6 ms·

I'm pretty sure short-sighted consumers/gamers shot themselves in the foot on this one, big time. I would have liked to have seen if Microsoft's move would have

by gfodor 13y ago

I'm pretty sure short-sighted consumers/gamers shot themselves in the foot on this one, big time. I would have liked to have seen if Microsoft's move would have led to cheaper per game pricing like we see on PC. I guess we'll never know. I actually respected them for making a ballsy change like this that may have brought the console gaming industry into the Steam era. Also, it now looks like you can no longer share/lend/give away your games digitally to friends and family, you have to lug a stupid disc around. High fives everyone, hooray!

jacquesc 13y ago
I think the hidden gem there is that all games will be available digitally. Once they figure out how lucrative their equivalent of Steam sales can be, that should start driving the cost of games down and also really hurt the used game market (which Microsoft and publishers are still eager to kill). When you download a game, you can't lend it. You can resell it. Yet no one seems to care (status quo and all). But I think it's the natural progression of things, the next-next gen will be all download (well, we all said that last time too..)
- eclipxe 13y ago
  Originally, you WOULD be able to lend it...now you can't
- cobrausn 13y ago
  Steam actually may enable digital game sharing - if you aren't playing your game, you would be able to share it with a friend who could play it while you are not (similar to how a physical game copy would work). But you would have to be 'always on' to verify that you are not playing at the same time they are. http://www.gamespot.com/news/steam-may-allow-game-sharing-report-6410433 http://www.gamespot.com/news/steam-may-allow-game-sharing-re...
- chc 13y ago
  > Once they figure out how lucrative their equivalent of Steam sales can be, that should start driving the cost of games down This seems pretty unlikely. Microsoft already has a large slice of its catalogue available for download on the 360 — and it's almost always cheaper to buy the disc. To illustrate, I will look up a random game that I did not know the price of before this. Saints Row: The Third costs $49 on the Xbox Marketplace. On Amazon, a new copy costs $29. Discounting lucrative titles just isn't how game companies work, and it especially isn't how Microsoft works.
meritt 13y ago
Exactly how is it the consumers fault for Microsoft deciding to restrict lending/sharing/etc of digital copies?
- eclipxe 13y ago
  Because previously, you could lend/share/give digital copies and the fact that the xbox connected every 24 hours could verify the license. Now, without the 24hr check lending will not be allowed. (I could lend all of my games to Bob, then Bob simply never connects to the net and is able to play them indefinitely)
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    From their statement it seems like disk-based lending will work exactly how it does in the past. You give your friend the disk, and he plays it. This seems to be what most gamers want.
  - tpetrina 13y ago
    They could divide users in two camps - those who want the old system and those who want the new system. If buying used games is good for you (e.g. you are living in country with less income than average American), don't enable the feature. If you like digital sharing, enable it. IMHO, their proposed system is OK, but it should be opt-in, not opt-out. I mean to buy a lot of games and I have zero interest in playing online. Why should I care about that anyway? 24-hour check is...let's be honest and just say it is limiting.
  - cameronh90 13y ago
    Why couldn't they make it so the 24hr check still exists, but only for validating shared games. Traditional disc/downloads could continue working just as they do already.
- mikelat 13y ago
  The gaming industry seems to be moving in the direction of the movie/music industry where they place completely unnecessary restrictions on the digital content they sell and blame their customers for it being there while all the meantime they don't actually ever produce anything I want to buy.
shock-value 13y ago
They are still (along with Sony) offering digital downloads of all titles. I don't think there is any reason, certainly no technical one, that they couldn't price digital differently than disc.
rocky1138 13y ago
This is incorrect as Steam allows for offline play.
- fuzzywalrus 13y ago
  Steam (while it doesn't have used game transfer) pricing has more to do with publishers and many competing platforms (Amazon, Gamesfly, Origin etc). I imagine Xbox One prices would be determined by Microsoft and the publishers (with the cost of licensing factored in), and not quite the free-for-all pricing that we've come to know and love about Steam.
jiggy2011 13y ago
I've brought this point up before, but I can't help but feel a significant factor in steam pricing is the ease of piracy on PC.
corresation 13y ago
This is talking specifically about disc-based games, which will return to operating as they always have. Good news for everyone. If you want to lend your game to a friend, give them your disc ("Lug" it around? For real?). Further when the inevitable system outage/hack attack happens, yay, those disc games still run. When Microsoft bans your Live account because your nephew trolled some people, yay, those disc games still run. Game makers can choose to do other things, just as they can on the PS4. Specific downloaded games might have specific activation policies, and so on. The outrage was that Microsoft seemed to make the baseline one that was very anti-consumer. They have done these sorts of things quite often, going above and beyond to serve interests other than their customers. Recall when Microsoft Media Center forcefully imposed completely irrelevant broadcast flags that no other DVR or cable box in the world listened to, deleting recordings after a prescribed period and so on.
- gfodor 13y ago
