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[Video Game Sales] 1st Sales Doctrine? We Doan Need No Steeking 1st Sales Doctrine!

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Posts

  • spacekungfumanspacekungfuman Poor and minority-filled Registered User, __BANNED USERS regular
    syndalis wrote: »
    ElJeffe wrote: »
    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.

    Also, games are unique in that their success or failure is judged during a very short period in which they must not only compete against other games, but against identical copies of th same game being sold for less on the secondary market. It's like if movies had to deal with used tickets being sold during opening weekend.

  • Death of RatsDeath of Rats Registered User regular
    syndalis wrote: »
    ElJeffe wrote: »
    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.

    It also ignores the fact that movies have a vastly different revenue stream than games. There's movie tickets, toy tie ins, DVD and Blu-Rays, rental shops, streaming options, broadcast television, and DD... every single one of these gives a chunk of money to the Studio. The only way you're not in some way contributing to that is if you buy a used DVD or torrent the movie.

    For games there's... toy tie ins and game sales. That's it. That's the revenue stream.

    No I don't.
  • syndalissyndalis Getting Classy On the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Products regular
    Maybe the industry could negotiate a 3 month waiting period from day of game release before retailers are able to sell used copies. Punished by them not being able to acquire new copies in the future if the break the rule multiple times.

    But this feels needlessly complex when the real final answer is Steam-like services. and everyone holding onto their discs and cartridges are going to have to deal with it, because it is where we are going, full steam ahead.

    SW-4158-3990-6116
    Let's play Mario Kart or something...
  • spacekungfumanspacekungfuman Poor and minority-filled Registered User, __BANNED USERS regular
    Lets also not forget that DVDs and BDs don't need to deal with their largest specialty retailer being a national pawnshop that actively tries to persuade the customers to buy used.

  • UltimanecatUltimanecat Registered User regular
    While paeans to developers are all well and good, as others have mentioned you are not destroying the industry by buying and selling used. Even being our most charitable to these arguments, used games are harmful to a certain segment of the industry as it currently desires to operate.

    From my previous example, I'm sure American auto makers thought dicking around with warranties and selling unreliable cars was important to their business model, and there was impassioned testimony before Congress about how changing the balance of rights over from seller to buyer would screw the industry. And that testimony wasn't even necessarily wrong - high gas prices and inability to compete on reliability with foreign makers knocked the American auto right off its pedestal for at least a decade or two.

    That's what it comes down to - does this move protect an entire industry that can't survive without it, or simply protect one class of doing business within it? And if the latter, is that method worth protecting at the cost of consumer rights and expectations?

    One thing is for sure - I'm not treating developers and publishers like they're a charity. They're not Girl Scouts selling cookies, they're selling a multi-million dollar product for profit.

    SteamID : same as my PA forum name
  • CptHamiltonCptHamilton Registered User regular
    syndalis wrote: »
    Maybe the industry could negotiate a 3 month waiting period from day of game release before retailers are able to sell used copies. Punished by them not being able to acquire new copies in the future if the break the rule multiple times.

    But this feels needlessly complex when the real final answer is Steam-like services. and everyone holding onto their discs and cartridges are going to have to deal with it, because it is where we are going, full steam ahead.

    I'd rather skip that step and go straight to the Netflix and Pandora model. You want to ensure developers make money? Quit selling to consumers. Sell to content-providers and let me pay them a flat fee to 'rent' and play the games I want to play. If you're a developer and nobody plays your games, you don't get as sweet a deal when it comes time to renew your distribution contract. You want another revenue stream besides the distribution deals? Sell hardcopy collectors editions to the people who give a shit.

    You know how many Steam games I have that I will probably never play again? A lot. Same with game discs. I don't even know how many games I own, but I'd guess there are maybe 20 or 25 of them that I would choose to keep if I had to discard all of the ones I wouldn't be playing again tomorrow, and that includes the ones I own but haven't played yet. Maybe 30 if you include my Steam library in the cull list.

    I used to buy music, either in physical form or mp3s. Now I listen to Pandora stations.

    I used to buy movies and went to Blockbuster like once a week on average. Now I watch Netflix, On Demand stations, and Crunchyroll.

    I hate paying for stuff and then feeling like I didn't get my money's worth, and a lot of the time a game just doesn't hold my attention over its entire length. Or some other game comes along that I'd really rather play in my limited free time. So if we're going to go all-digital, no real ownership on this, let's just skip the piddly shit and go all the way: let me stream or whatever the games I want, when I want them, for one price. If I want to spend 100 hours this month on Dragon Age 3, I do that. If I want to play an hour each of twenty different games? I do that. I dunno how much I'd pay for such a service, but a lot more than I pay for Netflix or Crunchyroll. Probably more than my current video game budget, averaged over the length of the year.

    PSN,Steam,Live | CptHamiltonian
  • syndalissyndalis Getting Classy On the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Products regular
    edited February 2013
    syndalis wrote: »
    Maybe the industry could negotiate a 3 month waiting period from day of game release before retailers are able to sell used copies. Punished by them not being able to acquire new copies in the future if the break the rule multiple times.

    But this feels needlessly complex when the real final answer is Steam-like services. and everyone holding onto their discs and cartridges are going to have to deal with it, because it is where we are going, full steam ahead.

    I'd rather skip that step and go straight to the Netflix and Pandora model. You want to ensure developers make money? Quit selling to consumers. Sell to content-providers and let me pay them a flat fee to 'rent' and play the games I want to play. If you're a developer and nobody plays your games, you don't get as sweet a deal when it comes time to renew your distribution contract. You want another revenue stream besides the distribution deals? Sell hardcopy collectors editions to the people who give a shit.

    You know how many Steam games I have that I will probably never play again? A lot. Same with game discs. I don't even know how many games I own, but I'd guess there are maybe 20 or 25 of them that I would choose to keep if I had to discard all of the ones I wouldn't be playing again tomorrow, and that includes the ones I own but haven't played yet. Maybe 30 if you include my Steam library in the cull list.

    I used to buy music, either in physical form or mp3s. Now I listen to Pandora stations.

    I used to buy movies and went to Blockbuster like once a week on average. Now I watch Netflix, On Demand stations, and Crunchyroll.

    I hate paying for stuff and then feeling like I didn't get my money's worth, and a lot of the time a game just doesn't hold my attention over its entire length. Or some other game comes along that I'd really rather play in my limited free time. So if we're going to go all-digital, no real ownership on this, let's just skip the piddly shit and go all the way: let me stream or whatever the games I want, when I want them, for one price. If I want to spend 100 hours this month on Dragon Age 3, I do that. If I want to play an hour each of twenty different games? I do that. I dunno how much I'd pay for such a service, but a lot more than I pay for Netflix or Crunchyroll. Probably more than my current video game budget, averaged over the length of the year.

    There already are streaming services out there like OnLive, and latency is a bitch, even on great internet connections. I tried playing a tony Hawk style game over it and just about lost my goddamned mind. I can't even imagine what a fighting game would be like.

    Another problem with this model is that content producers will renegotiate their library contracts from time to time, and halfway through your playthrough of Final Fantasy XV it could fall off the service until square gets their head out of their ass.

    This is a much bigger problem for games than it is for television and films...

    syndalis on
    SW-4158-3990-6116
    Let's play Mario Kart or something...
  • override367override367 ALL minions Registered User regular
    edited February 2013
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    ElJeffe wrote: »
    syndalis wrote: »
    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.

    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?

    "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?

