With the exception of Bioshock Infinite, I can't remember the last AAA game that wasn't $49.99 on PC day of launch. That's 20% below consoles, and they usually drop another $10 within 30-45 days. For price conscious folks, a 30% savings on every game adds up to being able to afford an entire extra AAA game for every 3 that they buy.

The reason for the price discrepancy is because copies sold can't be shared and passed around, so they're willing to take less per copy.

I'm waiting for Sony or MS to wise up and start pricing their digital downloads at or below Gamestop's used price. If they want to break used sales, that's how to do it.

They can just simply say that you need to be online for the game to work same as some games this gen wont work if you don't have a hard drive.

Just have them as online exclusive features, easy. Better than excluding the 40% of non connected consoles.

@demoskinos:

Except there aren't any. Halo 4 requires a HDD for online play, but that's the only one (and the core game still works without it).

SimCity requires an always online connection and is a busted piece of crap that on close inspection doesn't actually need to be online in order to function.

Steam also is on a platform where pirating is easily accessible, you can download Skyrim and have it running with in hours with a ISO emulator. To do that on a 360 involves firmware hacks and DVD drive hacks. Steam just provides a easy legal alternative to it. People seem to only talk about the sales and forget that games launch on Steam the same price as a boxed copy in the shop.

@thetenthdoctor:

No, I'm pretty damn sure that Multiplayer on Splinter Cell: Double Agent and I wanna also say that some portion of Burnout Paradise also required a Hard Drive. Halo is hardly the only one that has locked features behind hard drive usage. Its simply up to the developers to have the balls to stick to their vision and require people to be online.

Someone's probably already pointed this out but since Titanfall is online-only, they don't have to cater to the offline crowd. They can still offload physics and AI to the cloud.

@commandergermanshepard:

No they don't. Remember Me, DmC, Hitman Absolution, Tomb Raider, and every other game I purchased recently for PC was $49.99 on launch day- 20% less than $59.99 for PS and XBOX.

Wasn't comparing to console prices was comparing to PC games.

Just stop. Microsoft's cloud computing 'vision' for Xbox One remains unchanged.

I think that people who are making this argument fail to realize that EVEN IF a developer decides to create a game that implements an "always on" system that offloads computations to "the cloud," they would only be losing customers who wouldn't have bought the system under Microsoft's old policies. I don't think its accurate to say that they are spitting their user base because under Microsoft's old policies these people without internet would've never been a "user" in the first place. If a developer was fine with only selling to people who have internet then they can feel free to require it BUT if they are interested in selling more copies and reaching that once unavailable demographic, they will simply develop a game that supports both groups of people.

also if the dev has the ambition to make their game always online for the better, nothing will be stopping them from doing so, (look at destiny, titanfall, the crew, the division, im sure they knew the risks, but said fuck it in favor of their ambition)

just dont expect this from the indies on the xbox one (the very likely people to make the next groundbreaking game)

, as they seem to all jumped onto the ps4 due to the self publishing and free dev kits and the fact that patches cost over 10 grand on the xbox system.

Truth be said online games like The Division, Titan Fall and every other online game, can make use of the cloud. They are online games, and as that there is no excuse and it will be most likely impossible to play offline.

The cloud stuff was nonsense.

Right......... Except that both Xbox1 and PS4 are coming with 500gb standard with upgrade options. So no, there will not be issues with limited hard drive cache.

But these games are still $60 on consoles to download digitally, even though its essentially the same thing as downloading the game on Steam. Microsoft announced games were going to be $60 already, there is no evidence to make any of us believe that developers were going to drop prices because of a 24-hour online check-in.

Sony already has pretty great sales on PSN, especially if you're on PS+. I got Tomb Raider last week for $20, and it came with some DLC and Quantum Conundrum. I just bought Flower for $1.75 and Hell Yeah! for ~$3. A month or two ago they had a bundle of Borderlands 1 and 2 for $20.

Microsoft is the only one that has shitty sales and keeps prices at $50-$60 for digital games for years, and they're the ones that were pushing this all digital future bullshit.

No more cloud? :(

What will become of these gifs?

@thetenthdoctor said:

Arguably, most of the concessions made in game design have been due to the incredibly small amount of memory in the current consoles. The next gen systems both have at least 8 GB (I think?), so I don't think we'll be at a point any time soon where developers are saying 'Oh, if only I had guaranteed access to processing on a remote machine, maybe then I could make a good game'. It has been proven to be possible to make excellent games with next to no resources. Not that I'm saying it's impossible that your hypothetical situation could come up, I'm just saying it's very unlikely.