  How do I lend a game to my brother who lives on the other side of the U.S.? If you're going to make the argument that discs are "good enough" you sound a bit like people saying letters are "good enough" compared to e-mail. There are obvious advantages to digital content but it sounded like to get those advantages Microsoft decided it needed to add some "DRM-like" experiences. I'm not going to say it was the right tradeoff but them basically doing a 180 based upon nerd outrage about the used game market is disappointing. I would agree that making games unplayable if you are banned from XBox Live is horrible, and I am skeptical that was actually going to be a real policy since it's obviously unfair and there's no real "DRMy" reason to do it.
  - shock-value 13y ago
    > nerd outrage More like general consumer sentiment.
    - lizardking 13y ago
      As of earlier today the Xbox One was the number 1 product on Amazon, two spots ahead of the PS4. I'd say that's a decent indicator of actual consumer sentiment.
rmrfrmrf 13y ago
1) Microsoft doesn't set the price of games. What would have happened would be developers setting slightly higher prices than XBOX360, citing inflation and 'increased costs of development for more sophisticated systems' as reasons why the games are still more expensive. In other words, they'd be saying, "If it weren't digital only, it would be $89.99 instead of $59.99, so count your blessings!" Consumers are so well-trained to believe that they have no control over price; it's sad, really. 2) While you may have the luxury of a decent internet connection at a reasonable price, that is nowhere near the case for much of the USA. Gaming consoles are least common denominator products by design, so cutting off that huge segment of people for selfish reasons isn't a smart idea. 3) At 0.58 oz, a DVD weighs less than a sippy cup, so even the smallest of toddlers should have no issue carrying it. You're also missing the bigger point that, with a disc, you don't have to wait 2 hours for a game to download before you can play it.
- MartinCron 13y ago
  3) At 0.58 oz, a DVD weighs less than a sippy cup The Xbox One will support blu-ray discs, so your entire argument is invalid.
- gfodor 13y ago
  1) I don't buy that somehow gaming is a price fixing scheme. SNES games were $80 and that was 20 years ago. Market forces affect prices, and the used game market is a large market force. 2) "Re-authenticate every 24 hours" does not imply decent, always-on Internet. Most of the U.S. can re-authenticate every 24 hours. And those who are in the small minority that cannot should not prevent everyone else from the benefits of being able to digitally share their games with others. On military bases and space stations there can always be a special edition XBone that doesn't require connectivity and only plays discs with some software tweaks. Now, instead, we all lose. 3) The point about lugging it around was not the weight, it's the fact in 2013 there are use cases where a disc is the only way to do something, in this case, sharing a game. My lapto and iPad don't have disc drives and I haven't bought a game on a DVD in about 10 years.
  - brigade 13y ago
Osiris 13y ago
I agree. I was looking forward to buying a game and being able to play it completely offline without a disc. The disc would just act as a way to get the data onto your hard drive faster than a download. I'm annoyed that they are removing this functionality. While I don't like being prevented from reselling games, I have never resold one that I've bought, but I HAVE had a disc get scratched after bumping my Xbox with my foot. The only solution is to buy another disc, which sucks. Still, I think that they should push the online distribution model by selling online games at a CHEAPER price than the disc. The reason I currently buy discs instead of the online downloads is because the downloads never go on sale. For example, you can get Halo 4 on disc for $20 right now, but it's $60 on Xbox Live.
- chc 13y ago
  > I was looking forward to buying a game and being able to play it completely offline without a disc. That was never going to happen. Did you mean "online"?
  - mynameisvlad 13y ago
    Yes it was. The console would only need to connect once every 24 hours. The rest of the time, it wouldn't give two shits about if it was connected or not.
    - chc 13y ago
      I guess we have different definitions of "completely offline," with mine requiring that you not be online at all.
      - mynameisvlad 13y ago
        ... What? While playing your game, you could have been completely offline without a disk. The 24-hour requirement is completely separate.
chc 13y ago
> I would have liked to have seen if Microsoft's move would have led to cheaper per game pricing like we see on PC. We don't see that on the PC. Most big-name publishers largely charge the same on all platforms. How much was Diablo 3? Assassin's Creed 3 for PC? SimCity? These games all had always-online DRM, yet they cost just as much as an Xbox game. I would put the chances of the Xbox One's restrictions leading to cheaper games very close to zero. It seems actually more likely to me that gamers would end up paying more on average in a market where the supply and pricing of used goods is tightly controlled.
mcintyre1994 13y ago
I don't see the issue, for the most part PC games can be bought on disc as well as online. For the PC, the benefits of online have proven to outweigh the costs for a large amount of consumers. Requiring the Xbox One to prove that model is superior for consumers, instead of forcing it, can only help consumers. If it's no better for consumers and doesn't catch on, they have the disc based system as normal. If Microsoft really had plans to make games cheaper online, they can still do that. In fact, they can do that, and then when people buy more games online because they're more price competitive, they look like the good guys, pushing the better model, and ultimately being right. If. The great thing is consumers can't lose.
Stealth- 13y ago
I disagree. I think they have hit the perfect middleground. Those who want digital downloads can use them with the understanding that they cannot be traded, but like steam has always functioned. Those who prefer true, physical media can still use it just like it makes sense to. I think this is by far the best decision they could have made. They have kept DRM out of it for those that do not want it, but have also taken a step toward the online download service that they have been striving for.
falcolas 13y ago