    Well before you side tracked into the magical journey of pedantry that is the hallmark of many discussions on this forum, yes I believe that was the point I was addressing, that there are still a significant number of players who just play singleplayer, and consoles that aren't even hooked up to the internet. This is a key difference from Steam and why the two markets can't be compared side by side

    I still don't even know if you even agree or disagree with that assessment

    override367 on
  • CptHamiltonCptHamilton Registered User regular
    syndalis wrote: »
    syndalis wrote: »
    Maybe the industry could negotiate a 3 month waiting period from day of game release before retailers are able to sell used copies. Punished by them not being able to acquire new copies in the future if the break the rule multiple times.

    But this feels needlessly complex when the real final answer is Steam-like services. and everyone holding onto their discs and cartridges are going to have to deal with it, because it is where we are going, full steam ahead.

    I'd rather skip that step and go straight to the Netflix and Pandora model. You want to ensure developers make money? Quit selling to consumers. Sell to content-providers and let me pay them a flat fee to 'rent' and play the games I want to play. If you're a developer and nobody plays your games, you don't get as sweet a deal when it comes time to renew your distribution contract. You want another revenue stream besides the distribution deals? Sell hardcopy collectors editions to the people who give a shit.

    You know how many Steam games I have that I will probably never play again? A lot. Same with game discs. I don't even know how many games I own, but I'd guess there are maybe 20 or 25 of them that I would choose to keep if I had to discard all of the ones I wouldn't be playing again tomorrow, and that includes the ones I own but haven't played yet. Maybe 30 if you include my Steam library in the cull list.

    I used to buy music, either in physical form or mp3s. Now I listen to Pandora stations.

    I used to buy movies and went to Blockbuster like once a week on average. Now I watch Netflix, On Demand stations, and Crunchyroll.

    I hate paying for stuff and then feeling like I didn't get my money's worth, and a lot of the time a game just doesn't hold my attention over its entire length. Or some other game comes along that I'd really rather play in my limited free time. So if we're going to go all-digital, no real ownership on this, let's just skip the piddly shit and go all the way: let me stream or whatever the games I want, when I want them, for one price. If I want to spend 100 hours this month on Dragon Age 3, I do that. If I want to play an hour each of twenty different games? I do that. I dunno how much I'd pay for such a service, but a lot more than I pay for Netflix or Crunchyroll. Probably more than my current video game budget, averaged over the length of the year.

    There already are streaming services out there like OnLive, and latency is a bitch, even on great internet connections. I tried playing a tony Hawk style game over it and just about lost my goddamned mind. I can't even imagine what a fighting game would be like.

    Another problem with this model is that content producers will renegotiate their library contracts from time to time, and halfway through your playthrough of Final Fantasy XV it could fall off the service until square gets their head out of their ass.

    This is a much bigger problem for games than it is for television and films...

    Yeah, nobody has done it in a way that doesn't suck. Bandwidth does not flow like water, but if we're assuming that it flows sufficiently freely to make digital-only game distribution a viable possibility, I'm willing to wait to download heavily-DRM'd game content to my local box whenever I want to play a game. Supposedly the PS4 has this sorted out for DD games using some sort of buffer-then-play-while-you-download thing. That would work for me.

    The library thing is an issue, but if it were all the major consoles then fuck the publishers. What else are they going to do but take what the service(s) give them? Movies are a weird beast because you have DVD sales and like 4 major pay-to-stream services competing, all of them wanting timed or legitimate exclusives on titles. Plus half the big houses have a stake in or outright own cable channels, so want to stick their shit on there either on-demand or pay-per-view. Video games don't have those other outlets, like someone was saying. If the nextnextbox and the PS5 wanted to do Download Only Streaming Only Pay Us $50 a Month And Get Video Games On Tap Or Suffer, Bitches then EA and shit have no other choice but take whatever MS or Sony want to give them.

    PSN,Steam,Live | CptHamiltonian
  • zagdrobzagdrob Registered User regular
    I don't know exactly how revenue is shared between the publishers and developers, but I have to agree with SKFM, at least in the narrow context he presented.

    If all you care about is developers, the way you can most support them is to buy day 1 full priced games on release. It means that developer is going to get more money, more attention, and encourages the publishers / distributors to put in higher initial orders and push more sequels. He's not wrong in that sense.

    Look at Blizzard or Valve (absent WoW or Steam) - they got to where they are at because they consistently released good games that people wanted to buy on launch day. Games people read up on and followed development of and camped out to get when they were released. Hell, most Blizzard games stay at / near full price for a good three or four years after release, and even decade-old games like Starcraft or Diablo 2 command $20+ for the 'combo' pack. That means they get money, and can do more things that we as gamers like.

    Now, where I differ from SKFM is that I don't think a few AAA titles from a few developers are the best thing for gaming. It's been a LONG time since I've been so excited by a game I had to buy it on launch day. My gaming budget is limited, so instead of spending $60 on one AAA title, I'd rather wait for it to be on sale for $30, and spend the other $30 on a bunch of smaller, cheaper games. I've put $75 into my Steam wallet since Christmas, and gotten about a dozen different titles that will give me far more enjoyment than most AAA titles.

    If your gaming budget is unlimited, yeah...buying launch day titles at $60 is the best way to go. Me? I prefer to spread my gaming around, encourage slightly older games to go on sale so I can afford them, and buy some indie games too.

  • CptHamiltonCptHamilton Registered User regular
    zagdrob wrote: »
    I don't know exactly how revenue is shared between the publishers and developers, but I have to agree with SKFM, at least in the narrow context he presented.

    If all you care about is developers, the way you can most support them is to buy day 1 full priced games on release. It means that developer is going to get more money, more attention, and encourages the publishers / distributors to put in higher initial orders and push more sequels. He's not wrong in that sense.

    Look at Blizzard or Valve (absent WoW or Steam) - they got to where they are at because they consistently released good games that people wanted to buy on launch day. Games people read up on and followed development of and camped out to get when they were released. Hell, most Blizzard games stay at / near full price for a good three or four years after release, and even decade-old games like Starcraft or Diablo 2 command $20+ for the 'combo' pack. That means they get money, and can do more things that we as gamers like.

    Now, where I differ from SKFM is that I don't think a few AAA titles from a few developers are the best thing for gaming. It's been a LONG time since I've been so excited by a game I had to buy it on launch day. My gaming budget is limited, so instead of spending $60 on one AAA title, I'd rather wait for it to be on sale for $30, and spend the other $30 on a bunch of smaller, cheaper games. I've put $75 into my Steam wallet since Christmas, and gotten about a dozen different titles that will give me far more enjoyment than most AAA titles.

    If your gaming budget is unlimited, yeah...buying launch day titles at $60 is the best way to go. Me? I prefer to spread my gaming around, encourage slightly older games to go on sale so I can afford them, and buy some indie games too.

    Y'know, it's funny to look at Starcraft as compared to a lot of titles on the market. Starcraft 1 was, when released, the most pirated game in history. Despite that, it not only made Blizzard a mint, it stayed on the shelves for years and years. Before Starcraft 2 came out I could walk into a Best Buy and drop $30 on a Starcraft Battle Chest with the Battle.Net re-release edition and expansions, and that was a goddamned 11 or 12 year old game at that point. All of these publishers are bitching and whining about piracy and used games and how they need to make all their money in the first month because after that sales turn to shit and they might as well just go bury their stock in that salt flat with the old atari ET cartridges. And then there's Blizzard selling Diablo 2 and Starcraft 1 for $20 a decade on from when they came out, and apparently moving enough inventory to keep them stocked at places with rapidly shrinking PC game shelf space. There's something to be said for just making games that are awesome and have a lot of replay value.

    PSN,Steam,Live | CptHamiltonian
  • Death of RatsDeath of Rats Registered User regular
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    ElJeffe wrote: »
    syndalis wrote: »
    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.

    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?

    "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?

