The engineer bases his argument on an assumption that is usually erroneous:
The price of a product is related to its cost.
This is a logical assumption, but almost always false. It is far more commonly true that the price of a product is dictated by what consumers are willing to pay. If the PS4 version of game X sells for $59.99, it is more than likely that the Xbox1 version will sell for the same price, because people will perceive both versions as having the same value and be willing to pay the same amount for them both.
What Valve does with Steam prices is something different. New releases still cost roughly the same as traditional DVD copies bought in stores. Bargains start to appear on titles once they reach an age where a lot of stores stop stocking them. It is true you can get heavily discounted games on Steam, but this is totally unrelated to the lack of a used-game market. Somebody simply realized that a) A title nobody is selling makes no money and b) gamers will spend money they wouldn't have otherwise if they think they're getting a deal. Put a and b together and you have a recipe for profit. This also eliminates demand for used games. Why buy a skeezy dog-chewed box when you can get a steam-download for the same price or lower?
Don't get me wrong. If MS builds a curated steam-style store for the Xbox it will undoubtedly be a great thing for many (although not all) gamers. However, lower prices on new titles will not be one of the benefits this move brings. This is really just a grab for dollars that currently go to the used market, and it will likely work.
Thing is that here in europe/sweden steam is always the most expensive choice sine must publishers equals 1 usd to 1 eur. So here the only sane reason is to wait until they have sales since then it is just expensive and not overly expensive.
"people will perceive both versions as having the same value and be willing to pay the same amount for them both."
If they can resell one game but not the other, they're not necessarily going to perceive them as being of the same value. If they use the money they get from reselling the PS4 game to buy more games, they're not only not going to be willing to pay the same for both, they won't be able (except for the segment of the population that is able to increase its total spending on games).
It's hard to make a comparison with Steam, because there is pretty much no used market for PC games, so necessarily the economics are going to be different.
I wonder if Microsoft's far reaching agreements with publishers are going to see XBox One games come out at $49.99 instead of $59.99. I normally buy 5-10 games a year, so a $10 difference could easily make me tilt slightly more towards the One. Really the only thing that irks me is the phoning home daily thing. My internet has been down for more than a day at least twice in the past year, and I filled my time with console gaming rather than Steam or other services.
Very good points. The ability for publishers to discount games on steam where they otherwise couldn't in physical retail markets is that they have just one place to set that price and distribute it.
MS by eliminating the used game market forces consumers to buy these older games in digital form where publishers can offer these sales. I don't know if that will make them any cheaper than if someone simply bought a used game from ebay. It certainly won't affect the price of new games.
What bothers me is the notion that these digital purchases could go away at the end of the XBox1 generation. Consoles notoriously aren't backwards compatible friendly. I'm fine with buying PC games digitally on steam as I know they'll work as long as whatever Windows version I have is still around. And I would wager Windows 7 will be supported much longer than the XBox1 will be the current generation.
I find it similarly mind boggling that owning the discs for PS2 or PS3 games would not entitle me to the digital version for a PS4 (offering previous gen games as downloads was offered I believe?)
The value of games on steam is very related to the used game market because there is no used game market on steam, but users still buy old games at used market prices. The difference now is that the money continues to flow to the publisher and not entities with no hand in creating the game.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
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?
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 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.
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.
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 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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Microsoft has always struck me as a company that makes some really cool technology, then tries to find a way to make it relevant to the rest of us. For them, it seems the consumer is an afterthought and the technology is key.
Windows 8 was an impressive attempt to merge mobile and desktop OSes so that mobile users are no longer second-class citizens and have access to everything desktop users do. The problem? Mobile needed fixing, not desktop. In the push for engineering parsimony, they made the desktop experience worse simply so that it could be shared with mobile.
Kinect is a wicked piece of tech. It's just seriously, seriously cool. But what does it do? How does Kinect make gaming better? Outside of that one boxing game, I just don't see it. It makes everything demonstrably worse, like QTEs that work as cinematic finishing moves for bosses in God of War, but are completely pointless in 95% of the games they're included in. Kinect has the same problem: it's a really cool solution in search of a problem.
Perhaps the best example of this is Clippy, where MS used Bayesian algos to analyze text and offer suggestions. Again, a really cool little bit of datamining/ML, in 1997, no less, and running on the computational equivalent of a potato. Clippy is a really cool program. But it was completely pointless. It solved a problem no one had in a way that pissed off everyone.