I wish you were right, and the games would have indeed been cheaper. However, Microsoft said that they would not. http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/06/17/microsoft-reveals-the-price-of-xbox-one-games http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/06/17/microsoft-reveals-the... Was this a pre-emptive statement, based on their retraction today? Possibly, but probably not. Pricing their games lower would convey the secondary message that their games have less value than the equivalent game on PS4. Would they have lowered them eventually? Probably not until Sony did as well. There's was literally no reason for them to do so (aside from some graduate analysts saying it would have cost them in the long run).
mikelat 13y ago
The only difference with retail and digital sales is obviously the lack of a physical copy but also cutting out the middleman (which is retail). It's still ultimately up to the publisher and distributor if they want to sell you cheap games, and the fact that consoles are closed systems they really don't have a reason to sell you cheap games. They already sell games digitally on the current gen systems but choose not to do many decent sales. There isn't anything stopping them from giving you cheap games, they just don't want to - there's no reason for them to put in the DRM except to give themselves more control.
mead5432 13y ago
I wonder why they wouldn't just structure pricing to incent users to move towards the digital versions. You can pay the $60 for a disc based game and all the benefits/drawbacks therein or... pay $30 to get it digitally and be able to play it from any of their consoles and lend it to friends like they originally planned. Rather than backtrack, keep moving forward but do it a little bit more slowly... the way Amazon did/does with Kindle.
BlackAura 13y ago
While you might be right in part, Microsoft still shot themselves in the foot with this one. Some parts of the original plan were actually a good idea, if you think of the Xbox One as being purely for digital downloads. It's very similar to Steam, but with a few differences. Better in some respects (shared library, which Valve are reportedly considering), worse in others (can't work offline). The problem is that they were applying the exact same system to physical copies of a game. While their original plan was actually pretty good for digital distribution (it's a little more permissive than the Xbox 360), it's awful for physical copies. The physical copy is nothing more than a CD key and a backup so you don't have to download the game. It completely violates everyone's expectations of what a physical copy is, and what you can do with it. Microsoft explained all this very poorly. Their message was basically "here's all the ways we're going to restrict Xbox One games, all the extra requirements to play Xbox One games, and all the things you used to be able to do that you can't anymore". The benefits were an afterthought, barely mentioned, and they waited until E3 to even do that. What they probably should have done is separate physical and digital copies. Have digital copies work more or less the same as the original announcement, and physical copies work like they do on the Xbox 360. Then it becomes a choice. If you want all the benefits of digital distribution (and make sure you play those benefits up at every opportunity), you can do that. If you don't, get a physical copy, and it works the same way it always has. Although Microsoft do clearly want to move towards only digital distribution, they can't yet. The restrictions on physical copies are basically just a response to publishers, who are convinced that the used game market is the cause of all of their problems. They're wrong, of course. Just as they were wrong about piracy being the cause of all their problems, and just as they were wrong about game rentals being the cause of all their problems before that. As for the pricing thing - that will not happen. As far as publishers are concerned, US$60 for a game is a bargain. They'd love to charge more, but people won't pay more than that. There is no way they'd ever reduce that, even if they eliminated used games entirely, and had zero distribution and publishing costs. They've already established that people are willing to pay US$60 for a game, and the sale price of an item is simply whatever people are willing to pay for it. If they reduce costs, why would they reduce the asking price? If they increase sales by removing used games entirely, why could they reduce the price? That's not how businesses work. The only way game prices will come down is if there's some kind of competition. Game publishers will charge the same for an Xbox One or PS4 version of a game, because the publishers control the prices, so there's no competition there. New games currently cost the same on Xbox 360, PS3, and Steam, after all. Retailers don't really have much scope for reducing prices, because they have very little margin on new games, so there's no competition there. Used games would no longer be competing either, because publishers would just ask for some (probably very high) cut of all used game sales. There's no way to set up a competing online shop for Xbox One games, and no way to publish an Xbox One game without going through Microsoft, so there's no chance of competition there either. The only potential source of competition is between games. Publishers have demonstrated that they are not willing to do this. Not on consoles, anyway. Competition between games is what pushed mobile game prices down, even though all sales went through the same app store. That happened because the mobile space was dominated by smaller developers, mostly self-funded and self-publishing, who needed to compete or die. That's not the case with the major publishers and developers. Steam faces competition from retailers, from other online shops (either selling physical or digital copies), from all the publishers and developers who self-publish, and there's a great deal of competition between games because of the sheer number of smaller publishers or independent developers, combined with the absolutely enormous available back catalog, most of which still works on modern PCs. That, combined with various developers (Valve being the most obvious) who aren't even trying for a US$60 price point in the first place. That's why Steam has decent prices, why games cost less over time, any why they have such frequent sales. Competition, not because of restrictions on what you can do with the games.

