Video Games: Day One DLC Forever!

[Cuellar]

At first the whole thing "daily check in" pissed me off as well, but after thinking about it I don't mind the nearly always on. Plus I'd prefer to download games anyway, and I've never resold a game in my life. I use Steam for a lot of my games and use their stupid updater for my mods on Skyrim, I've played a ton of online games, MMORPGs etc... so most games I play actually work better online.

I really hate having stacks of game CDs around, plus the skype option would be nice since I usually skype using my ipad.

That being said, I'd rather play games on my PC than television.

[DaarioKnowsBest]

i dont think ive even been on a pc since tablets and smartphones came out

[Jabronius Maximus]

Most of my friends dumped the 360 after the red ring issue (myself included) and stuck with ps3 ever since. And I live in Canada, so Hulu and the cable box bit don't mean much at all to me. Anyway I paid for my cable box already, so why would I drop 500 bucks for something that does the same thing? It just seems like Xbox is trying to do too much. Judging from what I've seen the ps4 is a gaming console first, with a bunch of cool streaming features and services added on. That makes sense. The Xbox is, well, whatever they were calling it. Its a shame because its games look really good, but MS wasn't keen on pushing those.

[Stannis Eats No Peaches]

Xbox One is not a games console IMHO. It's a home entertainment system and one of its functions is to play video games.

[The Anti-Targ]

So, thoughts on this little think piece / editorial?

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-21539_7-57589018-10391702/why-xbox-one-and-ps4-may-be-the-final-generation-of-consoles/

I've been more or less thinking along these lines, but I think you'll always need a box with a pretty decent processor and GPU for playing the latest in AAA games. Even on PC no one's managed to produce entirely streaming games that are faced paced with lots of action happening on screen. There's too much data to push down those pipes and too much lag for fast twitch action to travel to a server farm, be processed and sent back to your screen before too many frames flash by.

I think proof of concept for full streaming of high end games needs to happen on PC before consoles can truly get in on that act. But streaming games will be a big revolution in PC, as you'll be able to play the latest and greatest games on nothing more than a basic laptop/desktop with integrated graphics, basic CPU and small amount of RAM.

I would pay a subscription for instant access to every single game in a console's library over paying a $60 (even $20) to buy just one game. Actually when I owned a PS1 I bought no games, I rented everything. With PS2 I rented most games and bought a few. With PS3 my local video/game rental store had a hopeless selection of PS3 games so I ended up buying every single game I played. I actually prefer the rental model, and if that means paying a sub for access to all games I'm all for that idea.

I hope PSN+ moves to a rent 1 or 2 games per month from the entire PSN library model rather than 1 game per month free out of a small list of games chosen by Sony to keep forever as long as you are a PSN+ subscriber. For the most part I'll intensely play a game for about a month and then not play it again for ages, and if I want to rent a game for 2 months then that should be an option, or rent a game a year after I first rented it.

Want to onine rent extra games: pay $5 per extra rental per week.

If I don't own a game in the form of a tradeable product, then I don't want to have the illusion of ownership by having to pay $60 up front for the game. I want the reality of renting the game at a rental price. And that really is my bug bear with the Xbone. You're paying an ownership price for a disc, but the reality is it's only a long term rental. I have a stack of discs of games I don't play any more, and a HDD full of downloaded games I don't play any more (but I don't delete them because I might want to play them again and don't want the hassle of having to re-download). My wife keeps bugging me to sell some games, but they have little value on the open market. I've sold some games because I dislike them and want to be rid of them and at least recover a few wasted dollars. But I would much rather have rented those games and lost a lot less money in the process.

Publishers don't like the rental model because they want their $60 up front from millions (hopefully) or 100s of thousands (usually) shortly after releasing a game. But long term the rental model leads to a healthy revenue stream as long as you have enough games in circulation.

[Switchback]

Yeah, I won't claim to know what all the technical details are around these things, but from my limited amount of knowledge it seems like streaming movies and music (totally passive) will require much less beef in the innards than streaming a high-end video game (totally active). So a device like the Roku or Apple TV working as a pass-through is fine for movies/music, but can't figure how'd it work for Skyrim?