At the risk of getting way off topic. I also like Windows 8 on the desktop. Yes, it is very slightly annoying that I have to click a large desktop icon after booting up, but after that it is simply a slightly faster, slightly better version of Windows 7. I can't think of any touch interaction aspect that I even see when using it in desktop mode.
I agree, ignore the Modern UI stuff and it is a better, faster Windows 7.
If you don't mind parting with $10, I recommend purchasing the Start8 and ModernMix from Stardock. Boots straight to desktop, gets the old start menu back, and runs ModernUI apps in a window.
You can setup a quick hack (add Explorer to the Start Apps folder) that switches to Desktop on load. Granted, you'll have an Explorer window open as well, but...small price to pay.
Same here, I just got a win 8 box a few weeks ago, and rather like it. I rather like the whole screen start menu thing, much better than Win7 or OSX's we know you are looking for something but we are only going to show you two search results in a tiny box because we don't want to cover your giant empty desktop.
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.
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...).
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.
>"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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
>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.
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.
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.
They'll make the same money, if not more, charging $40 for the game downloaded via xbla than they will for charging $60 at retail. Retail stores are incredibly expensive compared to web anything and so they take a huge cut.
MS' long-term plans probably involve cutting the publishing middleman out of their dev relationships.
I don't think digital goods / things that are very cheap on the margin really subscribe to the same laws of supply and demand.
For example, most people would probably agree piracy drives the price of photoshop up for the people that actually pay for it. In the eyes of supply and demand though what should happen is more piracy == less demand for legal copies -> lower prices.
That doesn't have much to do with supply/demand not applying to digital/low variable cost goods; the same phenomenon can be seen in, e.g., clothing. The concept that theft of clothing pushes up prices is pretty much as agreed upon as your example, but has nothing to do with the marginal cost of production.
"Think about it, on steam you get a game for the true cost of the game, 5$-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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
> 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.)
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.
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.
"If you want games cheaper than 59.99, you have to limit used games somehow."
Author thinks publishers will lower game prices to $39.99 since used games won't cut into their profits. Author clearly doesn't work at Microsoft nor in the game industry. Nor has a clear idea of how Capitalism or running a company works.
Facts: A Game that launches on all 3 platforms: Xbox 360 (disc based, allows used games), PS3 (disc based, allows used games), and Steam (digital DRM based, no used games) all launch at the SAME price. Despite Steam's DRM the PC version is NOT discounted. Publishers are not going to surrender extra income out of the "goodness of their hearts".
> Facts: A Game that launches on all 3 platforms: Xbox 360 (disc based, allows used games), PS3 (disc based, allows used games), and Steam (digital DRM based, no used games) all launch at the SAME price.
This is not the case in the EU. I also think this is bullshit for the US territory.
Resident Evil, Battlefield, Dead Island, and other Tripple A titles that have launched on all the platforms have been full price on the PC. I know this because my little brother is a game addict ($1,000 Gaming PC & twitch.tv streamer and all) and buys them all. The Digital PC version however does discount those same games much quicker than the consoles do.
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 hate this phrase, "trying to own the living room."
We think people want living room devices, but really they just need a living room computer.
A few months ago I went this way. No overengineered media center, just a tower next to the HDTV. Full-sized wireless keyboard and mouse. High-DPI to read text.
The experience immediately killed the 10 foot interface for me. All the 10' UIs out there feel slow, clunky, hobbled when compared to "just use a computer from your couch."
I understand that people are trying to simplify the experience, like Apple did with mp3s. Maybe you don't need to simplify here, though, because people already know how to use computers, they just don't see them in other rooms.
They just need a little nudge, a little help to see that it doesn't mean tiny text and wires across the living room floor.
True, I respect the honest disclosure, just bothered by the loaded assumptions: that this is a space that can/should be conquered by some closed device driven by a tiny remote control (supplemented by gestures and/or voice).
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.
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.
<rant>
>> Well, if you want the @#$@ing from Gamestop, go play PS4
Stop telling customers "take it or leave it". Tell them, "I'm sorry you can't do that", or "we've decided not to support X because Y". You keep telling us to go fuck off and buy a PS4, we might just do that.
Then you blame your half-assed approach on competitors (right after saying competition is good). You're Microsoft! King of anti-competitive practices. Why do you care what Target, Walmart, Gamestop, or Amazon think? If you wanted to build a Steam competitor, why didn't you build a Steam competitor? Why did you create a shitty Steam DRM system on top of physical media.
>> We want to own the living room.
Do consumers want you to? Every update to XBox 360 has made it worse.
- more ads on the landing page instead of instant access to recently used apps (e.g. hiding Netflix).
