So is Sony and Nintendo. The argument is that they did nothing pre-E3 after announcing their policies, or after the PS4 reveal. Not until the pre-order numbers started pouring in....
Looking online - it's official - it is now the XBOne80....
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Microsoft reverses Xbox One DRM
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So is Sony and Nintendo. The argument is that they did nothing pre-E3 after announcing their policies, or after the PS4 reveal. Not until the pre-order numbers started pouring in....
Looking online - it's official - it is now the XBOne80....
If this is true, then Microsoft will have more sales than I predicted. Originally before they did the Kinect and used games reversal I didn't think that Xbox had much hope. Think about it, why in the world would we need to check in every 24 hours on our connect to see if the Xbox is working properly? Why should we have to pay to use USED games? That was one of the worst marketing strategies I've ever heard of. PS4 was going to be the top game console when it comes out. But now since Microsoft decided to drop the two things that were holding them back, PS4 now has competition.
I do, and yes I know I'm one of the only guys here who believes this
Because every form of media that's had its physical distribution model disrupted by the internet has ended up passing its savings down to the consumer
eBooks are cheaper than physical books
Netflix is cheaper than going to Blockbuster
$10 MP3 albums are cheaper than $20 CD's
Buying off Steam is generally cheaper than buying boxes copies
Console games aren't special or immune to this. They're just another form of media.
Console games and cable TV are the two last holdouts to internet distribution disruption. Cable TV because the cable companies have a ton of clout and cable content subsidization is complicated. Console games because all 3 platform manufacturers are just baby stepping everything
Exactly, some silly gamers are too narrow minded to realize the benefits that DRM could bring in the future, just remember Steam used to be called "$team", but now PC gamers LOVE it due to the great sales that Steam have. The 10 person share plan was huge but it is now gone, same with being able to play games without having the disk in the drive. DRM is the future and all the whingers have done is hold it off for a little longer and set console gaming back another 5 or so years.
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Have you seen how Steam works? It was expensive at first aswell but now there are great sales on all the time, they can do this due to the massive reduction in piracy. If you do the right thing and play your games legit you should be supporting the DRM model as it will only benefit you in the future.
I assume that sony and ms will both have their own steam equivalents, boxes and discs are just options? Steam is excellent for players and publishers in so many ways, similar to the AppStore - Poor competitors like origin, retail store sales and marketing u-turns like this show how big, vocal and dynamic an audience gamers are.
EBooks are not always cheaper than real books. In many cases they are more.
Netflix is only cheaper than blockbuster if you are happy watching 2-3 year old content. Yor not watching the latest releases.
ITunes albums here are 8.99/9.99/11.99 pretty much same price you pay in Tescos for the CD
New releases on STEAM are never cheaper than the retail box price here. Most games sell for 39.99/34.99 on PC in stores here, a trip online will save you a further 5-10 if you shop around. On steam new releases are 49.99
If you were to go through Amazon and compare prices, eBook costing more than the print copy would be the exception
Blockbuster was killed by Netflix. It used to be $4 for a 2 day rental. Now it's $1 for a day rental at Redbox hoping they have that release you want or you roll the latest releases into your Netflix streaming account. Netflix is a better value proposition than Blockbuster ever was. Redbox is only viable because they streamlined operations from an old world staffed store model to a kiosk outside a 7-11
Tescos, along with Walmart, Target, etc are large companies that offset low profit margins with high volume. This is how they're able to discount things more than other brick and mortars. They also retail a million things other than media so they're less affected by disruption in any one market.
Better comparison would be Tower Records or Sam Goody, which charged up to $20 for a CD back in the day, $3-5 for a single. $13.99 was the sale price for an LP, $1-2 was the sale price for a single. Now on iTunes an album = $9.99, you can get a song for $1-$1.29. Those companies are dead because digital music distribution gave a better value proposition.
Depends on the store you're shopping at and how they monetize. You're talking Walmart, their goal is to move product as efficiently as possible to minimize operating expenses. But compare Steam vs Gamestop, what do you get
A lower price for digital media in any market is ensured by competition. When media is digital, money is saved by not having to move product across the country, deal with inventory, staff people to do this work, etc. There is real money to be saved here that will go directly to the consumer. If you're thinking MS would've gone all digital and just pocketed the higher profit margin instead of passing the savings down to consumers, that would never have happened. It be foolish for MS to do it because all Sony would have to do is adopt the same digital distribution model, pass the savings down for non-exclusives, and from that point on MS would be priced out of the market.
