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"Microsoft engineer" on Xbox1

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Re: "Microsoft engineer" on Xbox1

#261
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.

Re: "Microsoft engineer" on Xbox1

#262

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 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.

Re: "Microsoft engineer" on Xbox1

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the plural is abaci :)

So is abacuses.

Re: "Microsoft engineer" on Xbox1

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: "Microsoft engineer" on Xbox1

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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.

Re: "Microsoft engineer" on Xbox1

#266
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You've checked Hughesnet and Exede?

> You've checked Hughesnet

I say this as a former customer... Hughesnet is an absolute joke. Looking past their incompetent installers (who provided me with a major leak in the roof over my kitchen) and their horrible uptime (clouds in the sky = service outage), at it's best the internet service could only be described as painfully slow. Super high latency, constant dropped connections, poor throughput and to top it all off customer service that I'd rate as equivalent to cell phone providers.

Please, do yourself a favor, and stay far away.

Re: "Microsoft engineer" on Xbox1

#267
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.

Re: "Microsoft engineer" on Xbox1

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 EDIT: Less insulting.

> EDIT: Less insulting.

I can't even imagine what this looked like before the edit.

Re: "Microsoft engineer" on Xbox1

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Difference: if XBoxOne servers are ever shut down, single-player XBoxOne experience will be destroyed due to stupid DRM.

Yup, and it is not like Microsoft has never threatened to shut down DRM servers before.

It's not like they've done it before: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080422/234401923.shtml
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