    Well before you side tracked into the magical journey of pedantry that is the hallmark of many discussions on this forum, yes I believe that was the point I was addressing, that there are still a significant number of players who just play singleplayer, and consoles that aren't even hooked up to the internet. This is a key difference from Steam and why the two markets can't be compared side by side

    I still don't even know if you even agree or disagree with that assessment

    I do question the bolded portion. The question really isn't how many of these consoles aren't hooked up to the internet, the question is how many people who buy consoles don't have an internet connection.

    I thought a bit about bandwidth caps/limitations this morning, and the obvious solution to those issues is the same it is for steam. New games with a large download size still have retail copies on steam. If console games, instead of going DD only, but went to an account based structure (like steam), with retail copies being basically data backups to make installs easier, the only people being cut out of the market would be people without internet at all, which I imagine is a much smaller portion of the market than those with internet that can't handle 15+ gig downloads. Of course these boxed copies would shrink the retail space much like it did for PC games over the last decade, but buying a copy of COD 48: Blood of Bloodwarf on amazon to get the retail copy would allow those like LockedOnTarget or all of Canada to stay in the market while allowing the rest of us to have our DD paradise (or whatever).

    No I don't.
  • DeebaserDeebaser on my way to work in a suit and a tie Ahhhh...come on fucking guyRegistered User regular
    edited February 2013
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    ElJeffe wrote: »
    syndalis wrote: »
    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.

    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?

    "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?

    Well before you side tracked into the magical journey of pedantry that is the hallmark of many discussions on this forum, yes I believe that was the point I was addressing, that there are still a significant number of players who just play singleplayer, and consoles that aren't even hooked up to the internet. This is a key difference from Steam and why the two markets can't be compared side by side

    I still don't even know if you even agree or disagree with that assessment

    Well, you've done a pretty poor job of explaining your argument and have misused p tangential "facts" to support it, so I don't have much of an idea what you are looking for me to agree or disagree with, but Ill take a stab at it anyway.

    Most households have the internet now. Im sure the venn diagram overlap of "People that don't have access to the internet" and "People that buy new games day 1" is so small it isn't worth maintaining the status quo on that basis.

    Deebaser on
  • zagdrobzagdrob Registered User regular
    syndalis wrote: »
    syndalis wrote: »
    Maybe the industry could negotiate a 3 month waiting period from day of game release before retailers are able to sell used copies. Punished by them not being able to acquire new copies in the future if the break the rule multiple times.

    But this feels needlessly complex when the real final answer is Steam-like services. and everyone holding onto their discs and cartridges are going to have to deal with it, because it is where we are going, full steam ahead.

    I'd rather skip that step and go straight to the Netflix and Pandora model. You want to ensure developers make money? Quit selling to consumers. Sell to content-providers and let me pay them a flat fee to 'rent' and play the games I want to play. If you're a developer and nobody plays your games, you don't get as sweet a deal when it comes time to renew your distribution contract. You want another revenue stream besides the distribution deals? Sell hardcopy collectors editions to the people who give a shit.

    You know how many Steam games I have that I will probably never play again? A lot. Same with game discs. I don't even know how many games I own, but I'd guess there are maybe 20 or 25 of them that I would choose to keep if I had to discard all of the ones I wouldn't be playing again tomorrow, and that includes the ones I own but haven't played yet. Maybe 30 if you include my Steam library in the cull list.

    I used to buy music, either in physical form or mp3s. Now I listen to Pandora stations.

    I used to buy movies and went to Blockbuster like once a week on average. Now I watch Netflix, On Demand stations, and Crunchyroll.

    I hate paying for stuff and then feeling like I didn't get my money's worth, and a lot of the time a game just doesn't hold my attention over its entire length. Or some other game comes along that I'd really rather play in my limited free time. So if we're going to go all-digital, no real ownership on this, let's just skip the piddly shit and go all the way: let me stream or whatever the games I want, when I want them, for one price. If I want to spend 100 hours this month on Dragon Age 3, I do that. If I want to play an hour each of twenty different games? I do that. I dunno how much I'd pay for such a service, but a lot more than I pay for Netflix or Crunchyroll. Probably more than my current video game budget, averaged over the length of the year.

    There already are streaming services out there like OnLive, and latency is a bitch, even on great internet connections. I tried playing a tony Hawk style game over it and just about lost my goddamned mind. I can't even imagine what a fighting game would be like.

    Another problem with this model is that content producers will renegotiate their library contracts from time to time, and halfway through your playthrough of Final Fantasy XV it could fall off the service until square gets their head out of their ass.

    This is a much bigger problem for games than it is for television and films...

    Trying to play a completely streamed game would probably suck, but I don't think that's the model.

    Steam seems to be just fine. I can buy a game and be playing it a couple hours later...it's not insurmountable when you look at Netflix - a lot of people had no problem waiting a couple of days for the movie they picked to come in, and if we are using CapHamilton's model, it would be fine if you could only install and play 3-5 games at a time. Especially if your saves were backed up to the cloud, so the next time you wanted to play that particular game you could just re-download it and pick up where you left off.

    How about the base plan lets people have three 'active' games, and make say...three changes per month. That would let you potentially play six different games per month, but if you had a game you really liked you could keep it active indefinitely. Maybe limit the number of 'AAA' titles that you can play in a given month. The game is installed on your machine, just 'locked out' unless you set it active.

    Who wouldn't pay $20-30 / month for a service like that? I bet in a lot of cases, you would end up with people paying more to 'rent' a game (say...FTL) than it would cost them to just buy it. Or if you left a game like Skyrim active for three or four months, you would easily have paid as much as just buying it, but if you try out a game and don't like it you aren't just wasting $60 on something you'll be done with five hours later.

  • SanderJKSanderJK Crocodylus Pontifex Sinterklasicus Madrid, 3000 ADRegistered User regular
    How many developers are out there that do AAA releases and are not owned by a big publisher? So few are left that it's no consideration.

    Steam: SanderJK Origin: SanderJK
  • syndalissyndalis Getting Classy On the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Products regular
    zagdrob wrote: »
    syndalis wrote: »
    syndalis wrote: »
    Maybe the industry could negotiate a 3 month waiting period from day of game release before retailers are able to sell used copies. Punished by them not being able to acquire new copies in the future if the break the rule multiple times.

    But this feels needlessly complex when the real final answer is Steam-like services. and everyone holding onto their discs and cartridges are going to have to deal with it, because it is where we are going, full steam ahead.

    I'd rather skip that step and go straight to the Netflix and Pandora model. You want to ensure developers make money? Quit selling to consumers. Sell to content-providers and let me pay them a flat fee to 'rent' and play the games I want to play. If you're a developer and nobody plays your games, you don't get as sweet a deal when it comes time to renew your distribution contract. You want another revenue stream besides the distribution deals? Sell hardcopy collectors editions to the people who give a shit.

    You know how many Steam games I have that I will probably never play again? A lot. Same with game discs. I don't even know how many games I own, but I'd guess there are maybe 20 or 25 of them that I would choose to keep if I had to discard all of the ones I wouldn't be playing again tomorrow, and that includes the ones I own but haven't played yet. Maybe 30 if you include my Steam library in the cull list.

    I used to buy music, either in physical form or mp3s. Now I listen to Pandora stations.

    I used to buy movies and went to Blockbuster like once a week on average. Now I watch Netflix, On Demand stations, and Crunchyroll.

    I hate paying for stuff and then feeling like I didn't get my money's worth, and a lot of the time a game just doesn't hold my attention over its entire length. Or some other game comes along that I'd really rather play in my limited free time. So if we're going to go all-digital, no real ownership on this, let's just skip the piddly shit and go all the way: let me stream or whatever the games I want, when I want them, for one price. If I want to spend 100 hours this month on Dragon Age 3, I do that. If I want to play an hour each of twenty different games? I do that. I dunno how much I'd pay for such a service, but a lot more than I pay for Netflix or Crunchyroll. Probably more than my current video game budget, averaged over the length of the year.