by gfodor 13y ago

jacquesc 13y ago

I think the hidden gem there is that all games will be available digitally. Once they figure out how lucrative their equivalent of Steam sales can be, that should start driving the cost of games down and also really hurt the used game market (which Microsoft and publishers are still eager to kill). When you download a game, you can't lend it. You can resell it. Yet no one seems to care (status quo and all). But I think it's the natural progression of things, the next-next gen will be all download (well, we all said that last time too..)

eclipxe 13y ago
Originally, you WOULD be able to lend it...now you can't
cobrausn 13y ago
Steam actually may enable digital game sharing - if you aren't playing your game, you would be able to share it with a friend who could play it while you are not (similar to how a physical game copy would work). But you would have to be 'always on' to verify that you are not playing at the same time they are. http://www.gamespot.com/news/steam-may-allow-game-sharing-report-6410433 http://www.gamespot.com/news/steam-may-allow-game-sharing-re...
chc 13y ago
> Once they figure out how lucrative their equivalent of Steam sales can be, that should start driving the cost of games down This seems pretty unlikely. Microsoft already has a large slice of its catalogue available for download on the 360 — and it's almost always cheaper to buy the disc. To illustrate, I will look up a random game that I did not know the price of before this. Saints Row: The Third costs $49 on the Xbox Marketplace. On Amazon, a new copy costs $29. Discounting lucrative titles just isn't how game companies work, and it especially isn't how Microsoft works.

meritt 13y ago

Exactly how is it the consumers fault for Microsoft deciding to restrict lending/sharing/etc of digital copies?

