191–200 of 294 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plus, as once a poor schmuck in rural Nebraska, we had decent DSL.
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.
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 peop…
//Anders
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 realisticall…
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...).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The price doesn't concern me too much. 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…
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.
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.
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 abstractl…
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.
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 peop…