It's true, if you activate a game on steam you don't own it. The EU recently ruled in favour of consumers being able to sell on digital products. Is steam worried? Not really, because according to their TOS you're leasing games from them for a one time fee.
I'm fine with that though as long as I'm buying their games at the sale prices. I refuse to drop full rrp for a product I don't own.
I don't really even mind dropping full retail on a digital-only game if I'm excited enough about the game. I've never sold a game to Gamestop or wherever and there are very few games that I have any strong desire to re-play that've been released in recent years. I'd like to be able to loan steam games to a friend, but I'm basically alright with paying $50 or whatever for 10-40 hours of entertainment and then being done with it. It's cheaper than seeing an equivalent number of hours' worth of movies unless I rent them.
I just find it silly to pretend that there's no difference. If digital-only is the way of the future then fine, but I'd almost rather pay to 'rent' the games with a specified renewal period instead of 'buying' them and keeping them until some nebulous point in the future when they just go away.
It's kind of a shame, though, that eventually entire generations of video games will just be gone after the consoles cycle or the companies go bust or whatever. Kids of the PS5 (or whatever) era will never be able to show their great-grandkids what gaming was like 'in their day', before smell-o-vision games, except I guess through the future equivalent of youtube gameplay videos.
I doubt it to be honest. Remakes and re-releases are popular now, it's a relitivly cheap way from publishers to get another game out without having to spend dev hours making one.
I see no reason why 30 years from now I won't be able to download FFXV special re-release edition for my PS7 or whatever.
Remakes and re-releases of popular old games are popular now. I doubt the same is true of unpopular games. So if you wanted to show them an example of just how bad the bad old days were, you might be out of luck. Or if you just wanted to show them your favorite cult classic, there's a reasonable chance you'd out of luck.
You will never ever see sales akin to the awesome steam sales, or reactive game pricing that you see on steam, so long as there is a glut of retail discs across the country that major retailers paid wholesale pricing on with the assumption that they would sell for 60 bucks a pop.
All the stuff people like about steam and don't trust to happen on consoles cannot happen on consoles until the used game market and the majority of the physical media market is nuked from orbit. Full stop. This is the special sauce that let's Steam get away with selling games for 30 bucks over a holiday weekend and bring the price back up to 50 afterwards, or bundle 30 iD games for 20 bucks, or whatever.
Because the publishers get a slice every. single. time.
And for the most part they love it. And gamers love it. And we can't let that happen on consoles because... reasons?
I would think because
A) You'd have to get rid of the Physical and Used disc markets on consoles, which is hazardous as long as Broadband kind of remains in the sucky-ass situation it's in right now. Not to mention the fact as long as there's a physical market, people will feel ripped off if you infringe their ability to resell those discs or get used copies.
There's no guarantee that Microsoft, for example will do what Steam does. There's probably an argument that could be made that the push for the massive Steam sales were a result of a more consumer-friendly culture within Valve.
Do Sony or MS do Steamlike sales on PSN/XBLA-only titles that aren't effected by the physical disc market?
And your house could catch fire and all of your physical copies will be lost forever, wheras a digital distribution model will not only protect the games themselves by allowing you to download them again on your new, not burned computer... you also will likely still have your save games.
Or a burglar could come in and steal your shit while you are on vacation.
It is significantly more statistically likely that your house will go up in flames or you get robbed than Sony or Microsoft get out of the gaming business in the next 10-20 years.
And because I own the physical media, I can take steps to prevent these cases from happening. Offsite backups are damn near trivial these days and fireproof safes are a thing everyone should have for at least some things. In theory you could also backup physical media, but that's on much dicier legal footing.
There is nothing you can do to protect yourself from EA, Microsoft, Sony, or Valve being unable to keep their servers going for legal reasons.
You are playing to an extreme fringe here now.
the number of people who lock their xboxes and game collections in fireproof safes? Who have multi-terabyte backup solutions at home to handle their game collections, and the necessary hacking to let the game console play said backups?
Versus everyone who uses a digital distribution system gaining the security and benefits of having the right to download at any time, to any device their profile is active on.
Explain to me how this is relevant to avoiding the risk that comes with not owning your games again? That risk is the punishment that Deebaser was claiming did not exist back when I replied to this
Ultimately I am against the idea that in order the save the industry, consumers must be punished.
Only a small subset of consumers is being "punished", the tilapia tier. Also, as someone who has moved a few times, physical media is dumb, wasteful, and inconvenient. I used to have boxes and boxes of CD/DVD/BluRay, but now I have less than 10. Good fucking riddance.
There's risk involved in not owning your games that you can do nothing about reducing. You can either accept that level of risk and continue renting, or refuse to accept it and stop. But either way, you don't get to pretend it's not there and you don't get to pretend that you own your games when they're coming through digital distribution and your ownership isn't in the contract.
And your house could catch fire and all of your physical copies will be lost forever, wheras a digital distribution model will not only protect the games themselves by allowing you to download them again on your new, not burned computer... you also will likely still have your save games.
Or a burglar could come in and steal your shit while you are on vacation.
It is significantly more statistically likely that your house will go up in flames or you get robbed than Sony or Microsoft get out of the gaming business in the next 10-20 years.
And because I own the physical media, I can take steps to prevent these cases from happening. Offsite backups are damn near trivial these days and fireproof safes are a thing everyone should have for at least some things. In theory you could also backup physical media, but that's on much dicier legal footing.
There is nothing you can do to protect yourself from EA, Microsoft, Sony, or Valve being unable to keep their servers going for legal reasons.
You are playing to an extreme fringe here now.
the number of people who lock their xboxes and game collections in fireproof safes? Who have multi-terabyte backup solutions at home to handle their game collections, and the necessary hacking to let the game console play said backups?
Versus everyone who uses a digital distribution system gaining the security and benefits of having the right to download at any time, to any device their profile is active on.
Were it not for Gamestop and luddites, this generation could have been awesome from a pricing and an accessibility level.
What's going to be funny is if Valve rolls out with a Steambox, and it becomes known as the easy to use console that routinely puts AAA games for sale at 50-75% off and has an ocean of great indy titles, and never makes it hard to find old games, and the market responds by a big reduction of the marketshare of Sony and Microsoft over a few years.
I'm curious how willing game publishers will be to let Steam offer their games at 75% off if Steam starts to account for a considerable fraction of their overall game sales. If the Steambox dominates the console landscape (which I'm honestly not sure about... the decision to base it on Linux is kind of weird, given that it means you're basically asking developers to port to your nominally 'just a PC on the TV' console as a 4th platform in addition to xbox, playstation, and windows PC) it's going to mean that publishers don't have a steady stream of slowly declining in price physical console game sales to shore up the deep discounts offered on Steam.
I'm sure there's a balance to be struck there, between the lack of used games cutting into their sales and the larger number of purchases at temporarily lower price points... but if Steam did win the console war at some point, I'd be willing to bet that the end result is fewer big-name games in the Steam sales.
And your house could catch fire and all of your physical copies will be lost forever, wheras a digital distribution model will not only protect the games themselves by allowing you to download them again on your new, not burned computer... you also will likely still have your save games.
Or a burglar could come in and steal your shit while you are on vacation.
It is significantly more statistically likely that your house will go up in flames or you get robbed than Sony or Microsoft get out of the gaming business in the next 10-20 years.
And because I own the physical media, I can take steps to prevent these cases from happening. Offsite backups are damn near trivial these days and fireproof safes are a thing everyone should have for at least some things. In theory you could also backup physical media, but that's on much dicier legal footing.
There is nothing you can do to protect yourself from EA, Microsoft, Sony, or Valve being unable to keep their servers going for legal reasons.
Maybe somebody can correct me if I'm wrong, but the majority of bestsellers on consoles these days feature heavy multiplayer components. Call of Duty is definitely not the biggest selling franchise on Xbox because people love the single-player campaign so much. People didn't buy FIFA 13 because they were thrilled to run home and play the computer over and over and over. So in that regard, there is a similar threat to the present day consumer that the primary way they enjoy playing their favorite game (I mean, a lot of the dudes I played Battlefield 3 with admitted to not even touching the single player campaign) could have the lights turned off at any moment. This doesn't seem to stop consumers from continuing to make these multiplayer-centric games the most popular titles on the console.
You're also just arguing from the baseless assumption that in the instance MS or Sony decide to switch the authentication servers off, they won't just send out a system-wide dashboard patch which eliminates the authentication routine. You're also arguing from a baseless assumption that even if they make digital licenses a necessary way to play a copy of a game in the next gen, there won't be a mechanism for one user to transfer that license to another player, or there won't be a way to activate that license on other consoles by logging in an Xbox Live ID.
You're really just arguing a position to insane extremes at this point.
Oh I feel also obliged to add that within the past 6 months Microsoft did release a freeware game (Happy Wars) which is meant to make money from in-game economy. They also just released a cross-platform multiplayer game (Skulls of the Shogun) which is meant to be playable as multiplayer against any other Windows 8 device (phones, tablets, PCs). These are the sort of things they are aggressively pursuing in this generation! It's just entirely baseless to suggest that aggressively targeting the resale market is some sort of sinister plot to fuck over the hard-working Joe Plumbers who just wanna play single player CoD until the next NASCAR race is on. Gamer habits are changing, ergo the market is changing, too.
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syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Productsregular
And this is why there should be three versions of any given game:
1) A digital Distribution copy - this will be the standard.
2) A "collectors edition" that is physical media, limited run, and isn't bound to the console / profile. Still DRM'd up the butt and can't be copied easily, but its there. They only need to run MAYBE 100,000 of these for a AAA game. The pricing is the same as this past generations new game price (50-60), and once it is sold out it is sold out. Get the game online or from the used game market then.
3) A legendary edition that is 40-50 bucks more that comes with a cloth map, a gold coin, a cat helmet and a vibrator. Make a super small run of these for the few games that justify it.
There. Used games still exist and Gamestop has a reason for being, but the damage they are able to cause is drastically mitigated, while supplying the very small percentage of gamers who want to play games but don't have internet a means of buying titles for their platform.
does this seem like an acceptable middle ground for a generation?
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
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Deebaseron my way to work in a suit and a tieAhhhh...come on fucking guyRegistered Userregular
And your house could catch fire and all of your physical copies will be lost forever, wheras a digital distribution model will not only protect the games themselves by allowing you to download them again on your new, not burned computer... you also will likely still have your save games.
Or a burglar could come in and steal your shit while you are on vacation.
It is significantly more statistically likely that your house will go up in flames or you get robbed than Sony or Microsoft get out of the gaming business in the next 10-20 years.