eclipxe 13y ago
Because previously, you could lend/share/give digital copies and the fact that the xbox connected every 24 hours could verify the license. Now, without the 24hr check lending will not be allowed. (I could lend all of my games to Bob, then Bob simply never connects to the net and is able to play them indefinitely)
- jlgreco 13y ago
  From their statement it seems like disk-based lending will work exactly how it does in the past. You give your friend the disk, and he plays it. This seems to be what most gamers want.
- tpetrina 13y ago
  They could divide users in two camps - those who want the old system and those who want the new system. If buying used games is good for you (e.g. you are living in country with less income than average American), don't enable the feature. If you like digital sharing, enable it. IMHO, their proposed system is OK, but it should be opt-in, not opt-out. I mean to buy a lot of games and I have zero interest in playing online. Why should I care about that anyway? 24-hour check is...let's be honest and just say it is limiting.
- cameronh90 13y ago
  Why couldn't they make it so the 24hr check still exists, but only for validating shared games. Traditional disc/downloads could continue working just as they do already.
mikelat 13y ago
The gaming industry seems to be moving in the direction of the movie/music industry where they place completely unnecessary restrictions on the digital content they sell and blame their customers for it being there while all the meantime they don't actually ever produce anything I want to buy.

shock-value 13y ago

They are still (along with Sony) offering digital downloads of all titles. I don't think there is any reason, certainly no technical one, that they couldn't price digital differently than disc.

rocky1138 13y ago

This is incorrect as Steam allows for offline play.

fuzzywalrus 13y ago
Steam (while it doesn't have used game transfer) pricing has more to do with publishers and many competing platforms (Amazon, Gamesfly, Origin etc). I imagine Xbox One prices would be determined by Microsoft and the publishers (with the cost of licensing factored in), and not quite the free-for-all pricing that we've come to know and love about Steam.

jiggy2011 13y ago

I've brought this point up before, but I can't help but feel a significant factor in steam pricing is the ease of piracy on PC.

corresation 13y ago

This is talking specifically about disc-based games, which will return to operating as they always have. Good news for everyone. If you want to lend your game to a friend, give them your disc ("Lug" it around? For real?). Further when the inevitable system outage/hack attack happens, yay, those disc games still run. When Microsoft bans your Live account because your nephew trolled some people, yay, those disc games still run. Game makers can choose to do other things, just as they can on the PS4. Specific downloaded games might have specific activation policies, and so on. The outrage was that Microsoft seemed to make the baseline one that was very anti-consumer. They have done these sorts of things quite often, going above and beyond to serve interests other than their customers. Recall when Microsoft Media Center forcefully imposed completely irrelevant broadcast flags that no other DVR or cable box in the world listened to, deleting recordings after a prescribed period and so on.

gfodor 13y ago
How do I lend a game to my brother who lives on the other side of the U.S.? If you're going to make the argument that discs are "good enough" you sound a bit like people saying letters are "good enough" compared to e-mail. There are obvious advantages to digital content but it sounded like to get those advantages Microsoft decided it needed to add some "DRM-like" experiences. I'm not going to say it was the right tradeoff but them basically doing a 180 based upon nerd outrage about the used game market is disappointing. I would agree that making games unplayable if you are banned from XBox Live is horrible, and I am skeptical that was actually going to be a real policy since it's obviously unfair and there's no real "DRMy" reason to do it.
- shock-value 13y ago
  > nerd outrage More like general consumer sentiment.
  - lizardking 13y ago
    As of earlier today the Xbox One was the number 1 product on Amazon, two spots ahead of the PS4. I'd say that's a decent indicator of actual consumer sentiment.

rmrfrmrf 13y ago

1) Microsoft doesn't set the price of games. What would have happened would be developers setting slightly higher prices than XBOX360, citing inflation and 'increased costs of development for more sophisticated systems' as reasons why the games are still more expensive. In other words, they'd be saying, "If it weren't digital only, it would be $89.99 instead of $59.99, so count your blessings!" Consumers are so well-trained to believe that they have no control over price; it's sad, really. 2) While you may have the luxury of a decent internet connection at a reasonable price, that is nowhere near the case for much of the USA. Gaming consoles are least common denominator products by design, so cutting off that huge segment of people for selfish reasons isn't a smart idea. 3) At 0.58 oz, a DVD weighs less than a sippy cup, so even the smallest of toddlers should have no issue carrying it. You're also missing the bigger point that, with a disc, you don't have to wait 2 hours for a game to download before you can play it.

