1565

Another point to consider: Giving the current console generation this box will have to work for 7-8 years unless the cycle will get shorter again.
No one knows how AAA gaming will develop in these years therefore they need to have indies / smaller games there, too.
Most innovation in gaming arguably comes from indies these days and Xbox One would miss out on all of these if they’d ignored them.

1566

It’s a basic difference in philosophy.

I teach an experimental gaming module. Sony gets mentioned a fair bit*. Microsoft barely gets a look-in.

(*Braid, Patapon, Loco Roco, Heavy Rain, Little Big Planet…not to mention the works of ThatGameCompany, Team Ico…etc.)

1567

For better or worse, Sony never really has a target. They just throw as much as they can into their hardware and see if anything interesting comes out. That’s why we had things like Folding@Home and Linux in the PS3, the Firewire port on the first PS2 revision, analog buttons, etc.

MS seems a lot more planned and targeted. But that means stuff outside their corporate vision gets squeezed out.

1568

After the first one, it’s his money.

1569

It’s pointless – once games are all-digital, and this is coming in the next 5 years, then this concept of “reselling” games will be a fantasy.

So why hang on to an outdated business model that enables payday loan, pawn shop exploitation and profiteering? In short, Fuck Gamestop.

If you think PS4 is doing anything different, you’re in fantasyland. Sony is just keeping quiet as long as they can on blocking used game sales.

My advice is, get used to it. This year, 5 years from now, it’s all the same in the end.

1570

Except, wumpus, that problem that the “fantasy” here has been ruled to be identical to a box product. So they will be doing something different here.

1571

This logic makes no sense.

You hate gamestop fucking the gamer over so you want microsoft to do it instead? Either way i’m still getting screwed, who exactly does it doesn’t matter that much to me.

I also think sony is going to do something similar. I am like 60% sony, 40% microsoft, but it just makes sense even though my sony fanboi friend denies it. Assuming sony doesn’t want to fail, if they weren’t doing something just as bad for customers, they would have been all over the news about the advantage over xbox. This would be a great way for sony to get back in the American market which has kind of turned on them.

Anyway, the whole situation is what is wrong with the video games industry.

ok, so you find people are selling your game within the same day they buy it, do you:

A) Improve the amount of content in future games. If your game wasn’t 5 hours long, people wouldn’t finish it in a day.
B) Improve replayability. Even if your game had 5 hours of unique content, if it was fun to replay, people would hold on to it longer.
C) Make your game good enough that people play it again anyway even though it is short and the same experience each time
D) Instead of positive reinforcement (looking at the reasons gamers don’t keep your games more than a day), lead an assault on your loyal customers, doing everything possible to make their experience more limited and worse just so you don’t have to improve anything.

Sooner or later these companies are going to overreach and then there will be a reckoning.

1572

Don’t care about reselling games as long as there is an open marketplace on the consoles. Like Steam or the PC in general. If games can self publish and set their own prices, competition leads to downward price pressure. Reselling used games is what provides some of that flexibility that doesn’t exist on the console platforms now, but if Sony or MS opens up a bit, not needed.

1573

It’s just a matter of years before all games are digital and this old timey concept of reselling a physical artifact are gone forever. Sorry.

I say get used to it now, and enjoy reducing bottom-feeding pawn shop, payday loan scum like GameStop to nothing.

I bet you a zillion used game reselling dollars that PS4 does the same stuff.

1574

Full digital is coming. The fact you can’t resale will also change. the EU will drive this forward as they are with Steam in Germany as a test bed. The reason there isn’t so much pressure on digital being resold at present is the fact there are disc versions of most games on consoles and you can resell them. once that disappears re next gen consoles I believe it will get challenged more widely by the EU.

1575

You need to stop using this term to describe GameStop. You may not like their business practices, but that term has nothing at all to do with how their business operates in the used product space.

They people a pittance for used product, which they then actively sell at massively inflated prices. Hate on that all you like, but for the moment there is a substantial market in it - and it’s a business model that has nothing to do with cash advancing on paychecks.

