Does anybody know whether the XBone is going to have wireless? That actually strikes me as the biggest problem with internet dependency — most people paying $500-ish for a console probably have some kind of network connection (you don’t exactly need a fast one if it’s just to log in), but getting it to the box may or may not be plausible, depending on your living quarters. This is an especially likely problem for college students in particularly and young adults living in rented spaces in general… damn close to the core demographic for the XBone.
In general, the idea of putting non-resellable games on discs is not a viable one, IMHO. The iTunes Store and Steam succeeded at making DRM the norm for music/videos and PC games, respectively, precisely because they were digital downloads. Sure, you can’t resell your iTunes music, but you could buy just the one song you wanted, and whole albums were significantly cheaper on the iTunes store than on a CD ($10 versus $15-ish, IIRC). Steam games are often insanely cheaper than CD-ROMS. They can win on prices because digital distribution is so much more efficient than physical distribution — not only do you not have to print the CD’s and their cases (and print far more than you actually sell, since every store has overstock!), but there’s also all the money going into the physical store, the people working at the physical store, etc. So it’s much cheaper. Take away that efficiency, and there’s really very little that Microsoft can offer its customers in exchange for taking away their sense of actual ownership. The solution would be to go to a purely digital distribution model, but that removes a ton of your customers in one fell swoop and takes away the one big advantage consoles have over PC’s (convenience — popping in a disc).
Nope, that’s a pretty good assessment. This generation of consoles is going worse than I ever thought and I have to say I’m enjoying it. I mean, I’m not enjoying their crappy limited low spec hardware - that shit is going to hold back gaming in general - but I’m a fan of how they’re shooting themselves in the foot at every turn.
But people used to make a big deal about how you could resell stuff with consoles, trade games, etc. I never really cared - I was never impressed that you could resell your $60 game to gamestop for $12 or whatever when I could take that same $60 and get 15 games and keep them forever, but people made a big deal out of it.
But now you’re getting the worst of both worlds - you have no control over the games you own, but you’re also locked into being at the mercy of Microsoft and the publishers. For PC digital downloads there’s a free market, so there’s price and service competition. For the consoles - you pay and get restricted in whatever way MS or EA want you to be. You’re going to have any downsides of digital distribution without the upside. And there’s a far greater history of deliberate obsolescence on the console end - I still fire up 10 year old PC games sometimes and play multiplayer with a few dozen other people still doing the same thing, whereas I think stuff like FIFA gets shut down 15 months after the game comes out.
I’ve been very leery of the whole steambox thing, but as bad as this gen of consoles is going to be, maybe it’ll take off.
There is a way to avoid the problems you describe, though: buy the games you want, do your due diligence before you pull the trigger on the purchase, and enjoy the game you bought.
The used game thing mostly affects people who buy every game that comes out, play the game for a few days, and take it back and trade it in. It won’t be a problem for me, I have very specific tastes and rarely buy games that I find myself disliking.
I have nothing against PC games. I enjoy them very much, and given certain parameters I would have no problem getting a few for my current machine. Of course, that also has its own issues in that my machine can’t run some high-end games or older games without a hassle, whereas a console is guaranteed to play every game that is released for it, so that’s a plus.
Of late I haven’t been spending nearly as much time on my 360 as I used to, but what I do like about the 360 is that I can pop a game in and play, or I can access Netflix/Amazon and watch movies with the family. The XBox One will be able to all of that the same or better, and it has some games that are exclusive to the XBox that I really want to play. PCs will never have Forza, for instance.
PCs and consoles have their own advantages and disadvantages, there’s no need to make a holy war out of it.
[QUOTE=Justin_Bailey]
Ah, you’re one of those people. Carry on, the real world certainly is.
[/QUOTE]
Do you have gaming PC? A lot of people that say “my PC would have issues with modern games” Haven’t made the investment into a decent gaming PC. And I’m not saying spend $1200 for a beast. a nice, small form factor gaming PC for $700-$800 should have you covered and be trouble free. I mean, could you play modern games without a hassle on your PS1? Or would you have to make an investment into a new console?
Skyrim on the PS3, says hi. Consoles suffer from issues on occasion too, and they constantly suffer from performance troubles, specially as they continue to age. I watched my friend play Bioshock infinite on his xbox a few months ago. On top t it looking really bad, the frame rate dipped into the teens at places, making me feel queasy.
Can do the same on my PC.
Same for PC. Forza sucks, also, compared to some of the amazing racing sims on PC. This is pretty much the only selling point of consoles. AAA exclusive titles. PC has a lot more higher rated exclusive titles, but only a handful of exclusive titles with a lot of development and marketing behind them.
However, last time I checked, marketing does nothing for gameplay, and tripple A titles tend to have to appeal to the lowest common denominator because they require a wide audience appeal to make money back. So really, it’s only a subset of these handful of AAA console exclusive games that are worthwhile.
Precisely the kind of thing I cna wait to play 5 years into a console generation, when I can pick up an Xbone or a PS4 for $250, play the few games that never made it to PC, and then sell them back on ebay The PC is got me covered everywhere else.
When you say, “My console does X”, there is an implication that you are also saying PC’s DON’T do X.
I hear it all the time from console gamers who don’t actually game on PC’s, and so have no actual clue what it’s about.
