191–200 of 206 posts
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>That would have been really innovative. And a great way to lose out on billions of sales.
Ask Amazon how it turned out for them with the Kindle. Sold only online. No retailers. They crushed all the other physical ebook-readers re-sellers.
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What I don't like is how they overly complicated the beating around the bush of digital distribution. The whole if and or but clauses with "used" games they had only hurt their platform. You are never buying a piece of plastic for $60, you are buying a license for IP and a very long number etched on that polycarbonate. Used games were always at best a legal gray zone because the end user never had an explicit license…
> "Yes, it eliminates the used games market" And that's where the merry go round comes to a screeching halt. It's great that the Xbox is being developed in a part of the country where literally no one has to sell a game to play another one, but this is far from the reality in the rest of the country, let alone the world. For a great many users, "it eliminates the used games market" is where the sentence ends, because…
You could launch Halo 5 for $150, and drop the price every day by $10 to $50, and then $5 a day to $20, and then $2 a day to $2, and there would still be thousands buying on day 1.
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By Steam you mean GoG, they don't even have DRM on them, but they update the Windows installers so they work. Though I have to criticize their lack of the Linux ports of the old titles =\
Are you going to pay for the developer to do that? It's just lucky that Steam is supporting Linux at all nowadays.
If the iPhone got a physical keyboard, I'd totally swap my Android phone for it. I absolutely love Android, but my Nokia E75's physical keyboard just beats any touchscreen by a long way. Also I really miss physical buttons for music control beyond volume. I say this after owning a Galaxy Note 2 for half a year and absolutely loving it. It's just the touchscreen that every modern phone has that is so sucky.
What a terrible article. First, the analogy is completely wrong. Second, Microsoft is realizing people are getting seriously tired of the bullshit "always on" concept. It's hard to justify and is widely rejected as a valid technical limitation on platforms where you expect to always have an internet connection (and is only accepted when the gameplay itself REQUIRES a connection, unlike the late SimCity). It's complet…
If I understand your solution, what's keeping Person A from restoring from an earlier backup where the access was still valid? Or even sharing the backup with all the games available?
So it'd be up to the backup software with access to the sensitive storage being smart enough not to cause that problem. Alternatively, backups and restores could require an internet connection.
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> "Yes, it eliminates the used games market" And that's where the merry go round comes to a screeching halt. It's great that the Xbox is being developed in a part of the country where literally no one has to sell a game to play another one, but this is far from the reality in the rest of the country, let alone the world. For a great many users, "it eliminates the used games market" is where the sentence ends, because…
What about the part where, given that in the absence of a used game market games can be rapidly price slashed (since the entire ordeal with games in the first place is that the plastic disc and the burning cost cents, you are just reimbursing the development costs and eventually adding the sweet profit). If you can sell a game for a dollar, it is almost certainly a profit, because it only costs you pennies in transac…
This is a common raised point - but there's no evidence that this will actually happen. Valve has certainly done this, but Valve is also an extremely atypical company in their industry.
We have seen, for example, with existing digital purchase games (on PS3, 360, and PC) that games cost the same as their retail counterparts. The "no resale" model exists, and with the except of Steam, the lower prices thing has never materialized. This is true across all platforms - on PS3, on 360, on Origin, etc.
What Microsoft tabled was a lot of what ifs that had almost no chance of actually panning out. With the death of used games publishers could charge less, but neither logic nor industry trends bear that out.
The value proposition was a giant (unlikely) hypothetical vs. a cold reality of killing used games.
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>It's incredible how the Xbox team thought, "Look at that money over there. Let's take it!" What's next, Wal-Mart charging Ralph Lauren every time a customer comes in wearing a Polo shirt (because why should other clothing companies get free advertising in their store)? Could you explain this analogy because it makes zero sense to me. >The other issue? For the author to be completely honest, every "benefit" mentioned…
> How is it different than Steam, other than the point than speculating that Microsoft would never aggressively discount games as much as Steam does now They don't allow developers to self-publish, and Valve is privately owned by a benevolent dictator who won't be prone to public investor pressure for short term quarterly profits. People trust Valve to do the right thing. Microsoft on the other hand has a history of…
This can happen to provider, and is one of the reasons why I stay away from Steam games.
Many times within the last couple years, I've been ready to purchase a game, then walked away when I saw Steam is required.
Try hard as they might, it's impossible to make those "features" sound good. This one is especially amazing: "You could re-sell your physical disc game to Gamestop or any participating outlet that opted into Microsoft’s revenue sharing system." Gee, thanks, Microsoft! It's not like those outlets will pass the cost right onto the consumer or anything (oh wait, they will). It's incredible how the Xbox team thought, "Lo…
>It's incredible how the Xbox team thought, "Look at that money over there. Let's take it!" What's next, Wal-Mart charging Ralph Lauren every time a customer comes in wearing a Polo shirt (because why should other clothing companies get free advertising in their store)? Could you explain this analogy because it makes zero sense to me. >The other issue? For the author to be completely honest, every "benefit" mentioned…
It isn't. DRM is DRM and it sucks. I mostly stay away from Steam. Multiple times, I've walked away from purchasing games when I saw they required Steam. I've never taken my current-gen consoles online.
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> I would imagine they would allow you to play parts of the game without needing to install the whole game, similar to Steam. What games on steam do that? I've literally never seen that. Unless you mean like seperatation of single and multiplayer, but those are both still rather big.
Half-Life 2 (or so i remember)