    There already are streaming services out there like OnLive, and latency is a bitch, even on great internet connections. I tried playing a tony Hawk style game over it and just about lost my goddamned mind. I can't even imagine what a fighting game would be like.

    Another problem with this model is that content producers will renegotiate their library contracts from time to time, and halfway through your playthrough of Final Fantasy XV it could fall off the service until square gets their head out of their ass.

    This is a much bigger problem for games than it is for television and films...

    Trying to play a completely streamed game would probably suck, but I don't think that's the model.

    Steam seems to be just fine. I can buy a game and be playing it a couple hours later...it's not insurmountable when you look at Netflix - a lot of people had no problem waiting a couple of days for the movie they picked to come in, and if we are using CapHamilton's model, it would be fine if you could only install and play 3-5 games at a time. Especially if your saves were backed up to the cloud, so the next time you wanted to play that particular game you could just re-download it and pick up where you left off.

    How about the base plan lets people have three 'active' games, and make say...three changes per month. That would let you potentially play six different games per month, but if you had a game you really liked you could keep it active indefinitely. Maybe limit the number of 'AAA' titles that you can play in a given month. The game is installed on your machine, just 'locked out' unless you set it active.

    Who wouldn't pay $20-30 / month for a service like that? I bet in a lot of cases, you would end up with people paying more to 'rent' a game (say...FTL) than it would cost them to just buy it. Or if you left a game like Skyrim active for three or four months, you would easily have paid as much as just buying it, but if you try out a game and don't like it you aren't just wasting $60 on something you'll be done with five hours later.

    So basically Gamefly, but digital and through a steam-like download service? yes please.

    Give me the option to pay 10-50 bucks (depending on the title) to take a game out of rotation and keep it forever even if I stop subscribing and this is (as far as I am concerned) the perfect model.

    SW-4158-3990-6116
    Let's play Mario Kart or something...
  • PhillisherePhillishere Registered User regular
    edited February 2013
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    ElJeffe wrote: »
    syndalis wrote: »
    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.

    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?

    "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?

    Well before you side tracked into the magical journey of pedantry that is the hallmark of many discussions on this forum, yes I believe that was the point I was addressing, that there are still a significant number of players who just play singleplayer, and consoles that aren't even hooked up to the internet. This is a key difference from Steam and why the two markets can't be compared side by side

    I still don't even know if you even agree or disagree with that assessment

    I do question the bolded portion. The question really isn't how many of these consoles aren't hooked up to the internet, the question is how many people who buy consoles don't have an internet connection.

    I thought a bit about bandwidth caps/limitations this morning, and the obvious solution to those issues is the same it is for steam. New games with a large download size still have retail copies on steam. If console games, instead of going DD only, but went to an account based structure (like steam), with retail copies being basically data backups to make installs easier, the only people being cut out of the market would be people without internet at all, which I imagine is a much smaller portion of the market than those with internet that can't handle 15+ gig downloads. Of course these boxed copies would shrink the retail space much like it did for PC games over the last decade, but buying a copy of COD 48: Blood of Bloodwarf on amazon to get the retail copy would allow those like LockedOnTarget or all of Canada to stay in the market while allowing the rest of us to have our DD paradise (or whatever).

    The numbers I've seen vary wildly. There are market research surveys that show that anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of Xbox users are not connected. There are also reports that MS internal data shows that more than 70 percent of consoles manufacturer have never connected to Live.

    The latter will include units that are still in the retail chain, which will inflate the numbers, but it also suggests that a ton of people never go online. This isn't surprising, as 54 percent of users with incomes under $30K do not have broadband access. I don't know the demographics of Xbox/PS3 ownership, but I'd bet there is significant overlap between the lower brackets and console ownership, especially when you factor in the normal income/age brackets.

    Another fun fact, this generation has a penetration of 54 percent into U.S. households. That's pretty staggering in and of itself, and that number has to scare the shit out of any developer making the jump to the next generation. Gaming is a mass market medium now thanks to the long, slow adoption of the hardware. Even in the best case scenario, it will be years before a significant portion of those users migrate to the next generation, if they ever do.

    Phillishere on
  • CptHamiltonCptHamilton Registered User regular
    edited February 2013
    zagdrob wrote: »
    syndalis wrote: »
    syndalis wrote: »
    Maybe the industry could negotiate a 3 month waiting period from day of game release before retailers are able to sell used copies. Punished by them not being able to acquire new copies in the future if the break the rule multiple times.

    But this feels needlessly complex when the real final answer is Steam-like services. and everyone holding onto their discs and cartridges are going to have to deal with it, because it is where we are going, full steam ahead.

    I'd rather skip that step and go straight to the Netflix and Pandora model. You want to ensure developers make money? Quit selling to consumers. Sell to content-providers and let me pay them a flat fee to 'rent' and play the games I want to play. If you're a developer and nobody plays your games, you don't get as sweet a deal when it comes time to renew your distribution contract. You want another revenue stream besides the distribution deals? Sell hardcopy collectors editions to the people who give a shit.

    You know how many Steam games I have that I will probably never play again? A lot. Same with game discs. I don't even know how many games I own, but I'd guess there are maybe 20 or 25 of them that I would choose to keep if I had to discard all of the ones I wouldn't be playing again tomorrow, and that includes the ones I own but haven't played yet. Maybe 30 if you include my Steam library in the cull list.

    I used to buy music, either in physical form or mp3s. Now I listen to Pandora stations.

    I used to buy movies and went to Blockbuster like once a week on average. Now I watch Netflix, On Demand stations, and Crunchyroll.

    I hate paying for stuff and then feeling like I didn't get my money's worth, and a lot of the time a game just doesn't hold my attention over its entire length. Or some other game comes along that I'd really rather play in my limited free time. So if we're going to go all-digital, no real ownership on this, let's just skip the piddly shit and go all the way: let me stream or whatever the games I want, when I want them, for one price. If I want to spend 100 hours this month on Dragon Age 3, I do that. If I want to play an hour each of twenty different games? I do that. I dunno how much I'd pay for such a service, but a lot more than I pay for Netflix or Crunchyroll. Probably more than my current video game budget, averaged over the length of the year.

    There already are streaming services out there like OnLive, and latency is a bitch, even on great internet connections. I tried playing a tony Hawk style game over it and just about lost my goddamned mind. I can't even imagine what a fighting game would be like.

    Another problem with this model is that content producers will renegotiate their library contracts from time to time, and halfway through your playthrough of Final Fantasy XV it could fall off the service until square gets their head out of their ass.

    This is a much bigger problem for games than it is for television and films...

    Trying to play a completely streamed game would probably suck, but I don't think that's the model.

    Steam seems to be just fine. I can buy a game and be playing it a couple hours later...it's not insurmountable when you look at Netflix - a lot of people had no problem waiting a couple of days for the movie they picked to come in, and if we are using CapHamilton's model, it would be fine if you could only install and play 3-5 games at a time. Especially if your saves were backed up to the cloud, so the next time you wanted to play that particular game you could just re-download it and pick up where you left off.

    How about the base plan lets people have three 'active' games, and make say...three changes per month. That would let you potentially play six different games per month, but if you had a game you really liked you could keep it active indefinitely. Maybe limit the number of 'AAA' titles that you can play in a given month. The game is installed on your machine, just 'locked out' unless you set it active.

    Who wouldn't pay $20-30 / month for a service like that? I bet in a lot of cases, you would end up with people paying more to 'rent' a game (say...FTL) than it would cost them to just buy it. Or if you left a game like Skyrim active for three or four months, you would easily have paid as much as just buying it, but if you try out a game and don't like it you aren't just wasting $60 on something you'll be done with five hours later.