That made not be you, but it’s kind of instinct now, for me, to point out, that yes, actually, the PC does that too, and usually, does it better.
Comments like these are what make people not take you seriously in these debates. You have a total inability to turn off your pc fanboyism for even one second. It’s like you are truly blind to your console prejudice and always argue that you are being objective when you’re not.
I’m largely a PC gamer, but I have an old XBox (that I largely use for occasional games of Jurassic Park) and a PS3, which I bought because it was, at the time, cheaper than a standalone BluRay player.
I do most of my gameplaying on the PC, but in this house, at least, the PS3 has one huge advantage that the PC doesn’t, and that’s local multiplayer. If I want to play a game with my daughter, we’ll fire up Little Big Planet 2, or Ratchett and Clank. We can play minecraft on the networked PCs, but you need a pc per person for that.
Whilst PC gaming generally is just as easy as console gaming these days (Airman Doors, USAF, I don’t even need to ‘pop in a disc’ to play the huge majority of my games, I just play 'em through Steam.) it really is not as easy to setup a similar sofa gaming session as it is on a console, and this is why the consoles will sell. The regular internet-connection thing will annoy people, and the used-game thing may well result in fewer ‘impulse’ purchases and people waiting for games to go cheap (I very rarely buy a full price PC game). But there’s still a huge market for an easy game box so you can play on your sofa with your mates, and I don’t see anything that’s going to kill that here.
You seem to believe there’s a bright line between “Wii owners” and “hardcore gamers,” which is untrue. You also seem to be under the impression that the Wii is unprofitable or unpopular (far from it) and that the Wii U needs “saving” (it has sold better after 8 months than the PS3 and Xbox 360 did after the same time period).
I don’t think it is. This is a link to the Co-Optimus website, and it’s a list of all PS3 titles with what they call “Couch Co-op” - there’s 193 on the list. If you remove the filter for Couch Co-op, and just bring up the games with some kind of co-op mode, there are 271. Which says to me that over 2/3rds of PS3 games with co-op feature a couch co-op mode.
It also lists 345 co-op XBox360 games, 246 of which have Couch Co-op, so a similar percentage there.
Yes, many games are purely single player across all formats. But the couch co-op thing is not rare on the current gen consoles and, given the success of the Wii, I don’t see it becoming rare on the next gen.
Many fo those games are several years old. And that’s what I meant. They have become rarer this generation has aged. Used ot be every console game supported couch co-op. Now, you gotta look at the back of the box to make sure.
Forza doesn’t suck. That’s just a ridiculous thing to even say. That’s like saying Mario Bros sucks compared to PC platformers. What are these amazing pc racing sims you speak of because they sure don’t get any props in gaming media.
Everything you say oozes contempt towards console games in general.
As far as bias against pc gaming I’m not. Just because I think pc gaming is going the way of the Buffalo doesn’t mean I don’t have pc games I enjoy playing. PC sales are dropping like a rock. They will continue to do so. I believe the days of building your own gaming PCs are numbered as I stated earlier.
That’s why I like my console. I like popping in Saints Row 2 and laying back on the couch while my wife cooks dinner or plays on her laptop next to me. I’ll play BF3 on my PC when I need to get in the zone, but for relaxing evening play where I don’t have to focus 100% on the screen, that’s my PS3.
Indeed they are, but that’s because most PS3 games are several years old. Last year, I count 27 titles that have the couch co-op label. Take a look at the actual games in the list - they include big names like Far Cry 3 and Borderlands 2 that came out on the PC but didn’t include local coop in that format.
I’m labouring this point a little because it’s one of the genuine points that the consoles have over PCs these days, and there’s no evidence that it’s something that’s slowing down, and there’s certainly no evidence that the new XBone isn’t going to include it for a significant percentage of games, and that’s going to sell them a lot of consoles, regardless of a once a day internet connection that most users aren’t going to care about. It’s going to be a solve-once problem that, once it’s up and running, will be invisible to the majority of their users.
If it’s a poor service and their servers are often down, then this may well cause issues for them further down the line. A good example of this is Sim City 5 which, despite being roundly criticised pre-release for its always on connection requirement, still managed to pre-sell enough copies to cause the launch problems that ruined its reputation.
Forza is an arcade racer. Mind you, it’s definitely on the technical side of arcade racers it’s obviously not mario cart, but in terms of the physics simulation and complexity of driving it is NOT a sim.
The only reason console gamers think it is is because marketing has sold it to them as such, and because they don’t know any better. Anything outside the scope of the mainstream console world might as well exist on another planet to the average console gamer.
Actual simulation racers like rFactor, Gtr, Race room, sim raceway, iracing, autoclub revolution, project CARS (available on PC now, but which will probably one of the first true sims to hit consoles next year), and several others, tend to account for a lot more variables in their physics simulations, and support all manner of wheels and pedal setups as well. I’m not even sure the console market would necessarily be interested.
As a pure racing game I think Forza is decent, though I personally prefer the Code Master games like Dirt and Grid and F1. As a sim? Well, it’s not even one. Unless with “sim” you mean car collector simulator? I believe that franchise has some of the best interiors (though in terms of the overall package, I think C.A.R.S might give it a run for it’s money).
The PC is got me covered everywhere else.