And because I own the physical media, I can take steps to prevent these cases from happening. Offsite backups are damn near trivial these days and fireproof safes are a thing everyone should have for at least some things. In theory you could also backup physical media, but that's on much dicier legal footing.
There is nothing you can do to protect yourself from EA, Microsoft, Sony, or Valve being unable to keep their servers going for legal reasons.
You are playing to an extreme fringe here now.
the number of people who lock their xboxes and game collections in fireproof safes? Who have multi-terabyte backup solutions at home to handle their game collections, and the necessary hacking to let the game console play said backups?
Versus everyone who uses a digital distribution system gaining the security and benefits of having the right to download at any time, to any device their profile is active on.
Were it not for Gamestop and luddites, this generation could have been awesome from a pricing and an accessibility level.
What's going to be funny is if Valve rolls out with a Steambox, and it becomes known as the easy to use console that routinely puts AAA games for sale at 50-75% off and has an ocean of great indy titles, and never makes it hard to find old games, and the market responds by a big reduction of the marketshare of Sony and Microsoft over a few years.
I'm curious how willing game publishers will be to let Steam offer their games at 75% off if Steam starts to account for a considerable fraction of their overall game sales. If the Steambox dominates the console landscape (which I'm honestly not sure about... the decision to base it on Linux is kind of weird, given that it means you're basically asking developers to port to your nominally 'just a PC on the TV' console as a 4th platform in addition to xbox, playstation, and windows PC) it's going to mean that publishers don't have a steady stream of slowly declining in price physical console game sales to shore up the deep discounts offered on Steam.
I'm sure there's a balance to be struck there, between the lack of used games cutting into their sales and the larger number of purchases at temporarily lower price points... but if Steam did win the console war at some point, I'd be willing to bet that the end result is fewer big-name games in the Steam sales.
I'd imagine they'd be pretty willing as the marginal cost will be pretty much zero.
Well, if we see something that's better than the way things work now, for pretty much everyone involved, doesn't it make sense to just move to that system full sail instead of painfully pounding away at the current system till it looks kinda similar to the better system you're driving for?
It's like healthcare. Democrats would love to adopt a single payer universal healthcare system. That's what we wanted during health reform. Instead of getting that, we're slowly hacking away at the current system, hopeful that someday we can get it to look like that. It's painful, and stupid, and we only do this this way to please those who are just too damned scared of change to realize it would be better for them in the long run.
Or in the case of health care, we do it because of republicans.
This is based on the premise that it is better for all.
No one has provided a convincing argument that it would be and we already know definitively that things that are currently important to a whole bunch of console gaming consumers would be stripped away.
There is absolutely no guarantee that this would be better for everyone.
Do you use steam?
How many steam games do you own?
How many did you buy at deep discounts because the publishers ran awesome sales?
Do you have an iPhone or an android device?
How many games do you own for that?
Do you take advantage of the nearly weekly awesome sales that the publishers are able to do?
Do you think GameStop would be upset if the game they spent 40 bucks to put on their shelf for 60 was being sold half off for the weekend online? Don't you think they would lobby against something so consumer friendly in their own best interest?
Every time a system like this is enacted it's pros far outweigh the cons.
Have you missed the point where multiple people have said that, given the right price point, they're fully willing to throw away their ability to resell a game?
You keep mentioning Steam, iphone, android, ect. Pick a platform that doesn't routinely have <=$10 games, and you might have a point.
And this is what the argument is. That given the ability to have those sorts of sales without being beholden to Gamestop or other retailers, you would see those sorts of sales on the consoles. Every piece of evidence supports this theory. The Wii E-shop does it, Origin does it. Amazon does it. Steam does it. It happens on every platform where you can buy a game for the PC.
That's the point.
This is drinking some hefty kool-aid if you honestly believe that the only thing stopping Microsoft and Sony from charging less for games is that dastardly gamestop. Seriously, they're going to pocket the difference and to believe otherwise absent anything proving otherwise is naive as shit.
The publishers don't like you, they are not your friends, you are a source of profit to them period. Valve, Apple, and Android (and Origin) have sales because they're competing with piracy, not other platforms.
override367 on
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syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Productsregular
It's not gamestop alone.
It is gamestop, best buy, wal mart, and everyone else who sells these games.
These companies place orders in the tens or hundreds of thousands for a title they expect to sell for 60 bucks.
How pissed would YOU be if you spent 40 dollars per unit on 25,000 units only to have that company two weeks down the road price the digital copy at 29.99 for a weekend? The physical copies are an anchor keeping them from being flexible without hurting business relationships.
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
You will never ever see sales akin to the awesome steam sales, or reactive game pricing that you see on steam, so long as there is a glut of retail discs across the country that major retailers paid wholesale pricing on with the assumption that they would sell for 60 bucks a pop.
All the stuff people like about steam and don't trust to happen on consoles cannot happen on consoles until the used game market and the majority of the physical media market is nuked from orbit. Full stop. This is the special sauce that let's Steam get away with selling games for 30 bucks over a holiday weekend and bring the price back up to 50 afterwards, or bundle 30 iD games for 20 bucks, or whatever.
Because the publishers get a slice every. single. time.
And for the most part they love it. And gamers love it. And we can't let that happen on consoles because... reasons?
The things holding this back on consoles:
1. Consumers throwing a fit about losing used games
2. Bandwidth speeds not being high enough (seems to work fine for steam though)
3. Crushing paranoia from gamers ("it's totally not going to be BC next gen", "they're not going to have those sales, they're just greedy")
The major point people don't seem to understand is Every Single Time the publishers get to quickly do sales and set their own prices, they follow the Steam model. No matter what the platform is. The publishers aren't holding up game prices from being more like steam, the damned retailers are.
You forgot:
4. The demographics of the console market are very, very different from the demographics of the Steam market. How many Steam users do you think have shitty network connections or let their 6 year old kids play on their accounts?
The fact that the Steam model would work great for you personally does not mean it would work well for everyone who owns a console.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
Do Sony or MS do Steamlike sales on PSN/XBLA-only titles that aren't effected by the physical disc market?
I've said this in this thread. On Tuesday, Microsoft had a one day XBL sale of Games On Demand versions of Halo 3, Halo Reach, and Halo ODST for $9.99 and Halo 4 (the current one) was $39.99. Yesterday they had three Assassin's Creed titles for $9.99, and a host of other games for $2.99 or $4.99 (I recognized Bioshock, Virtua Fighter 5, and a Tomb Raider game that I eyed). They regularly feature time-based discounts on XBLA titles, or temporarily they reduce the point cost on a game's entire DLC inventory. I've also been slowly spending through 1600 MS points I was awarded for taking part in an offer last summer where if you purchased 4 out of 6 special "Summer of XBLA" games, you got 1600 points. They are already doing dynamic pricing via their digital marketplace, and yes -- they're already doing it on games which you would surely find in a Gamestop used games rack.
I don't use PSN, but I've heard that if you're a subscriber to PSN+ they frequently give away free games (generally older ones that weren't top-sellers, but often still quality) so yes, Sony is also finding ways to deliver digital content to their core subscribers.
It's happening now. It really makes much more sense to suggest it would be a positive trend that continues into the next generation a la Steam than it is to suggest that they're just going to lock the price point in at $60 and tell all the poor people to go fuck themselves. People who don't want to go online with their consoles? Yeah, they'll probably be left shopping at flea markets. But I think it's pretty asinine to suggest the future of gaming is offline anyway.
And your house could catch fire and all of your physical copies will be lost forever, wheras a digital distribution model will not only protect the games themselves by allowing you to download them again on your new, not burned computer... you also will likely still have your save games.
Or a burglar could come in and steal your shit while you are on vacation.
It is significantly more statistically likely that your house will go up in flames or you get robbed than Sony or Microsoft get out of the gaming business in the next 10-20 years.
And because I own the physical media, I can take steps to prevent these cases from happening. Offsite backups are damn near trivial these days and fireproof safes are a thing everyone should have for at least some things. In theory you could also backup physical media, but that's on much dicier legal footing.
There is nothing you can do to protect yourself from EA, Microsoft, Sony, or Valve being unable to keep their servers going for legal reasons.
...This doesn't seem to stop consumers from continuing to make these multiplayer-centric games the most popular titles on the console.
A true paragraph that has nothing to do with what I was talking about.
You're also just arguing from the baseless assumption that in the instance MS or Sony decide to switch the authentication servers off, they won't just send out a system-wide dashboard patch which eliminates the authentication routine.
You're telling me that a for-profit company will simply do a nice thing for their customers out of the goodness of their heart? At a time when either a judge or their creditors may have legal control over their decisions? Really?
You're also arguing from a baseless assumption that even if they make digital licenses a necessary way to play a copy of a game in the next gen, there won't be a mechanism for one user to transfer that license to another player, or there won't be a way to activate that license on other consoles by logging in an Xbox Live ID.
Where did I argue this? Please either quote the exact post or retract this statement.
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Deebaseron my way to work in a suit and a tieAhhhh...come on fucking guyRegistered Userregular
It is gamestop, best buy, wal mart, and everyone else who sells these games.
These companies place orders in the tens or hundreds of thousands for a title they expect to sell for 60 bucks.
How pissed would YOU be if you spent 40 dollars per unit on 25,000 units only to have that company two weeks down the road price the digital copy at 29.99 for a weekend? The physical copies are an anchor keeping them from being flexible without hurting business relationships.
Yeah, it's also the reason why an iPhone costs the same amount at the Apple Store as it does at a third party retailer. People won't carry your shit if you undercut them.
It is gamestop, best buy, wal mart, and everyone else who sells these games.
These companies place orders in the tens or hundreds of thousands for a title they expect to sell for 60 bucks.
How pissed would YOU be if you spent 40 dollars per unit on 25,000 units only to have that company two weeks down the road price the digital copy at 29.99 for a weekend? The physical copies are an anchor keeping them from being flexible without hurting business relationships.
And your house could catch fire and all of your physical copies will be lost forever, wheras a digital distribution model will not only protect the games themselves by allowing you to download them again on your new, not burned computer... you also will likely still have your save games.
Or a burglar could come in and steal your shit while you are on vacation.
It is significantly more statistically likely that your house will go up in flames or you get robbed than Sony or Microsoft get out of the gaming business in the next 10-20 years.
And because I own the physical media, I can take steps to prevent these cases from happening. Offsite backups are damn near trivial these days and fireproof safes are a thing everyone should have for at least some things. In theory you could also backup physical media, but that's on much dicier legal footing.
There is nothing you can do to protect yourself from EA, Microsoft, Sony, or Valve being unable to keep their servers going for legal reasons.