MartinCron 13y ago
3) At 0.58 oz, a DVD weighs less than a sippy cup The Xbox One will support blu-ray discs, so your entire argument is invalid.
gfodor 13y ago
1) I don't buy that somehow gaming is a price fixing scheme. SNES games were $80 and that was 20 years ago. Market forces affect prices, and the used game market is a large market force. 2) "Re-authenticate every 24 hours" does not imply decent, always-on Internet. Most of the U.S. can re-authenticate every 24 hours. And those who are in the small minority that cannot should not prevent everyone else from the benefits of being able to digitally share their games with others. On military bases and space stations there can always be a special edition XBone that doesn't require connectivity and only plays discs with some software tweaks. Now, instead, we all lose. 3) The point about lugging it around was not the weight, it's the fact in 2013 there are use cases where a disc is the only way to do something, in this case, sharing a game. My lapto and iPad don't have disc drives and I haven't bought a game on a DVD in about 10 years.
- brigade 13y ago

Osiris 13y ago

I agree. I was looking forward to buying a game and being able to play it completely offline without a disc. The disc would just act as a way to get the data onto your hard drive faster than a download. I'm annoyed that they are removing this functionality. While I don't like being prevented from reselling games, I have never resold one that I've bought, but I HAVE had a disc get scratched after bumping my Xbox with my foot. The only solution is to buy another disc, which sucks. Still, I think that they should push the online distribution model by selling online games at a CHEAPER price than the disc. The reason I currently buy discs instead of the online downloads is because the downloads never go on sale. For example, you can get Halo 4 on disc for $20 right now, but it's $60 on Xbox Live.

chc 13y ago
> I was looking forward to buying a game and being able to play it completely offline without a disc. That was never going to happen. Did you mean "online"?
- mynameisvlad 13y ago
  Yes it was. The console would only need to connect once every 24 hours. The rest of the time, it wouldn't give two shits about if it was connected or not.
  - chc 13y ago
    I guess we have different definitions of "completely offline," with mine requiring that you not be online at all.
    - mynameisvlad 13y ago
      ... What? While playing your game, you could have been completely offline without a disk. The 24-hour requirement is completely separate.

chc 13y ago

> I would have liked to have seen if Microsoft's move would have led to cheaper per game pricing like we see on PC. We don't see that on the PC. Most big-name publishers largely charge the same on all platforms. How much was Diablo 3? Assassin's Creed 3 for PC? SimCity? These games all had always-online DRM, yet they cost just as much as an Xbox game. I would put the chances of the Xbox One's restrictions leading to cheaper games very close to zero. It seems actually more likely to me that gamers would end up paying more on average in a market where the supply and pricing of used goods is tightly controlled.

mcintyre1994 13y ago

I don't see the issue, for the most part PC games can be bought on disc as well as online. For the PC, the benefits of online have proven to outweigh the costs for a large amount of consumers. Requiring the Xbox One to prove that model is superior for consumers, instead of forcing it, can only help consumers. If it's no better for consumers and doesn't catch on, they have the disc based system as normal. If Microsoft really had plans to make games cheaper online, they can still do that. In fact, they can do that, and then when people buy more games online because they're more price competitive, they look like the good guys, pushing the better model, and ultimately being right. If. The great thing is consumers can't lose.

Stealth- 13y ago

I disagree. I think they have hit the perfect middleground. Those who want digital downloads can use them with the understanding that they cannot be traded, but like steam has always functioned. Those who prefer true, physical media can still use it just like it makes sense to. I think this is by far the best decision they could have made. They have kept DRM out of it for those that do not want it, but have also taken a step toward the online download service that they have been striving for.

falcolas 13y ago

I wish you were right, and the games would have indeed been cheaper. However, Microsoft said that they would not. http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/06/17/microsoft-reveals-the-price-of-xbox-one-games http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/06/17/microsoft-reveals-the... Was this a pre-emptive statement, based on their retraction today? Possibly, but probably not. Pricing their games lower would convey the secondary message that their games have less value than the equivalent game on PS4. Would they have lowered them eventually? Probably not until Sony did as well. There's was literally no reason for them to do so (aside from some graduate analysts saying it would have cost them in the long run).