In 2013, Borders = dead, Blockbuster = dead, Tower Records = dead, but Gamestop = still alive. Console industry is lagging
It means I have to hunt amongst my discs for the game I want, then put it in. No, not the biggest obstacle on the planet. But it's far better for on demand games that allow you to download it to the HDD and then play it from a button.
I know the issues with killing piracy. Surely there must be a way to let players combine both. Putting some unique ID on each game can't be the hardest thing in the world, and it would allow secondhand sales if you could de-activate from a Microsoft server.
If Apple were to ever jump into this game via a modified AppleTV, this would be a huge area of possibility. Apple isn't going to sell any discs, but I think I saw patents recently about reselling digital media from Apple. I don't see why Apple couldn't design something like a used store where you can sell your media for 50 percent of its current new price or something. The seller gets most of the cut, Apple takes a cut, and the original seller (like a studio or record label) gets a portion. That's instant new revenue for Apple and the original sellers. Sure, you will sell less new to some people who buy the used. But more people might buy something if they knew they could sell it back later.
I really love my 360. I like the interface, the features, the capabilities it has . . .
I have a mix of new retail, used, and XBLA downloads. I just dig this thing.
I wanted the "next"Box to be an improved version of the 360. When the One was announced, it was definitely NOT an improved 360. It was this whole new thing with so many unsavory additions that I soured to it almost immediately.
Seeing MS turn around on some of these decisions makes me hopeful that the future of gaming (and especially xbox) is not dead.
However, the biggest deal-breaker of all still stands. No backwards compatibility with 360 games and XBLA titles?
You don't need to see my identification.
These aren't the droids you're looking for.
We can go about our business.
Move along.
I have a mix of new retail, used, and XBLA downloads. I just dig this thing.
I wanted the "next"Box to be an improved version of the 360. When the One was announced, it was definitely NOT an improved 360. It was this whole new thing with so many unsavory additions that I soured to it almost immediately.
Seeing MS turn around on some of these decisions makes me hopeful that the future of gaming (and especially xbox) is not dead.
However, the biggest deal-breaker of all still stands. No backwards compatibility with 360 games and XBLA titles?
You don't need to see my identification.
These aren't the droids you're looking for.
We can go about our business.
Move along.
Video rental stores and speciality music stores were already getting hammered though and digital was just the final nail in the coffin. For example, Netflix's DVD-in-the-mail cut Blockbuster off at the knees way before streaming started and, like you mentioned, big stores like Best Buy and Walmart were already laying waste to record stores.
Of course there is only so far prices can fall as marketing and distributing the physical media is only a sliver of the actual costs. Producing and marketing the game/movie/book/album are the lion's share of the costs.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if a publisher offered the disc for $59.99 and the digital version for $49.99. I suspect this would push many toward the digital version. With the price being the same and the ability to resell the disc version, the digital version is not very appealing.
You can easily knock $10 off the price of a $60 game by going digital. You don't have to deal with returns and the cost of distribution gets minimized.
Nintendo just put out Animal Crossing New Leaf. Retail = $39.99, but the eShop cost = $34.99. It ended up breaking eShop download records. I don't know how much of that is based on price though.
MS had provided a way to resell the digital version anyway. I think it's the once a day DRM verification that pissed most people off.
And how would it? What exact motivation would publishers and MS have to make the games cheaper? The fact that they are making more money? Sorry, that's their goal. What reason would they have to reduce prices and make less money? Just cause they would have opened up a way to make more money on their games does not mean they'd pass that on to us. They'd have to have a real reason to give up that money, some reason that would say they needed to do that to keep up sales. With a captive market like a console (you want an xbox game, you will pay what they tell you to), what actual motivation would they have? They don't need to worry about people going elsewhere for games.
Don't mistake could be able to reduce the price of the game to will reduce the price of the game. The way they were proposing might make it so they can make more money (and could afford to reduce prices if they wanted to), but it had no real motivations for them to reduce the price of games except they are nice guys. And you're naive to think they'll reduce prices just to be nice.
Let me ask you this, did CD's come down in price once they became the dominant form over cassettes? I mean they were cheaper to make than tapes... and yet some how the price never went down. Why? Because there was no reason for them to reduce the price. Just cause their costs got cheaper didn't mean they passed on the savings, they charged what the market would bear, not a certain amount over what it cost them. The market was ok with the higher prices so they saw no reason to lower prices. Only when digital became popular and they had to compete did you see prices lower (and by that time CDs were on their way out).
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I don't care if we are talking Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo. A digital downloaded game (or movie or music) should be cheaper than the physical copy. A game should be $10 cheaper than full price retail if it is a digital download. As a ballpark, let's just say that it should always be 20% less than the current retail price.