Except you can't really offsite backup console games. At least not legally. And if you're going that route you can "offsite" Steam games less onerously.
You will never ever see sales akin to the awesome steam sales, or reactive game pricing that you see on steam, so long as there is a glut of retail discs across the country that major retailers paid wholesale pricing on with the assumption that they would sell for 60 bucks a pop.
All the stuff people like about steam and don't trust to happen on consoles cannot happen on consoles until the used game market and the majority of the physical media market is nuked from orbit. Full stop. This is the special sauce that let's Steam get away with selling games for 30 bucks over a holiday weekend and bring the price back up to 50 afterwards, or bundle 30 iD games for 20 bucks, or whatever.
Because the publishers get a slice every. single. time.
And for the most part they love it. And gamers love it. And we can't let that happen on consoles because... reasons?
The things holding this back on consoles:
1. Consumers throwing a fit about losing used games
2. Bandwidth speeds not being high enough (seems to work fine for steam though)
3. Crushing paranoia from gamers ("it's totally not going to be BC next gen", "they're not going to have those sales, they're just greedy")
The major point people don't seem to understand is Every Single Time the publishers get to quickly do sales and set their own prices, they follow the Steam model. No matter what the platform is. The publishers aren't holding up game prices from being more like steam, the damned retailers are.
You forgot:
4. The demographics of the console market are very, very different from the demographics of the Steam market. How many Steam users do you think have shitty network connections or let their 6 year old kids play on their accounts?
The fact that the Steam model would work great for you personally does not mean it would work well for everyone who owns a console.
But the bad news here is that it seems the console manufacturers are primarily interested in serving the online customer base. Without knowing any sort of real market research, I'd be willing to wager that's because the online customers realize a much greater return for the publishers/developers than the offline ones, which is why they probably aren't particularly sweating losing the offline segment.
Like I said, CoD doesn't break sales records every Christmas because of the single player campaign. This year's Madden ad campaign was based entirely around dudes talking shit to each other on headsets from couches in their respective homes. FIFA 13 isn't ruling the sports game market because playing the computer is endlessly entertaining.
And if you're a budget minded game player who doesn't want to engage in multiplayer games? Well, a large # of my favorite titles from this generation were XBLA offerings, all ~$15 as their first day pricing, and I don't think I've even played 5% of what they have available there. Just ... yeah ... gaming is changing. Whatever worked for the SNES isn't going to work for the next generation. That's just the facts.
And this is why there should be three versions of any given game:
1) A digital Distribution copy - this will be the standard.
2) A "collectors edition" that is physical media, limited run, and isn't bound to the console / profile. Still DRM'd up the butt and can't be copied easily, but its there. They only need to run MAYBE 100,000 of these for a AAA game. The pricing is the same as this past generations new game price (50-60), and once it is sold out it is sold out. Get the game online or from the used game market then.
3) A legendary edition that is 40-50 bucks more that comes with a cloth map, a gold coin, a cat helmet and a vibrator. Make a super small run of these for the few games that justify it.
There. Used games still exist and Gamestop has a reason for being, but the damage they are able to cause is drastically mitigated, while supplying the very small percentage of gamers who want to play games but don't have internet a means of buying titles for their platform.
does this seem like an acceptable middle ground for a generation?
I think we're more likely to see Steam (or DD distribution methods) offer the option of physical media. You have a bandwidth cap? Buy your game online. Instead of 'Download and Install' you pay $5-10 and they will mail you in the next X days a DVD / USB drive / SD card that contains your 5 gig digital download. Plug it in, install it to your account, grab your patches, and good to go.
That covers 90% of the legitimate bitching that '1 game kills my bandwidth' or 'I still have dialup and don't want to wait a month to download a game'.
It's really no different than your #2 model, since it's going to require the same online authentication.
As for not being able to use your old games because the servers are down? That already happens. I've got at least several MMOs from the early 2000's (Motor City Online, Earth & Beyond, City of Heroes) where the DVD on the shelf isn't worth the plastic it's printed on. It's a fact of life...
I know I've been able to transfer Impulse and Amazon keys to Steam, and I would assume those transfers go both ways - especially in the incredibly unlikely event that Steam were to ever go down. Not that I think that would ever happen...
In a worst-case scenario, you are going to see a game that loses it's online authentication servers and no patch is released to strip it cracked or available on Abandonware sites. My understanding - and I'm not a lawyer - is that if you actually purchased a game, it's legal to run a cracked version or version you obtained from elsewhere. If we see a rash of games being 'bricked' due to lack of authentication servers, I'm sure that would get hashed out pretty quickly.
You will never ever see sales akin to the awesome steam sales, or reactive game pricing that you see on steam, so long as there is a glut of retail discs across the country that major retailers paid wholesale pricing on with the assumption that they would sell for 60 bucks a pop.
All the stuff people like about steam and don't trust to happen on consoles cannot happen on consoles until the used game market and the majority of the physical media market is nuked from orbit. Full stop. This is the special sauce that let's Steam get away with selling games for 30 bucks over a holiday weekend and bring the price back up to 50 afterwards, or bundle 30 iD games for 20 bucks, or whatever.
Because the publishers get a slice every. single. time.
And for the most part they love it. And gamers love it. And we can't let that happen on consoles because... reasons?
The things holding this back on consoles:
1. Consumers throwing a fit about losing used games
2. Bandwidth speeds not being high enough (seems to work fine for steam though)
3. Crushing paranoia from gamers ("it's totally not going to be BC next gen", "they're not going to have those sales, they're just greedy")
The major point people don't seem to understand is Every Single Time the publishers get to quickly do sales and set their own prices, they follow the Steam model. No matter what the platform is. The publishers aren't holding up game prices from being more like steam, the damned retailers are.
You forgot:
4. The demographics of the console market are very, very different from the demographics of the Steam market. How many Steam users do you think have shitty network connections or let their 6 year old kids play on their accounts?
The fact that the Steam model would work great for you personally does not mean it would work well for everyone who owns a console.
But the bad news here is that it seems the console manufacturers are primarily interested in serving the online customer base. Without knowing any sort of real market research, I'd be willing to wager that's because the online customers realize a much greater return for the publishers/developers than the offline ones, which is why they probably aren't particularly sweating losing the offline segment.
Like I said, CoD doesn't break sales records every Christmas because of the single player campaign. This year's Madden ad campaign was based entirely around dudes talking shit to each other on headsets from couches in their respective homes. FIFA 13 isn't ruling the sports game market because playing the computer is endlessly entertaining.
And if you're a budget minded game player who doesn't want to engage in multiplayer games? Well, a large # of my favorite titles from this generation were XBLA offerings, all ~$15 as their first day pricing, and I don't think I've even played 5% of what they have available there. Just ... yeah ... gaming is changing. Whatever worked for the SNES isn't going to work for the next generation. That's just the facts.
30-40% of call of duty players have never played the multiplayer, even once
Edit: 20% of battlefield 3 players played singleplayer only, and that game is pretty much all multiplayer!
override367 on
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syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Productsregular
And this is why there should be three versions of any given game:
1) A digital Distribution copy - this will be the standard.
2) A "collectors edition" that is physical media, limited run, and isn't bound to the console / profile. Still DRM'd up the butt and can't be copied easily, but its there. They only need to run MAYBE 100,000 of these for a AAA game. The pricing is the same as this past generations new game price (50-60), and once it is sold out it is sold out. Get the game online or from the used game market then.
3) A legendary edition that is 40-50 bucks more that comes with a cloth map, a gold coin, a cat helmet and a vibrator. Make a super small run of these for the few games that justify it.
There. Used games still exist and Gamestop has a reason for being, but the damage they are able to cause is drastically mitigated, while supplying the very small percentage of gamers who want to play games but don't have internet a means of buying titles for their platform.
does this seem like an acceptable middle ground for a generation?
I think we're more likely to see Steam (or DD distribution methods) offer the option of physical media. You have a bandwidth cap? Buy your game online. Instead of 'Download and Install' you pay $5-10 and they will mail you in the next X days a DVD / USB drive / SD card that contains your 5 gig digital download. Plug it in, install it to your account, grab your patches, and good to go.
That covers 90% of the legitimate bitching that '1 game kills my bandwidth' or 'I still have dialup and don't want to wait a month to download a game'.
It's really no different than your #2 model, since it's going to require the same online authentication.
As for not being able to use your old games because the servers are down? That already happens. I've got at least several MMOs from the early 2000's (Motor City Online, Earth & Beyond, City of Heroes) where the DVD on the shelf isn't worth the plastic it's printed on. It's a fact of life...
I know I've been able to transfer Impulse and Amazon keys to Steam, and I would assume those transfers go both ways - especially in the incredibly unlikely event that Steam were to ever go down. Not that I think that would ever happen...
In a worst-case scenario, you are going to see a game that loses it's online authentication servers and no patch is released to strip it cracked or available on Abandonware sites. My understanding - and I'm not a lawyer - is that if you actually purchased a game, it's legal to run a cracked version or version you obtained from elsewhere. If we see a rash of games being 'bricked' due to lack of authentication servers, I'm sure that would get hashed out pretty quickly.
Actually, I love that option - buy a copy of the game online and have it mailed to you, ready to be installed on your console? Perfect.
Also, have the delivery media contain a writeable sector that houses your profile and your console ID, so you can play the game offline, or bring the game over to your friends' internet-connected house if you want to play it there.
syndalis on
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
You will never ever see sales akin to the awesome steam sales, or reactive game pricing that you see on steam, so long as there is a glut of retail discs across the country that major retailers paid wholesale pricing on with the assumption that they would sell for 60 bucks a pop.
All the stuff people like about steam and don't trust to happen on consoles cannot happen on consoles until the used game market and the majority of the physical media market is nuked from orbit. Full stop. This is the special sauce that let's Steam get away with selling games for 30 bucks over a holiday weekend and bring the price back up to 50 afterwards, or bundle 30 iD games for 20 bucks, or whatever.
Because the publishers get a slice every. single. time.
And for the most part they love it. And gamers love it. And we can't let that happen on consoles because... reasons?
The things holding this back on consoles:
1. Consumers throwing a fit about losing used games
2. Bandwidth speeds not being high enough (seems to work fine for steam though)
3. Crushing paranoia from gamers ("it's totally not going to be BC next gen", "they're not going to have those sales, they're just greedy")
The major point people don't seem to understand is Every Single Time the publishers get to quickly do sales and set their own prices, they follow the Steam model. No matter what the platform is. The publishers aren't holding up game prices from being more like steam, the damned retailers are.
You forgot:
4. The demographics of the console market are very, very different from the demographics of the Steam market. How many Steam users do you think have shitty network connections or let their 6 year old kids play on their accounts?
