Watch any simultaneously Steam and console release you like, for a decent game that doesn't immediately crash in value everywhere because it stinks. Watch the prices over the course of the first six months. Watch them both start out at $60, but watch the Steam price come down first, and more often. It's the usual pattern.
Watch Steam have their sales where something goes on sale for $5 or $10 while the consoles are still charging $25 on average.
I played Mass Effect 2 for $5 on the PC, when it was still ~20$ on the consoles. At that price, I don't care that I can't sell it. The abstract ethical arguments still theoretically apply, but in practice it's not worth worrying about. That's already approximately the delta between buying and selling used anyhow.
Based on history, Microsoft isn't going to work this way. For some reason, Steam is still the only digital retailer that has figured out the true supply/demand relationship and tweaked the price curves to maximize their returns, based an a rational model of the economy. Almost everyone else would seem to rather sell nothing at $20 than sell lots at $5.
(Nintendo's even worse than Microsoft at this, actually. EA's Origin seems to have at least partially absorbed this lesson. What's really weird to me is that rationally, the lower prices almost certainly maximize revenue; holding on to higher prices is probably based more in politics than economics.)
They also don't have to compete with the scariest publisher of them all, bittorrent; who sells everything for $0.
Console games are probably priced quite well to maximize marginal revenue. I know people who will drop $40 on a console game but who would not be willing to spend $20 on the same game for PC simply because there is a pirate version available.
You can't have a purely digital content item and not have it bind itself to some kind of purchaser. Why? Because then you'll have one person buying the item and distributing it for every family and friend out there. You might then try to argue that physical items like books and DVDs are subject to this exploitation. Obviously the physicality of the items make them unfit for mass sharing. It takes a lot of time to swap around a single book or DVD. It takes 5 seconds to whip up a dropbox link to my giant email list.
Aside from the above, Steam started off with a "all sales are final and permanently tied to the account purchaser" model. No one expects to be able to buy a game on Steam and then share it with a friend.
Well, the exceptions are not that exceptional. Do you buy digital music that you cannot lend? Are you not able to lend a game purchased on gog without paying? All the ebooks I bought I share with my family (and I have the legal right to do so, admittedly, I live in a country where DRMed ebooks are not the only solution).
Valve is a small company (compared to the publishers/sony/MS) that has track record of amazing games and a company that groks gaming and gamers. While Steam is indeed some form of weak DRM the value the platform adds is substantial. Steam workshop and other mod tools are important.
Also while you are on a PC you control what steam can do and not the other way around.
MS lack good will with PC gamers (the communities overlap). They deliberately stagnate the platform, GFWL was terrible ...
Even pre-owned/discounted console games cost substantially more than this unless the game is very old or unpopular.
If you buy the HalfLife2 orange box ulimate set and already own HalfLife2. Then you can give your old HL2 copy to a friend for free.
One of the concerns is that people like microsoft wouldn't bother doing the above.
It basic customer protection and it is good if you have healthy secondary market. There should be some basics customer rights that should not be able to be waivered and the licence seller should not be allowed to offer less.
Except for a few major titles, most stuff gets discounted eventually, sometimes even substantially. This leads to decisions of buying it now for a lot or half off later. Console games take forever to get discounted by comparison.
Combine with a locked up marketplace and it's bad aspects of both worlds: Full price downloads with no disk sharing.
So, either stop complaining about physical distribution, or else stop complaining about being able to share freely, or get off your couch and figure out a way to get both and sell it to these companies.
* Customer purchase a licence to download and play a game, linked to an account
* Licences can be given or traded with other account holders (subject to a reasonable time-limit)
* Machine has to phone home in order to complete trade.
That would be a completely fair system for all parties involved. But publishers don't want a system that is completely fair for all parties involved.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...
