@huntad: yeah, the whole argument of someone pointing at steam when it was doing this in 2004 is ridiculous because people were pretty much exclusively buying boxed discs in stores at that point. Times have changed and people nowadays know what a digital purchase is and understand the concept of DRM. So using the excuse of "well console gamers just don't understand digital distribution or aren't used to it" is total BS. People have been buying shit on XBLA and PSN for years now with the current gen. I'm an IT guy and i can explain to stupid people who barely know anything about software and computers the concept of a software license with little difficulty. They need to offer more in return for what we're giving up not owning physical media to do with what we please.

Nobody should use /b/ as a source, but his points seem reasonable.

I think this is a really important statement. For PC you can buy direct the developer, from Steam, from Origin (uuggh), from from GOG, etc, etc. To buy a digital XBOXOne game you have to buy from Microsoft - there will be no competition!

MGR:Revengeance is £44.99 on the GOD service in the UK (digital), but its £24.99 on Amazon and £20 (physical) in a number of UK high-street stores (the ones that are left anyway); I think that pretty much says exactly what will happen to an all digital future.

>2013

>Believing anything on 4chan

>mfw

Wow. That was really boring. Couldn't read it all. Made me wish i already had my PS4 and a bunch of pre-owned games to play instead.

About the only thing I'd agree with if this was a real Microsoft employee is this:

The thing is we suck at telling the story.

Because he sucked at telling the story also.

I don't know why Microsoft fanboys like pointing to "digital downloads" as the future, and that somehow Sony doesn't get it. The Playstation 3 has had day-one downloads before the Xbox 360. I honestly don't know if the Xbox 360 even has it, since I haven't used mine in months, and it didn't look like they did then - you can usually get it weeks/months afterwards. Sony has tinkered with a download-only platform before with the PSP Go. The Vita launched with supporting both physical and downloaded games, as PS4 will. I think they clearly get that shifting to downloads is the future, but they're not going to shoot themselves in the foot like Microsoft has.

Even if this is fake, I'm really getting sick of the defense for this thing being that consumers are wrong to think that Microsoft doesn't know what's best for them.

Sony already does Steam like sales (and free games) for PS+ members anyway. They also do digital distribution of games. All without bolting on annoying restrictions and pages of rules.

"Everyone and their mother complains about how gamestop fucks them on their trade ins, getting 5$ for their used games." Which is why on PS4, Wii U and current-gen systems you can sell your games on eBay or some other avenue for a better deal. Xbox One only allows approved retailers.

This isn't a messaging problem. There are just no consumer benefits to message. You don't need to be always online or block used games to do digital distribution or provide sales as Sony and Nintendo have proven.

You act like the GiantBomb forums are any better.

You also act like there aren't a whole bunch of developers who visit 4chan.

Too bad you chose not support half of europe or japan with your masterplan of a console

If Microsoft had the intention of lowering game prices because of DRM, they would have already done so on the Xbox 360's digital games. But they didn't.

Everyone mocked the iPad before it came out and now it is a very common household item. Sometimes consumers don't know they want something until they get it.

Not saying Microsoft is 100% on point with their strategy but it's not uncommon for companies to come out with products that the consumer doesn't even know they might want or need.

Don't even bother reading that, it's very obvious this person does not work for Microsoft and sounds about as much like an engineer as a teenager on 4chan repeating everything Microsoft has said so far. The blathering about the cloud is literally some of the stupidest writing I've ever seen.

The cloud capabilities is the shit they like the most. We basically made a huge cloud compute shit and made it free. What people are doing with it is kind of cool. THe original intention was to get all the Multiplayer servers not requiring 3rd party costs (Like EA shutting down game servers to cut costs), as well as taking all the games that servers hosted by the clients (Halo, etc), and have all that compute done in the cloud allowing more CPU cycles for gameplay. That will really expand what developers can do. Anything that doesn't need per frame calculation and can handle 100ms delays can be shifted to the cloud. That's huge.

A lot of his points were too paper thin for me to take seriously:

> Everyone hates getting screwed over at Gamestop?