The fact that the Steam model would work great for you personally does not mean it would work well for everyone who owns a console.
But the bad news here is that it seems the console manufacturers are primarily interested in serving the online customer base. Without knowing any sort of real market research, I'd be willing to wager that's because the online customers realize a much greater return for the publishers/developers than the offline ones, which is why they probably aren't particularly sweating losing the offline segment.
Like I said, CoD doesn't break sales records every Christmas because of the single player campaign. This year's Madden ad campaign was based entirely around dudes talking shit to each other on headsets from couches in their respective homes. FIFA 13 isn't ruling the sports game market because playing the computer is endlessly entertaining.
And if you're a budget minded game player who doesn't want to engage in multiplayer games? Well, a large # of my favorite titles from this generation were XBLA offerings, all ~$15 as their first day pricing, and I don't think I've even played 5% of what they have available there. Just ... yeah ... gaming is changing. Whatever worked for the SNES isn't going to work for the next generation. That's just the facts.
30-40% of call of duty players have never played the multiplayer, even once
Edit: 20% of battlefield 3 players played singleplayer only, and that game is pretty much all multiplayer!
Do you have a source for that? I'd be curious.
And even if that is the case, it definitely seems the content producers are saying "we don't care about that 30-40%." Especially since I'd be willing to guess that the trend since the first CoD title release is that the # of offline-only players has been decreasing with each iteration.
edit: and I wouldn't be surprised one bit to find out that the offline-only players are also the most frequent users of trade-ins and used game discounts, which again we know the publishers aren't particularly interested in serving.
And this is why there should be three versions of any given game:
1) A digital Distribution copy - this will be the standard.
2) A "collectors edition" that is physical media, limited run, and isn't bound to the console / profile. Still DRM'd up the butt and can't be copied easily, but its there. They only need to run MAYBE 100,000 of these for a AAA game. The pricing is the same as this past generations new game price (50-60), and once it is sold out it is sold out. Get the game online or from the used game market then.
3) A legendary edition that is 40-50 bucks more that comes with a cloth map, a gold coin, a cat helmet and a vibrator. Make a super small run of these for the few games that justify it.
There. Used games still exist and Gamestop has a reason for being, but the damage they are able to cause is drastically mitigated, while supplying the very small percentage of gamers who want to play games but don't have internet a means of buying titles for their platform.
does this seem like an acceptable middle ground for a generation?
In a worst-case scenario, you are going to see a game that loses it's online authentication servers and no patch is released to strip it cracked or available on Abandonware sites. My understanding - and I'm not a lawyer - is that if you actually purchased a game, it's legal to run a cracked version or version you obtained from elsewhere. If we see a rash of games being 'bricked' due to lack of authentication servers, I'm sure that would get hashed out pretty quickly.
That is not the case. Bare minimum, you need to circumvent some copy protection method and then you run afoul of the DMCA. Abandonware is not legal (although it gets its name from no one bothering to do anything about sharing it). Cracking a game is not legal unless you are engaging in security testing. There's a strong argument to made that simply downloading a game from some non-official source is illegal (if not worth even considering prosecuting), regardless of whether or not you already own a copy.
@The Green Eyed Monster : still waiting for that quote or a retraction.
You will never ever see sales akin to the awesome steam sales, or reactive game pricing that you see on steam, so long as there is a glut of retail discs across the country that major retailers paid wholesale pricing on with the assumption that they would sell for 60 bucks a pop.
All the stuff people like about steam and don't trust to happen on consoles cannot happen on consoles until the used game market and the majority of the physical media market is nuked from orbit. Full stop. This is the special sauce that let's Steam get away with selling games for 30 bucks over a holiday weekend and bring the price back up to 50 afterwards, or bundle 30 iD games for 20 bucks, or whatever.
Because the publishers get a slice every. single. time.
And for the most part they love it. And gamers love it. And we can't let that happen on consoles because... reasons?
The things holding this back on consoles:
1. Consumers throwing a fit about losing used games
2. Bandwidth speeds not being high enough (seems to work fine for steam though)
3. Crushing paranoia from gamers ("it's totally not going to be BC next gen", "they're not going to have those sales, they're just greedy")
The major point people don't seem to understand is Every Single Time the publishers get to quickly do sales and set their own prices, they follow the Steam model. No matter what the platform is. The publishers aren't holding up game prices from being more like steam, the damned retailers are.
You forgot:
4. The demographics of the console market are very, very different from the demographics of the Steam market. How many Steam users do you think have shitty network connections or let their 6 year old kids play on their accounts?
The fact that the Steam model would work great for you personally does not mean it would work well for everyone who owns a console.
But the bad news here is that it seems the console manufacturers are primarily interested in serving the online customer base. Without knowing any sort of real market research, I'd be willing to wager that's because the online customers realize a much greater return for the publishers/developers than the offline ones, which is why they probably aren't particularly sweating losing the offline segment.
Like I said, CoD doesn't break sales records every Christmas because of the single player campaign. This year's Madden ad campaign was based entirely around dudes talking shit to each other on headsets from couches in their respective homes. FIFA 13 isn't ruling the sports game market because playing the computer is endlessly entertaining.
And if you're a budget minded game player who doesn't want to engage in multiplayer games? Well, a large # of my favorite titles from this generation were XBLA offerings, all ~$15 as their first day pricing, and I don't think I've even played 5% of what they have available there. Just ... yeah ... gaming is changing. Whatever worked for the SNES isn't going to work for the next generation. That's just the facts.
30-40% of call of duty players have never played the multiplayer, even once
Edit: 20% of battlefield 3 players played singleplayer only, and that game is pretty much all multiplayer!
Do you have a source for that? I'd be curious.
And even if that is the case, it definitely seems the content producers are saying "we don't care about that 30-40%." Especially since I'd be willing to guess that the trend since the first CoD title release is that the # of offline-only players has been decreasing with each iteration.
I can't find anything from past 2011 for COD, but I'd assume that it's at least a similar figure (although probably higher, since COD games have a far more in depth singleplayer, especially black ops 2)
But what continuously baffles me is why anyone would suspect that killing used games would result in price savings for them, given the retailer/publisher relationship?
It is gamestop, best buy, wal mart, and everyone else who sells these games.
These companies place orders in the tens or hundreds of thousands for a title they expect to sell for 60 bucks.
How pissed would YOU be if you spent 40 dollars per unit on 25,000 units only to have that company two weeks down the road price the digital copy at 29.99 for a weekend? The physical copies are an anchor keeping them from being flexible without hurting business relationships.
This completely ignores the fact that individual retail stores will put the physical copy on sale for $29.99 for a week.
Like, seriously, those of you arguing that retail stores are holding back digital prices like this aren't actually paying much attention to the retail market. Physical games go on sale all the time. Between now and the end of the year you will have multiple opportunities to get games like Metal Gear Rising, DMC, Dead Space 3, and Tomb Raider for 20-40 bucks. Last year fall games like Halo 4, Far Cry 3, Forza, NFS, CoD, Hitman, and so on could be gotten near the end of the year for forty bucks, a month or two after release.
You will never ever see sales akin to the awesome steam sales, or reactive game pricing that you see on steam, so long as there is a glut of retail discs across the country that major retailers paid wholesale pricing on with the assumption that they would sell for 60 bucks a pop.
All the stuff people like about steam and don't trust to happen on consoles cannot happen on consoles until the used game market and the majority of the physical media market is nuked from orbit. Full stop. This is the special sauce that let's Steam get away with selling games for 30 bucks over a holiday weekend and bring the price back up to 50 afterwards, or bundle 30 iD games for 20 bucks, or whatever.
Because the publishers get a slice every. single. time.
And for the most part they love it. And gamers love it. And we can't let that happen on consoles because... reasons?
The things holding this back on consoles:
1. Consumers throwing a fit about losing used games
2. Bandwidth speeds not being high enough (seems to work fine for steam though)
3. Crushing paranoia from gamers ("it's totally not going to be BC next gen", "they're not going to have those sales, they're just greedy")
The major point people don't seem to understand is Every Single Time the publishers get to quickly do sales and set their own prices, they follow the Steam model. No matter what the platform is. The publishers aren't holding up game prices from being more like steam, the damned retailers are.
You forgot:
4. The demographics of the console market are very, very different from the demographics of the Steam market. How many Steam users do you think have shitty network connections or let their 6 year old kids play on their accounts?
The fact that the Steam model would work great for you personally does not mean it would work well for everyone who owns a console.
But the bad news here is that it seems the console manufacturers are primarily interested in serving the online customer base. Without knowing any sort of real market research, I'd be willing to wager that's because the online customers realize a much greater return for the publishers/developers than the offline ones, which is why they probably aren't particularly sweating losing the offline segment.
Like I said, CoD doesn't break sales records every Christmas because of the single player campaign. This year's Madden ad campaign was based entirely around dudes talking shit to each other on headsets from couches in their respective homes. FIFA 13 isn't ruling the sports game market because playing the computer is endlessly entertaining.
And if you're a budget minded game player who doesn't want to engage in multiplayer games? Well, a large # of my favorite titles from this generation were XBLA offerings, all ~$15 as their first day pricing, and I don't think I've even played 5% of what they have available there. Just ... yeah ... gaming is changing. Whatever worked for the SNES isn't going to work for the next generation. That's just the facts.
30-40% of call of duty players have never played the multiplayer, even once
Edit: 20% of battlefield 3 players played singleplayer only, and that game is pretty much all multiplayer!
Do you have a source for that? I'd be curious.
And even if that is the case, it definitely seems the content producers are saying "we don't care about that 30-40%." Especially since I'd be willing to guess that the trend since the first CoD title release is that the # of offline-only players has been decreasing with each iteration.
I can't find anything from past 2011 for COD, but I'd assume that it's at least a similar figure (although probably higher, since COD games have a far more in depth singleplayer, especially black ops 2)
But what continuously baffles me is why anyone would suspect that killing used games would result in price savings for them, given the retailer/publisher relationship?
"Our telemetry might tell us that as many as 20% just want to play almost offline—connected yet offline." <> "20% of battlefield 3 players played singleplayer only."
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syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Productsregular
But what continuously baffles me is why anyone would suspect that killing used games would result in price savings for them, given the retailer/publisher relationship?
Precedent. Tons and tons of precedent. Every single place this model has been instituted, publishers are willing to do sales because they do not account for losses, only smaller gains per unit which turn into bigger gains because of volume.
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
You will never ever see sales akin to the awesome steam sales, or reactive game pricing that you see on steam, so long as there is a glut of retail discs across the country that major retailers paid wholesale pricing on with the assumption that they would sell for 60 bucks a pop.