[Arthmail]

Considering the problems that the US is having with the NSA and Prism, i have no desire to move to a cloud system, even for games. There is too much room for abuse. I like how Steam operates, with games that I've bought being digitally managed, but i have no desire to rent games. I do not think it is a sustainable model, either, over simple purchases. I think it would reduce the quality in games.

[The Anti-Targ]

Yeah, but no.

It's pretty clear that Microsoft is targeting non-traditional gamers with the XBox. If, for instance, they lose 50% market share of the gaming market to Sony (which would be a ridiculous assumption given the popularity of Halo 5 alone, but let's go with that) do you know how many units that actually is, as far as having to replace it?

6.5 million. That's it.

Dude, Xbox is a game console brand. No one cares about Xbox or Playstation or Wii (U) unless they like (or have come to like) playing video games on their TV. I think it's a huge gamble to rely on picking up lost gamer market share from the non-gaming, TV watching public. Why is anyone going to drop $500 in order to watch TV shows and movies they are already watching? Where is the value proposition for non-gaming households?

General entertainment features are there for kids to convince parents, or husbands to convince wives, that getting a game console is good for everyone. It's how I convinced my wife that PS2 and PS3 were a good buy. PS2 was our first DVD player, and PS3 was ourt fist (and still only) Blu-ray player. Blu-ray is also the reason I'll be able to convince my wife to move the PS3 into our bedroom once we buy PS4, instead of selling it which was her first thought.

You can feed me crow pie if Xbone sells to a lot of non-gaming households (but you'll have to buy your own plane ticket to NZ), but as of now I'm not at all convinced that non-game features of any description can drive sales of any games console to a new customer base.

Are you only talking US numbers?

Halo still only sells to about 25% of Xbox owners in the USA And a lot less outside the USA), so even if MS preserves the custom of every person who purchased Halo 3 (the biggest selling Halo at present) Sony still has 75% of Xbox 360 owners they can try to poach. And it's certain that not everyone who buys Halo loves it enough to be sure they will choose Xbone first over PS4 or Wii U.

And I'd bet my left nut that PS4 will substantially outsell Xbone globally. PS3 has outsold Xbox360 globally (and with a year less time on the market) and PS3 had a shockingly bad first 2.5 years on the market. I think if we consider North Amerca only it will be close, but Xbone will drop market share if things play out they way they appear to be going.

How's this doozy from Don?

During the interview when asked about the Xbox One's need for online connectivity, Mattrick said "...fortunately we have a product for people who aren't able to get some form of connectivity, it's called Xbox 360."

[Sonic The Hedgehog]

Dude, Xbox is a game console brand. No one cares about Xbox or Playstation or Wii (U) unless they like (or have come to like) playing video games on their TV. I think it's a huge gamble to rely on picking up lost gamer market share from the non-gaming, TV watching public. Why is anyone going to drop $500 in order to watch TV shows and movies they are already watching? Where is the value proposition for non-gaming households?

General entertainment features are there for kids to convince parents, or husbands to convince wives, that getting a game console is good for everyone. It's how I convinced my wife that PS2 and PS3 were a good buy. PS2 was our first DVD player, and PS3 was ourt fist (and still only) Blu-ray player. Blu-ray is also the reason I'll be able to convince my wife to move the PS3 into our bedroom once we buy PS4, instead of selling it which was her first thought.

You can feed me crow pie if Xbone sells to a lot of non-gaming households (but you'll have to buy your own plane ticket to NZ), but as of now I'm not at all convinced that non-game features of any description can drive sales of any games console to a new customer base.

Wasn't the PS2 having a DVD player one of the big reasons it outsold the Dreamcast? But then I heard that was in Japan where a PS2 was actually cheaper than just a DVD player alone. So if a lot of people didn't already have the other features Microsoft is offering with the new system, I'd say the Xbox One could sweep the sales that way. But as it is, it's looking like it'll just be 500 dollars for people to consolidate most of what they already have. I'm no tech guy, so I can't speak with much certainty, but I'm thinking you're right about this being a gamble for Microsoft that won't pay off. I'd say after the new systems are out for a few months Microsoft is going to start moving pretty fast to try and sweeten the deal somehow for customers.

[Jabronius Maximus]

Hahaha there's a video on YouTube for that quote from Mattrick, I had it on loop for a while. Pure gold.

But really, aside from the cable box thing, how different is the Xbox from the ps4?