Well if you have a game you don't want on the One all it's going to do is sit on a hard drive/in the cloud and you'll never get ANY money back for it.

Saying that Sony doesn't 'Get it' is crazy because Sony has been doing things like this long before MS has. PSN has had great sales, free PS+ games launch titles day one (with options to download in advance). Sony also know an all digital future is coming, they're just not forcing it upon their user base. There's no doubt in my mind they'll make it more appealing than disc based sales but they won't make the consumer feel like they were a tool in the process.

@humanity: iPads criticisms hurt it initially. At launch, it was a large iPod touch, and there were many upset t it's lack of multitasking, and many of Apple's policies allow for the existence of things like the Nexus 7 and alternative platforms.

Same thing with Microsoft: they are doing big steps in trying to define the future of console and pc interactions, but they are not all In sync with customer demand. Kinect has been publicly ridiculed, online security and privacy are big issues. They don't seem friendly, they seem old-school corporate. And steam fought for >10 years to achieve a platform that still isn't as big as the 360 or ps3. Trying to make some half-step almost steam is dumb; especially when Sony is going all in on making its digital storefront basically steam (they have e3 sales! And they're pretty great! Picked up sound shapes for $4!)

Also, 4chan. Srsly.

Everything he says is everything we know. If I was to go on 4chan and pretend to be an engineer I could easily type that out before this.

Its filled with common knowledge.

People are treating the DRM bullshit like people dont understand it. We do no disc swapping no broken discs. It also mean No tradeing in and no lending renting or borrowing.

This could be accepted if greedy pockets of Ms wasnt on the other side of this.

People dont trust Microsoft to controll us. Thats the main thing. Not that we are not seeing beninfits (despite the lack of talk from ms) its because of the 7 years rep that they wring you pockets over gold,digital shelves,msp and adverts. That our pockets are pretty empty before devs start asking us for money.

This is the problem. Trust.....we dont Trust Microsoft.

Also yeah, I handle my discs so badly I can't help but scratch them and snap them in half, I'm such a clutz...

Have damaged discs even been an issue in the past decade?

Wait, he even hypes smartglass? Alright, he HAS to actually work for Microsoft.

@angouri: Yes exactly! It hurt it initially - I'm really curious to see where this generation will be a year from the time the consoles become available.

Sony is giving you a solid platform, but it's basically the same service we currently get from the PS3 with a few novel changes like the live streaming or sharing.

Microsoft is attempting a complete overhaul of how we engage with games and I'm curious how that whole experiment will pan out with time and early adopters.

Sony is not doing the same. They also have cloud service but they are not promoting it like Microsoft does. What Mircosoft tries to do and what they always try is to restrict customer in their freedom. They are not customer friendly their are money focused no matter the consequences.

Not that I know of and definetely not for me. It's not that hard to get the disc out of the drive, put it back in the box and put the other disc in.

Also he mentions Steam a lot but if MS was trying to go that route they should have already taken the first steps on the 360, maybe starting with sales where the deals are actually worth while. At the moment they miss most of what's good about Steam, have even worse restrictions (on Steam you don't have to be connected to the internet ever again after you installed the game) but they're saying: "No guys it's totally going to be awesome."

In addition to that their messaging has been totally fucked. Conflicting reports from differens MS officials: that just doesn't paint a good picture. Then Don Mattricks comes in and says that people who have trouble with internet connections can always go back to the 360 and the only thing I can think of is "well how about fuck you then" and I don't even have trouble with a stable connection (though it's pretty slow here).

I was open to MS's attempt at a next gen console but even if games like Quantum Break and Killer Instinct could be pretty cool there is absolutely no way I'm going to get a XBox One. Maybe they are able to get their shit together down the line but right now I can only shake my head.

Of course it's way too early to say things like "Sony won this generation" and there will be enough people who don't give a shit about the restrictions and who will buy the XBox One but I still think that MS is going to have a pretty tough time. It's going to be very interesting.

@darji: It's a traditional model of how players interact with games. Everyone has some form of cloud service right now, that is nothing new.