All the stuff people like about steam and don't trust to happen on consoles cannot happen on consoles until the used game market and the majority of the physical media market is nuked from orbit. Full stop. This is the special sauce that let's Steam get away with selling games for 30 bucks over a holiday weekend and bring the price back up to 50 afterwards, or bundle 30 iD games for 20 bucks, or whatever.
Because the publishers get a slice every. single. time.
And for the most part they love it. And gamers love it. And we can't let that happen on consoles because... reasons?
The things holding this back on consoles:
1. Consumers throwing a fit about losing used games
2. Bandwidth speeds not being high enough (seems to work fine for steam though)
3. Crushing paranoia from gamers ("it's totally not going to be BC next gen", "they're not going to have those sales, they're just greedy")
The major point people don't seem to understand is Every Single Time the publishers get to quickly do sales and set their own prices, they follow the Steam model. No matter what the platform is. The publishers aren't holding up game prices from being more like steam, the damned retailers are.
You forgot:
4. The demographics of the console market are very, very different from the demographics of the Steam market. How many Steam users do you think have shitty network connections or let their 6 year old kids play on their accounts?
The fact that the Steam model would work great for you personally does not mean it would work well for everyone who owns a console.
But the bad news here is that it seems the console manufacturers are primarily interested in serving the online customer base. Without knowing any sort of real market research, I'd be willing to wager that's because the online customers realize a much greater return for the publishers/developers than the offline ones, which is why they probably aren't particularly sweating losing the offline segment.
Like I said, CoD doesn't break sales records every Christmas because of the single player campaign. This year's Madden ad campaign was based entirely around dudes talking shit to each other on headsets from couches in their respective homes. FIFA 13 isn't ruling the sports game market because playing the computer is endlessly entertaining.
And if you're a budget minded game player who doesn't want to engage in multiplayer games? Well, a large # of my favorite titles from this generation were XBLA offerings, all ~$15 as their first day pricing, and I don't think I've even played 5% of what they have available there. Just ... yeah ... gaming is changing. Whatever worked for the SNES isn't going to work for the next generation. That's just the facts.
30-40% of call of duty players have never played the multiplayer, even once
Edit: 20% of battlefield 3 players played singleplayer only, and that game is pretty much all multiplayer!
Do you have a source for that? I'd be curious.
And even if that is the case, it definitely seems the content producers are saying "we don't care about that 30-40%." Especially since I'd be willing to guess that the trend since the first CoD title release is that the # of offline-only players has been decreasing with each iteration.
I can't find anything from past 2011 for COD, but I'd assume that it's at least a similar figure (although probably higher, since COD games have a far more in depth singleplayer, especially black ops 2)
But what continuously baffles me is why anyone would suspect that killing used games would result in price savings for them, given the retailer/publisher relationship?
Huh -- I wonder how that data works, too, since the link mentions "20% connected, but offline." I wonder if Microsoft or their publishers really have any way of tracking strictly offline play.
And while the % of offline players in CoD is a bit surprising to me (I don't have a hard time accepting it, I'm really just curious to dig at who is tracking this stuff and how) I do believe the trend would most likely be a steady decrease in offline only players, not vice versa, which definitely seems to be the trend that game manufacturers have been tracking for around a decade now. (Totally personal anecdote -- I have distinct memories of when the EGM editorial board fell deeply in love with any OG Xbox game with a big multiplayer element (that one Splinter Cell one they wouldn't shut up about forever) and I found it endlessly frustrating as a gamer because I wasn't online and thought it was stupid to be championing games for features that only a handful of gamers would be able to realize -- anyway...)
And what continues to baffle me is how people refuse to see Steam as a benevolent model for what could happen on consoles, as opposed to presuming as immutable fact that MS/Sony's business plan is to screw as many people as quickly as possible.
You will never ever see sales akin to the awesome steam sales, or reactive game pricing that you see on steam, so long as there is a glut of retail discs across the country that major retailers paid wholesale pricing on with the assumption that they would sell for 60 bucks a pop.
All the stuff people like about steam and don't trust to happen on consoles cannot happen on consoles until the used game market and the majority of the physical media market is nuked from orbit. Full stop. This is the special sauce that let's Steam get away with selling games for 30 bucks over a holiday weekend and bring the price back up to 50 afterwards, or bundle 30 iD games for 20 bucks, or whatever.
Because the publishers get a slice every. single. time.
And for the most part they love it. And gamers love it. And we can't let that happen on consoles because... reasons?
The things holding this back on consoles:
1. Consumers throwing a fit about losing used games
2. Bandwidth speeds not being high enough (seems to work fine for steam though)
3. Crushing paranoia from gamers ("it's totally not going to be BC next gen", "they're not going to have those sales, they're just greedy")
The major point people don't seem to understand is Every Single Time the publishers get to quickly do sales and set their own prices, they follow the Steam model. No matter what the platform is. The publishers aren't holding up game prices from being more like steam, the damned retailers are.
You forgot:
4. The demographics of the console market are very, very different from the demographics of the Steam market. How many Steam users do you think have shitty network connections or let their 6 year old kids play on their accounts?
The fact that the Steam model would work great for you personally does not mean it would work well for everyone who owns a console.
But the bad news here is that it seems the console manufacturers are primarily interested in serving the online customer base. Without knowing any sort of real market research, I'd be willing to wager that's because the online customers realize a much greater return for the publishers/developers than the offline ones, which is why they probably aren't particularly sweating losing the offline segment.
Like I said, CoD doesn't break sales records every Christmas because of the single player campaign. This year's Madden ad campaign was based entirely around dudes talking shit to each other on headsets from couches in their respective homes. FIFA 13 isn't ruling the sports game market because playing the computer is endlessly entertaining.
And if you're a budget minded game player who doesn't want to engage in multiplayer games? Well, a large # of my favorite titles from this generation were XBLA offerings, all ~$15 as their first day pricing, and I don't think I've even played 5% of what they have available there. Just ... yeah ... gaming is changing. Whatever worked for the SNES isn't going to work for the next generation. That's just the facts.
30-40% of call of duty players have never played the multiplayer, even once
Edit: 20% of battlefield 3 players played singleplayer only, and that game is pretty much all multiplayer!
Do you have a source for that? I'd be curious.
And even if that is the case, it definitely seems the content producers are saying "we don't care about that 30-40%." Especially since I'd be willing to guess that the trend since the first CoD title release is that the # of offline-only players has been decreasing with each iteration.
I can't find anything from past 2011 for COD, but I'd assume that it's at least a similar figure (although probably higher, since COD games have a far more in depth singleplayer, especially black ops 2)
But what continuously baffles me is why anyone would suspect that killing used games would result in price savings for them, given the retailer/publisher relationship?
"Our telemetry might tell us that as many as 20% just want to play almost offline—connected yet offline." <> "20% of battlefield 3 players played singleplayer only."
Oh here's Deebaser laser focusing on my edit to try and nullify my point
Are you arguing that an insignificant number of players don't make use of the online components?
Because Treyarch seems to think that these people exist
"As popular as COD is, there are a lot of people who don’t play multiplayer,” says David Vonderhaar, Black Ops II's game-design director. “And quite frankly, this bugs the s--- out of us."
So yeah, people do just play singleplayer. Hell I played more singleplayer Blops 2 than I did MP and I know other people who did too, so there's at least a few of us
And what continues to baffle me is how people refuse to see Steam as a benevolent model for what could happen on consoles, as opposed to presuming as immutable fact that MS/Sony's business plan is to screw as many people as quickly as possible.
Because they answer to the retailers, and their model isn't digital, and is a ways away from being digital, many games are platform-locked to their service, and in the past they haven't returned excessive profits in the form of lower game prices
Steam has actual competition, the PSN and XBOX stores do not. Reducing all game sales for a platform to one single store would limit the market. It wouldn't leave us in the same situation as where PC gaming is now. Steam isn't even the only online store that sells Steam keys. It frequently gets into price wars with Amazon over its own games.
I don't think for a second that Steam would have as many good sales if the only place to get PC games was the Steam store. Competition breeds lower prices. But there would be no competition here.
You will never ever see sales akin to the awesome steam sales, or reactive game pricing that you see on steam, so long as there is a glut of retail discs across the country that major retailers paid wholesale pricing on with the assumption that they would sell for 60 bucks a pop.
All the stuff people like about steam and don't trust to happen on consoles cannot happen on consoles until the used game market and the majority of the physical media market is nuked from orbit. Full stop. This is the special sauce that let's Steam get away with selling games for 30 bucks over a holiday weekend and bring the price back up to 50 afterwards, or bundle 30 iD games for 20 bucks, or whatever.
Because the publishers get a slice every. single. time.
And for the most part they love it. And gamers love it. And we can't let that happen on consoles because... reasons?
The things holding this back on consoles:
1. Consumers throwing a fit about losing used games
2. Bandwidth speeds not being high enough (seems to work fine for steam though)
3. Crushing paranoia from gamers ("it's totally not going to be BC next gen", "they're not going to have those sales, they're just greedy")
The major point people don't seem to understand is Every Single Time the publishers get to quickly do sales and set their own prices, they follow the Steam model. No matter what the platform is. The publishers aren't holding up game prices from being more like steam, the damned retailers are.
You forgot:
4. The demographics of the console market are very, very different from the demographics of the Steam market. How many Steam users do you think have shitty network connections or let their 6 year old kids play on their accounts?
The fact that the Steam model would work great for you personally does not mean it would work well for everyone who owns a console.
But the bad news here is that it seems the console manufacturers are primarily interested in serving the online customer base. Without knowing any sort of real market research, I'd be willing to wager that's because the online customers realize a much greater return for the publishers/developers than the offline ones, which is why they probably aren't particularly sweating losing the offline segment.
Like I said, CoD doesn't break sales records every Christmas because of the single player campaign. This year's Madden ad campaign was based entirely around dudes talking shit to each other on headsets from couches in their respective homes. FIFA 13 isn't ruling the sports game market because playing the computer is endlessly entertaining.
And if you're a budget minded game player who doesn't want to engage in multiplayer games? Well, a large # of my favorite titles from this generation were XBLA offerings, all ~$15 as their first day pricing, and I don't think I've even played 5% of what they have available there. Just ... yeah ... gaming is changing. Whatever worked for the SNES isn't going to work for the next generation. That's just the facts.
30-40% of call of duty players have never played the multiplayer, even once
Edit: 20% of battlefield 3 players played singleplayer only, and that game is pretty much all multiplayer!
Do you have a source for that? I'd be curious.
