFF!!!11), but then it's just yours, and yours alone, you can't sell or lend it - and we'd have to check every once in a while it's really you who's playing."
I wouldn't mind that at all since they'd be giving me a choice, and I'd gladly pay less, despite the 'lockdown'.
Dear Microsoft, all you have to do is ask your target audience what they think - you might be suprised.
I mean yes, don't introduce the Kin, but at the same time, if Apple'd asked what consumers want, we'd be thinking the RAZR is cool instead of the DROID RAZR.
Conversely, nobody whines about Microsoft not releasing new versions of Halo, (or games in general with the number "3" in their title).
I have a steam library worth several grand, but I only paid a few hundred for it. Is anyone really convinced you will see Steam style sales on Xbox 1?
So you'll pardon me if I think this is full of crap. I want to see low priced games like on Steam. But until I see it from MS, I'll probably switch to full-time PC gaming again.
The only reason Valve has the power to charge what they charge is because they incrementally built that power - retailers at one point threatened to pull games from shelves for using Steam's authentication!
By the way; anyone working for one of those companies hit by the recession that has asked their staff to take a pay cut, "but we'll restore your salary when the good times return" ? Yeah, right.
This is EXACTLY what the used game market does for disk-based games. The only difference between the steam model and the disc-based model is that the producer doesn't get a cut of the game sales.
Steam sales are a way of increasing profits by price discriminating to capture the long tail of the demand curve. Used games have nothing to do with earning the developers more money. Maybe they're similar from a consumer perspective, but that doesn't mean they're similar.
In the case of Steam , they have to be cheap because their competition is TPB which is the cheapest game store out there.
Although I'd guess that people's gaming budget isn't as simple as X number of games @ $Y max each and so-called blockbuster titles could easily start charging more without losing too much of their fan bases.
Videogames are also somewhat addictive, so the supply curve might look more like tobacco or alcohol.
MS' long-term plans probably involve cutting the publishing middleman out of their dev relationships.
For example, most people would probably agree piracy drives the price of photoshop up for the people that actually pay for it. In the eyes of supply and demand though what should happen is more piracy == less demand for legal copies -> lower prices.
Taking down Gamestop doesn't require anything but a better Gamestop replacement. This dev complains about how people dislike their new move, yet complain about Gamestop? Uh, this new move limits private sale by third parties. That's what's annoying.
The fact Xbox tosses ads in your face on every single home screen except settings is also extremely distasteful, and MS burned a lot of goodwill on that.
Comparing to Steam is nice, but MS's execution is yet to be seen. People I know with thousands of bucks into Steam don't love Steam. They are annoyed with the restrictions - but, it's just so easy (easier than pirating) that they tend not to care. Browsing and purchasing on the Xbox360 is such a PITA, so if the XB1 doesn't fix it, they have no hope of doing what Steam did.
The 24 hour thing is also retarded. It feels intrusive, and isn't necessary to prevent piracy. My guess is they'll probably "acquiesce" and move it to 3 days or a week - it was probably planned to spark outrage long before sales, so they can give in and ride the "see, MS isn't so bad" wave closer to launch.
This is the single biggest thing that puts a bad taste in my mouth from my Xbox. Am I a customer or a product? Companies should pick only one. If I pay money, I don't want to be sold.
Do you have Cable TV? 70% of America does, knowing that they are both customer and product.
The difference here is while cable has (for now) an iron grasp on content and monopoly in their coverage areas, gaming has competition.
I am. I don't buy their TV or phone service, but they provide the best internet connection in every place I have lived. They have consistently been cheaper and faster than fios, uverse and any DSL. I can run a server, they don't block ports, and my IP is effectively static.
Ever watched TV? Ever been to the cinema? Ever read a newspaper or a magazine? Get real.
Hint: One of those services has ads.
Bonus Hint: One of those services was released to game consoles and Roku in 2008 while the other was added late 2010, early 2011.
Speak for yourself, please.
In addition, you can easily get the same ad-free content on iTunes, but I never see it compared as a replacement for Netflix. It's just not as convenient.
For me, Netflix is better than Hulu. I wish I could pay more for Hulu's content with no ads.
For me, "The Magazine" is better than ad-subsidized magazines. I wish there were more like it.
I would pay Facebook to be exempted from creepy data mining and ads.
I would pay more to NPR to never have to listen to their insufferable fund drive again.