mikelat 13y ago

The only difference with retail and digital sales is obviously the lack of a physical copy but also cutting out the middleman (which is retail). It's still ultimately up to the publisher and distributor if they want to sell you cheap games, and the fact that consoles are closed systems they really don't have a reason to sell you cheap games. They already sell games digitally on the current gen systems but choose not to do many decent sales. There isn't anything stopping them from giving you cheap games, they just don't want to - there's no reason for them to put in the DRM except to give themselves more control.

mead5432 13y ago

I wonder why they wouldn't just structure pricing to incent users to move towards the digital versions. You can pay the $60 for a disc based game and all the benefits/drawbacks therein or... pay $30 to get it digitally and be able to play it from any of their consoles and lend it to friends like they originally planned. Rather than backtrack, keep moving forward but do it a little bit more slowly... the way Amazon did/does with Kindle.

BlackAura 13y ago

While you might be right in part, Microsoft still shot themselves in the foot with this one. Some parts of the original plan were actually a good idea, if you think of the Xbox One as being purely for digital downloads. It's very similar to Steam, but with a few differences. Better in some respects (shared library, which Valve are reportedly considering), worse in others (can't work offline). The problem is that they were applying the exact same system to physical copies of a game. While their original plan was actually pretty good for digital distribution (it's a little more permissive than the Xbox 360), it's awful for physical copies. The physical copy is nothing more than a CD key and a backup so you don't have to download the game. It completely violates everyone's expectations of what a physical copy is, and what you can do with it. Microsoft explained all this very poorly. Their message was basically "here's all the ways we're going to restrict Xbox One games, all the extra requirements to play Xbox One games, and all the things you used to be able to do that you can't anymore". The benefits were an afterthought, barely mentioned, and they waited until E3 to even do that. What they probably should have done is separate physical and digital copies. Have digital copies work more or less the same as the original announcement, and physical copies work like they do on the Xbox 360. Then it becomes a choice. If you want all the benefits of digital distribution (and make sure you play those benefits up at every opportunity), you can do that. If you don't, get a physical copy, and it works the same way it always has. Although Microsoft do clearly want to move towards only digital distribution, they can't yet. The restrictions on physical copies are basically just a response to publishers, who are convinced that the used game market is the cause of all of their problems. They're wrong, of course. Just as they were wrong about piracy being the cause of all their problems, and just as they were wrong about game rentals being the cause of all their problems before that. As for the pricing thing - that will not happen. As far as publishers are concerned, US$60 for a game is a bargain. They'd love to charge more, but people won't pay more than that. There is no way they'd ever reduce that, even if they eliminated used games entirely, and had zero distribution and publishing costs. They've already established that people are willing to pay US$60 for a game, and the sale price of an item is simply whatever people are willing to pay for it. If they reduce costs, why would they reduce the asking price? If they increase sales by removing used games entirely, why could they reduce the price? That's not how businesses work. The only way game prices will come down is if there's some kind of competition. Game publishers will charge the same for an Xbox One or PS4 version of a game, because the publishers control the prices, so there's no competition there. New games currently cost the same on Xbox 360, PS3, and Steam, after all. Retailers don't really have much scope for reducing prices, because they have very little margin on new games, so there's no competition there. Used games would no longer be competing either, because publishers would just ask for some (probably very high) cut of all used game sales. There's no way to set up a competing online shop for Xbox One games, and no way to publish an Xbox One game without going through Microsoft, so there's no chance of competition there either. The only potential source of competition is between games. Publishers have demonstrated that they are not willing to do this. Not on consoles, anyway. Competition between games is what pushed mobile game prices down, even though all sales went through the same app store. That happened because the mobile space was dominated by smaller developers, mostly self-funded and self-publishing, who needed to compete or die. That's not the case with the major publishers and developers. Steam faces competition from retailers, from other online shops (either selling physical or digital copies), from all the publishers and developers who self-publish, and there's a great deal of competition between games because of the sheer number of smaller publishers or independent developers, combined with the absolutely enormous available back catalog, most of which still works on modern PCs. That, combined with various developers (Valve being the most obvious) who aren't even trying for a US$60 price point in the first place. That's why Steam has decent prices, why games cost less over time, any why they have such frequent sales. Competition, not because of restrictions on what you can do with the games.