graf1k

I have to say, I began reading this article prepared to call bullshit from the beginning, but I have to say, the guy kind of has a point. Granted, the situation isn't as dire as he makes it out to be. Nobody is really being bilked by these sales. Even if I buy 200 Steam games and I've only played 10% of them, I have them pretty much forever, assuming a catastrophe doesn't befall Valve. I still own them. If 10 years from now I decide "Hey, time to see what the big deal about The Stanley Parable was", I can totally do it.

Also, I don't buy his argument about somebody spending their last $12 on a game, only for it to go on sale. Unless you're still living with your parents, you are simply put, an IDIOT if you spend your last $$ on a video game, for any reason. In those cases where a young adult or teenager spends their last $$ on a Steam sale, it's really not that big a deal. They'll have more money quickly enough. It's no the end of the world. It's nice of him to refund the kid's money but honestly, that kid was probably poor-selling it in the first place, and even if he wasn't, a week or two max and he'll have spending money again most likely.

That said, he absolutely has a point about rewarding early adopters and fans that buy your game day one with a sale, rather than them paying full price and all the bandwagon hoppers getting the deals. You're starting to see that though with discounts and bonuses for pre-sales on Steam and PSN. For instance, OlliOlli is discounted this week by 20% or so. Sure, it'll probably be 50% off by the end of the year, if not sooner, but it's still a nice gesture for the fans that want the game bad enough to not wait for a sale.

Unfortunately, I don't think you can make that work outside the digital realm. If a retail box copy of a game launched at $50 and then went up to $60, that most likely will tank sales of the game until it's eventually $20-30. If you're a game that gets popular on word of mouth, like Payday 2 did for instance, that could completely negate that buzz when people find out they pay more for being late to the party.

I take no joy in it, but I absolutely called this whole WiiU thing. Anybody that wanted to play last-gen games for the next 2 years or so probably already had a PS3 or a 360 and so the only people out there buying the WiiU are the Nintendo try-hards die-hards. The quasi-shitty tablet was a bad enough mistake, but to pair it with largely last-gen hardware made for something too expensive to compete with 360/PS3 and not powerful enough to compete with PS4/XBone. The only surprising thing about dev support drying up is that it didn't even take until the end of the PS3/360 era to happen.

That said, I really don't know what, if anything at Nintendo will actually change. Putting games out on smartphones would cannibalize the one healthy platform Nintendo has, but the WiiU is so far gone at this point, I don't think it's possible to save it. In less than three months, the PS4 and XBOne are on the verge of outselling the WiiU which has been out for about 14 months, and it's only going to get worse. If they give up and start work on their next home console, that just screws over their most die-hard fans. I do not envy Iwata right about now...

Great idea Drew & Jeff had a great idea.

Tax on a digital subscription? Whaaaaa???? Oh well, reupped anyway. Fuck you guys and your goddamn Unprofessional Fridays. I can't live without it.

@spraynardtatum: Agreed but Facebook and Twitter are integrated into everything. Doesn't mean you have to use it. I never do. That said, I really hope they patch in uploading to YouTube eventually. You know, considering it's the biggest repository of videos in the world...

Lack of MP3 support ad DLNA kind of sucks but it's pretty cool that they are open to adding it, rather than insisting people use the Sony music store and all that crap. I like being able to stream my music from my iPhone to my 360 & PS3.

This is easily the most bummed I've been hearing about the passing of a person I've never met. Dude had just the best personality in the world. I can only imagine how the his family and friends feel. I guess from here on out they're all 'Jeffcasts'...

Fuck Ryan Davis.

But if you look at where we are now compared with, say, five years ago, the digital market has expanded by leaps and bounds. In another few years, the used market may begin to dry up all by its lonesome, with no forceful nudging from console makers. All those features Microsoft was talking about could easily be plugged back in, and at a time when the market is actually prepared for this kind of shift. And isn't that how it ought to be, anyway?

This. A thousand times this. Look, people want to equate the former Microsoft policy on DRM, used games, and physical media v. digital downloads to Steam. There is one MASSIVE difference however. Steam was and is still, more or less, not forced on anyone. The retail disc-based market was not intentionally gimped to bring it down to the same level as digital downloads. Instead, Valve increased the value and incentive of buying a game digitally to the point that it was more convenient and a better experience to buy a game digitally on Steam than to buy at a store through things like automatic patching/updates, cloud saves, Steam achievements, Steamworks, a unified library, and most of all being reliable. That, and the sales which made the games a better value. Over time, more and more gamers realized this and bought their games through Steam and other publishers began to put more content out on Steam and became more amiable to sales, until we reached the point we are at today.