- the horrible decision to make subtitles the system default, then keep turning it back on (seems like every 2-3 weeks it forgets I don't like them)
Prediction: XB1 home screen will just be wall to wall ads with a tiny little "play game" thing in the corner 7 screens over. Every time I want to play a game, I will probably have to scroll by shitty music offerings, shitty game previews, shitty video offerings, etc.
>> You can turn it off tho, and turn the console like OFF off
I bet this will be obnoxious and tedious. Switch on the back? Inside a settings menu?
>> We basically made a huge cloud compute shit and made it free
Really?!? No more Live fee? Did I totally miss this? or by "free" do you mean for "for sale costing money on an ongoing basis for consumer, but free for publishers"?
>> If all you do is play games, and nothing else, PS4.
This is why we're pissed and you seem to have missed that. Xbox should be a game console first, and a media machine second. MS has said they've made a really awesome Tivo + Roku machine and it also plays games.
So yeah, that's why MS is getting flak. But the real issue is that no one at MS seems to understand that!
</rant>
It's funny how his view is that M$ is somehow on the long tail of video games and that it's the consumers that are being misled.
Sony bought Gaikai, you dumb fucks. They are going to offer a subscription for unlimited video games streaming WHILE selling tradeable games because you lot were too busy in your fiefdoms jacking off. You dipshits couldn't even understand a fucking pincer business idea like that; all you know is embracing, extending and executing small dumb companies and have no fucking clue how to actually compete.
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 $15 there.
Moving on to Steam, my library is clogged full of shit I'd love to sell back or give to someone else. I still, to this day, hate Steam. It's convenient, sure, but I still often shop at the alternative instant download providers and I'm not talking about Origin or Amazon.
Beyond that, and back to actual gripes about the XBone, the only thing that has my friends and I completely against it is the always on Kinect. I don't like the idea of having a device in my home that can be used to monitor everything I do or say at any time. If it's proven you can turn that functionality off, it takes away about half of the reason I give people to not buy it. Even then, I'm paranoid enough that I won't be getting one. That aside, I don't need a media center, so the XBone doesn't appeal to me. My console is for playing video games; I have a computer for Internet shit (e.g. Netflix).
Wow, seems the hiring standards over at MS are lower than I thought. I read through all of that and it mostly sounded like ramblings of someone on the verge of a nuclear mind meltdown.
There were a few good points the anonymous poster made about the advantages of non-physical media like no scratches or brothers/friends losing your discs, people just aren't ready to have a mostly medium-less console. It works for an iPhone or eBook reader, but a console is something that is synonymous with physical mediums.
"Well, if you want the @#$@ing from Gamestop, go play PS4." — we don't have a Gamestop here in Australia but I presume Electronic Boutique is basically the same and while sometimes you get reamed on trade-ins, chances are if you are trading in, you don't care how much you are getting because you're parting with the game anyway.
If XBOX One games are cheaper as a result of the lock-in console DRM, then Microsoft might have a worthy advantage in the fanboy fight against Sony. But we all know games won't be cheaper (especially new and exclusive titles).
I think the problem with the whole digital vs physical debate is that bandwidth is an ongoing cost (especially if you go over). Although my Internet plan gives me 500gb of bandwidth a month (times that by the 5 people currently in my house who love downloading TV shows and movies a lot) and a digital game is chewing up bandwidth left-right and centre.
It is true that textbooks are extremely over-priced in US because they are priced with multiple re-sale in mind. It maybe true for games but even so, it will take some time before the effect kicks in.
Part of the problem is that if something is physical, people expects it to be lend-able. E.g. Books, CDs, DVDs, etc. (you can also think of things you can borrow in the library) People don't expect their digital downloads to be lend-able (e.g. iTunes songs, Kindle books, etc.) In that sense, Microsoft has to play the game carefully. I think it will still work if games on XB1 sells at <$35 compared to $60 on PS4.
On the note of internet connection, as much as Microsoft thinks that everyone should have an internet connection at home today, it is still something that you should not expect everyone to have. Many XBOXes are sold globally and internet broadband connectivity may not come easily.
Besides the issue of lending of games, I do agree on the vision that the console will be a center piece of the living room. It is much more than just games.
<prejudice>I think most of the whiner's are American's with a high sense of entitlement</prejudice>. Personally, I'm just gonna quietly switch to PS4.
I think MS's thinking is a bit ahead of its time, and possibly a bit too Americanized. USA and a lot of other countries have cheap, reliablish Internet. The onliny model will be OK for them.