    I don't see a point in limiting the number of game swaps per month if you're on a subscription model anyway, unless it's just to conserve bandwidth. If your customer base is large enough that their subscription payments cover making deals with publishers such that you can have a reasonable catalog, there's nothing (except the afore-mentioned bandwidth reduction) to be gained by limiting how many games they can play. If you want to offer a tiered service like Netflix and Blockbuster had for their dvd-by-mail services ($N = 1 game, swap twice a month; $2N = 3 games, swap weekly; $4N = whatever the fuck you want you crazy bastard) then sure. But since games take so much longer to consume than movies you probably wouldn't see a lot of people wanting to pay more to swap more often. And if you have a 3 - 5 installed game limit (which seems really low, considering modern storage capacities) people are going to be less willing to try something new if they already have some games they're playing. I think, to make it work, you'd have to pick one or the other: charge more for more games 'active' or charge more to install more games per month, but install all you want up to your HD capacity.

    But nobody can even convince cable TV providers to let us buy our channels (much less shows) a la carte so I doubt the game companies would go for that kind of deal until forced at gunpoint.

    CptHamilton on
    PSN,Steam,Live | CptHamiltonian
  • The Green Eyed MonsterThe Green Eyed Monster i blame hip hop Registered User regular
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    ElJeffe wrote: »
    syndalis wrote: »
    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.

    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?

    "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?

    Well before you side tracked into the magical journey of pedantry that is the hallmark of many discussions on this forum, yes I believe that was the point I was addressing, that there are still a significant number of players who just play singleplayer, and consoles that aren't even hooked up to the internet. This is a key difference from Steam and why the two markets can't be compared side by side

    I still don't even know if you even agree or disagree with that assessment

    I do question the bolded portion. The question really isn't how many of these consoles aren't hooked up to the internet, the question is how many people who buy consoles don't have an internet connection.

    And the more cynical, but unavoidable question that goes along with that is -- how much money do publishers get out of the average non-internet connected console game consumer? If that consumer does lots of trade-ins, buys a very high volume of used games, low volume of new ones, I don't think the publisher is super concerned about losing that customer. If we agree that the companies need to adapt to survive, then it seems pretty silly to complain when the companies adapt by catering to the consumption habits of those players with the most disposable income for gaming.

  • ForarForar #432 Toronto, Ontario, CanadaRegistered User regular
    emnmnme wrote: »
    What causes the price of new videogames to drop so fast?

    In February 2011, Bulletstorm, Civ 5, Dead Space 2, Kirby's Epic Yarn were on shelves - these games were sold for the standard $60. 2 years later and now they're all $20 or less new. Doesn't matter if they're Greatest Hits or Platinum million sellers or flops; if a game was released two years ago, it's probably $20 today. But why? These aren't Madden games with obsolete rosters - aside from multiplayer lobbies that look like ghost towns, they're all still playable and enjoyable. I don't remember this happening during the N64/PSX days.

    Do lower used game prices cause all games to lose value quicker? A race to the bottom?

    Sorry to drag this up from the early pages, but some games do drop pretty quickly (I think Dead Space 2's price dropped by 33-50% within 3-4 months on Steam, and no it wasn't a sale, that was the base price), however it does mean that games/developers/publishers who keep their prices up longer can seem kind of obnoxious.

    Activision, for example, will keep games nearly half a decade old at that $20 price point, and rarely go on sale for any significant amount. Modern Warfare 1 and 2 are literally approaching 5.5 and 3.5 years old and that's where they sit. Black Ops 1 is 2.5 years old and it's still up at $40. Especially when it comes to franchises with yearly (or nearly yearly) releases, keeping the older titles up at nearly full price ($50-60 possibly minus 10-20% on pre-order or with bonuses) that I won't even pay for new AAA titles kind of baffles me.

    Of course, part of this ire is garnered because this series in particular focuses heavily on the MP aspects, whereas the SP campaigns can generally be beaten in an afternoon, and since I can't even count the fucks I don't give for the MP I'm reluctant to pay more for a 5 hour experience than I would on a more fully fleshed out SP game that'll last two to ten times as long.

    And of note, I'm referring strictly to Steam editions, which are impervious to the issue of used games. I'm sure I could find copies of all of the above for $5 on ebay or craigslist, but I'm a KB&M guy for my shooters, so here we are.

    I have nothing against companies wanting to recoup their costs and make some profit, but seriously guys, if there have been 2-5 sequels (literal and/or spinoff) it's probably okay to start dropping those prices.

    First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
  • The Green Eyed MonsterThe Green Eyed Monster i blame hip hop Registered User regular
    Forar wrote: »
    emnmnme wrote: »
    What causes the price of new videogames to drop so fast?

    In February 2011, Bulletstorm, Civ 5, Dead Space 2, Kirby's Epic Yarn were on shelves - these games were sold for the standard $60. 2 years later and now they're all $20 or less new. Doesn't matter if they're Greatest Hits or Platinum million sellers or flops; if a game was released two years ago, it's probably $20 today. But why? These aren't Madden games with obsolete rosters - aside from multiplayer lobbies that look like ghost towns, they're all still playable and enjoyable. I don't remember this happening during the N64/PSX days.

    Do lower used game prices cause all games to lose value quicker? A race to the bottom?

    Sorry to drag this up from the early pages, but some games do drop pretty quickly (I think Dead Space 2's price dropped by 33-50% within 3-4 months on Steam, and no it wasn't a sale, that was the base price), however it does mean that games/developers/publishers who keep their prices up longer can seem kind of obnoxious.

    Activision, for example, will keep games nearly half a decade old at that $20 price point, and rarely go on sale for any significant amount. Modern Warfare 1 and 2 are literally approaching 5.5 and 3.5 years old and that's where they sit. Black Ops 1 is 2.5 years old and it's still up at $40. Especially when it comes to franchises with yearly (or nearly yearly) releases, keeping the older titles up at nearly full price ($50-60 possibly minus 10-20% on pre-order or with bonuses) that I won't even pay for new AAA titles kind of baffles me.

    Of course, part of this ire is garnered because this series in particular focuses heavily on the MP aspects, whereas the SP campaigns can generally be beaten in an afternoon, and since I can't even count the fucks I don't give for the MP I'm reluctant to pay more for a 5 hour experience than I would on a more fully fleshed out SP game that'll last two to ten times as long.

    And of note, I'm referring strictly to Steam editions, which are impervious to the issue of used games. I'm sure I could find copies of all of the above for $5 on ebay or craigslist, but I'm a KB&M guy for my shooters, so here we are.

    I have nothing against companies wanting to recoup their costs and make some profit, but seriously guys, if there have been 2-5 sequels (literal and/or spinoff) it's probably okay to start dropping those prices.

    I think you point to the reason the companies maintain those prices in your own post, though -- if a franchise is multi-centric, the publisher would actively want to discourage late adopters from simply picking the lower price point on the older title and playing the multiplayer on that (pretty certain there are still healthy #s of CoD:MW2 players online with Xbox Live right now, lord knows I still have no problem finding Team Fortress 2 games when I feel like it). Publishers would rather keep the price points similar to encourage the consumer to adopt the latest title, their most recent investment.

    I mean honestly, considering the amount of play time a lot of online users get out of these multi-centric titles, $60 for the amount of entertainment they get out of the product is hardly a price point to scoff at. If you only want single-player content, then fine -- stay supporting those titles. But when the rest of the gaming community goes and throws its dollar behind multiplayer, that's just the breaks. The publishers are going to stay chasing that dollar, not that of the thrift gamer determined to get a bargain on every game.