Also here in Canada, people who subscribe to Optik TV from Telus can use the 360 as an extension of the main DVR, basically using it as a cable box to watch live TV. It might not be to the same extent of what the Xbone is, but this was enabled in 2010. I had a 360 until early 2011, and I'm also an Optik subscriber. I never heard of that functionality until last week. I don't know if the TV bit of the Xbone will be widely adopted, because the Telus-powered 360 certainly wasn't. It may have been due to poor advertising, but no one I asked knew about it either.

Then again, the Xbone could just be ahead of its time, much like the ps3 was with it's blu-ray player, Bluetooth tech, etc. I could see the Xbone really flexing its muscle later on, if MS continues to back it 100% like Sony did with the ps3. But then again a big reason why ps3 aged well was its slightly superior specs that started to show in the first-party games. So Xbone is just a big mixed bag right now, its really confusing and MS really has its work cut out. But I'm sure in the immediate future, MS will get hammered by Sony.

[Kalbear]

Yeah, I won't claim to know what all the technical details are around these things, but from my limited amount of knowledge it seems like streaming movies and music (totally passive) will require much less beef in the innards than streaming a high-end video game (totally active). So a device like the Roku or Apple TV working as a pass-through is fine for movies/music, but can't figure how'd it work for Skyrim?

The big limitation isn't the downstream; HD content is HD content, and it doesn't matter about rendering. What matters is how laggy it feels when playing. But many gamers are already used to that sort of thing. So are facebook gamers and social gamers. Networking and latency issues are well dealt with and understood for twitch games, and that's basically the same thing. You need almost no processing power to deal with video compression and streaming 1080P - at least by comparison to, say, an actual gaming console.

Put it another way. You need a total of 121Mbits/second to stream full 1080p to any given device right now with zero compression. That's not really that bad; it's well within the realm of cable modems and childs play for some of the gigabit hubs that are going out now. Compression gets that down by a factor of 6-8; while compression can't be as good as it is on TV (because for the most part video games differ significantly in their frame to frame composition compared to something like a football screen) it still can be quite high.

If Gaikai can stream dead space to a java app on a browser, you can do it to a set top box.

ut I'm thinking you're right about this being a gamble for Microsoft that won't pay off. I'd say after the new systems are out for a few months Microsoft is going to start moving pretty fast to try and sweeten the deal somehow for customers.

They may do it much earlier than that. For starters they're coming out for xmas; PS4 isn't. That will help with early adoption quite a bit. The PS4's price point of the $400 is their entry level as well, and if it's anything like the entry level of the PS3 that'll mean it's barely functional and you won't want it. Mostly, MS will sell things at a loss if they need to get market share that way and it makes sense. They were the pioneers of doing that. They have been happily making money on XBox Live accounts to the point where they were experimenting with giving away xbox 360s in exchange for live subscriptions of 2 years. They can do the same thing here as well.

[Kalbear]

Why is anyone going to drop $500 in order to watch TV shows and movies they are already watching? Where is the value proposition for non-gaming households?

Why is anyone going to buy a tivo to let them record shows when they have a perfectly working VCR?

There's a lot of value proposition. Not everyone has a netflix-enabled device for their TV. Many more don't have hulu+, amazon, hbogo that they can go through their TV to get. Or Pandora, Spotify, etc. For most people you either buy an expensive TV with a shitty interface for that or go through something like your DVD player (which often doesn't play it very well). And if you want to switch between a netflix movie and something on TV you have to switch devices.

Okay, so what if you don't? What if you just pause watching that movie on demand and then go to the live sports feed for a second because you got an alert that something awesome just happened. That 'something awesome just happened' is showing up because MS monitors twitter feeds and points out places that may be interesting. So you can jump right to that game and check it out without having an alert on your phone, laptop or something texting you. And then you check it out - happily it was automatically recorded for you on the DVR so even if you miss out you can check it out later and pause and rewind it - and then you can go back to your movie. Or you watch a livestream while playing another game. Etc, etc.

This isn't some farfetched notion of what some fictional people want to do; this is what people are already doing on their xbox, only extended further to their cable and TV functionality. This convergence is already happening for a lot of users; the difference is that most of it is happening on computers. But the PC largely sucks for it. It's either big and unwieldy or small and the screen size is meh; in both cases the UI for this sort of thing is really clunky.