And even if that is the case, it definitely seems the content producers are saying "we don't care about that 30-40%." Especially since I'd be willing to guess that the trend since the first CoD title release is that the # of offline-only players has been decreasing with each iteration.
I can't find anything from past 2011 for COD, but I'd assume that it's at least a similar figure (although probably higher, since COD games have a far more in depth singleplayer, especially black ops 2)
But what continuously baffles me is why anyone would suspect that killing used games would result in price savings for them, given the retailer/publisher relationship?
"Our telemetry might tell us that as many as 20% just want to play almost offline—connected yet offline." <> "20% of battlefield 3 players played singleplayer only."
Oh here's Deebaser laser focusing on my edit to try and nullify my point
Are you arguing that an insignificant number of players don't make use of the online components?
Because Treyarch seems to think that these people exist
"As popular as COD is, there are a lot of people who don’t play multiplayer,” says David Vonderhaar, Black Ops II's game-design director. “And quite frankly, this bugs the s--- out of us."
So yeah, people do just play singleplayer. Hell I played more singleplayer Blops 2 than I did MP and I know other people who did too, so there's at least a few of us
And what continues to baffle me is how people refuse to see Steam as a benevolent model for what could happen on consoles, as opposed to presuming as immutable fact that MS/Sony's business plan is to screw as many people as quickly as possible.
Because they answer to the retailers, and their model isn't digital, and is a ways away from being digital
What are you talking about? You made a claim that isn't supported by the link that you provided. Don't do that.
Steam has actual competition, the PSN and XBOX stores do not. Reducing all game sales for a platform to one single store would limit the market. It wouldn't leave us in the same situation as where PC gaming is now. Steam isn't even the only online store that sells Steam keys. It frequently gets into price wars with Amazon over its own games.
I don't think for a second that Steam would have as many good sales if the only place to get PC games was the Steam store. Competition breeds lower prices. But there would be no competition here.
Again this is something I don't really know, but is it really Steam setting the price or the publishers? Because publishers have competition with other publishers. If Battlefield 5 is getting roundly outsold by Call of Duty: Modern Black Ops 4, wouldn't the publisher of Battlefield 5 be the one with a vested interest in a price drop? I mean, XBLA has different price points and I've tracked games before that have seen a price drop over time (because I balked at 1200 points for example, but gave it a second look at 800 points, and like I've said there's still sale offerings from time to time) and it's not like the XBLA games are competing against a separate distributor.
(But honestly this is all so speculative at this point it's hard to say concretely much at all. I'm really just offering a counter viewpoint to the idea that a single distributor means a lack of price competition.)
It is gamestop, best buy, wal mart, and everyone else who sells these games.
These companies place orders in the tens or hundreds of thousands for a title they expect to sell for 60 bucks.
How pissed would YOU be if you spent 40 dollars per unit on 25,000 units only to have that company two weeks down the road price the digital copy at 29.99 for a weekend? The physical copies are an anchor keeping them from being flexible without hurting business relationships.
This completely ignores the fact that individual retail stores will put the physical copy on sale for $29.99 for a week.
Like, seriously, those of you arguing that retail stores are holding back digital prices like this aren't actually paying much attention to the retail market. Physical games go on sale all the time. Between now and the end of the year you will have multiple opportunities to get games like Metal Gear Rising, DMC, Dead Space 3, and Tomb Raider for 20-40 bucks. Last year fall games like Halo 4, Far Cry 3, Forza, NFS, CoD, Hitman, and so on could be gotten near the end of the year for forty bucks, a month or two after release.
This is missing the point.
The publisher doesn't care what the retailer sells it for because once the retailer has it the publisher has already been paid. Only the retailer cares what they sell their games for. The retailer can choose to put it on sale and try to drive traffic to their store, or keep it at $60 for 3 years if they really want to.
The retailer cares very much what the publisher sells digital copies of their game for because this could potentially interfere with them recouping their expenses!
The fact that retailers sometimes choose to discount stuff they've already bought and paid for does not mean that the retailer won't be pissed if the publisher cuts prices.
You will never ever see sales akin to the awesome steam sales, or reactive game pricing that you see on steam, so long as there is a glut of retail discs across the country that major retailers paid wholesale pricing on with the assumption that they would sell for 60 bucks a pop.
All the stuff people like about steam and don't trust to happen on consoles cannot happen on consoles until the used game market and the majority of the physical media market is nuked from orbit. Full stop. This is the special sauce that let's Steam get away with selling games for 30 bucks over a holiday weekend and bring the price back up to 50 afterwards, or bundle 30 iD games for 20 bucks, or whatever.
Because the publishers get a slice every. single. time.
And for the most part they love it. And gamers love it. And we can't let that happen on consoles because... reasons?
The things holding this back on consoles:
1. Consumers throwing a fit about losing used games
2. Bandwidth speeds not being high enough (seems to work fine for steam though)
3. Crushing paranoia from gamers ("it's totally not going to be BC next gen", "they're not going to have those sales, they're just greedy")
The major point people don't seem to understand is Every Single Time the publishers get to quickly do sales and set their own prices, they follow the Steam model. No matter what the platform is. The publishers aren't holding up game prices from being more like steam, the damned retailers are.
You forgot:
4. The demographics of the console market are very, very different from the demographics of the Steam market. How many Steam users do you think have shitty network connections or let their 6 year old kids play on their accounts?
The fact that the Steam model would work great for you personally does not mean it would work well for everyone who owns a console.
But the bad news here is that it seems the console manufacturers are primarily interested in serving the online customer base. Without knowing any sort of real market research, I'd be willing to wager that's because the online customers realize a much greater return for the publishers/developers than the offline ones, which is why they probably aren't particularly sweating losing the offline segment.
Like I said, CoD doesn't break sales records every Christmas because of the single player campaign. This year's Madden ad campaign was based entirely around dudes talking shit to each other on headsets from couches in their respective homes. FIFA 13 isn't ruling the sports game market because playing the computer is endlessly entertaining.
And if you're a budget minded game player who doesn't want to engage in multiplayer games? Well, a large # of my favorite titles from this generation were XBLA offerings, all ~$15 as their first day pricing, and I don't think I've even played 5% of what they have available there. Just ... yeah ... gaming is changing. Whatever worked for the SNES isn't going to work for the next generation. That's just the facts.
30-40% of call of duty players have never played the multiplayer, even once
Edit: 20% of battlefield 3 players played singleplayer only, and that game is pretty much all multiplayer!
Do you have a source for that? I'd be curious.
And even if that is the case, it definitely seems the content producers are saying "we don't care about that 30-40%." Especially since I'd be willing to guess that the trend since the first CoD title release is that the # of offline-only players has been decreasing with each iteration.
I can't find anything from past 2011 for COD, but I'd assume that it's at least a similar figure (although probably higher, since COD games have a far more in depth singleplayer, especially black ops 2)
But what continuously baffles me is why anyone would suspect that killing used games would result in price savings for them, given the retailer/publisher relationship?
"Our telemetry might tell us that as many as 20% just want to play almost offline—connected yet offline." <> "20% of battlefield 3 players played singleplayer only."
Oh here's Deebaser laser focusing on my edit to try and nullify my point
Are you arguing that an insignificant number of players don't make use of the online components?
Because Treyarch seems to think that these people exist
"As popular as COD is, there are a lot of people who don’t play multiplayer,” says David Vonderhaar, Black Ops II's game-design director. “And quite frankly, this bugs the s--- out of us."
So yeah, people do just play singleplayer. Hell I played more singleplayer Blops 2 than I did MP and I know other people who did too, so there's at least a few of us
And what continues to baffle me is how people refuse to see Steam as a benevolent model for what could happen on consoles, as opposed to presuming as immutable fact that MS/Sony's business plan is to screw as many people as quickly as possible.
Because they answer to the retailers, and their model isn't digital, and is a ways away from being digital
What are you talking about? You made a claim that isn't supported by the link that you provided. Don't do that.
Alright, I was wrong about "20% of battlefield players playing only offline", good show. 20% play offline, while being online. We do not know how many play offline while being offline, because that data is unavailable.
Do you dispute my overall point, that a significant number of gamers play offline?
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Deebaseron my way to work in a suit and a tieAhhhh...come on fucking guyRegistered Userregular
You will never ever see sales akin to the awesome steam sales, or reactive game pricing that you see on steam, so long as there is a glut of retail discs across the country that major retailers paid wholesale pricing on with the assumption that they would sell for 60 bucks a pop.
All the stuff people like about steam and don't trust to happen on consoles cannot happen on consoles until the used game market and the majority of the physical media market is nuked from orbit. Full stop. This is the special sauce that let's Steam get away with selling games for 30 bucks over a holiday weekend and bring the price back up to 50 afterwards, or bundle 30 iD games for 20 bucks, or whatever.
Because the publishers get a slice every. single. time.
And for the most part they love it. And gamers love it. And we can't let that happen on consoles because... reasons?
The things holding this back on consoles:
1. Consumers throwing a fit about losing used games
2. Bandwidth speeds not being high enough (seems to work fine for steam though)
3. Crushing paranoia from gamers ("it's totally not going to be BC next gen", "they're not going to have those sales, they're just greedy")
The major point people don't seem to understand is Every Single Time the publishers get to quickly do sales and set their own prices, they follow the Steam model. No matter what the platform is. The publishers aren't holding up game prices from being more like steam, the damned retailers are.
You forgot:
4. The demographics of the console market are very, very different from the demographics of the Steam market. How many Steam users do you think have shitty network connections or let their 6 year old kids play on their accounts?
The fact that the Steam model would work great for you personally does not mean it would work well for everyone who owns a console.
But the bad news here is that it seems the console manufacturers are primarily interested in serving the online customer base. Without knowing any sort of real market research, I'd be willing to wager that's because the online customers realize a much greater return for the publishers/developers than the offline ones, which is why they probably aren't particularly sweating losing the offline segment.
Like I said, CoD doesn't break sales records every Christmas because of the single player campaign. This year's Madden ad campaign was based entirely around dudes talking shit to each other on headsets from couches in their respective homes. FIFA 13 isn't ruling the sports game market because playing the computer is endlessly entertaining.
And if you're a budget minded game player who doesn't want to engage in multiplayer games? Well, a large # of my favorite titles from this generation were XBLA offerings, all ~$15 as their first day pricing, and I don't think I've even played 5% of what they have available there. Just ... yeah ... gaming is changing. Whatever worked for the SNES isn't going to work for the next generation. That's just the facts.
30-40% of call of duty players have never played the multiplayer, even once
Edit: 20% of battlefield 3 players played singleplayer only, and that game is pretty much all multiplayer!
Do you have a source for that? I'd be curious.