When a "kill the ads" in-app purchase is available, I buy it.
(1) Though as a side benefit the AppleTV devices uses a small fraction of the power that the Xbox 360 used.
I actually liked the ad for the Pizza Hut XBox app. I thought it was hilarious.
I think that if the ads were actually useful, and showed off products/services that I actually would buy, then it's perfectly fine to show ads there.
Once the XB1 lifecycle is over, I have no guarantee I will be able to play the games I bought. As far as I'm aware XB1 is not backwards compatible at all. Once my 360 dies, if I can't find another one in working condition, or XBL stops offering services for the 360, my 360 XBLA games are gone forever.
Sooner than that though, right? Weren't they shutting off Halo servers when new Halo games came out during the same console lifecycle?
Of course that is a problem you'll have with multiplayer on all the consoles I guess. Maybe gamers are okay with that. I would be bummed as hell if I couldn't play the occasional quake match anymore though.
Hopefully they will just patch the console to enable offline play before this happens, but I guess you don't know for sure.
Halo 2 was released in 2004 (on the Xbox!), and the online play servers were just shut down earlier this year. Given that the platform it was released on has nearly been superseded twice by now (first by the Xbox 360, and soon by the Xbox One), I think they've given it a fair run.
As far as I'm aware, all of the other Halo games are still playable online.
http://mw4.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/equivocation
Sony were concerned they were heading towards irrelevance - they upped their game to win share back.
I'd say it was a perfectly efficient market - and then I remember we're talking about kids being able to swap games like I did in the 80s as if it's a revolution ... the boomers heading these companies right now should be ashamed of what they've created.
Maybe Microsoft thought Sony would just follow their lead since there wasn't a DRM scheme that Sony didn't like or try (before).
Makes me sad that execs actually sat round a table listed those as objectives.
On average I've moved house once a year for every year since I moved to London in 2007. There was one place I stayed in for 18 months, but everything else was 12 months. In all these moves except one I've had to wait 3-4 weeks (sometimes more) to get my broadband connected, so essentially for 1/13th of a year the only internet I have is through my mobile phone.
These 4 weeks a year are also the times when I get most of my single-player gaming done (I'm not saying I play hours of games every night, but for a couple of nights a week for a few weeks a year I'll settle down with a good RPG or similar).
The 24 hour check-in will make this impossible, thereby probably making me play less games overall (or I could just buy a PS4...).
It's annoying, but the 24-hour checkin is a requirement to have used game sales for the system. You can remove it if you want to get rid of any chance of reselling your games, but that'd cause even more outrage.
The pastebin was posted on 4chan... 4chan... And all of the information in it could have been gleaned from publicly available sources. We should at best discuss it like it is rumour, and much more realistically just ignore it as trolling.
PS - I am not a Microsoft Engineer, I was making a point.
Oh wait. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Streets-of-Asia/1595621342030...
If more people stopped to think what the Master plan here might be, we would all be better off.
Instead we're entrenched in cold-war-like mentality of Apple-FRIEND, GOOGLE-FRIEND, SONY-BEST-FRIEND, ... Microsoft-ENEMY.
Microsoft stopped being a monopoly long, long time ago (in internet time), yet everybody still continues to hate.
I don't pretend to be some emotionless paragon of objectivity. It's just...criticism is good. I try to even highlight my own flaws, so they can be addressed. It's far more useful than trying to ignore problems.
These feelings largely depend on whether you view the world in absolute or relative terms.
I'm normally the one defending MS, but come on. Unless I have my facts wrong about Xbox 1, Xbox 1 is literally doo doo.
Second, there is no evidence that companies who's job is to maximize profit will have any incentive to lower their prices for disc-less games. For this, we CAN look at Steam (and other services). AAA titles are full retail when they are released. The price degrades over time, but the same thing happens with disc releases.
This is a one-sided win for Microsoft (and game publishers for XB1) and is yet another reason to avoid the XBox 1 like the plague. That is the market feedback that Microsoft should receive.
What killed it (I think) was that people would sell a used boxed PC game and then download the pirate version but re-use the legitimate CD key for multiplayer.
So you would buy a used game and try to play it online but get "Your CD key is already in use" messages half the time. I got burned by this a few times.
This is also one of the reasons that stores stopped accepting returns of PC games. People would buy a game , copy down the CD key and then return it for refund claiming that it didn't work.