Now I'm totally going to say that MS utterly fucked up on their marketing. They blew it, big time. No questions. They utterly sucked and dropped the ball like no one's business. MS is also the gaming console that pioneered what the online model looks like - the friends list, the karma system, the achievements, the matchmaking. Everyone takes this for granted, but this is stuff that MS came up with. We laughed at the achievement system when it first came out (and sony flat out DID laugh about it); now it is so ubiquitous that not having achievements is pretty ludicrous to think of.

[Switchback]

They may do it much earlier than that. For starters they're coming out for xmas; PS4 isn't. That will help with early adoption quite a bit. The PS4's price point of the $400 is their entry level as well, and if it's anything like the entry level of the PS3 that'll mean it's barely functional and you won't want it. Mostly, MS will sell things at a loss if they need to get market share that way and it makes sense. They were the pioneers of doing that. They have been happily making money on XBox Live accounts to the point where they were experimenting with giving away xbox 360s in exchange for live subscriptions of 2 years. They can do the same thing here as well.

What I heard from Sony was "Holiday 2013" release, which sounds for sure like it will be available by Christmas, and that the base $399 model is 500GB, which doesn't sound bare bones. Unless there will be some features they're holding back? But I didn't hear anything like that.

[Kalbear]

What I heard from Sony was "Holiday 2013" release, which sounds for sure like it will be available by Christmas, and that the base $399 model is 500GB, which doesn't sound bare bones. Unless there will be some features they're holding back? But I didn't hear anything like that.

The official date I've seen is 12/31/13. Could be wrong.

The $399 hasn't been entirely cleared up, but it sounds like it'll come with one controller and a few other missing items. It won't have kinect-like stuff or anything like that, but that's probably fine. The scary rumor I've heard is that it won't support the PSN+ and you'll have to buy a higher end model, but that's just a rumor.

[Jabronius Maximus]

What I heard from Sony was "Holiday 2013" release, which sounds for sure like it will be available by Christmas, and that the base $399 model is 500GB, which doesn't sound bare bones. Unless there will be some features they're holding back? But I didn't hear anything like that.

There's rumors swirling around twitter that the release will be around end of November for USA (I guess that includes Canada). Again, these are just rumors:

http://www.thegameeffect.com/news/ps4-release-date-leaked-by-supplier

And GT 6 will also be released on November 28, but at the moment its for ps3. It could end up being a launch title for ps4 around the same time, but who knows.

Even if the $399 is the base model, I would imagine it would have the same internals as the premium (memory and processors), but a smaller hard drive. And the premium might come with the Eye, which isn't exactly flying off the shelves right now. And really, they'd be insane to pull what they did with the ps3 and remove WiFi from the base model.

So for me if the base model has the same guts as the premium (maybe HDD differences), I'd definitely go with the basic.

This is of course totally presumptive, because both MS and Sony might even do the smart thing and have only one model to help streamline the experience.

[Switchback]

The official date I've seen is 12/31/13. Could be wrong.

The $399 hasn't been entirely cleared up, but it sounds like it'll come with one controller and a few other missing items. It won't have kinect-like stuff or anything like that, but that's probably fine. The scary rumor I've heard is that it won't support the PSN+ and you'll have to buy a higher end model, but that's just a rumor.

I saw the 12/31 date on Amazon, but I figured that was just a placeholder. I definitely haven't heard that date as official from Sony yet, and again the only thing I heard from them was "Holiday 2013", which is what they said in their press conference. If they're counting New Years as the "holiday season", that'd be a first.

I think if they include versions with and without the Move and Camera bundle, that'd be a plus. That's one of the biggest things that strikes me iffy about MS, is making us have that camera connected, turned "off" or not. I'd rather just not have it included at all in anything I buy.

If Sony does require a more expensive version to support PS+, and thus online multiplayer, well that would pretty much shit on any goodwill they've managed to accumulate thus far, and would be a bad management decision of epic proportions. Can't imagine they'll do that.

[Kosciuszko]

The official date I've seen is 12/31/13. Could be wrong.

The $399 hasn't been entirely cleared up, but it sounds like it'll come with one controller and a few other missing items. It won't have kinect-like stuff or anything like that, but that's probably fine. The scary rumor I've heard is that it won't support the PSN+ and you'll have to buy a higher end model, but that's just a rumor.