But there are still a lot of places that have XBox's that have expensive + useless Internet. Like where I live.
I'm moving from XBox 360 to PS4 because, as it is on the 360, I get a "Can't connect to XBox live" message about once an hour. If I went to XBox4, I'm assuming it'd be more annoying.
I bought the computer/console and the software; I expect it to work for me, not to police me, not to try to advertise to me, just do what I paid for.
The logic is just too silly, too not-well-thought-out for me to buy into it.
We come in trying to find a way to take money out of gamestop, and put some in developers and get you possibly cheaper games...
The biggest problem here is that this - the whole crux of his paste - did not happen at launch. If this were true, then MS would make new XBox One games cheaper than $60 - but they didn't. The XBox One games are all $60.
If you want games cheaper then 59.99, you have to limit used games somehow
MS did find a way - the new XBox One model is built around this. But the games aren't cheaper.
Nice try, but it's either (a) bogus, (b) faulty/incomplete understanding by a lower level employee, or (c) some lower level employee buying into a bunch of management speak.
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.
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.
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.
He doesn't really address the issue of lending games. When my wife bought me a PS3 for my birthday last year I had zero games.
My friend at work lent me a huge stack of games — he's a gamer and had a ton of games he loved but didn't play anymore.
It was a great introduction to gaming for me and it led me to purchase many of the sequels to the games I played initially. I have purchased about 10 games since, and about 7 of those were purchased purely based on games I had played from the initial stack that I borrowed.
I don't understand why they feel the need to capture this as a "revenue stream." Focusing on great games and great convenience will surely get them more money in the long term.
I'm sorry, I don't buy it. Maybe internally they look at it like this. But I honestly think the reasoning behind the always online policy is so they can collect analytics from the kinect.
From an advertisers perspective, it's the holy grail. Imagine being able to see the viewers heart rate, where they were looking, how they were sitting, how the move and body language. All of that data would be very useful. I'm sure there are systems like this already, but to my understanding they are in a controlled environment. If you sat me in a room and told me to look at an advert after having to travel etc I'd act a lot differently to just sitting on my couch.
I have no idea what the demographics are these days, but certainly I, and most of my friends, are least concerned about price, and most concerned that most game are not that fun, and the damn console keeps doing less and less of what I want each year. My PS3 is the only thing I can think of that has gotten less capable with each update.
People say the kindle is different, but if my books became unavailable, I'd grab them from other sources, no questions and no qualms. If you want to sell me something, then sell me something, don't quibble about it after the fact.
Regardless if this is actually legitimate or not...
> "* Without actually thinking about how convienent it would be for the majority of the time to not find that disc your brother didn't put back...*"
First off, it's "convenient". Secondly, that's a horrible argument when those consoles are meant to be geared towards mature gamers that would never have this issue.
And as others have mentioned, you can't play both sides. Either you go all digital and have this model or you don't. If you try to play in the middle, you're always going to be screwing someone in your audience over.
As I see it, DRM is much more of a problem on consoles than it is on PC. In my Steam library, I have Commander Keen right next to Bioshock Infinite. There's no "expiration date" for my games. On the other hand, consoles come in generations. They only last a decade at most, and it looks like we're not going to have backwards compatibility going forward. What's going to happen when Microsoft decides to pull support for their 10, 20, 30 year old DRM-laden consoles? Not every game is going to get an HD remake, sadly.
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.
Wow, a whole lot of product/business vision and dealmaking/tradeoffs, all of it quite sensible, and yet I see 4 pages of lecture and not a mention of fun, engaging games
"The thing is, the DRM is really really similar to steam... You can login anywhere and play your games, anyone in your house can play with the family xbox. The only diff is steam you have to sign in before playing, and Xbox does it automatically at night for you (once per 24 hours)"
Even if used game sales would kill the business model and force AAA game producers out of business, I would say that the First Sale Doctrine is more important than the entire industry. If I buy a product, then I am free to use it, abuse it, break it, sell it, give it, modify it, or throw it away however I please.
If the AAA game industry cannot survive while used games exist, then I would rather the entire industry die than end up with a precedent of buying something yet not owning it.
1) If they're so big on moving away from disc sales, why sell discs at all? Afaik some stores already sell download cards for games, why not use those?
2) It may well be that it has to check if it's connected every 24 hours, but what happens if you need to move house? Do you just sign in again, or does something worse happen?
3) They're forcing the kinect onto the user - you can't make a product successful by forcing people to use it, they have to want to use it.