Because of the huge restrictions Microsoft is imposing on it's playerbase, first party developers will have a lot more interesting tools to play with. They are guaranteed that all their customers will have a kinect and a steady internet connection. Take for example Doom 3 - the way the player interacted with consoles and switches by giving you a free aim reticule. First party XBO games can make all those interactions viable through the Kinect. Whenever a keypad comes up you can lift up your hand and put in the code with a gesture. In stealth games you could reach out and slowly pull a door open to look through. All those puzzles in Mass Effect where you had to "hack" something could be relegated to little Kinect minigame.

That sounds pretty neat to me.

I believe him. Microsoft hire 14 year olds as engineers now, right?

Oh yeah like all the other awesome kinect stuff in games that works so great.... Kinect is not great for games and they really have not proven anything in this regard. And all the stuff developer can do with the cloud stuff for example can they do on the PS4 as well However Sony has given gamers a choice to make use of it or not.

But with Steam you only need to check online once, then you can play offline as long as you want...

The steam comparison is also disingenuous, for Steam, the hardware (computers) were already at a stage that they could support a service like Steam, and yeah sure, Steam had some teething problems when it launched, but it didn't cost us $500 and it's not gonna cost us another $500 for the next version when all the kinks are finally figured out. Consoles aren't the same as PCs, and people don't use them as the same thing. Sure, a console steam would be nice, but it'll take at least another generation. These kind of advancements, games in the cloud, sharing with family members, etc, are great, but you can't force the bad stuff like oppressive DRM (even by Steam standards) on them.

And the lending games thing? Fuck you guys, people rarely lent games on PC, while it has been a staple of console gaming since the beginning. I have friends who regularly lend Xbox 360 games to each other, hell their game libraries are so mixed up they've forgotten what's whose, Microsoft has, in one swoop, fucked them.

People should be careful what they wish for. Some look at Steam and think 'I want that on console!' Well, sorry, but you can't have what Steam is on a console. Imagine what Steam would be if it had no competition, no checks and balances and absolute power to dictate all terms of the market. That's what you can have on a console, but it isn't a future you should be wishing for.

@darji: This isn't the same Kinect.

Either way, we will see. I'm not going to condemn a system I haven't even seen in action.

If you want to keep hating a system you've never seen then go ahead though. We are all aware from your thousands of revolutionary Neogaf copy paste threads how you feel about the XBO.

People like Brad already said it is still not working great.

Seems to me like every hardcore Xbox Fan desperately tries to reason Microsofts actions or "plan". The things that are pointed out with this are only possibilities, it's not Microsoft "being bad at telling the story", they are only good sides on their actions which COULD have been used. Or else said: Yes DRM is able to show it's benefits but this doesn't mean they intend to let their customers profit from them.

And no, the Xbox One is not at all comparable to Steam....

That didn't sound anything like an engineer and I'll believe that garbage about lowering prices when the digital downloaded you can't trade it right fucking now drop below 50 bucks.

@oldmanlight: You said it exactly, "Microsoft's message about eventually saving the consumer money would've swayed a lot of opinions regarding their DRM if they had bothered to share that with the consumer following the backlash."

I personally have zero faith in MS delivering. The analogy to Steam and PCs ring false to me. I customize my PC as I wish, Steam has no fees to use their service and offer a ton of F2P game, all we have from MS is blind faith that the console game market will course correct and price will drop.

At the most basic level I see the types of folks that represent the console, MS has a bunch of suits while Sony promotes people like Adam Boyes and Shuhei Yoshida, and gets developers to go out there to talk about their games. The Sony system is not publisher driven, if I were expecting price drops from games I think the company working directly with the developer could deliver this. Prices go on Steam sale because Valve and the devs come to an agreement to help them re-energize interest in their games not because Gamestop is not involved.

Yesterday I bought a $4 sale copy of Gnomoria on Steam. Not only is this a game still in Alpha that would not be stocked in Gamestop, but it would never appear on Xbox because there is no developer. It would never go sale to begin with.