And even if that is the case, it definitely seems the content producers are saying "we don't care about that 30-40%." Especially since I'd be willing to guess that the trend since the first CoD title release is that the # of offline-only players has been decreasing with each iteration.
I can't find anything from past 2011 for COD, but I'd assume that it's at least a similar figure (although probably higher, since COD games have a far more in depth singleplayer, especially black ops 2)
But what continuously baffles me is why anyone would suspect that killing used games would result in price savings for them, given the retailer/publisher relationship?
"Our telemetry might tell us that as many as 20% just want to play almost offline—connected yet offline." <> "20% of battlefield 3 players played singleplayer only."
Oh here's Deebaser laser focusing on my edit to try and nullify my point
Are you arguing that an insignificant number of players don't make use of the online components?
Because Treyarch seems to think that these people exist
"As popular as COD is, there are a lot of people who don’t play multiplayer,” says David Vonderhaar, Black Ops II's game-design director. “And quite frankly, this bugs the s--- out of us."
So yeah, people do just play singleplayer. Hell I played more singleplayer Blops 2 than I did MP and I know other people who did too, so there's at least a few of us
And what continues to baffle me is how people refuse to see Steam as a benevolent model for what could happen on consoles, as opposed to presuming as immutable fact that MS/Sony's business plan is to screw as many people as quickly as possible.
Because they answer to the retailers, and their model isn't digital, and is a ways away from being digital
What are you talking about? You made a claim that isn't supported by the link that you provided. Don't do that.
Alright, I was wrong about "20% of battlefield players playing only offline", good show. 20% play offline, while being online. We do not know how many play offline while being offline, because that data is unavailable.
Do you dispute my overall point, that a significant number of gamers play offline?
I don't know why you're getting so hurt and defensive.
Also, you're still wrong. We don't have data for any of it. We have a developer saying "Our telemetry might tell us that as many as 20% just want to play almost offline—connected yet offline."
That's the source of your 20% "fact". Do you see how the word "might" and the phrase "as many as" take away from that statement? You could madlibs the hell out of that and get 100% true albiet meaningless statements.
As to your overall point, so what? Does it even matter how many COD/BF/Halo players are in it exclusively for the single player campaign?
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
edited February 2013
I think that this discussion is getting a little side tracked. Earlier, we were pretty clearly talking about developers. We all like developers, right? They make all the games we know and love. Developers mostly don't have the resources to self publish, so they go to publishers, and as a result, the publishers choose what games go to retail and what games don't. Once a publisher decides to publish a game, they make their decisions about sequels or further work with a developer based on the first month or so of sales of the game. So, putting aside issues like class warfare or internet connections or gamestop, if you care about developers, you should only buy new games, and should do so when they are newly released. If you must trade in your games, you should wait on trading in used games until they have been out for a while, otherwise you are giving more people the opportunity to buy used copies during that crucial window.
Whether the used market ultimately leads to more sales or not isn't even the point. If you care about developers, you should not buy used games shortly after launch, or trade them in, full stop. Even if you use those recent tradeins to buy more new games, you are still doing a net harm, because you are trading multiple recent games (and thereby taking away multiple new game sales) in exchange for your one new game purchase with the credit.
Edit: Just to say it, the reason that I and others have said that it is better to outright steal a game from a store than to buy it used is that if you steal a copy, the store needs to buy another from the publisher during the early window. If you buy it used, you actually decreased the number of copies of the game that the store needs to order.
And if you really care about Chris Nolan as a filmmaker, you should never rent any of his movies and only buy them on BD for full price even if you don't have a BD player.
And if you really care about Starbucks you should only ever drink coffee and also bathe in it and use it to wash your dishes.
Or maybe people should base their purchasing decisions on what benefits them as people and not what benefits businesses.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
So... Basically I went to bed last night, and woke up to find a good deal of people acting like I'm a sociopath for advocating for DD games and saying that while I'm not all that concerned for people who can't use such a system, I understand that such a system would cut them out, and therefore shouldn't be implemented at the moment.
ITT I learn that talking about what I personally want while also talking about what I think should actually happen really confuses people sometimes. They don't have to be mutually exclusive here folks. I wouldn't care if everyone's satalite bill went up so I could still watch AMC, even if it pushed some people away from the service, but that doesn't mean I think it should happen. Of course I care about my own interests, everyone does.
Anyway, thread has moved on since then, but to all of you who decided to dogpile on me after I went to bed, you're all wonderful and charming people and I'm sure that's going to take your really far.
No I don't.
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syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Productsregular
And if you really care about Chris Nolan as a filmmaker, you should never rent any of his movies and only buy them on BD for full price even if you don't have a BD player.
And if you really care about Starbucks you should only ever drink coffee and also bathe in it and use it to wash your dishes.
Or maybe people should base their purchasing decisions on what benefits them as people and not what benefits businesses.
Thing is, the rental model is built around relationships between the content creators/distributors and the company doing the renting. There are rules they follow that allow for them to rent the content. You can't just buy 100 copies of Iron Man 2 and rent them to people.
Starbucks example is just goosey. I don't even know how to address that.
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
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I would think because
A) You'd have to get rid of the Physical and Used disc markets on consoles, which is hazardous as long as Broadband kind of remains in the sucky-ass situation it's in right now. Not to mention the fact as long as there's a physical market, people will feel ripped off if you infringe their ability to resell those discs or get used copies.
Do Sony or MS do Steamlike sales on PSN/XBLA-only titles that aren't effected by the physical disc market?
There's risk involved in not owning your games that you can do nothing about reducing. You can either accept that level of risk and continue renting, or refuse to accept it and stop. But either way, you don't get to pretend it's not there and you don't get to pretend that you own your games when they're coming through digital distribution and your ownership isn't in the contract.
I'm curious how willing game publishers will be to let Steam offer their games at 75% off if Steam starts to account for a considerable fraction of their overall game sales. If the Steambox dominates the console landscape (which I'm honestly not sure about... the decision to base it on Linux is kind of weird, given that it means you're basically asking developers to port to your nominally 'just a PC on the TV' console as a 4th platform in addition to xbox, playstation, and windows PC) it's going to mean that publishers don't have a steady stream of slowly declining in price physical console game sales to shore up the deep discounts offered on Steam.
I'm sure there's a balance to be struck there, between the lack of used games cutting into their sales and the larger number of purchases at temporarily lower price points... but if Steam did win the console war at some point, I'd be willing to bet that the end result is fewer big-name games in the Steam sales.
I have about 400+ on my account god only knows how many have never been installed let alone played.
If steams servers went poof and it was all lost tomorrow I'd probably re-buy maybe 20 of those games.
Maybe somebody can correct me if I'm wrong, but the majority of bestsellers on consoles these days feature heavy multiplayer components. Call of Duty is definitely not the biggest selling franchise on Xbox because people love the single-player campaign so much. People didn't buy FIFA 13 because they were thrilled to run home and play the computer over and over and over. So in that regard, there is a similar threat to the present day consumer that the primary way they enjoy playing their favorite game (I mean, a lot of the dudes I played Battlefield 3 with admitted to not even touching the single player campaign) could have the lights turned off at any moment. This doesn't seem to stop consumers from continuing to make these multiplayer-centric games the most popular titles on the console.
You're also just arguing from the baseless assumption that in the instance MS or Sony decide to switch the authentication servers off, they won't just send out a system-wide dashboard patch which eliminates the authentication routine. You're also arguing from a baseless assumption that even if they make digital licenses a necessary way to play a copy of a game in the next gen, there won't be a mechanism for one user to transfer that license to another player, or there won't be a way to activate that license on other consoles by logging in an Xbox Live ID.
You're really just arguing a position to insane extremes at this point.
Oh I feel also obliged to add that within the past 6 months Microsoft did release a freeware game (Happy Wars) which is meant to make money from in-game economy. They also just released a cross-platform multiplayer game (Skulls of the Shogun) which is meant to be playable as multiplayer against any other Windows 8 device (phones, tablets, PCs). These are the sort of things they are aggressively pursuing in this generation! It's just entirely baseless to suggest that aggressively targeting the resale market is some sort of sinister plot to fuck over the hard-working Joe Plumbers who just wanna play single player CoD until the next NASCAR race is on. Gamer habits are changing, ergo the market is changing, too.
1) A digital Distribution copy - this will be the standard.
2) A "collectors edition" that is physical media, limited run, and isn't bound to the console / profile. Still DRM'd up the butt and can't be copied easily, but its there. They only need to run MAYBE 100,000 of these for a AAA game. The pricing is the same as this past generations new game price (50-60), and once it is sold out it is sold out. Get the game online or from the used game market then.
3) A legendary edition that is 40-50 bucks more that comes with a cloth map, a gold coin, a cat helmet and a vibrator. Make a super small run of these for the few games that justify it.
There. Used games still exist and Gamestop has a reason for being, but the damage they are able to cause is drastically mitigated, while supplying the very small percentage of gamers who want to play games but don't have internet a means of buying titles for their platform.
does this seem like an acceptable middle ground for a generation?
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
I'd imagine they'd be pretty willing as the marginal cost will be pretty much zero.
This is drinking some hefty kool-aid if you honestly believe that the only thing stopping Microsoft and Sony from charging less for games is that dastardly gamestop. Seriously, they're going to pocket the difference and to believe otherwise absent anything proving otherwise is naive as shit.
The publishers don't like you, they are not your friends, you are a source of profit to them period. Valve, Apple, and Android (and Origin) have sales because they're competing with piracy, not other platforms.
It is gamestop, best buy, wal mart, and everyone else who sells these games.
These companies place orders in the tens or hundreds of thousands for a title they expect to sell for 60 bucks.
How pissed would YOU be if you spent 40 dollars per unit on 25,000 units only to have that company two weeks down the road price the digital copy at 29.99 for a weekend? The physical copies are an anchor keeping them from being flexible without hurting business relationships.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
You forgot:
4. The demographics of the console market are very, very different from the demographics of the Steam market. How many Steam users do you think have shitty network connections or let their 6 year old kids play on their accounts?
The fact that the Steam model would work great for you personally does not mean it would work well for everyone who owns a console.
I've said this in this thread. On Tuesday, Microsoft had a one day XBL sale of Games On Demand versions of Halo 3, Halo Reach, and Halo ODST for $9.99 and Halo 4 (the current one) was $39.99. Yesterday they had three Assassin's Creed titles for $9.99, and a host of other games for $2.99 or $4.99 (I recognized Bioshock, Virtua Fighter 5, and a Tomb Raider game that I eyed). They regularly feature time-based discounts on XBLA titles, or temporarily they reduce the point cost on a game's entire DLC inventory. I've also been slowly spending through 1600 MS points I was awarded for taking part in an offer last summer where if you purchased 4 out of 6 special "Summer of XBLA" games, you got 1600 points. They are already doing dynamic pricing via their digital marketplace, and yes -- they're already doing it on games which you would surely find in a Gamestop used games rack.