In what world are you in? I wish they were. In general, they aren't.
If you are willing to deal with a lot less selection. I like Netflix, it's great if you can find stuff on there you like, but anytime I am looking for a specific movie, they don't have it. It's only that I was able to look at their library and find stuff I would watch that I use it. Plus, let me add, they had competition (rental stores) so they had motivation to offer a good value.
I don't know, I haven't tried buying a CD lately. But it's only more recently that MP3 albums were that cheap. Last I checked they were the same price as their CD counterpart (but as I said, I haven't tried buying one recently).
At this point one could argue they are more expensive cause they aren't that popular and so they have to charge more to make it even worth offering it in CD form.
And there are trade offs for that (having to deal with Steam's DRM). And once again, they have competition (boxed copies, other stores to get games). It's not that they are cheaper to make that makes those games cheaper, it's the fact they have competition and need to offer a better value to get customers.
You are ignoring the fact that most of the ones that you are right on (That they are cheaper), it's because they have competition. A game on a console really doesn't. Especially if you want to use MS's proposed restrictions that would get rid of competition to buying digitally (That's pretty much what they were trying to do, force physical discs to be digital). There would be no competition to keep their prices low.
You answered it down below, when you said competition.
Look at iOS, where games are Freemium - $5 and no dev is putting out something for $30. You get enough competition and it creates a ceiling and it's now possible to price yourself out of the market.
Part in bold is my whole point, except replace CD with any type of physical media that can be digitally distributed.
And CD's weren't disruptive to cassettes because they were the same exact data in a cheaper physical medium. They were disruptive because they were higher fidelity. People were buying them because the sound quality was superior.
It's only now that everything has been reduced to 1's and 0's, that we can worry about whether we want that digital data packaged physically or off the internet.
On Day 1, publishers release hard covers. eBooks are always cheaper than these.
Some time later after they've milked all the hard covers, they release mass market copies on cheap paper, which are priced lower. These can be cheaper than eBooks, which is what I think you're getting at, and it's that way because of the agency pricing model, where the publishers set the price and don't bother pricedropping their eBooks in conjunction with the mass paper release because they still act like the eBooks are competing with hard covers. So basically there's a digital price disconnect right now between the hard cover/mass paper pricedrop. Eventually once we're past this whole pricefixing thing and the eBook market fixes itself, I'd expect eBook pricing to mirror the pricedrop.
Blockbuster's old model was $4 for a 2 day rental, per video. So I rent 4 movies, that's $16.
$16 on Netflix is unlimited streaming plus unlimited disc rentals of all movies. That's better value for your dollar.
Kanye West search on Amazon - every MP3 album except Yeezus is cheaper than the CD. Yeezus is the same price and that's because it just dropped and Amazon is trying to optimize CD sales by offsetting a lower price with high volume. Its in their best interests to do this because whatever CD's they don't move they're gonna have to pay for in the form of inventory costs. Later after volume goes down, they normalize the prices again and it'll look like all the other albums, where digital < physical.
Yeah DRM is a trade off and reaction to it just snowballed and killed off potential game changing digital distribution for this next console generation. Far as consoles though, I think competition is pretty healthy. 3 competing platforms that have all pulled a profit every console generation. And they're all dependent on the same third party IP that would've been subject to competitive pricing. If MS got its digital model to work, it could've priced the digital version of the next BF or COD $10 below Sony's, which would've had to follow or be priced out of the market. We'd have a driver for lower cost games.
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many countries have fixed book prices to keep the market stable .. so the publisher sets the price and every retailer (including amazon etc.) has to follow that
and in nearly all of those countries the same law applies to e-books
which means zero, zip, nada, price drops ... ever
around here a printed book costs perhaps 9 bucks and the drm protected e-book 8 bucks ... same for hardcover:
20 for the physical
18 for the ebook
the publishers have zero transport or printing costs and charge nearly identical prices
last time i rented a movie it was less than a euro per 24 hours... (as far as i remember 0,80 cents for dvds and 1,2 for a blu ray) and that was 5 years ago
also a point completly ignore by you is the ridiculous region locking with digital only content: i can drive 10 kms and buy a dvd, book or cd in switzerland or germany or order stuff from amazon.co.uk without a problem ...
with nearly every e-book, digital store, streaming service etc., buying an mp3 from a german store ? how about a german billing adress or credit card first ?
with blu rays i have 3 regions, with physical books there are none, with ps3 games there are none
if you are from the US you will never have a problem with that, because you get all the stuff & all the services across thousands of miles no matter what...
i can drive across europe without taking my passport out of my pocket but can't download something from an online store of a neighbour country 5 miles away.
region & account locked DRM is the work of the antichrist. full stop.