  • ForarForar #432 Toronto, Ontario, CanadaRegistered User regular
    I think you point to the reason the companies maintain those prices in your own post, though -- if a franchise is multi-centric, the publisher would actively want to discourage late adopters from simply picking the lower price point on the older title and playing the multiplayer on that (pretty certain there are still healthy #s of CoD:MW2 players online with Xbox Live right now, lord knows I still have no problem finding Team Fortress 2 games when I feel like it). Publishers would rather keep the price points similar to encourage the consumer to adopt the latest title, their most recent investment.

    I mean honestly, considering the amount of play time a lot of online users get out of these multi-centric titles, $60 for the amount of entertainment they get out of the product is hardly a price point to scoff at. If you only want single-player content, then fine -- stay supporting those titles. But when the rest of the gaming community goes and throws its dollar behind multiplayer, that's just the breaks. The publishers are going to stay chasing that dollar, not that of the thrift gamer determined to get a bargain on every game.

    In response, I shall take a look at the Steam stats for gameplay, available on their site;
    Current Players Peak Today Game
    25,518 35,987 Call of Duty: Black Ops II - Multiplayer
    8,472 15,036 Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 - Multiplayer
    4,721 9,462 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - Multiplayer
    3,517 4,645 Call of Duty: Black Ops II - Zombies
    2,112 3,204 Call of Duty Black Ops - Multiplayer

    While there certainly do appear to be people playing online, we're talking up to a literal order of magnitude difference between the older titles and their recent brethren, especially when you bump the Zombies players in with BO2.

    As Gabe N has pointed out, profits (not just sales, actual profits) from games will often go up during sales. You lose out on the bonus per unit but you can make up for that in a massive glut of sales. I can't tell you how often I'll look at a top 10 seller list during a Steam sale and see $2-5 games sitting in the top 5, on par with or higher than their barely discounted 'triple A' title peers.

    Does this mean all games should be on heavy sales all the time? Of course not. There's certainly something to be said for the initial price (and thus profit per unit) being high initially to recoup some costs and even help fund future endeavors, but you can't tell me that they haven't already made their money back on the earlier CoD's.

    Actually, let's check Wikipedia!

    Call of Duty 4: MW sales: reportedly over 13 million.
    Modern Warfare 2 Sales: Reportedly over 25 million unique players, over 1 billion dollars in sales as of January 2010.
    Black Ops 1: reportedly around 14 million sales in the US alone, may have made around $820 million in sales or more.

    I suspect they've made their cash back.

    They're certainly free to charge whatever they like, and this was only the example that comes to mind off hand, but it's one that has stood out in my mind and in a number of Steam sales.

    First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
  • DeebaserDeebaser on my way to work in a suit and a tie Ahhhh...come on fucking guyRegistered User regular
    edited February 2013
    Digital distribution allows for much more responsive pricing than old timey brick and mortar distribution.
    EMBRACE THE FUTURE

    Deebaser on
  • LilnoobsLilnoobs Alpha Queue Registered User regular
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    ElJeffe wrote: »
    syndalis wrote: »
    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.

    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?

    "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?

    Well before you side tracked into the magical journey of pedantry that is the hallmark of many discussions on this forum, yes I believe that was the point I was addressing, that there are still a significant number of players who just play singleplayer, and consoles that aren't even hooked up to the internet. This is a key difference from Steam and why the two markets can't be compared side by side

    I still don't even know if you even agree or disagree with that assessment

    Well, you've done a pretty poor job of explaining your argument and have misused p tangential "facts" to support it, so I don't have much of an idea what you are looking for me to agree or disagree with, but Ill take a stab at it anyway.

    Most households have the internet now. Im sure the venn diagram overlap of "People that don't have access to the internet" and "People that buy new games day 1" is so small it isn't worth maintaining the status quo on that basis.

    Before you start calling people out on "facts" you may want to provide your own, first, since it is you advocating a needed change.

  • spacekungfumanspacekungfuman Poor and minority-filled Registered User, __BANNED USERS regular
    This whole discussion will be moot in a few years anyway. There is no doubt in my mind that the generation following the PS4/xbox 720 will be download only, or download preferred with disc based copies which only permit an installation, and which cannot be used to install the game on more than one console.

  • syndalissyndalis Getting Classy On the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Products regular
    This whole discussion will be moot in a few years anyway. There is no doubt in my mind that the generation following the PS4/xbox 720 will be download only, or download preferred with disc based copies which only permit an installation, and which cannot be used to install the game on more than one console.

    I think it might even start happening this generation, especially if steam makes a big splash into the console space and Microsoft/Sony are forced to compete, ala what the Wii did to spur the creation of PSMove and Kinect.

    SW-4158-3990-6116
    Let's play Mario Kart or something...
  • ShadowfireShadowfire Vermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered User regular
    syndalis wrote: »
    ElJeffe wrote: »
    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.

    Well, no... Redbox and Netflix were buying movies at retail to rent them when studios started their rental delays. There's nothing really stopping them from renting whatever they want.

    WiiU: Windrunner ; Guild Wars 2: Shadowfire.3940 ; PSN: Bradcopter
  • DeebaserDeebaser on my way to work in a suit and a tie Ahhhh...come on fucking guyRegistered User regular
    Lilnoobs wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    ElJeffe wrote: »
    syndalis wrote: »
    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.

    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?

    "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?

    Well before you side tracked into the magical journey of pedantry that is the hallmark of many discussions on this forum, yes I believe that was the point I was addressing, that there are still a significant number of players who just play singleplayer, and consoles that aren't even hooked up to the internet. This is a key difference from Steam and why the two markets can't be compared side by side

    I still don't even know if you even agree or disagree with that assessment

    Well, you've done a pretty poor job of explaining your argument and have misused p tangential "facts" to support it, so I don't have much of an idea what you are looking for me to agree or disagree with, but Ill take a stab at it anyway.

    Most households have the internet now. Im sure the venn diagram overlap of "People that don't have access to the internet" and "People that buy new games day 1" is so small it isn't worth maintaining the status quo on that basis.

    Before you start calling people out on "facts" you may want to provide your own, first, since it is you advocating a needed change.

    That's not a very compelling argument for the status quo.

  • MechMantisMechMantis Registered User regular
    There's "The Internet" and then there's The Internet.

    In Western New York there's huge swaths of territory where you simply cannot get better than satellite internet, especially in the southern tier. Really, really shitty satellite.


    It's no good. Caps and speeds a little better than 56k ahoy. And this is in New York State.

    I don't even want to think about how bad it is in someplace like North Dakota.

  • shrykeshryke Member of the Beast Registered User regular
    syndalis wrote: »
    Maybe the industry could negotiate a 3 month waiting period from day of game release before retailers are able to sell used copies. Punished by them not being able to acquire new copies in the future if the break the rule multiple times.

    But this feels needlessly complex when the real final answer is Steam-like services. and everyone holding onto their discs and cartridges are going to have to deal with it, because it is where we are going, full steam ahead.

    I'd rather skip that step and go straight to the Netflix and Pandora model. You want to ensure developers make money? Quit selling to consumers. Sell to content-providers and let me pay them a flat fee to 'rent' and play the games I want to play. If you're a developer and nobody plays your games, you don't get as sweet a deal when it comes time to renew your distribution contract. You want another revenue stream besides the distribution deals? Sell hardcopy collectors editions to the people who give a shit.

    You know how many Steam games I have that I will probably never play again? A lot. Same with game discs. I don't even know how many games I own, but I'd guess there are maybe 20 or 25 of them that I would choose to keep if I had to discard all of the ones I wouldn't be playing again tomorrow, and that includes the ones I own but haven't played yet. Maybe 30 if you include my Steam library in the cull list.

    I used to buy music, either in physical form or mp3s. Now I listen to Pandora stations.

