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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

#11

Post by nemothekid »

gcb0 wrote: 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)

I'm pretty sure for MS and Sony, they were selling software. Sony was selling every PS3 for a loss 6 years into its product life cycle.

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

#12

Post by forrestthewoods »

gcb0 wrote: 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)

Historically speaking MS and Sony hardware is sold for a loss which is covered by the cut they get per game sold. I'm not sure how big of a loss, if any, the PS4 and XB1 are being sold for. It could be close to even.

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

#13

Post by jff »

clavalle wrote: post #5

Don't worry. Valve will come out with a nice car (SteamBox) and will craft their message more carefully to make sure all of the horse lovers don't get spooked before they fall in love with the ride.

The success of the Valvemobile will be in no way affected by the hood ornament, I suppose.

To un-knot the twisted metaphor, I'm saying Valve already got past the wailing 10 years ago. Their Steam model already enjoys widespread success and approval, while Microsoft is, well, Microsoft.

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

#14

Post by chaostheory »

The problem is that Microsoft put a saddle on the car by offering physical discs. I really didn't see the point of it if it was always online, given that MS has their music and movie stores.

Moreover it didn't really give consumers the main benefit of always on DRM: lower prices for games. This is why consumers don't care about the DRM on iOS or even Android.

Another major problem is that for all the features offered for Xbox One that apologists like to keep repeating (family sharing, trade-ins, lending, selling), there was a really big caveat: publishers have to approve that feature for their respective games. Even if they did approve it, I can imagine all the restrictions they would have imposed (trade-in approved stores, minimum time & publisher set prices for trade-ins, and so on)

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

#15

Post by kevingadd »

clavalle wrote: post #5

Don't worry. Valve will come out with a nice car (SteamBox) and will craft their message more carefully to make sure all of the horse lovers don't get spooked before they fall in love with the ride.

Valve doesn't have to do anything about messaging because Steam already works like the XBox One was going to.

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

#16

Post by ewzimm »

proland wrote: 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…

Sounds like politics. I'm sure we're not hearing the whole discussion. There's nothing stopping a Steam-like DRM option to link a game key to your account or a Steam-like offline mode once you've authenticated once. These schemes are not some fabulous new invention. They have been implemented in the real world for the last decade. If you like them, I suggest buying a Steam box.

Analyses like these seem to forget how much the software of consoles has changed over the last few years. This next generation likely to evolve much faster. The hardware is already obsolete, and it hasn't been released yet. The software is what matters, and it will change. Both Microsoft and Sony have clearly stated that they intend to grow their server farms and make them integral to the experience. So whether you're connecting to Smartglass 2.0 or iPSN, the experience in seven years will not be the same as the experience today.

I found physical media authentication unnecessarily cumbersome in the 90's. It's pretty funny that it's still necessary in some cases, but that's DRM. Too bad that just offering incentives for connecting to official servers isn't the standard means of encouraging legitimate sales. People are lining up for content they could easily get for free on services like Netflix, Spotify, and Steam because they provide superior experiences. I've never downloaded a legally questionable game copy, but I'm still not interested in these backward console DRM schemes, whether through fragile optical discs or constant surveillance. I can do better elsewhere. But I'm looking forward to what they come up with next.

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

#17

Post by kytmizuno »

UberMouse wrote: post #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 arou…

I think the problem happens when Person A buys a game disc and lends a digital copy to Person B. Person A then disconnects from the Internet and plays using the game disc and Person B plays with the 24H online check in. Now you have two people playing the same game at the same time with only one copy of the game bought.

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

#18

Post by hobs »

UberMouse wrote: post #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 arou…

Yeah, that is a much more reasonable way to think about it, and frankly the way it was presented was fuck you guys we are getting all of ours. I still dont think it was a messaging problem, it was a microsoft having a money boner problem. Plenty of people will be wailing about anything on the internet anyway. They doing something? You dont like it! They did something else to mollify you! Their cowardice has cost us great features!

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

#19

Post by infrec »

kevingadd wrote: post #15
clavalle wrote: post #5

Don't worry. Valve will come out with a nice car (SteamBox) and will craft their message more carefully to make sure all of the horse lovers don't get spooked before they fall in love with the ride.

Valve doesn't have to do anything about messaging because Steam already works like the XBox One was going to .

Not entirely. For one Steam has offline mode which is certainly better than what MS was proposing.

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

#20

Post by mxxx »

chaostheory wrote: post #14

The problem is that Microsoft put a saddle on the car by offering physical discs. I really didn't see the point of it if it was always online, given that MS has their music and movie stores. Moreover it didn't really give consumers the main benefit of always on DRM: lower prices for games. This is why consumers don't care about the DRM on iOS or even Android. Another major problem is that for all the features offered…

physical discs are useful for people with always-on-but-still-painfully-slow internet, and it also was a way for MS to compromise and not piss off all the physical disc retailers, who happen to be the same people who will retail the console itself.
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