They stopped doing before the days of CD keys being required for multiplayer, but right around the time that hard disks got big and cheap enough that you could just copy the contents of the CD to your HD and then bring back the CD.
I'm not sure how delusional you have to be to believe that the reason your customers hate your DRM is because your competitors had a "viral team" that persuaded them to be.
- "Scratched discs" and my "little brother" messing with my games are two use cases I have never encountered in my entire gaming life. For those who have encountered those issues? Bummer! Life goes on. In fact, props to PS3 for using Blu-Ray, which has extra protection against scratches by design.
- How in the world is GameStop the enemy? Forget the War on Drugs -- this War on Trade-Ins is perhaps the most absurd thing I've ever heard. The fact that publishers, developers, etc. feel entitled to a cut of that $5 most people get for trade-ins says a lot about how up-their-own-asses this industry has become.
- I don't want Microsoft OWNING any part of my house, thank you very much.
- Any "savings" Microsoft will give customers for new games (which will never happen anyway) will be made up with the cost of XBox Live.
- The "phone home" model is shit. Absolute shit. Stop keeping tabs on me.
- Lack of indie dev access? How can a gaming system that's marketing itself as 'ahead of the curve' be so ridiculously out-of-touch with what's successful in the market?
- The ONLY TIME the 100% digital model works for me is when the convenience of information transfer outweighs the cost of the game itself. Steam is great because whenever I have to reinstall Windows, all of my games just automagically re-download. In iOS, I'm purchasing new devices (iPads, new iPhones, etc.) on an almost-yearly cycle. All I have to do is enter my credentials, and all of my apps and data are right there. Not too shabby considering most apps are $10 or less, not freaking $70!
You buy a AAA title for €60, don't like it, trade it back in again a few days later. You get €10 - €20 for it. This then goes back on the used shelf at the €50 - €55 price point, just enough to make it slightly more attractive than purchasing at the rrp.
To use the example in here, a $5 buyback value game would sell for about $10 where I worked. I don't know about Gamestop's percentages, but I imagine it would sell for closer to $15 there.
Moving on to Steam, my library is clogged full of shit I'd love to sell back or give to someone else. I still, to this day, hate Steam. It's convenient, sure, but I still often shop at the alternative instant download providers and I'm not talking about Origin or Amazon.
Beyond that, and back to actual gripes about the XBone, the only thing that has my friends and I completely against it is the always on Kinect. I don't like the idea of having a device in my home that can be used to monitor everything I do or say at any time. If it's proven you can turn that functionality off, it takes away about half of the reason I give people to not buy it. Even then, I'm paranoid enough that I won't be getting one. That aside, I don't need a media center, so the XBone doesn't appeal to me. My console is for playing video games; I have a computer for Internet shit (e.g. Netflix).
Nobody (well, almost nobody) gets mad when they can't resell their iPhone games or mp3s or Kindle books; compare that to the outpouring of anger when a company puts limitations on used optical media games or CDs or books.
Humans are wired to see a physical item (disks, etc.) and think mine.
I buy my iPhone games for $5 at most. Steam usually has a lot of promotions and discounts, so I get lots of games for under, say, 15 bucks. Physical media games are usually way above these prices.
Even though most people at least abstractly understand the non-resaleability of bits (whether due to the infinite duplicability of DRM-free media, or the practical inflexibility of DRM systems), a big reason they don't complain about iPhone apps or Steam games is likely the frequently low prices they pay.
A $60 game demands at least a bit of fungibility for most consumers. A $0.99 one doesn't, regardless of whether it came from a disc or an app store. If, as the supposed insider claims, XBO games can actually retail for half what a resale-friendly game would, then that offsets the implicit devaluation of non-resaleable media.
If Call of Duty 8 retails for $59.99 on the PS4 and $29.99 on the XBO, that suddenly makes the DRM a very appealing tradeoff. If they're both $59.99, Xbox is dead in the water.
Exactly, if MS had been thinking this all along, they could have proved it with a low price game option announced with the DRM. That would have been really appealing to a lot of people.
The point is to let the price fall faster after launch. Xbox can't exactly promise "Our games' prices will fall faster than the other guys" because the market will determine that -- in aggregate they will, but there's a reason Skyrim is still $30 on Steam.
Microsoft wants a world where you have account-locked games tied to disks, because it gives them the benefits of Steam-like DRM but also the game conveniently on a disk to take to a friend's so he doesn't have to download it, and to let the poor schmuck in rural Nebraska with 25 kb/s to play the game some time in the next week.