1576

Sorry, you re not reselling physical artifacts. You re reselling bytes and bytes of code and its a relatively new concept that came with the rise of consoles. When PC was ascendant, no one was selling used software, because it was illegal to do so. Now we re just returning to that time.

1577

It’s a predatory business that a) gives nothing back to the people who made the games b) allows a cadre of middlemen to fatten their wallets forever reselling other people’s work over and over. It shouldn’t even be possible, and won’t be possible once everything is sold digitally. Inside a decade at the most pessimistic, and more likely within 5 years.

E-books have been around forever, and you can totally resell e-books, right?

Gird your loins, because the future is almost here, and it’s all digital all the time.

1578

There we go. Your problem isn’t even with GameStop; you just don’t think a second hand market should exist.

1579

Yay capitalism, right? Find a market need and exploit it.

Up until recently, there’s no good reason it should not be possible. Games have been sold as a physical product and the fact it is made of bytes is little different to books being made of words - at least from the perspective of various consumer laws. Games are also far from unique in not rewarding the original creator when sold second-hand, this is true of pretty much anything you buy second hand.

E-books have been around forever, and you can totally resell e-books, right?

Gird your loins, because the future is almost here, and it’s all digital all the time.

I can buy ebooks for the cheaps and from a variety of resellers, which helps to lessen the value of a second hand market to begin with, but they have also been on the front foot at delivering books as a service - online delivered, account bound, etc - obviously the same direction console games are now inevitably heading. I don’t disagree with you on the future, I probably won’t even mind it depending on how it turns out, but don’t blame GameStop for fulfilling a current market need legally. Save your ire for the idiots that sell their week old $60 game for a $10 in-store credit. It’s not GameSpot’s fault those people exist.

It puts the console vendors in a difficult position. The channel exists for a reason, it delivers services at scale that MS, Sony and Nintendo can’t - physical presence in every shopping mall, local stocking of physical product, advertising streams, credit risk mitigation, demo facilities, etc. That comes at the cost of them providing a margin to that channel. MS, Sony and Nintendo may be capable of delivering all future content digitally to users, but they still have to deliver that to a device, a device they still need physically distributed by the channel because they can’t do it themselves. Having a healthy channel is essential to MS, Sony and Nintendo. By denying that channel a revenue stream that helps keep them profitable, they may be cutting their noses off to spite their face, but time will tell if that is the case. Now, it could be that once (and if) the console vendors remove the second-hand market, they may then return part of those assumed additional profits back to the channel through improved margins on new product, but that also remains to be seen.

1580

In a digital world the creators get a lot more control of their works. (Outside of piracy, but on Xbone and PS4 I am assuming piracy is going to be rather difficult, unlike PC.)

I am OK with this, since the creators deserve a cut of their work, and more money to more creators means more stuff created.

Versus more money to bullshit middlemen who create jack shit and do nothing but harvest cash from idiots.

It would be fun to resell a second-hand digital eBook copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone over and over though, I suppose. It’s like printing money, forever!

1581

That’s asinine. Selling used goods doesn’t “print money”. You paid for the product and are recouping some of that cost by reselling it. The original producer doesn’t make anything off the secondhand sale, and that’s perfectly fine. Toyota doesn’t make any money when you sell your car on craigslist either.

Obviously selling pirated goods prints money, but nobody’s talking about that here, right?

1582

selling what you own is called private property, and it takes more than a EULA to abolish it.

It can be a license, a rock or whatever.

1583

True, laws and consumer rights just need to catch up and they will eventually, unless Wumpus is in charge, then he can fuck over all consumers which should make him happy.

The thing that gets me is people that create seem to think they are more worthy and entitled to more than their buyer and so on. I mean writing songs earns way more than the person singing it yet neither are worth millions of pounds in comaprison to saving someone life or putting your own life at risk for your country. Artists like to think their creativity and end product is worth far more than it is really but we as the population lap it up.

1584

I feel obligated to point out that a used car is not the same as a new car, and that the (significant) segment of people for whom that distinction is important helps keep Toyota in business. Software, on the other hand, is just bits…perfectly preserved bits.