Here in the US, physical books follow wholesale pricing - publisher sells to distributor at wholesale prices and distributor sets the price. This is what Amazon was trying to adopt until Apple came up with that agency model, where publisher sets the price, distributor takes 30%. So now you got this disparity between physical and eBook monetization because physical price is controlled by the distributor, and eBook price is controlled by the publishers. Publishers are now in court accused of illegally keeping eBook prices artificially high so go figure
According to that model
Brick and Mortar: 8 high def movies, physical media only = $16
Netflix: Unlimited high def movies, physical or streaming = $16
Scale to euros or whatever currency you want
I ignore it because region locking isn't exclusive to digital distribution. DVD's and Blu Rays are physical media, but they're region locked.
Region locking existed long before the internet disrupted media distribution
yes but that works that way only in selected countries, here they can keep e-book prices high totally legally ...
in Austria:
Physical: for 16 bucks i can rent 13 blur rays or 20 dvds
Netflix: here i get nothing because, you Netflix isn't available...
obviously you simply don't understand the non-us digital market:
with blu rays there are 3 regions: north america, europe & australia, eastern markets ... but with digital stores i have 27 regions in europe alone !
for you in the US there is little difference between the disc region you live in and the digital stores ... can you imagine having 50 different live,psn,itunes,netflix digital stores, for each states a different one, in the US ? all with region locked content ?
with ps3 disc-games i have currently have zero region locks, worldwide..
The share plan just allowed you to play 15-30 minute full-game demos. I imagine there would also be a once-per-day limit or no saved data to prevent you from just reloading and continuing the game.
I honestly can't believe what I'm hearing, when I read DRM-supporters on sites like Kotaku I figured they must be joking. I'm in the console game industry and this affects me, but nobody I work with wanted DRM, not even the publishers were keen (who this benefits the most).
Steam isn't DRM as everyone claims it to be. Or to use automobile analogies; there are many types of cars. Steam and the proposed Xbox One DRM are not the same*. Steam has a month+ check in requirement (although this is really hazy. I've got an offline machine with a few Steam games on. It hasn't seen a connection in 4 months and I can still play games on it). And those low prices aren't because of DRM, prices are low because on the PC there is competition everywhere. You also get backwards compatibility
And besides, not all games even include Steam's DRM. I, and several of my friends, just use Steam as a delivery method. You buy any of our games and you get an unprotected .exe. Most do choose to use Steam's DRM though, but not everyone does.
Let's not forget the biggest problem with the 24-hour check in; region-locking-from-hell. If Xbox One isn't supported in your country you don't get to play it at all. Did you see how many countries would be able to play the DRMed Xbox One at launch?
This is not pushing gaming forward.
If you're a supporter of DRM and want the exact same experience there's a solution - buy your games, all of them, from the download shops. You'll be able to access your games from anywhere, just be sure you're using a connection that doesn't mind AAA bluray-sized downloads (30gb+). More suited to connections in Europe and Asia (areas that won't have Xbox TV support or support at all at launch)
No it wasn't. I picked up HL2 new for £20, half the price of most new AAA games. Steam launched selling it's own games for cheap, then took on other publishers games for cheap. Nothing has changed other than the frequent sales they now run.
tl;dr DRM is very bad mmkay.
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I've been buying CD's recently, since iTunes only has 256kbps for the same price as a CD (Daft Punk's RAM was the same price in HMV as it was on iTunes at launch). I figured I'd just by the physical media because I have a physical backup with the option to rip at any bitrate I want.
For the same reasons I buy Bluray and won't touch an iTunes video. The free ones I have just look and sound awful on my setup.
(* had to drop this one in- theres the other form of DRM that constantly checks. The type used by Sim City, the game that everyone loves because it's such a faultless and brilliant system. It's a shame Ubisoft decided to drop always-on DRM from their games!)
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You are wrong it was confirmed by Microsoft that there was no time limit. People like you just cherry pick the bad stuff about DRM without even doing your research. For someone that claims to be in the console industry you don't have a great knowledge do you lol.
http://slumz.boxden.com/f13/aaron-greenberg-game-sharing-time-limit-not-true-1942432/
http://www.castleawesome.com/2013/0...en-confirms-family-sharing-had-no-time-limit/
http://au.ign.com/articles/2013/06/21/on-xbox-ones-social-network-canceled-family-share-demos