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"Microsoft engineer" on Xbox1

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Re: "Microsoft engineer" on Xbox1

#101

Post by bcRIPster »

marssaxman wrote: post #85
onedognight wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Am I a customer or a product? Do you have Cable TV? 70% of America does, knowing that they are both customer and product.

...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.

Re: "Microsoft engineer" on Xbox1

#102

Post by MostAwesomeDude »

jlgreco wrote: post #33
sliverstorm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> X-bone That is fantastic. Pronounced like the word "bone" I assume?

Yes. This is already how many communities are referring to it.

Re: "Microsoft engineer" on Xbox1

#103

Post by fragmede »

nrivadeneira wrote: post #96
ianlevesque wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All four examples you gave are in decline. His viewpoint is shared by a growing segment of the population.

Advertisements are not the reason they're in decline. People don't sign up for Netflix because it's ad-free, they sign-up for convenience.

And yet Hulu+, with more timely content is doing no where near as well as Netflix.

Hint: One of those services has ads.

Re: "Microsoft engineer" on Xbox1

#104

Post by cortesoft »

cbhl wrote: post #87
mtkd wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The whole point of the DRM switch from disc based to cloud based is to kill disc swapping ... bringing discs to friends house, trade-ins" Makes me sad that execs actually sat round a table listed those as objectives.

Yes. It would be 10x better to play the game at a friends house without needing to bring the discs in your backpack, which is what this enables.

And then wait 30 mins while you download the game

Re: "Microsoft engineer" on Xbox1

#105

Post by wutbrodo »

gmu3 wrote: post #62
jiggy2011 wrote: post #10

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 st…

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.

Re: "Microsoft engineer" on Xbox1

#106

Post by corresation »

MiguelHudnandez wrote: post #24
MichaelGG wrote: post #13

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 abou…

> 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.

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.

Re: "Microsoft engineer" on Xbox1

#107

Post by beloch »

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.

Re: "Microsoft engineer" on Xbox1

#108

Post by bluetidepro »

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.

Re: "Microsoft engineer" on Xbox1

#109

Post by jiggy2011 »

pyrocat wrote: post #98
jiggy2011 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he means if they turn off all the servers , so there is nowhere for the console to "call home" to. So you will be unable to play at all. Hopefully they will just patch the console to enable offline play before this happens, but I guess you don't know for sure.

Why bother spending money to pay a developer to patch it for offline play? They already have your money.

Long term goodwill I suppose.

Re: "Microsoft engineer" on Xbox1

#110

Post by TillE »

mey wrote: post #84
alyx wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

http://arstechnica.com/science/2011/08/users-treat-criticism...

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.

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