The point is, though, you cannot force it like Microsoft was trying to do. That instantly makes people defensive and people are savvy enough that when they hear from a corporation "trust us, this is better for everyone, including you", they don't take that at face value. Not without some hard proof which Microsoft effectively did not give, or to a satisfying degree. About the only thing they offered in return for not being able to resell your games and having to check in every 24 hours or lose access to your library was the "family share" thing, which was admittedly a cool idea, and the ability to acces your library "anywhere". Personally, that latter incentive never held any water with me. I mean, what are the odds that I'd be somewhere without my own console and games, but still had access to someone's Xbox One, and enough time to download one or more 10-20gb games and actually play them? I mean, that is just not a scenario I see ever happening for more than 0.000000000001% of the gaming population, and certainly not on a regular enough basis to really consider it a good value for all the extra concessions Microsoft was asking for in return.

Family sharing, on the other hand, if it functioned without time limits, even with the constraints they placed on it, was a cool idea and one I would have liked to have. But here's the thing. There is no reason I can see that they cannot still do family sharing with digitally bought games. No technical reason, anyway. In fact, it's exactly something like this that could be their Trojan Horse so to speak, to bring about an all-digital future sooner rather than later. Like I said, adding value to a digital download is exactly how Steam got to the point it is today. So, what is family sharing if not a huge value-add to convince someone to buy a game digitally rather than buy a physical copy? All else being equal, it's a solid feature tick in the favor of digital downloads that Microsoft can rightfully say is just not doable for physical copies of games without always online, which people have made clear they do not want. Give people the choice, and eventually more people will opt for the path of least resistance or at least the best value. If you make digital downloads more appealing, through added value and/or a better price, people will gladly CHOOSE digital. You take some of their rights with physical media away though on the promise that it'll lead to cheaper digital games and marginal "features", people will cling to what they have and know works, rather than a promise.

It was the right move on their part, and props to them for finally realizing it. That said, I would have never thought after E3 that they'd cave and reverse course before the consoles launched. I figured it would take a dismal launch holiday and maybe an additional quarter of bad sales (kind of like Nintendo and the 3DS price drop) to realize their mistake.

As a consumer though, I am still concerned about the hardware limitations and their negative relationship with independent developers. Legit analysis of the consoles have shown the PS4 will have approximately 30% more GPU "power" than the One, and that could be the difference between 1080p@60Hz and not. We'll have to see. That aside, if they insist on no indie published games, that will lose them mindshare and exclusives over time. Considering the 7th generation of consoles was still such a hard-fought and even battle between Sony and MS, despite Sony cocking up MAJORLY with the price, and the 360 having a full year of sales head start, you'd think Microsoft would be a bit more humble.

EDIT: Also, props to Scoops! Dude has one foot out the door, practically on it's way to Chiraq and he still breaks one of the biggest stories of the year in gaming before pretty much anybody else (from what I saw anyway).

@djjoejoe: You really don't need a game to be optimized to make use of an SSD. I mean, I'm sure it wouldn't hurt, but it's not really needed. The thing to keep in mind, though is that while we know the PS4 will most likely use a standard 2.5" laptop HDD and thus will use a SATA connection, that's about all we know. Is it SATA rev. 1, SATA rev. 2, or SATA rev. 3? My guess is it's at least rev. 2 but the throughput has doubled with each revision, so it's key to if the PS4 could even make use of the extra throughput and IOPS of an SSD. Also, there is the issue of TRIM/garbage collection. Without proper TRIM support, an SSD will significantly slow down over time and if there is no garbage collection at all, even after you delete stuff form the drive, the SSD would eventually appear to the system as if completely full until it is reset. Being that Sony isn't putting an SSD into the PS4, they might not figure to give the PS4 those features.

SSDs are most useful at bootup, when the OS is trying to load hundreds of files and programs all at once. That is where the exponentially higher IOPS numbers are put to use best, but seeing as Microsoft and Sony are both talking about the speed of their new system OSs, my guess is they're already speeding that up some other way (also a dedicated games console has a lot less system overhead than a multipurpose PC, so it's probably trying to load significantly fewer files to begin with.

tl;dr: I wouldn't buy an SSD to drop into your PS4 just yet. Wait until we know more about the innards and Sony's support for SSDs in the PS4 before you do, but performance won't be as improved as HDD -> SSD in a PC regardless.