Under the status, quo, maybe - but if you change the distribution and licensing model, something wonderful happens…
This is a very profitable distribution model. Lower consumer prices and healthy profits are not mutually exclusive concepts, if you are willing to embrace sensible changes to the distribution model.
They recognize that people are fearful of change for no rational reason and have bent over backwards to make sure that you’ll *still *be able to buy a used Xbox One disc at Gamestop, if that’s what you think you want to do - and many will opt for this because it is familiar… This is, initially, going to keep the cost of physically-distributed, transferable titles up. But eventually, just as we saw with PC games, more and more people will find that the convenience and lower cost of the DD model is more and more attractive, and console developers will be able to make games available at launch at already-attractive prices, which will come down to offer-you-can’t-refuse prices as they age, because they are getting the full benefit of those later sales, and will no longer have to price the titles in anticipation of them changing hands once or twice with no further benefit accruing to the creators. This is the way forward, and Xbox One is at the vanguard of the movement, if being nine years late to the party is can still be considered the “vanguard.”
Nintendo and Sony can play catch up six or seven years, when their local-processsing-only consoles can’t realistically hope to compete with a console that is designed to be able to offload much of the computational heavy lifting to external servers, which (extrapolating from growth of Xbox live between generations) should number about 2 million by then.
Pretty sure this is a crock of lies; Why? Because if your internet connection goes down, your games don’t stop working until your next 24 hour check in. If they were really offloading stuff into “the cloud” (You know, like…Simcity was!) then games would break pretty much immediately when your internet died.
Here’s the thing. You’re no longer just relying on your internet. You’re also relying on Microsoft’s internet and servers. And we’ve never seen a major company’s servers buckle under the load of a new release, or get hacked and be down for nearly a month…
I wish you luck with your wildly optimistic feelings on the subject, and only time will tell, but right now, the signs point to you being excessively optimistic.
No, this is a feature that has already been documented and demonstrated, it’s built into the API and developers are well-apprised of what they can do with it. It is not immediately clear how many launch titles will make use of his feature, and to be honest at the moment it seems almost overkill, because just moving to up-to-date hardware is going to seem like plenty - but what this really offers is future-proofing, extending the performance abilities beyond what the other consoles of this generation are capable of. Any computation that doesn’t have to be made for every single frame can be handled by xbox live servers in the future, and the infrastructure can be built up to meet increasing demand, taking advantage of hardware improvements as they come. This is fecking massive, and unyokes the abilities of the console from it’s 2013 hardware limitations. It is genius.
Yes, that’s right - but the advantages of no longer relying exclusively on your local hardware outweigh this enormously. Yes, I can remember a few instances of not being able to get through to the Xbox live servers. They were annoying and inconvenient, and each of them lasted… uh… almost an hour? And the way that cloud computation is exploited via the API, you won’t suddenly not be able to play your games, this will just fall back to the CPU and your frame rate will take a hit.
Horse-hockey - my observations are based on confirmed statements and common sense.
Cloud computing won’t have any effect on how games look. Graphics need to be computed every frame, and graphics processors are so tightly pipelined that even if some calculations could be done remotely there would be no way to make use of them without stalling the pipe.
Most other compute-intensive tasks in videogames also have similar tight time constraints: line-of-sight checks, physical simulations, AI behaviors. They might not need to be done every frame, but they do need to be low-latency. Who cares if a shattering vase is beautifully simulated if the key frames take 500ms to come back from the cloud?
Add to this the fact that cloud computing isn’t free. Servers are expensive, which is why games that rely heavily on remote computation (like MMOs) operate on a monthly fee model. Even if developers do figure out a clever way to make use of the cloud, the server costs will prevent it from being used in most games.
Just to be a little more explicit here, to get a decent frame rate of 50 FPS, you need a frame time of 20ms. I’ve just tried Pinging Google and the time is 45 ms. That’s three frames. It can work. I used to play Aces High, an online combat flight sim where the latency was 150 ms or more and it caused some interesting issues. You sometimes could appear to fly through someone. When you were in combat with someone you had to guess their latency and adjust your lead accordingly.
