Well, he talks about potential lower prices, much like steam. If thats the case, then... Game. Set. Match.
http://penny-arcade.com/report/arti...ames-with-ten-family-members-but-some-details So this game sharing with "family" members is really intriguing. I mean it can't work the way I think it does. I could just add a few family members and split the price and we can all share the game.... that would actually be really cool, cause I have a cousin who buys every AAA game.
They should make the model more simple: Boxed discs will be the same as usual. Downloaded games will be 50% cheaper but no sharing.
I've said this in one of these threads, but I think there is some resistance to having two pricing models for games (one for retail, one for DD). Maybe $5-$10 difference is OK, but something like $60 at retailers and $30 on XBL/PSN is a little tougher. IIRC, retailers are very opposed to this model (for obvious reasons). They may refuse to stock your game, give it good shelf space, etc. Or if you're the platform holder, they might decide to not push your platform very hard (they don't really make much money of console sales anyway). As long as retail has so much power, it is tough to do anything EXCEPT what they want. I think that partially explains why DD prices for console games have not been cheaper than retail (along with a slew of other reasons).
With the Xbox model, retail games are a pointless waste of money. I guess you could still connect online via dialup to get your 24 hour checkup, in which you couldn't really download, but for the most part, everyone will be on high speed. Personally, I'd love to see $40 for new games available for download.
I think history has shown that in similar situations, a large percentage of people (majority?) still generally would buy at retail instead of download (even with advantages to DD). If that wasn't the case, then yeah, MS could just cut out retailers all together. Though I guess another problem is that you need the retailer to sell your console...and they won't do that if they don't have games to sell...and you can't sell games if no one has your console.
Sony is so full of BS that's it's a sight for sore eyes. That instructional video about selling and sharing discs will be one for the ages as it illustrates utter blindness to the changing landscape of gaming and will be seen as completely quaint in the near future. First of all disc based distribution of full games is nearly dead and betting on it as a long term strategy like Sony is trying to fool gamers into believing is stupid. In the next few years, the only games that will be distributed on disc will be glorified demos of F2P games and multiplayer only games. Cliff Bleszinski is absolutely right when he proclaims the death of single-player games; if you want to play games you will have to be online. Which brings us to the much maligned "always-online" part of Xbox one. Gamers are ironically revolting against a console with a very restricted offline mode when in fact they will more and more have to be de facto online to play any new games at all (What if I don't have internet? LOL). More importantly and contrarily to what RC Cola has been saying, the Xbox one is literally light years ahead of the PS4 in that it is the ONLY console fully capable of operating in a fully digital world and with all that what it entails in terms of - yes- digital rights management. The DRM scheme set up by MS make sense only if we consider it in a world where your game will no longer be on a disc but on internal hard disc or stored somewhere in a cloud storage system. Lending and selling - yes, selling "digital" games because contrarily to what is asserted by Sony in its instructional video, first sale principle also extends to downloaded content - games and contents can be made possible if only there is a system in place that ensures that only one copy of the game is being distributed. In effect, the "family-sharing" scheme devised by MS can only be implemented without any abuse by consumers if the much maligned DRM scheme is also implemented.
I used to be so adamant about having physical discs. Maybe I'm getting a bit wiser as I'm aging or, like usual, I'm just a little bit slower to jump on the bandwagon, but I'm definitely starting to embrace the concept of an all digital format. So long as you can keep track of the games you own in the cloud through this generation and next. Being able to go to a friends house and play all your games by just signing into your profile, and not having to worry about bringing a disc, that would be nice.
I understand why they still will, but at least it served a more practical purpose before. Would be interesting if they used download cards like they do for points and game add-ins. Discounting games by a small amount would still be nice, and help shift people in that direction. If it wasn't for discounts offered by retailers making the games less than Xbox sells them for, I would go exclusively downloaded.
PlayStation Plus is already a lesser Steam and PS3 (yes, PS3!!!; Microsoft is basically copying Sony) has the ability to share your PS Network account with 3 other people. Every major game today releases digitally, so PSN games are more affordable than games on Steam sales. For example, you can buy The Last of Us for $60 through the PS Store, but if you have 3 friends who want to play it too, share your account and split the costs - it's $15 for a freshly released AAA title. And you can all play it at the same time, online or offline. So please educate yourself before you start talking like a madman, Sony has just shown that they care about consumers wherever they are and whatever their preference is. You can play online or offline, buy disc games and share them with your friends, buy digital games and share them with your friends. Basically, do whatever the hell you want to do, you have the power.