I don't use PSN, but I've heard that if you're a subscriber to PSN+ they frequently give away free games (generally older ones that weren't top-sellers, but often still quality) so yes, Sony is also finding ways to deliver digital content to their core subscribers.
It's happening now. It really makes much more sense to suggest it would be a positive trend that continues into the next generation a la Steam than it is to suggest that they're just going to lock the price point in at $60 and tell all the poor people to go fuck themselves. People who don't want to go online with their consoles? Yeah, they'll probably be left shopping at flea markets. But I think it's pretty asinine to suggest the future of gaming is offline anyway.
Yeah, it's also the reason why an iPhone costs the same amount at the Apple Store as it does at a third party retailer. People won't carry your shit if you undercut them.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
But the bad news here is that it seems the console manufacturers are primarily interested in serving the online customer base. Without knowing any sort of real market research, I'd be willing to wager that's because the online customers realize a much greater return for the publishers/developers than the offline ones, which is why they probably aren't particularly sweating losing the offline segment.
Like I said, CoD doesn't break sales records every Christmas because of the single player campaign. This year's Madden ad campaign was based entirely around dudes talking shit to each other on headsets from couches in their respective homes. FIFA 13 isn't ruling the sports game market because playing the computer is endlessly entertaining.
And if you're a budget minded game player who doesn't want to engage in multiplayer games? Well, a large # of my favorite titles from this generation were XBLA offerings, all ~$15 as their first day pricing, and I don't think I've even played 5% of what they have available there. Just ... yeah ... gaming is changing. Whatever worked for the SNES isn't going to work for the next generation. That's just the facts.
I think we're more likely to see Steam (or DD distribution methods) offer the option of physical media. You have a bandwidth cap? Buy your game online. Instead of 'Download and Install' you pay $5-10 and they will mail you in the next X days a DVD / USB drive / SD card that contains your 5 gig digital download. Plug it in, install it to your account, grab your patches, and good to go.
That covers 90% of the legitimate bitching that '1 game kills my bandwidth' or 'I still have dialup and don't want to wait a month to download a game'.
It's really no different than your #2 model, since it's going to require the same online authentication.
As for not being able to use your old games because the servers are down? That already happens. I've got at least several MMOs from the early 2000's (Motor City Online, Earth & Beyond, City of Heroes) where the DVD on the shelf isn't worth the plastic it's printed on. It's a fact of life...
I know I've been able to transfer Impulse and Amazon keys to Steam, and I would assume those transfers go both ways - especially in the incredibly unlikely event that Steam were to ever go down. Not that I think that would ever happen...
In a worst-case scenario, you are going to see a game that loses it's online authentication servers and no patch is released to strip it cracked or available on Abandonware sites. My understanding - and I'm not a lawyer - is that if you actually purchased a game, it's legal to run a cracked version or version you obtained from elsewhere. If we see a rash of games being 'bricked' due to lack of authentication servers, I'm sure that would get hashed out pretty quickly.
30-40% of call of duty players have never played the multiplayer, even once
Edit: 20% of battlefield 3 players played singleplayer only, and that game is pretty much all multiplayer!
Actually, I love that option - buy a copy of the game online and have it mailed to you, ready to be installed on your console? Perfect.
Also, have the delivery media contain a writeable sector that houses your profile and your console ID, so you can play the game offline, or bring the game over to your friends' internet-connected house if you want to play it there.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Do you have a source for that? I'd be curious.
And even if that is the case, it definitely seems the content producers are saying "we don't care about that 30-40%." Especially since I'd be willing to guess that the trend since the first CoD title release is that the # of offline-only players has been decreasing with each iteration.
edit: and I wouldn't be surprised one bit to find out that the offline-only players are also the most frequent users of trade-ins and used game discounts, which again we know the publishers aren't particularly interested in serving.
@The Green Eyed Monster : still waiting for that quote or a retraction.
http://bf3blog.com/2012/05/20-percent-of-battlefield-3-players-play-offline/
I can't find anything from past 2011 for COD, but I'd assume that it's at least a similar figure (although probably higher, since COD games have a far more in depth singleplayer, especially black ops 2)
But what continuously baffles me is why anyone would suspect that killing used games would result in price savings for them, given the retailer/publisher relationship?
This completely ignores the fact that individual retail stores will put the physical copy on sale for $29.99 for a week.
Like, seriously, those of you arguing that retail stores are holding back digital prices like this aren't actually paying much attention to the retail market. Physical games go on sale all the time. Between now and the end of the year you will have multiple opportunities to get games like Metal Gear Rising, DMC, Dead Space 3, and Tomb Raider for 20-40 bucks. Last year fall games like Halo 4, Far Cry 3, Forza, NFS, CoD, Hitman, and so on could be gotten near the end of the year for forty bucks, a month or two after release.
My Let's Play Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC2go70QLfwGq-hW4nvUqmog
"Our telemetry might tell us that as many as 20% just want to play almost offline—connected yet offline." <> "20% of battlefield 3 players played singleplayer only."
Precedent. Tons and tons of precedent. Every single place this model has been instituted, publishers are willing to do sales because they do not account for losses, only smaller gains per unit which turn into bigger gains because of volume.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Huh -- I wonder how that data works, too, since the link mentions "20% connected, but offline." I wonder if Microsoft or their publishers really have any way of tracking strictly offline play.
And while the % of offline players in CoD is a bit surprising to me (I don't have a hard time accepting it, I'm really just curious to dig at who is tracking this stuff and how) I do believe the trend would most likely be a steady decrease in offline only players, not vice versa, which definitely seems to be the trend that game manufacturers have been tracking for around a decade now. (Totally personal anecdote -- I have distinct memories of when the EGM editorial board fell deeply in love with any OG Xbox game with a big multiplayer element (that one Splinter Cell one they wouldn't shut up about forever) and I found it endlessly frustrating as a gamer because I wasn't online and thought it was stupid to be championing games for features that only a handful of gamers would be able to realize -- anyway...)
And what continues to baffle me is how people refuse to see Steam as a benevolent model for what could happen on consoles, as opposed to presuming as immutable fact that MS/Sony's business plan is to screw as many people as quickly as possible.
Oh here's Deebaser laser focusing on my edit to try and nullify my point
Are you arguing that an insignificant number of players don't make use of the online components?
Because Treyarch seems to think that these people exist
So yeah, people do just play singleplayer. Hell I played more singleplayer Blops 2 than I did MP and I know other people who did too, so there's at least a few of us
Because they answer to the retailers, and their model isn't digital, and is a ways away from being digital, many games are platform-locked to their service, and in the past they haven't returned excessive profits in the form of lower game prices
I don't think for a second that Steam would have as many good sales if the only place to get PC games was the Steam store. Competition breeds lower prices. But there would be no competition here.
My Let's Play Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC2go70QLfwGq-hW4nvUqmog
What are you talking about? You made a claim that isn't supported by the link that you provided. Don't do that.
Again this is something I don't really know, but is it really Steam setting the price or the publishers? Because publishers have competition with other publishers. If Battlefield 5 is getting roundly outsold by Call of Duty: Modern Black Ops 4, wouldn't the publisher of Battlefield 5 be the one with a vested interest in a price drop? I mean, XBLA has different price points and I've tracked games before that have seen a price drop over time (because I balked at 1200 points for example, but gave it a second look at 800 points, and like I've said there's still sale offerings from time to time) and it's not like the XBLA games are competing against a separate distributor.
(But honestly this is all so speculative at this point it's hard to say concretely much at all. I'm really just offering a counter viewpoint to the idea that a single distributor means a lack of price competition.)
This is missing the point.
The publisher doesn't care what the retailer sells it for because once the retailer has it the publisher has already been paid. Only the retailer cares what they sell their games for. The retailer can choose to put it on sale and try to drive traffic to their store, or keep it at $60 for 3 years if they really want to.
The retailer cares very much what the publisher sells digital copies of their game for because this could potentially interfere with them recouping their expenses!
The fact that retailers sometimes choose to discount stuff they've already bought and paid for does not mean that the retailer won't be pissed if the publisher cuts prices.
Alright, I was wrong about "20% of battlefield players playing only offline", good show. 20% play offline, while being online. We do not know how many play offline while being offline, because that data is unavailable.
Do you dispute my overall point, that a significant number of gamers play offline?
I don't know why you're getting so hurt and defensive.
Also, you're still wrong. We don't have data for any of it. We have a developer saying "Our telemetry might tell us that as many as 20% just want to play almost offline—connected yet offline."
That's the source of your 20% "fact". Do you see how the word "might" and the phrase "as many as" take away from that statement? You could madlibs the hell out of that and get 100% true albiet meaningless statements.
As to your overall point, so what? Does it even matter how many COD/BF/Halo players are in it exclusively for the single player campaign?
Whether the used market ultimately leads to more sales or not isn't even the point. If you care about developers, you should not buy used games shortly after launch, or trade them in, full stop. Even if you use those recent tradeins to buy more new games, you are still doing a net harm, because you are trading multiple recent games (and thereby taking away multiple new game sales) in exchange for your one new game purchase with the credit.
Edit: Just to say it, the reason that I and others have said that it is better to outright steal a game from a store than to buy it used is that if you steal a copy, the store needs to buy another from the publisher during the early window. If you buy it used, you actually decreased the number of copies of the game that the store needs to order.
And if you really care about Starbucks you should only ever drink coffee and also bathe in it and use it to wash your dishes.
Or maybe people should base their purchasing decisions on what benefits them as people and not what benefits businesses.
ITT I learn that talking about what I personally want while also talking about what I think should actually happen really confuses people sometimes. They don't have to be mutually exclusive here folks. I wouldn't care if everyone's satalite bill went up so I could still watch AMC, even if it pushed some people away from the service, but that doesn't mean I think it should happen. Of course I care about my own interests, everyone does.
Anyway, thread has moved on since then, but to all of you who decided to dogpile on me after I went to bed, you're all wonderful and charming people and I'm sure that's going to take your really far.
Thing is, the rental model is built around relationships between the content creators/distributors and the company doing the renting. There are rules they follow that allow for them to rent the content. You can't just buy 100 copies of Iron Man 2 and rent them to people.
Starbucks example is just goosey. I don't even know how to address that.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
This is madness. You are positing an argument where
World A) Used games sales allowed. McDevelopers game sells 100 new copies.
World
And saying that World A is worse for developers than World B.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.