Obviously - and there’s no suggestion that cloud servers are going to be doing the grunt work of the GPU.
There is a lot going on computationally that will tolerate a latency of a tenth of a second, and Microsoft is telling developers they can count on about three times the local CPU and memory. This means (as one example) you can count run more individual AI routines, and more complicated AI and increase the number of NPC opponents, larger user-modifiable/destructible environments with persistence, etc. You are freer that you would be if you are developing for local resources only, and it’s built into the API.
I think what you’re missing is that these clusters are supported by Microsoft, and touted as an incentive to develop for the platform. “Go nuts, guys!”
We’ll see, but your PR statements aside, I see no reason to have confidence that this technology is remotely ready to happen in any useful sort of way. That didn’t stop them with the original Kinect though!
So I am going to continue to blithely accuse you of optimism.
There’s little reason to suspect that Microsoft will follow the steam model and lots of reasons to suspect they won’t. Digital distribution on PCs is a free market. I can buy from whoever will sell me games the cheapest. This means that DD sites will compete on price. Microsoft will have total control over their digital store.
Microsoft already has a limited form of DD in the form of xbox arcade games. While these are not AAA titles and often limited/budget titles and therefore priced lower to begin with, you rarely see them on deep discount. Nothing at all like what you regularly see on the PC DD side of things.
Valve has always been one of the most consumer-friendly businesses in the US. I don’t know if it’s because they’re private and run by one guy, and therefore they have the ability not to be dicks whereas every public company feels like they’re mandated to be dicks or what, but Valve has always been very good and generous to consumers. Microsoft has no such history.
I think there may be some other factors but that’s just guessing on my part. Console users seem to be more prone to buy the latest greatest thing, dump it quickly, and move on to the next thing. This supports a high price model. PC games usually tend to have more life to them - as a random example, there are probably hundreds of thousands of people still playing battlefield 2 released in 2005. Modding and user content adds life to games, and PC gamers seem to stick with more things for the long haul. It may be that there’s less incentive to price things aggressively on console, especially when there’s no competition threatning to do the same.
The “sell a lot for cheap” model of digital distribution hasn’t taken off anywhere except PC gaming. I don’t understand why, since it’s been very successful, but you don’t see $3 ebooks and $3 CDs or anything along those lines. The digital distribution revolution has been so far solely limited to PC gaming, it may be an anomaly rather than the norm.
If a game-producer wants to sell a discounted game via the Microsoft store, is Microsoft going to tell them no? It’s hard to see why they’d want to prevent their users from getting cheaper games over the objections of the people selling the game, and it’d be the game-studios and not Microsoft taking the hit (presumably hoping to make it back in higher sales).
I don’t really see what the upside would be for Microsoft in inflating the cost of games. While there’s no direct competition, there are other platforms people will choose between (perhaps including the Steambox in a few years). And beyond games, other places where they can spend their entertainment budgets. Its in Microsofts interest to have studios sell games for as low a price as they can be convinced to accept.
Absolutely they’d say no if they wanted to. If they had some perception about wanting to enforce the perception of what a game should cost, they’d discourage discounts on games. If people are totally free to set whatever price they want on xbox arcade, why aren’t there a ton more sales than we actually see?
Microsoft has some interest in projecting the image that $60 is what a game should cost, and you should just go ahead and buy it at that price. If a few publishers here and there start bucking that trend, it lowers the expectation of pricing in general, and how fast and how deeply games should be discounted. Microsoft has a vested interest in keeping game prices high, and their own steps into digital distribution confirm that they want it that way. I’m sure we’ll see 33% or 50% off sales on 2+ year old games occasionally, but nothing like Steam.
The ebooks situation is still being sorted out, but price-per-track of music has indeed dropped due to most consumers moving from buying physical media in brick-and-morter stores. (see the first graph here). I think we are seeing and will continue to see the same thing happen in videogames. There’s too much competition for gamer-dollars to prevent it, and its not clear its even in the studio or consel makers interest to do so if they could.