Features like these I readily say would be nice to have. However, of all people, Nintendo seemed to peg my feelings exactly on game ownership vs DD: http://kotaku.com/marios-creator-likens-game-ownership-to-toy-ownership-513097447 Exerpt: Games, to me, are toys. I want to keep my favorite toys forever. I want no possibility that my favorite toys will be taken away because particular authentication servers are no longer up in 20 years. That's my biggest issue with the XBone model. I honestly don't care that much about being able to sell games back. This is my issue. King's field is about 20 years old. I would rage if I could no longer play it.
Lol no. PSN is about sharing of accounts between 2 people (restricted from 5 because of obvious abuse by users due to a lack of safeguards) which can be quite dangerous due to potential sharing of email, passwords and credit card numbers. Xbox One's system is about the sharing of a digital library accessible to a maximum of 10 people while complete ownership is still retained by the owner of the library. Quick. Safe. Convenient. There you go, Mr Educator!
What will happen with XBoxOne when they quit supporting it? I've never thought about that. Direct download isn't a huge problem, since it is saved to a harddrive, and can potentially be backed up (I've never tried, but I assume I could). Which isn't much different than having the hard copy of the game. #1 reason I own a Wii is Virtual Console, so I can download my childhood games. Love playing the older Zeldas and FFs.
No one knows. Maybe not even MS. As you'd expect, MS may (or...will) decide to shut down authentication/game servers for Xbone games at some point. The question is whether MS has a back-up plan in mind for playing games if those servers aren't there (e.g., "OK, you can play these games offline."). Depending on what that is, perhaps you can still play Ryse 15-20 years from now (all offline). Or maybe you can't. I'm somewhat skeptical about whether that will be possible given how much Microsoft is pushing the cloud, even for single-player games. They're making it seem like a bigger deal than it really is, but certainly if servers are being used to compute AI, physics, etc., then the game won't be able to function regardless of DRM changes if the servers aren't available (unless devs implement a way to gracefully fail if servers are down...but then, how useful is cloud processing if you can get by without using it and the user won't notice?). You can try to play it off your HDD, but if the game can't connect to a server to offload AI computations, it won't work. There isn't really an easy way to support this model (see DIVX players), especially if things don't go exactly as MS might like. Of course, if the console bombs (relatively speaking), and MS decides to kill it early and/or exit the business, you can probably forget playing these games in the future. Even if things go perfectly for MS (sell 500M+ consoles or whatever craziness), it is difficult to say how MS might treat this. Basically, lots of variables in play here.
only thing with all these digital downloads is how big games are. I'm talking about the big titles that fill up a blu-ray. I used to have comcast and 100mbit down, but I'm stuck with uverse at my condo and the fastest speed I can have is 15mbit down. Lets say a game is 10 gigs, that would take ages to download to your system. Go to your friends house who has a slower connection, and you wouldn't even be able to play the game because it will take too long. Of course, internet will get faster in the future, but is there someway xbox one is going to counteract with the long wait time? play while you download? is that possible?
Yeah, you can play while you download. IIRC, Sony played with this idea on PS3 already and has pushed it with PS4. Their solution involved using Gaikai tech, but I'm sure MS can implement something similar. You could also just download portions of the game (SP, MP, etc.). Could still take some time for some games (and if you have 1.5-2mbps, good luck still), but don't think it will be as bad as trying to straight up download ~50GB.
RC did reference awhile back in one of these threads that play-as-you-download is possible and has been demonstrated, IIRC. But that raises the question of, if I'm halfway through a game at home, and then go to a friend's place and want to keep playing from where I'm at... won't that be kind of tough on a play-as-you-download system? Will the system automatically know where you are in the game and download the parts you need first? Honestly hadn't considered that aspect that much though. I'm much more flabbergasted at the notion that XBone is all-digital, yet only comes with a 500GB hard drive.
