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The Internet Just Made Microsoft Kill a Car for a Faster Horse

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Re: The Internet Just Made Microsoft Kill a Car for a Faster Horse

#2
Microsoft remembered it sells (mostly) console, not (mostly) games.

pleasing the pirates sells wonders.

If you only lived your teenager years in the US or Japan, then you will not understand. But Sony et al sold millions of consoles to other countries where the market probably bought 1 game per 10 consoles sold (numbers vaguely remembered from a playstation1 analysis i read a long time ago)

Re: The Internet Just Made Microsoft Kill a Car for a Faster Horse

#4
I don't really see how the features they removed are incompatible with not requiring online checkins every 24h and certainly not with the used game policy. I don't see why they couldn't have made the online checkins optional, but required to do any of the game sharing, and if you don't check in within 24h it just disables games that aren't yours and doesn't let other people play yours.

Sure, that could be gotten around but people are going to figure out how to pirate anyway.

Re: The Internet Just Made Microsoft Kill a Car for a Faster Horse

#6
post #2

Microsoft remembered it sells (mostly) console, not (mostly) games. pleasing the pirates sells wonders. If you only lived your teenager years in the US or Japan, then you will not understand. But Sony et al sold millions of consoles to other countries where the market probably bought 1 game per 10 consoles sold (numbers vaguely remembered from a playstation1 analysis i read a long time ago)

"market probably bought 1 game per 10 consoles sold"

You seem to have reciprocated your fraction there: http://www.vgchartz.com/analysis/platform_totals/Tie-Ratio/G...

Globally, the PS1 sold about 9 games per console. I don't necessarily fully trust that site or that number, but it's probably at least within a factor of two, which still leaves it a great distance from your number.

Re: The Internet Just Made Microsoft Kill a Car for a Faster Horse

#8
This really just looks like sour grapes from Microsoft to me.

There's no reason they couldn't have both...

Buy a physical disk? Trade use it like you always have, but you don't get to make use of all the fancy cloud features.

Buy your game online? You'll need to phone home every once in a while (24 hours was a bit harsh, maybe more like 1 week), and you can't trade it like physical media, but you get the fancy new lending features.

Decide you like the new way better? Convert your physical copies into 'cloud' copies and throw out the disks.

Problem solved.

Re: The Internet Just Made Microsoft Kill a Car for a Faster Horse

#9
post #8

This really just looks like sour grapes from Microsoft to me. There's no reason they couldn't have both... Buy a physical disk? Trade use it like you always have, but you don't get to make use of all the fancy cloud features. Buy your game online? You'll need to phone home every once in a while (24 hours was a bit harsh, maybe more like 1 week), and you can't trade it like physical media, but you get the fancy new le…

It would be an extremely safe bet to say that will be the case within a year of two of launch. They're scrambling too much to change what they've got for the difference to be possible in 6 months, but the differentiation will definitely happen.

Re: The Internet Just Made Microsoft Kill a Car for a Faster Horse

#10
post #2

Microsoft remembered it sells (mostly) console, not (mostly) games. pleasing the pirates sells wonders. If you only lived your teenager years in the US or Japan, then you will not understand. But Sony et al sold millions of consoles to other countries where the market probably bought 1 game per 10 consoles sold (numbers vaguely remembered from a playstation1 analysis i read a long time ago)

Microsoft and Sony get a cut of every game sold for their platforms, while the consoles themselves are sold for a loss, at least at launch. That's how it has worked for the last two generations and I think it's the same this time around.

The exception is Nintendo, who sold the Wii (and presumably the Wii-U) for a small profit.

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