> Kindle books can be loaned to another reader for a period of 14 days. The borrower does not need to own a Kindle -- Kindle books can also be read using our free Kindle reading applications for PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android devices. Not all books are lendable -- it is up to the publisher or rights holder to determine which titles are eligible for lending. The lender will not be able to read the book during the loan period. Books can only be loaned once, and subscription content is not currently available for lending
I prefer physical products because you "own" it. You can share it, you can watch it when/where/how you want and you can resale it. The day Microsoft will decide that theirs servers for the Xbox One are too expansive (like all the old Halo multiplayer server), you will lose all your right on theses games.
I only use digital distribution when they are cheap enough (Steam and Netflix).
I don't deny the use case you provide (certainly, I'm a fan; I don't care much about digital), but the point is that Microsoft stands to gain a lot from this. The 1% backlash won't make a dent in the potential profit upside.
I'd pay a relatively hefty monthly subscription fee to have unlimited access to an entire library of games.
When people talk about wanting to revolutionize distribution, they mean take advantage of all the efficiency and convenience technology enables. Some would just like to pirate everything, but not everyone. No one means they want to find ways to tweak traditional distribution models to make them even worse.
Let's say MS figures out how to let us share games, but it requires a central licensing authority (MS) to negotiate the transactions. Would you not agree the same geeks arguing the lack of sharing now will be the same ones to pick at that system too? It's a moving target, and doesn't do a bit of good for the stakeholders. I'd expect to not see this sort of system to play out.
As long as the used/borrowed copy still plays fine without any fees when the disc is in the tray, I don't see any difference to the console status quo.
Used/borrowed copies wouldn't get the play-without-the-disc feature (for free). But that doesn't even rate as a 'bummer'. That's just a logical, necessary architectural decision.
Otherwise a group of friends would just buy 1 copy of a game, pass it around installing it and then everyone would be able to play without the disc needing to be present. They could even sell the physical disc to Gamestop when they were done and still all be able to play the game.
Obviously, no publisher would sign up for that. So you get account-binding on install. Again, as long as having the disc exempts you from the fee, we're not talking about an experience any different from today. And it would still be more consumer-friendly than purely digital services like Google Play, Steam, iTunes, Origin, etc.
Without media, I generally agree: no one expects to be able to loan your electronic copy of a game to a friend, or to resell it.
However, the concern is that this will apply for physical media: it will require installation onto your box and be associated with your X-Box Live account. You can take it to a friend's house to play, if you sign into your account, but you can't leave it there unless you let him stay on your account.
If it accepts "disc is in the slot" as its "DRM," that would be totally fine. The concern is that it won't do that. Which sucks. If you are selling physical media for a console, the license needs to move with the media.
It sounds like it's not simply a matter of forcing the borrower to play from the disc directly, and the disc is merely a delivery mechanism for a DRM download. (I'm taking the article's word on this; seems like Microsoft is being deliberately vague on the actual mechanics.)
In order for someone play a disc that they have purchased on someone else's console, the owner will need to sign into their Xbox LIVE account in order to play the game. Even if the owner leaves the disk with his or her buddy, they will not be able to play it without either a) signing in with the owner's XBL account or b) paying full retail price for the title.
That's what CD keys are for, so unless they bring that to consoles the person who owns the disk owns the game.
With online DRM (like, I suppose, Xbox has) it should be only one running instance at a time per bought copy. Which sounds perfectly reasonable. I suspect there are some "offline mode" workarounds, but this is essentially the same as just "pirating" the game.
All this boils down to a question on whenever lending, trading or gifting an "used" game is legal. If law considers so, then removal of an option to give the game away is a straight violation of consumer's rights.
e.g. If at this point in time, you're playing the best Nintendo DS and PS3 games released from 2006-2011, every single one will cost peanuts on eBay or Amazon marketplace.
That makes my gaming experiences very different from someone playing 2560xwhatever with all settings on Ultra. Maybe I don't know what I'm missing. But I tend to emphasize gameplay over shinies.
Along those lines, Monaco is fabulous.
;)
Still though, for popular multi-player games there are still many active servers/players.