    I used to buy movies and went to Blockbuster like once a week on average. Now I watch Netflix, On Demand stations, and Crunchyroll.

    I hate paying for stuff and then feeling like I didn't get my money's worth, and a lot of the time a game just doesn't hold my attention over its entire length. Or some other game comes along that I'd really rather play in my limited free time. So if we're going to go all-digital, no real ownership on this, let's just skip the piddly shit and go all the way: let me stream or whatever the games I want, when I want them, for one price. If I want to spend 100 hours this month on Dragon Age 3, I do that. If I want to play an hour each of twenty different games? I do that. I dunno how much I'd pay for such a service, but a lot more than I pay for Netflix or Crunchyroll. Probably more than my current video game budget, averaged over the length of the year.

    As an bit of info added to this point Pandora, for instance, really try to fuck the content producers over. Spotify (a similar service) is known for this too.

  • PhillisherePhillishere Registered User regular
    MechMantis wrote: »
    There's "The Internet" and then there's The Internet.

    In Western New York there's huge swaths of territory where you simply cannot get better than satellite internet, especially in the southern tier. Really, really shitty satellite.


    It's no good. Caps and speeds a little better than 56k ahoy. And this is in New York State.

    I don't even want to think about how bad it is in someplace like North Dakota.

    The county I live includes one of the world's largest research universities. My choices are a DSL service that's barely a step up from broadband - Netflix streaming did not work on it - and my cell phone. Despite being a massive tech nerd, I finally dropped the DSL and use my phone as a hotspot for low-level browsing and email.

    My mom lives in the sticks in a dirt poor rural county. She has blazing fast Time Warner broadband. When I had Time Warner, it was mediocre. I've also had AT&T DSL that was faster than the TW.

    Broadband penetration in this country is random and erratic. Even when you have it, you don't necessarily have it.

  • shrykeshryke Member of the Beast Registered User regular
    The numbers I've seen vary wildly. There are market research surveys that show that anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of Xbox users are not connected. There are also reports that MS internal data shows that more than 70 percent of consoles manufacturer have never connected to Live.

    The latter will include units that are still in the retail chain, which will inflate the numbers, but it also suggests that a ton of people never go online. This isn't surprising, as 54 percent of users with incomes under $30K do not have broadband access. I don't know the demographics of Xbox/PS3 ownership, but I'd bet there is significant overlap between the lower brackets and console ownership, especially when you factor in the normal income/age brackets.

    Another fun fact, this generation has a penetration of 54 percent into U.S. households. That's pretty staggering in and of itself, and that number has to scare the shit out of any developer making the jump to the next generation. Gaming is a mass market medium now thanks to the long, slow adoption of the hardware. Even in the best case scenario, it will be years before a significant portion of those users migrate to the next generation, if they ever do.

    I wonder though, do those people not have their XBox connected to the internet because they can't or because they just don't have any reason to? It just occurred to me.

  • syndalissyndalis Getting Classy On the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Products regular
    shryke wrote: »
    The numbers I've seen vary wildly. There are market research surveys that show that anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of Xbox users are not connected. There are also reports that MS internal data shows that more than 70 percent of consoles manufacturer have never connected to Live.

    The latter will include units that are still in the retail chain, which will inflate the numbers, but it also suggests that a ton of people never go online. This isn't surprising, as 54 percent of users with incomes under $30K do not have broadband access. I don't know the demographics of Xbox/PS3 ownership, but I'd bet there is significant overlap between the lower brackets and console ownership, especially when you factor in the normal income/age brackets.

    Another fun fact, this generation has a penetration of 54 percent into U.S. households. That's pretty staggering in and of itself, and that number has to scare the shit out of any developer making the jump to the next generation. Gaming is a mass market medium now thanks to the long, slow adoption of the hardware. Even in the best case scenario, it will be years before a significant portion of those users migrate to the next generation, if they ever do.

    I wonder though, do those people not have their XBox connected to the internet because they can't or because they just don't have any reason to? It just occurred to me.
    Xboxes did not have built in wifi for the first few years and not everyone has a router or switch by their television, especially not seven years ago.

    I would bet big money that the newer Xbox models have a much higher rate of connection to the Internet.

    SW-4158-3990-6116
    Let's play Mario Kart or something...
  • programjunkieprogramjunkie Registered User regular
    edited March 2013
    shryke wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    This doesn't make any sense though. You are also keep trying to say you aren't talking about substitution while talking about substitution. It's a concept in economics that is about exactly what we are talking about.

    Anyway:
    1) Actually yes, we can assume that alot of people will not buy new if they can buy used. The used market in console gaming is fairly well established and trusted, so many people will buy used simply because it's cheaper. We know this in part because Gamestop operates on this very principle and makes alot of money doing it.

    Two things:
    1. Used games are likely inferior goods, so to the extent that people can afford not to do so, they will avoid them.

    2. It's entirely possible that it is both within the publisher's best interests to charge $60 and there is a sizable enough market at $50 for Gamestop to make a profit selling games for it. Monopoly pricing deliberately skews high to maximize total profit while telling a very large number of customers who could provide a marginal profit to fuck off.

    1) Gamestop seems to indicate this is not a particularly big concern. They have based their entire business on this not being true for the most part. Used games are, at best, like $10 inferior to a new game. That's negligible.

    2) If that were true, it would be even more in publisher's interest to just kill the used marker and charge $50 for the game and make money on all the sales. The only way that doesn't work is if you assumed some ridiculous break down of profits from new sales to publishers.

    That's not true. Here's an example:
    Product A can sell 10 copies at $60 apiece, 11 total copies at $50 apiece, or 100 total copies at $5. It costs $1 to manufacture product A. What price will maximize the profit from A?

    The answer is to sell 10 copies and tell the other 90 potential customers to fuck off (ceteris paribus). However, there's still tons of profit left to be had, and that's where Gamestop comes in.

    (The full answer is to sell 10 copies at $60 and then the rest of the copies later on at the reduced but still profitable price)
    Gamers are already prioritizing games over other forms of entertainment and marginal increases in the cost of gaming is not likely to do anything but see small drops in the number of units purchased or something, instead of some imagined total conversion where they suddenly go to the ballet every week and play Angry Birds more or something.

    As a counterpoint, Steam makes absurd amounts of money by pricing games reasonably during sales.

    I ... in what way is this a counterpoint to what you quoted?

    Steam shows that you can make alot of money in the DD game via volume and good pricing. This is in no way related to people switching from big budget games to $1 apps.[/quote]

    I should have been a bit clearer. Steam suggests that the price elasticity of demand is pretty high once you go low enough , and I'd be tempted to suggest the opposite would apply (and though I haven't seen data on it recently enough to recall, I strongly suspect microtransactions are extremely good at "cheating" this).


    Edit to add:
    _J_ wrote: »
    Can we split this up for a sec and talk about some of the individual components? Put aside the Gamestop profit and look at the other side of the coin: Trading games. Because it takes two to tango. People are trading their games.

    Why should this not be allowed? Why is it when I buy a console game, I am to be eternally locked to it, never having another soul ever touch it? Why am I not allowed to just give it away to a friend? Why should this be denied?

    If Player A buys Game-X, plays it, and gives the cartridge to Player B, who plays the game, two people played the game and the developer only sold one copy.

    I think it's reasonable to discern that, from the developer's perspective, that's kinda fucked up.

    I don't think it is reasonable at all. This is one of the most wrong ideas revolving around media today. We don't pay a plumber twice if someone gets married and their new husband/wife uses the bathroom. We don't consider carpoolers to be freeloaders pirating transportation from Toyota. Etc. The same should apply to IP.

    programjunkie on
  • ElJeffeElJeffe Moderator, ClubPA mod
    My 360 and PS3 are both connected to the internet, but other than Netflix I probably don't use them online more than a few times per year, and that's generally to download an XBLA game or something. I am "connected" but only technically.

