I wonder how much investment has already been allocated, between the major publishers, to develop the platforms that allow for their games to easily tap into online resources (the cloud). My guess is a lot. The policy change means nothing for those games. THis next generation is already going in this direction regardless of MS' policies. The cloud is still there and a large portion of gamers are still online and even larger portion of gamers are capable of being online even if they haven't chosen to be so on their consoles, so far.
Just look at CoD. I'll bet that less than 5% of player base buys CoD games for the campaign. They buy it for the multiplayer and even though it's not restricted to only online gamers it's in fact always online.
Sim City was just the beginning. We will see a lot of games requiring online connections to be playable even if they are essentially single player games. Let's just hope that the SIM City debacle doesn't repeat itself and that we get get some actual online benefits for the trouble of being always online.
I'm pretty much all digital now and while I liked the overall direction MS was taking, they went about in an idiotic manner. You can't force consumers into you restrictive ecosystem, you have to entice them with something of value to make them believers in your system. Steam, for example, has earned the trust of a loyal fan base and for MS to expect that gamers would embrace the new Xbox ecosystem in the same way overnight, without any indication or example of it being ready to compete with Steam sales and the overall pricing model, just shows how out of touch and unprepared for this shift in consumer behavior they are.
I would never just accept this. If I got a call from a retail store trying to sell me additional shit I would cancel my pre-order and buy it somewhere else. This is no better than telemarketers. If I get a call from a telemarketer I politely inform him that every second he spends trying to sell me on a product I'm less likely to buy it, if they don't get the message I hang up.
I do vote with my my money. I don't like Origin or the way EA does business so I don't usually buy EA games and I don't have an Origin account. I do break that rule occasionally with cheap games but I never drop a full price on them. I'll probably make an eception with Mirror's Edge 2 which would in fact count as voting with my money.
I don't like the way Icelandic retailers handle game prices, too high at launch and the drop in price happens way late and is never all that much. So, I don't buy games in Iceland. I use Steam, PSN and Amazon UK.
When I get really hooked on a game I think about it all day long when I'm not playing it. I'm so totally immersed that I sometimes start to wonder if I'm just a little bit crazy. I'm not a big tablet gamer (I don't even own one) but I'm really interested in this feature because it's a potential way to interact with that game world that's consuming me at any given time when I'm not in a position to play the game proper.
Whether or not it's going to be successful or not depends on how they plan to implement the companion app. Will it be included in the purchase of the game, will it be totally free for anyone to play and potentially get sold on the main game or will they charge for it. I think we will see experimentation with all of those models but I think it going totally free makes the most sense as it might rope people in that otherwise would not be interested in a given game.
@zfubarz: They did say that two people can be playing a game at the same time so that makes it a little bit more exploitable. I think that a lot of people would in fact take advantage of this if they could just like the did with the 5 system limit of PS3 back in the day but I do think that all is not what it seems and MS will have some kind of system in place to prevent people from exploiting the system.
I do agree that the Steam model is awesome but I don't think MS is going about the right way. They are setting themselves up for the shitstorm when they could be enticing people to want that future instead of trying to force it on them.
I know what, I'm a Sony guy. I've been a Sony guy forever and I'm going to be a Sony guy next gen. I bought a PS3 at launch and locked myself into the ecosystem and for the first half of the generation I was an unhappy Sony guy. I was ready for Microsoft to sell me on the Xbone. I liked the PS4 strategy from the beginning but I was willing to try something different.
I'm almost entirely a digital consumer and I believe that Microsoft is genuine in their intent on pushing digital at all costs and that alone should be enough for me to make the switch but the message Microsoft is pushing is not one of moving the masses into the future. It's one of trying to force the change before the market is fully ready and doing it on their terms instead of appealing to customers with the benefit of a digital future.
I believe that this hypothetical MS employee might genuine in his attempt of explaining the intent of MS, but the message from every press conference, interview and article coming from MS is one of confusion and half-baked strategy. It might very well be that MS is up to something shady and are working cahoots with the NSA to spy on you while violating your property rights but I agree with the general direction they are going (excluding the Kinect stuff, I just don't see the point). The thing is that it can't be forced. Customers have to be enticed into going all digital not told that this is the future wether you like it or not.
I find the trolls to be easily ignored and when I do notice them it's usually because they are exceptionally dumb and laughable.
There are so many places on the internet where the ratio between civilized rational discussion and idiotic name-calling is much higher in favor of the latter. We are pretty troll-free compared to many other sites but this is a sizable community on the internet and people on the internet are assholes and there really is nothing to be done about.
That said, I agree with OP so shut the fuck up you Sonysoft shills.
Log in to comment