Honestly, Sony can take the same pricing strategies as Microsoft on their digital downloads -- Microsoft just wants to have more convenient digital downloads, while Sony just wants more convenient disks.
My guess is that long-term Microsoft will prove to be on the right side of history (the success of Steam is evidence). Sony can probably do just fine for now, they can always transition in later generations when the downsides are no longer breaking news stories.
Wow. There's this whole rest of the world that would kill to get that speeds. I'm confused as to why MS would try to alienate basically everyone not in NA, EU with that kind of a minimum requirement. People in Asia and Africa can pay up that kind of money for the console, but there aren't infrastructure to get you that kind of internet speeds in a budget.
Like Soldiers, 35% of America... and even then, the larger part of Europe won't have servers for the XBox One launch. So even if you do have a good connection in say... Poland or Japan... you can't play XBox One at all.
Valve does sell discs for their games, and they're just ways of delivering bits for Steam. The DRM is 100% identical in every way.
80% of the US population is urbanized. Most of the ones that aren't still have access to DSL, cable modems, or fixed wireless of at least a few megabits.
Of the remaining population, a lot of them don't want to play video games or can't afford them anyway. Some (probably large) portion of those that are viable gaming customers will simply make do with satellite connections.
The "poor schmuck in rural Nebraska with 25kb/s" market segment is just too small to economically justify catering to.
But more generally, why are you only talking about the United States? What you are saying might be true of the US, but plenty of places across the wider world are home to people who play video games but don't have an internet connection. Or have a spotty internet connection. Or have a connection with restrictive data caps (meaning digital download only would be impossible).
So yeah, MS screwed the pooch on this one and that will now all be Sony territory.
Are you unwittingly basing your comment on the standards of the still-privileged White minority, comprising less than 9% of a country of just 53 million?
Am I the only one who actually read the comment I originally replied to?
By the way, even the top 10% of South African households have an average income of just US$15,000, so the actual potential customer base is still smaller than you think.
I say this as a former customer... Hughesnet is an absolute joke. Looking past their incompetent installers (who provided me with a major leak in the roof over my kitchen) and their horrible uptime (clouds in the sky = service outage), at it's best the internet service could only be described as painfully slow. Super high latency, constant dropped connections, poor throughput and to top it all off customer service that I'd rate as equivalent to cell phone providers.
Please, do yourself a favor, and stay far away.
As for the incompetent installers, they're probably the exact same local contractors working for Dish Network or DirecTV. Results will vary by area.
So, to him, a game is NOT worth 60 bucks. The 60 dollar price point has nothing to do with him. He pays between 30 and 40 max, usually only playing B rated single player games years after the fact.
Adding DRM isn't going to magically increase the value of a game to the customer. That's not how a market works. The market currently has decided that a video game is worth something per person, on average. Let's call that $40 per game (just an example). So, with the DRM, you sell two $60 games for every three $40 games. Still the same $120 except it all goes to you instead of the first sale to you and the next two to Gamestop.
If MS can assume (or predict, or hope, or whatever) that more of their sales will go directly to them, then they have an incentive to drop the price of their copies of the game because they know that a gamer probably has a fixed budget for gaming and they want to maximize their value.
I don't have numbers but I would be interested in seeing what the average price per console game actually paid by a customer is. My hunch is that the DRM isn't expected to increase the overall sales, in fact they might decrease BY DESIGN. But MS doesn't care about overall game sales. They care about 1st sales. So they might get a bigger piece of a smaller pie and still make out in the end.
Sidenote, Steam's success came from no legit competition, better prices (allowable, in part, by their DRM) and great marketing but I agree that Microsoft's strategy is more likely long term.
....all in all, though, it just feels shitty to have something physical in my hand that I can't really sell to someone if I want.
Anyways, long story short, it's really hard to price discriminate in typical markets, because it's both really hard to figure out which of your customers will pay full price, and it's really hard to stop the people who get discounts from reselling to the full price folks.
But, if your market is digital, flash-in-the-pan pop culture items, then you have a market that's pretty much tailor-made for price discrimination. Who will pay $60 for a game? Well, the ones who buy it on launch, or pre-order for nominal bonuses. How do you stop the the people who buy at a discount from selling to those who pay full price? Two ways -- you attach the game via DRM to an account that is inconvenient to transfer, and you only sell the discounted copies 2 years later. Sales are also a good way to do this -- many people who buy games in sales either were waiting for a sale because the price was too expensive, or heard about the game because of the sale and wouldn't have bought the game otherwise.