Comparing its strategy with Steam doesn't work for me, since I already boycott Steam anyway, for the same reason I'll boycott the Xbox One. I don't want to be under surveillance while I play a single-player game, or even a multiplayer game in LAN mode. I don't want to be under surveillance at all in my own home, by any entity public or private.
I call fake. I'm skeptical that anyone working in Studio A would call out that it's on 40th street. Even more damaging is that Typhoon is in the Commons, not in any of the Studio buildings. And I've never heard anyone call it "Streets of Asia" -- "Typhoon" is both its primary name and faster to say.
The comparison to Steam entirely breaks down when you consider that Steam is opt-in, whereas the Xbone's DRM is not even opt-out, but entirely mandatory.
The main reason I don't complain so much about steam is the existence of GoG and direct DRM-free sales (Humble store), which I always prefer if they carry the game I'm interested in.
Why not just go straight to free-to-play model? CoD for $0 for the first level, but $5 each level after that. I'd try a lot more games out if I didn't have to pay $60 up front, and it would encourage developers to make better games rather than the current AAA tentpole model where they depend on the pre-release hype.
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.
> On a console you have to pay for that PLUS any additional licenses for when you sell / trade / borrow / etc
This is rubbish. Better DRM is what makes the difference. I bet resales are about 1/100th as costly to studios as piracy, especially for single player games.
Jesus Christ this guy is a cocky fucker. I'll never buy a xbox piece of shit again. DRM my ass. I'm against piracy but don't force me into something like DRM. With Sony you can still download games as digital and physical media.
I'm getting really sick of console DRM being compared to Steam DRM like they are equals. they aren't, not even close, because steam has sales 2x a year where even brand new games can be had for up to 75% off
This does not ring true. "Developers?" If you substituted the word "publishers" for "developers" THEN it makes more sense. Surely any engineer working on Xbox knows the difference.
Complete bullshit. It's not a "long tail" strategy at all. Allowing people to sell their games means consumers can recoup some of the cost and put it towards a future purchase. So the $60 price tag isn't as bad as it seems, and developers shouldn't actually see any lost sales as long as they continue to make games.
You can also circumvent unfair DRM on the PC by pirating games, so the consumer ultimately has the power to take back their rights in that situation. On a console, this sort of DRM would absolutely be the death of "owning" your games. That's why the reaction to Xbox One's DRM has been so extreme.
I doubt the guy even works for MS though. His writing is barely as good as your average forum-trolling college dropout.
If Microsoft was so big on fucking DLC, then they should make the DLC from the 360 backwards compatible to the new Xbox. Thank you Microsoft for fucking me over and wasting shitloads of money which will not be usable on the new system. Thank you for being fucking arrogant about it as well, and telling me that I better keep my 360. I always have been an Xbox fan. Come end of the year, hello Playstation. Fucking arrogance like this crap cemented the idea of switching, "if you want the @#$@ing from Gamestop, go play PS4."
I would like to AGAIN reiterate that Steam does not enforce DRM. Valve provides Steam DRM as an option for people publishing on the Steam platform. (An argument has been made to me that if Steam goes away for good, not being able to install games from Steam is also a form of DRM, but I'm not sure I entirely agree with this position)
It's like this fucking myth that refuses to die.
The Microsoft situation enforces something different unless they decided they didn't want people to understand that the phoning home thing was a publisher option.
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.
The price of a product is related to its cost.
This is a logical assumption, but almost always false. It is far more commonly true that the price of a product is dictated by what consumers are willing to pay. If the PS4 version of game X sells for $59.99, it is more than likely that the Xbox1 version will sell for the same price, because people will perceive both versions as having the same value and be willing to pay the same amount for them both.
What Valve does with Steam prices is something different. New releases still cost roughly the same as traditional DVD copies bought in stores. Bargains start to appear on titles once they reach an age where a lot of stores stop stocking them. It is true you can get heavily discounted games on Steam, but this is totally unrelated to the lack of a used-game market. Somebody simply realized that a) A title nobody is selling makes no money and b) gamers will spend money they wouldn't have otherwise if they think they're getting a deal. Put a and b together and you have a recipe for profit. This also eliminates demand for used games. Why buy a skeezy dog-chewed box when you can get a steam-download for the same price or lower?
Don't get me wrong. If MS builds a curated steam-style store for the Xbox it will undoubtedly be a great thing for many (although not all) gamers. However, lower prices on new titles will not be one of the benefits this move brings. This is really just a grab for dollars that currently go to the used market, and it will likely work.