    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.
  • LilnoobsLilnoobs Alpha Queue Registered User regular
    edited March 2013
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Lilnoobs wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    ElJeffe wrote: »
    syndalis wrote: »
    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.

    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?

    "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?

    Well before you side tracked into the magical journey of pedantry that is the hallmark of many discussions on this forum, yes I believe that was the point I was addressing, that there are still a significant number of players who just play singleplayer, and consoles that aren't even hooked up to the internet. This is a key difference from Steam and why the two markets can't be compared side by side

    I still don't even know if you even agree or disagree with that assessment

    Well, you've done a pretty poor job of explaining your argument and have misused p tangential "facts" to support it, so I don't have much of an idea what you are looking for me to agree or disagree with, but Ill take a stab at it anyway.

    Most households have the internet now. Im sure the venn diagram overlap of "People that don't have access to the internet" and "People that buy new games day 1" is so small it isn't worth maintaining the status quo on that basis.

    Before you start calling people out on "facts" you may want to provide your own, first, since it is you advocating a needed change.

    That's not a very compelling argument for the status quo.

    Oh well.

    This whole discussion will be moot in a few years anyway. There is no doubt in my mind that the generation following the PS4/xbox 720 will be download only, or download preferred with disc based copies which only permit an installation, and which cannot be used to install the game on more than one console.

    I mostly agree and think this generation will be used to get consumers used to the idea of DD and organically shift away from used games.

    Lilnoobs on
  • DeebaserDeebaser on my way to work in a suit and a tie Ahhhh...come on fucking guyRegistered User regular
    edited March 2013
    Lilnoobs wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Lilnoobs wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    ElJeffe wrote: »
    syndalis wrote: »
    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.

    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?

    "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?

    Well before you side tracked into the magical journey of pedantry that is the hallmark of many discussions on this forum, yes I believe that was the point I was addressing, that there are still a significant number of players who just play singleplayer, and consoles that aren't even hooked up to the internet. This is a key difference from Steam and why the two markets can't be compared side by side

    I still don't even know if you even agree or disagree with that assessment

    Well, you've done a pretty poor job of explaining your argument and have misused p tangential "facts" to support it, so I don't have much of an idea what you are looking for me to agree or disagree with, but Ill take a stab at it anyway.

    Most households have the internet now. Im sure the venn diagram overlap of "People that don't have access to the internet" and "People that buy new games day 1" is so small it isn't worth maintaining the status quo on that basis.

    Before you start calling people out on "facts" you may want to provide your own, first, since it is you advocating a needed change.

    That's not a very compelling argument for the status quo.

    Oh well.

    That's not the rhetorical "I win" button you think it is. If you would like to question or debate in good faith any aspect of my argument, use specifics.


    edit: oh wait, nvm you're this guy...
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Lilnoobs wrote: »

    I don't really hold much weight with that argument because I've never seen any numbers that indicate people wait for that $5 price drop before they buy a game.

    demandcurve.gif

    Deebaser on
  • ShadowfireShadowfire Vermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered User regular
    ElJeffe wrote: »
    My 360 and PS3 are both connected to the internet, but other than Netflix I probably don't use them online more than a few times per year, and that's generally to download an XBLA game or something. I am "connected" but only technically.

    That could just be us, nerds on a forum, though. I mean, my 360 and PS3 are connected to the internet, but my 360 hasn't been booted in about six months, while the PS3 has been only for one game.

    WiiU: Windrunner ; Guild Wars 2: Shadowfire.3940 ; PSN: Bradcopter
  • LilnoobsLilnoobs Alpha Queue Registered User regular
    edited March 2013
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Lilnoobs wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Lilnoobs wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    ElJeffe wrote: »
    syndalis wrote: »
    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.

    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?

    "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?

    Well before you side tracked into the magical journey of pedantry that is the hallmark of many discussions on this forum, yes I believe that was the point I was addressing, that there are still a significant number of players who just play singleplayer, and consoles that aren't even hooked up to the internet. This is a key difference from Steam and why the two markets can't be compared side by side

    I still don't even know if you even agree or disagree with that assessment

    Well, you've done a pretty poor job of explaining your argument and have misused p tangential "facts" to support it, so I don't have much of an idea what you are looking for me to agree or disagree with, but Ill take a stab at it anyway.

    Most households have the internet now. Im sure the venn diagram overlap of "People that don't have access to the internet" and "People that buy new games day 1" is so small it isn't worth maintaining the status quo on that basis.

    Before you start calling people out on "facts" you may want to provide your own, first, since it is you advocating a needed change.

    That's not a very compelling argument for the status quo.

    Oh well.

    That's not the rhetorical "I win" button you think it is. If you would like to question or debate in good faith any aspect of my argument, use specifics.


    edit: oh wait, nvm you're this guy...
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Lilnoobs wrote: »

    I don't really hold much weight with that argument because I've never seen any numbers that indicate people wait for that $5 price drop before they buy a game.

    demandcurve.gif

    That graph is not showing what you think it's showing. But as an attempt to move away from the snark, I already used specifics.

    Let me re-highlight what I bolded, quoted, and responded to:
    Most households have the internet now. Im sure the venn diagram overlap of "People that don't have access to the internet" and "People that buy new games day 1" is so small it isn't worth maintaining the status quo on that basis

    So now that we have specifics, let me see this venn diagram that you are using as evidence. Please.
    Is this specific enough?

    Lilnoobs on
  • Death of RatsDeath of Rats Registered User regular
    Lilnoobs wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Lilnoobs wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Lilnoobs wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Deebaser wrote: »
    ElJeffe wrote: »
    syndalis wrote: »
    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.

    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?

    "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?

    Well before you side tracked into the magical journey of pedantry that is the hallmark of many discussions on this forum, yes I believe that was the point I was addressing, that there are still a significant number of players who just play singleplayer, and consoles that aren't even hooked up to the internet. This is a key difference from Steam and why the two markets can't be compared side by side

    I still don't even know if you even agree or disagree with that assessment

    Well, you've done a pretty poor job of explaining your argument and have misused p tangential "facts" to support it, so I don't have much of an idea what you are looking for me to agree or disagree with, but Ill take a stab at it anyway.

    Most households have the internet now. Im sure the venn diagram overlap of "People that don't have access to the internet" and "People that buy new games day 1" is so small it isn't worth maintaining the status quo on that basis.

    Before you start calling people out on "facts" you may want to provide your own, first, since it is you advocating a needed change.

    That's not a very compelling argument for the status quo.

    Oh well.

    That's not the rhetorical "I win" button you think it is. If you would like to question or debate in good faith any aspect of my argument, use specifics.


    edit: oh wait, nvm you're this guy...
    Deebaser wrote: »
    Lilnoobs wrote: »

    I don't really hold much weight with that argument because I've never seen any numbers that indicate people wait for that $5 price drop before they buy a game.

    demandcurve.gif

    That graph is not showing what you think it's showing. But as an attempt to move away from the snark, I already used specifics.

    Let me re-highlight what I bolded, quoted, and responded to:
    Most households have the internet now. Im sure the venn diagram overlap of "People that don't have access to the internet" and "People that buy new games day 1" is so small it isn't worth maintaining the status quo on that basis

    So now that we have specifics, let me see this venn diagram that you are using as evidence. Please.
    Is this specific enough?

    It's Schrodinger's argument. We don't know either way, and any though one way or another on that is going to be speculation. We can't assume that it's not that way, but we also can't assume that it is. However, the console manufactures would have that kind of information, or something close to it. When they do decide to go DD only, it will be because the above has proven to be true.

    No I don't.
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