The current status quo is that all the profit from the $30 customers is going to GameStop. Microsoft would rather it go to themselves and their developers, so they would rather have digital downloads. Not so they can stop games from being sold at $30, just so that they can sell games themselves at that price without killing their market.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Destiny-Xbox-One/dp/B00CX9T598/
Folks either want to rent entertainment , or buy it knowing they can resell it, because they know that the act of consumption will devalue that item for them but it will retain greater value for others who have not yet consumed its entertainment.
With Steam I am in control of the hardware. I can build a new, faster, better PC at any time and still play my games.
When Xbox Two comes out and they discontinue production of Xbox One what happens to my games? What happens when the servers are shut down? Are they stuck in the cloud or a computer recycling center someplace? When my Xbox One stops working (I'm sure it will) can I buy a used one on eBay, plug it in and continue to play my games?
At least with my PC I can build a new one if it breaks. With my NES I don't need to rely on a server some where in a data center still operating. Also, I still have more faith in my NES lasting and working longer than any console put out in recent years, including the Xbox One (or any Playstation model) even though it's over 20 years old now.
So personally, I imagine there are plenty of people who care about it.
Accessible computing power is growing much faster than it has been in the last few decades thanks to networking. In just a few seconds, I can start as many cloud servers as I want and stream data directly to myself. I can easily run emulators of every past or present video game console right now on a phone. Sony is vocal about moving their infrastructure to the cloud as well.
This next generation is running on traditional AMD processors, and by 2020, I'm sure that emulating the correct environment for their software will not be a problem. Whether you stream your data from Sony or yourself, accessing it and your games will not be a problem. The console itself will eventually be just a DRM device to get you to the servers. The power or compatibility of the machine means very little in that case.
You know how PS3 used to support old games? It had the old Emotion Engine (PS2 cpu) built directly into their system--it was a turducken of processing.
"wah wah wah i cant run my games from a different processor architecture wah wah wah" this is dumb anyone thinking this is dumb
EDIT: Less insulting.
This particular category of complaint is very, very common to people that don't understand the technology that they use past the "push shiny buttan on the ui" level. Anybody who has ever touched native code in their life knows that porting applications from different operating system versions--much less processor families!--is non-trivial. But to gamers, oh no, they need to be able to play an old game that technology has passed by--and yet, they specifically went out and bought a goddamned information appliance instead of an engine of computation that they could own and maintain themselves. They brought this on themselves.
Gamers are always "me me me, i want this, wah wah wah". There is not a single customer demographic I can think of that is less interested in understanding their tools and more vocal about the slightest inconvenience, real or otherwise. The worst of them are the ones that have nothing to do but pass of hatred and vitriol online to other gamers, sometimes even passing it off as "games criticism", like they're fucking Ebert or something.
And honestly, we caused this. We catered to gamers, we made their lives so simple and carefree and priced things so low that they are literally the worst customers on earth.
My friends in the web business? Look at this. Look at what these people have become, and expect the same sort of shitty behavior from your users in five-ten years.
I can't even imagine what this looked like before the edit.
And who's fault is that? The consumers? Microsoft is the one that's being "so dumb". People obviously care about backwards compat. and then they did this stupid bullshit.
> You know how PS3 used to support old games?
Ummm, the right fucking way? You know...by doing what it takes and giving the customers what they obviously fucking want?
Why don't you get your head out of your fucking asshole, asshole?
I will, however, guarantee we will never see $30 release-day games of the quality of GTA or COD. If anyone was willing to do that, they would have done it on Steam, XBox Live, or Playstation Store already--they all have DRM'd digital downloads, and it would immediately switch all of their users to that distribution platform. If I could buy GTA5 for $60 physical or $30 digital, there's no contest.
If anything, my bet is some of the new games will be $69.99 for X1 and $59.99 for X360, justified by the additional graphics and "extra" content. See DVD vs. Blu-ray.
The entire original post is wishful thinking from an engineer. As an engineer myself, the first thing I ever learned was that management, sales, and marketing aren't just blowing smoke at the public. The point of always on confirmation is to shut down used sales and stop piracy. That's it. There's no noble endeavor to save us from scratched disks. They love scratched disks; it means you have to buy another copy.
