[SackAttack]

Originally Posted by Mizzou B-ball fan

2. You can't share your library with 10 family members

This is still a feature that MS could implement if they wanted to do so. They can put a 'digital only' restriction on it, which wouldn't hinder anything as you can now loan out your physical copy. So you'd still be able to share with all your friends if they implemented it in this way.

Agreed, but more specifically, the whole point behind trying to 'kill' used games was that publishers felt like they were only getting a fraction of the sold copies they felt 'entitled' to. They'd sell a million new copies, say, but that same game might get resold 3-4x as a 'used' copy, so they felt like they were only getting 20% of actual sales. If the '10 family members' thing had happened, think about the potential impact on single-player games. Titles like Call of Duty, which have a primarily multiplayer draw, would still sell however many copies, because you wouldn't be able to have 11 people use it at the same time.

A single-player game, though? Mass Effect 4: The Next Generation comes out, you can share that game with 10 'family members,' and suddenly there's a game that 11 people don't feel as if they have to buy. One person buys it, or maybe they all chip in, and then they just kind of take turns playing it. If it's not a crucial I HAVE TO PLAY THIS NOW game, you have this feature that sounds really cool for consumers but ends up being a colossal pain in the ass for publishers; how long does it continue to get supported? Surely, if used games restrictions were going to be 'up to the publisher,' the same would be true of library sharing.

I think if Microsoft really feels strongly about that feature, they can still implement it for digital libraries. I mean, look - you already have a setup on Xbox 360 where if the digital game is being played on the original console, you can play it online, offline, whatever. If you're playing it on a console other than the one you bought it on, you have to be signed in to Live to play it. What's so hard about carrying that setup forward to digital libraries? Okay, you have sharing, but if you're not the 'owner' of the game, you have to be logged in to access that shared library. That way whoever's playing Mass Effect 4, that license is spoken for and the other 9 people with shared access have to wait for that individual to stop playing.

If Microsoft really feels that it's critical to have the game owner be connected in order to enable the shared library, then what you do is create a scenario where the owner can opt-in to sharing his or her titles. If you choose to share Halo 5, by opting in you've flipped a switch whereby you have to be online in order to play that game. If you choose not to share your games, you can play online, offline, whatever. This didn't have to be an either/or situation where either solo/offline gamers fuck off or online gamers don't get the cool features they're looking forward to.

3. There's no gifting purchased games online

You can still gift a copy in person or buy it online on release and gift it via online stores.

Kinda where I'm at. Yeah, the idea of being able to give a game away digitally was kind of cool, but not at the cost of the objections I raised before this about-face. Probably the main issue here is that in terms of digital gifting, where you're at now isn't giving away the copy you don't want anymore; it's buying a whole new copy for the person you want to gift to.

I wonder how much the digital gifting as envisioned by Microsoft would even have been used. In the current generation, when you finish playing a game, how many of you say 'here, I don't want this anymore' and give it away rather than try to trade it for something you haven't played or otherwise recoup value?

4. The disc needs to be in the Xbox One even if you've installed game

See #1. You can still do digital if you really want it that bad. Putting in a disk requires a minimal time commitment. It's more of a complaint for the sake of complaining rather than any real issue.

I think that's unfairly dismissive. That's a feature that would have been useful for young families. No more worries about the kids destroying dad's games (or their own), necessitating re-purchases. Yes, you can go digital, if you're part of the 70% of the country with reliable, quality broadband access. This is a feature I'm kind of mixed on. I don't think Xbox One was set up in such a way as to make this REALLY useful - a 500 GB hard drive that users couldn't upgrade would seem like it'd hit a bottleneck eventually, and saying 'well you can just go buy external storage if you run out of space' is just goofy. On the other hand, if they could have implemented this without the 24 hour check-in requirements, that would have been really neat.

5. It makes cloud computing less attractive for developers

I could see this at some level, but no one forced them to switch paths either. If this was so important to the system architecture, why go away from it at such a critical point? Given how quickly they made the switch despite this, I'd say that 'cloud computing' was more of a buzz word than a real game changer. Somewhat like EA announcing new engines in their games while seeing no real changes in the core gameplay that really would make a difference in the game.

I think this one is harder to gauge because we have yet to see how 'cloud computing' would significantly impact games. The only example we have up to now has been SimCity, and everything that's come out about that has suggested that 'cloud computing' was a fancy way of saying 'DRM,' that there was nothing being done by the 'cloud' that the end user's machine couldn't have done itself.

What this reminded me of was Sony's talk about how the Cell processor in PS3 would interface with Cell processors in your dishwasher, blender, microwave, etc and your PS3 would get progressively more powerful the more Cell-powered devices you owned.

It's a way to talk big and get people excited and in the end it's so much sturm und drang.

6. There's less potential for game price drops

This was a non-starter from the beginning. As with before, people continue to make the faulty comparisons to services like Steam which aren't even remotely similar and draw the assumption that MS would have implemented similar price drops. No way. Steam has competitors left and right who sell the same games they do. Also, Steam and other online services don't have to worry about totally switching their architecture every 5-7 years like a console. You can keep games forever in Steam without any worries, something that MS never fully explained how that would work in the end game (and is probably glad right now that they didn't have to do so). PS+ users get heavily discounted or free games on a regular basis. I'm sure MS will have something similar in order to match that service. That's the only thing you're going to see that remotely resembles Steam on a console.

I bolded the two things that stood out to me. First, yeah, Steam has competition in the delivery marketplace (although a lot of that competition are selling...Steam keys) and that incentivizes the sales. However, there's a part you're missing. Namely, it isn't that sales follow DRM. It's that the lower pricing encourages adoption of digital. That's the part of the puzzle the hardware manufacturers have missed up to now. How many first-time Steam users buy a game at full price because, ooh, Steam? They don't. They get sucked in during the sales with the cheap games and get converted to the Steam Way of Life.

Same situation here. The people who enjoy the convenience of digital buy that way anyway. The people who object, 8 times out of 10 they object because there's no tangible difference on price. The retail price is as it is because of the presence of middlemen; the argument is that a digital price could be significantly less without affecting the margins of the publishers. Continuing to sell at $59.99 digitally is a great boon for the publishers, who get that $10-20 back that otherwise went to the retailer, but doesn't do anything for the consumer. Microsoft don't need a daily-check-in policy in order to deliver lower prices on digital content. That's absurd. If they're serious about encouraging the adoption on digital, lower digital prices and sales is how they'll make it happen. The lower prices will be what encourages the adoption of DRM, not vice versa.