12/31 is the Amazon release date, probably because Amazon hasn't received word beyond "2013" from Sony yet. I'd bet on a release date fairly close to Xbox One, perhaps even earlier since the PS4 is a more focused product and doesn't have to worry about things like the TV features.

And no PS+? Really? That's a stupid rumor and there's absolutely no reason for Sony to do that. They seem to very much realize that marketshare was there problem this generation, along with online play. They won't suddenly cut PS+ after pushing it so hard (seriously, it is now a better service than Live IMO, and I'm not the only one).

I'm with Anti-Targ in that I just think this is a huge gamble for MIcrosoft to be taking. It may very well pay off, but at best I'm thinking it'll be like the PS3 this generation. Respectable sales but lagging behind, only catching up in the last couple of years of its life. We can talk about features all we want, but the truth is when people, gamer and non-gamer alike, see 500 dollar versus 400 dollar price-tags, that's going to have the biggest impact by far. Check this out too for what I mean:

http://www.amazon.co...es/ref=sv_vg_11

Amazon isn't the best indicator, and it's still early, but PS4 occupies the number 1 and number 3 slot here. The Xbox One occupies the number 2 and number 16. They also don't have even the small number of games selling the PS4 does, nor accessories like the PS4 does, on the first page. Xbox One stuff doesn't start showing up until the number 30 as far as games goes, as of 3:40 AM CST.

[Werthead]

Paradox have added a 'Jazz Mode' to Leviathan Warships on popular demand. It's a bit surreal.

So, thoughts on this little think piece / editorial?

Streaming is viable right now. I played Space Marine and Deus Ex: Human Revolution from start to finish on OnLive. Both were twitch-games which needed rapid responses and no visible latency (Space Marine rather more, it has to be said) and they were both 100% playable. In both games I often forgot I was using a streaming service, as there was no discernible difference to playing from the hard drive.

If you can do that now - or more accurately in late 2011, which is when I tried it - you'll be able to roll it out on a much bigger scale in a decade's time, there is zero question about that. The ethical questions about game ownership and so on are another matter, but technically there's no impediment to it at all, as long as internet technology continues to improve.

MS is also the gaming console that pioneered what the online model looks like - the friends list, the karma system, the achievements, the matchmaking. Everyone takes this for granted, but this is stuff that MS came up with.

Which they pretty much took from PC online services. MS put in on console, sure, but it wasn't a massive leap forwards in ingenuity.

[Werthead]

"Original video content? Well, Sony Pictures makes Breaking Bad, so you can stick your Master Chief up your dick."

"You like indie games? We've got all of them. Fucking all of them. Get into bed with us and we'll treat you like a princess."

"They're ours now, Microsoft. You've abandoned them, and we've taken them. These are our people now. You dropped the ball, Microsoft. You dropped all of the balls, and we kicked those balls into the net. "

[The Anti-Targ]

I'm rather surprised at how cheap PS4 and Xbone are going to be when they launch here. I thought $800 for PS4 and $900-$950 for Xbone, but it looks like $650 and $750. At that price I think I'll treat myself to the PS4 Eye bundle which will probably be $700.

And whatever rumour that's gone around suggesting PS+ won't work on the base console is simply FUD being spread by Xbone fans, by the sound of things. What won't work on any PS4 day 1 is Gaikai game streaming, Sony announced that would be coming in 2014. Sony specifically stated that multiplayer is behind the PS+ paywall for the precise reason that Sony needs to generate more revenue from day 1 in order to be able to sell PS4 for $399, in the USA, and not kill Sony. Why then would they release the console without the cheap sku being able to hook people up to PS+?

What do you think about this comment?

While next-generation consoles, including the Wii U released by Nintendo late last year, will dominate E3, digital play has changed considerably from when their predecessors arrived some seven years ago.

Smartphones and tablet computers have powered a boom in games available for free, with money made from ads or in-game purchases.

"I think the console players will continue to be in denial about what is really going on," said Clive Downie, who spent 17 years at videogame titan Electronic Arts before becoming chief at mobile games platform company DeNA.

"People's time is being eroded, so console sales will be eroded by people playing on mobile devices."

Aligns quite well with my previously stated view that the console market's gonna shrink.