I disagree. The cheaper a hobby gaming is, the more people will play games and the more Microsoft will make. Keep in mind the savings here aren’t coming from the studios or Microsoft cut, it’s game retailers that are loosing out. Everyone else makes the same cash per game, but cheaper prices mean they’ll sell more games and make a net profit.
That’s my big thought. There’s actual competition in the PC DD marketplace. You have at least four “big” retailers (Steam, Amazon, GreenmanGaming, GamersGate), some publisher retailers (Origin, Uplay), various smaller/regional outfits (GetGamesGo, GOG, Nuuvem, etc) and then a bunch of indie/bundle outfits. I don’t see how a single source (Microsoft) is going to have the same market incentives. Everyone uses Steam as the go-to example for cheap gaming but in reality I probably get maybe 25-30% of my games from Steam and the rest elsewhere based on price.
Even with Steamworks, Valve doesn’t charge for 3rd party or retail activation. So Valve doesn’t get anything when I buy a copy of Skyrim from GMG and activate it on Steam. They’re forced to compete on pricing, selection and service.
Like that’s hard to do. We’re talking about a team that named something the X-Box One and didn’t stop to think that every gamer on the planet would abbreviate it to XBone.
Another issue with digital on consoles is that, unlike PC where boxed retail is irrelevant except in a couple of territories, consoles live or die by retail. It’s why E3 exists - to get retail to open up shelf space for game -x and system -y.
Because they are so dependent on retail, they cannot undercut them. On PC you often see digital sales coming in way lower than boxed retail copies. If Microsoft did that, retailers would not carry their games, and the majority of game sales on consoles are still done though brick and mortar stores.
So making digital more attractive by lower the price over boxed copies may not be possible in the long run, and may even be difficult later in the lifespan of these machines.
They most certainly do go down. Back in the cartridge era, there were some games that were $75-$80, and at least one (Virtua Racing) I believe was $100.
When CD games hit the market, all consumers got the benefit of lower production costs with mostly standard $50 pricing. The nominal price of games has now risen to $60, but adjusted for inflation, you’re still paying less than you did in 1995.
I think you should stop talking about a service that you clearly know nothing about.
Yes, there are AAA games available digitally via Microsoft for the Xbox 360. They are called “Games on Demand.” They don’t USUALLY release simultaneously with retail, but we’ve seen a bit of that lately IIRC (Certainly, Sony has done some simultaneous digital releases, but I’m not 100% sure if MS has done the same, I’ve been paying less attention their stuff lately, and ‘lately’ is when this started happening). Usually the stuff you find in Games on Demand is stuff you would find at retail, but “older” (6 months or so) and priced “accordingly” - i.e. what you might be expected to pay for that title on Amazon, roughly, though I get the feeling that these prices are set by the game publishers, not by MS, so the numbers can kinda be all over the place.
And you do see stuff on “deep discount” unless “50% or more” is no longer a “deep discount” with some regularity. Not as often as on the PC where something is on sale pretty much every DAY now, but it’s weird to see a month go by without at least a handful of titles - both On Demand and Arcade - going on sale for fairly substantial discounts, though again, these are generally older titles to avoid undercutting retail.
I had posted some pricing off Microsoft’s “Games on Demand” website. However, the games I looked up pricing on were actually Windows games from Microsoft’s GOD service. Although they were all far more expensive than base pricing on Steam (usually double or more), I can’t say that they price the Xbox360 Games on Demand games the same way so I removed my above post.
Without an Xbox360, I apparently can’t browse their GOD pricing for that system.
I forgot about those, but I was aware. I have an xbox 360, you know. But this hurts your case rather than helps it. The fact that the 360 has AAA titles for digital distribution and yet doesn’t ever have sales anything remotely like PC DD is evidence that supports my point. Their base price is $40+ and so even a meager 50% off sale only brings them in line with the base price of similar games on PC DD. Almost every game that would be on that Xbox service has been $5 or less on PC DD.