"Hey everyone $29.99 (or less) for release day games"
No one would be complaining about always-on DRM at that price. Sadly it's very unlikely since they are selling physical discs.
I agree the use of discs seems a silly move, especially WRT new pricing models and the implications. IMO they should be optional; 50GB (?) is an infeasibly large download for a lot of places in the world today, but this is not the case everywhere nor forever. Digital distribution allows for more possibilities.
The problem with the reduced cost argument is that I really can't see cross platform developers pricing the Xbox version lower, so long as they believe it to be the equal to the PS4 version (which might not be the case, the PS4 seems it should have a little more graphics power). And as a consequence I can't see Xbox exclusives selling for less than those-- they won't want to appear inferior.
Add into that the fact that the PS4 will be cheaper too- I think who 'wins' in the upcoming generation may depend on how magic MS can make the kinect sensor-related software with media/TV control. If they can make it awesome and polished enough to make people forget about the fact they are putting an always connected '3d' camera into your home with an always-on internet connection in a device from one of the companies which has most-cooperated with the NSA (I wonder if they might justify the depth camera data as 'metadata'?), then I think MS could be on to a winner. If not, it seems advantage Sony so far.
And by mine you mean 'ours' right? because a huge issue being discussed here is people sharing games, its not a individual issue, its a community issue.
As I recall it, the main reason we didn't do a wholesale switch over to digital distribution was because that would have upset the retailers who sell games. We relied on these same retailers to sell our xbox consoles. We were afraid that if we took a way the game revenue they would stop selling xboxes. We thought it would be best to make the transition gradual. So we took the first step back in 2009. This appears to be another step.
Like in the pastebin, you can say it's the same for Steam and you would be right. However in 36 years, I will still have backups, or some competitors will still be in business (Amazon, GOG or any competitor) so I will always be able to find a way to buy it (or even download it on a website like http://www.myabandonware.com/ ).
Also when I buy a game, I always expect to be able to get at least the resell value on it, if needed. It's not possible on a digital market so when I buy it I expect it to cost less. Which is also not the case.
EDIT: Don't you love to be able to read books much older than you? Don't you would love to know that in 100 years, XboxOne game would still be playable?
That's a neat theory, but if you listen to virtually any publisher or developer talk about used games and game pricing it is abundantly clear that they view $60 as the game price (and as far as they are concerned, you're getting a huge bargain), and used sales beyond that as virtually akin to theft. They absolutely do not view it from the angle of the game being worth $30 and the rest being money they're forced to charge to make up the losses.
On the PC with Steam the publishers are willing to drop the price to compete with piracy, but assuming the Xbox One is not cracked to the point of a Dreamcast, I can't imagine them ever allowing Steam-like prices.
Yup.
Prices are lower on Steam mostly competition provides downward price pressure.
If Microsoft opens up their system to self-publishing and lets devs set their own low prices, including offering steam like sales, then that would maybe produce lower costs. Used games is a red herring.
Large publishers probably don't want downward price pressure on the platform. Look at IOS where even 3 dollars is considered expensive. To them, restricting pricing and availability to keep prices high is a feature that may encourage them to go with one platform or another.
I'm not totally averse to that argument either -- I hate what the f2p model has done to game design on IOS. Right now Steam is a great middle ground and I hope they can maintain that.
You can't even transfer games from one account to another account that YOU owe. It's not allowed.
Just some perspective into this. And I don't agree there should be ANY limitations for hard media.
Not in Australia.
In Australia we pay 89.95 / 99.95 for a AAA game released on Steam, versus the USD price of 39.95 / 49.95 / whatever. It must be the shipping of the bits over the pacific that jacks the price up right?
Yes, eventually the prices drop, and you can buy a game that originally retailed for almost $100 for under $20, but that takes a long time. I just gave up on buying big studio games on steam. I only buy indie stuff now.
I was really excited about the xbone (day one owner of original xbox and 360), then the official word came out about it, and I decided I would buy the ps4 instead.
Aus minimum wage is as low as $5.87 (for a 15 yr old)
Also, it's worrisome how little MS is supporting the indie scene while they tout digital distribution as the future. With our current Internet infrastructure, they should be going after the indies first! Right now it just makes way more sense to download a bite size game over your connection than a full AAA title.