Also, relevant XKCD: http://www.xkcd.com/606/
It's like a politician deliberately following the mantra of "if you can't convince them, confuse them".
They haven't been clear, but even if they were clear, the "facts" of how it works will remain uncertain, simply because it's remote controlled DRM and that's what DRM does.
This shitstorm surrounded the PS4 event. There are zero reasons this should catch Microsoft by surprise, so I can only assume this confusion is by design, since anything else would imply re-imagining our understanding of incompetence.
If the service provider drops support, goes out of business, or decides to ban you, you lose an enormous investment.
I've known for at least three years that I would completely drop out of the console market after the PS3/360/Wii generation. Things are just getting too crappy. Maybe I'll go support Ouya instead.
But Consoles have historically been well removed from the DRM wars. It is extremely frightening to me to see DRM enter a mainstream console. If the PS4 follows suite, I'm probably gonna have to boycott both systems and stick with the WiiU.
There's a reason they trust you:
1. You are after older games, so you are probably older, and less likely to be a thief. (And even less likely to write screeds about how you aren't really stealing it.)
2. The games have already gone through the peak of their popularity cycle, so they have already captured the bulk of their revenue. Anything now is just a bonus.
3. The price is so low that they don't lose much to piracy even if someone steals it.
I haven't even made it all the way through the last bunch of things I got from GoG, but when I do I'm headed right back there to get some more stuff.
Because there are so few modded consoles, though, the console game market works much better. You can buy a game, lend it around, borrow it from Blockbuster or Gamefly, or sell it. If you don't have the disk, you generally can't play. (Yes, there are people who have defeated this. They are an incredible minority that aren't worth paying attention to.)
They are taking away that option. I fully understand why publishers of PC games try to lock stuff down, despite the very best peer-reviewed research being published on torrentfreak saying they shouldn't. [2] But for consoles I must object.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
[2] This was sarcasm.
PC: Oh, the piracy is too much we need stronger DRM.
Console: We control the entire chain, we need stronger DRM to maintain that control.
cite: http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/05/xbox-one-analysis/ But what if a second person simply wanted to put the disc in and play the game without installing – and without paying extra? In other words, what happens to our traditional concept of a “used game”? This is a question for which Microsoft did not yet have an answer, and is surely something that game buyers (as well as renters and lenders) will want to know. (Update: Microsoft called Wired after this story was originally published to say that the company did have a plan for used games, and that further details were forthcoming.)
So taking games around to other people's houses? Or used games? Undefined. Not evil, not announced. They might be doing something bad, but this is shit-stirring, and nothing more.
But of course the nice option is rarely taken by anyone.
That said, this wrinkle isn't my biggest gripe with the new or even current xbox -- peer hosting is.
If I install a game on my console and then lend the disk to my friend and he installs it on his, how will the game know it has already been installed on another console?
If you go with an always online model then you will be able to implement a formal game lending system into the console itself.
[1] http://games.on.net/2013/05/microsoft-reveals-the-xbox-one-m...
My mom taught me to share before I was old enough to walk. No government or corporation in the world is going to change my opinion of it.
I will be going out of my way to make sure I do not buy anything produced by Microsoft ever again, operating systems, consoles, software, etc. We are losing control of our computers. These computers will become a part of us one day, we must preserve our ownership of the metal on up through the software to the right to own and use the software itself. This is important.
I fear the day when we are all just extensions of the mothership, when the system decides you are out of line, the human slaves are simply a "thin client", they just press a button, and your entire life folds up and disappears, and resources are administered to another area. Buyers are losing their RIGHTS here. It's boiling a frog slowly. Soon we won't be able to own anything.
http://www.gamespot.com/news/microsoft-clarifies-xbox-one-us...
If its write once media, how are they going to implement this. Will you have to type in a DRM KEY and get it verified via a MS server (or hold the box up to the kinect camera to read it? (I should patent that....))
seems odd.