@super_aids: It requires a minimum of a 1.5 Mbps connection. MS are also skipping the launch for countries all across the world that already have live, because the standard net connections aren't fast enough to accommodate for the Xbone's needs. Just because people have the internet doesn't mean it's good internet. Mine is pretty fast, but it drops like a bastard, slows during random hours and sometimes just breaks horribly when the line goes down.

Americans have mixed lines depending on providers. When this console comes out, how many people are going to be returning them because they weren't aware of the 1.5 Mbps connection necessary to connect to the internet and play the games that they bought? The answer, I'd say, is a lot.

OT: This MS dude, if he is who he says he is, seems to be contradicting himself, given how he managed to speak about how people are being fucked by gamestop, but it's been somewhat confirmed that a backroom deal making gamestop one of the participating retailers you can trade Xbone games in to has been made. He also states that competition is good - then essentially says that he wants to eliminate competition entirely because vision! but that's not how it works. Digital gaming will kill competition, allow publishers and companies to control the entire retail industry and kill consumer rights. Not because it's a bad idea, but because like all good ideas, when shitheads get their claws into it, it turns terrible. I'll keep my physical discs thanks, and no online check in, because I own what I paid for.

>Honestly, if you care about anything other then pure games AT ALL. Xbox 1 > PS4. If all you do is play games, and nothing else, PS4.

Yeah I want my console for pure games.

So the bigger picture is saving me from issues that I don't actually have with physical media like disc swapping, hunting around for discs, scratches and the like? The problem here is that they're forcing a change to the way physical media behaves while we make the transition to the supposedly wonderful all digital future. In what other industry is this happening? People buy music digitally because of the advantages it offers, but absolutely noone has fucked with the way physical media works, and the same goes for movies. People will move to digital media if you make the advantages clear and offer a cheaper product, but not if you take away or drastically change their existing options and rights.

.

Also: cheaper "then" vs. "than" 59... I'm from germany, so I don't really know how typical a mistake like that is for guys who supposedly work at the "office at xbox". Everybody's entitled to his share of typos, but this is more than a typo and also more than "it's" vs. "its".

Why is that BS? It sounds logical to me, but I would really like to hear your argument.

I would also like to hear something to back this up.

I am not sure I 100% agree with this. Profit will win out at the end of the day and if a company will sell 2 £40 games 6 months after release or 10 £10 games they are going to reduce the prices. This is what steam have found out, and why they do such big discount sales. Steam aren't doing sales to compete with their online competitors who they have utter dominance over. They have deep discounting because they have crunched the numbers and looked at the trends. The let all the biggest fans who want it early pay full price and then they start to discount as according to the research they have done. Its not about the competition, its about claiming the most profit from each game.

On a larger point, I think the comments in the OP, whoever they are from make some good points and in some ways go to the heart of what is being offered with these two consoles. Microsoft are trying to be innovative and looking to a future where your living room is controlled by one box, with hand gestures and voice commands, always logged in and using the cloud (although I think he exaggerates its potential at the moment). Sony are offering more of the same with a more powerful console. I think MS vision is interesting and valid but they have just messaged it very badly, and maybe, maybe it didn't take into account what a conservative bunch gamers are.

No matter what people say about disks and digital, I think more and more we will be downloading games in the next generation and this issue of lending to friends etc is going to go away. There is going to have to be a big conversation about what digital rights entail but this is going to happen. People need to back away from casting MS as the big bad guy and try to look past their messaging at what they are trying to do, some of which is very interesting.

Having said that, i'm buying a PS4, like the guy says, I only want to play games, and it is £100 cheaper.

I can't believe I didn't think of that. Surely M$ has though and just said "fuck it".

I love how all this gives me flashbacks to a couple of years back when digital distribution, and the accompanying DRM, overtook the PC gaming space.

Back then "Console Gamers" didn't get tired of telling "PC Gamers" to "Deal with it! Shouldn't pirate all those games!". Guess payback is a bitch? Back then people already predicted that the big console companies gonna enforce these very same methods on their customers using the "second hand sales" excuse. Now it's actually happening and suddenly all those customer rights, which didn't seem so important before, are now the most important issue ever.

Your example works when it's the only game on the market, but when you have to consider the economics of making a multi billion dollar industry that releases thousands of games on a yearly basis function and be profitable enough to sustain itself, I don't think selling every game for $10 and having them all be competitive at that price point would work given the limited number of people that actually buy and play games.

Say Sony just dropped the prices of everything on PSN to $10 right now; you don't think that would cut severely into their future $60 games Beyond: Two Souls or Gran Turismo 6? people would still be interested in those games and maybe the hardcore would still go for them but most people would be busy with a monster backlog to give a damn about a $60 game.

Ultimately under your scenario, I don't think enough people would buy Beyond at a $10 price point to make up the difference in revenue they would have received had they been able to sell it for $60.

I'm not talking about selling all games at $10 right of the bat, you lower the prices as different tiers of consumers purchase the game at the price they are comfortable with. Let Gabe explain it much better than I ever could - original article here

'Now we did something where we decided to look at price elasticity. Without making announcements, we varied the price of one of our products. We have Steam so we can watch user behavior in real time. That gives us a useful tool for making experiments which you can’t really do through a lot of other distribution mechanisms. What we saw was that pricing was perfectly elastic. In other words, our gross revenue would remain constant. We thought, hooray, we understand this really well. There’s no way to use price to increase or decrease the size of your business.

But then we did this different experiment where we did a sale. The sale is a highly promoted event that has ancillary media like comic books and movies associated with it. We do a 75 percent price reduction, our Counter-Strike experience tells us that our gross revenue would remain constant. Instead what we saw was our gross revenue increased by a factor of 40. Not 40 percent, but a factor of 40. Which is completely not predicted by our previous experience with silent price variation. …

Then we decided that all we were really doing was time-shifting revenue. We were moving sales forward from the future. Then when we analyzed that we saw two things that were very surprising. Promotions on the digital channel increased sales at retail at the same time, and increased sales after the sale was finished, which falsified the temporal shifting and channel cannibalization arguments. Essentially, your audience, the people who bought the game, were more effective than traditional promotional tools. So we tried a third-party product to see if we had some artificial home-field advantage. We saw the same pricing phenomenon. Twenty-five percent, 50 percent and 75 percent very reliably generate different increases in gross revenue.'

I think the last sentence is the most important and shows how price variation can alter profit it ways which wouldn't seem common sense.

@9999dmg said:

That stood out to me too. The guy's whole way of writing is just off.

Also,

>Honestly, if you care about anything other then pure games AT ALL. Xbox 1 > PS4. If all you do is play games, and nothing else, PS4.

Thanks for letting me know.

Ok, what about the under-powered console yet more expensive than PS4 by a whole $100? Could MS hide behind Steam on this as well?

How about region locking the whole console (hardware not just software)? Steam?

The problem is MS didn't leave any stone unturned in their quest for anti-consumerism. They fairly deserves the negative press they're receiving.

@dezztroy: GB is better than 4chan. (Have you ever been on 4chan?)

@jimbo said:

This is what really irks me with the whole "it's just like Steam, you guys" defense. Valve isn't a massive, publicly-traded corporation with a digital retail service on a closed platform.

So now we're using an anonymous source, from a website that's best known for pictures of people in San Diego Chicken suits having sex with anime ladies, as another reason to bitch about the Xbone. This might be turning into a little bit of a witch hunt.

The thing that gets me is that the PS4 offers the exact same digital download services, without the restrictions.

The steam argument makes sense, but with the rise of drm free sales through humble bundles and such raise the question as to why there needed to be so many restrictions in place on your connection even with digital titles? When you buy a digital game through xbox, it's not like a friend can borrow it (you can allow them to play it if they are one of 10 people you select), so why would it stop working after being offline for 24 hours? I can play games on a tablet without wifi, but it's not required to always be on in order to play anything. It's such a lame excuse and I feel that Microsoft wants to be like apple, which is fine, but I can see only getting the stuff at Microsoft stores in the future if retailers are mad about anti-used.