All I'm saying is if the publishers were serious about killing the used game market than they'd start treating it like competition and not that ugly duckling in the room that eats all their food. Undercut the price that used game retailers charge and guaranteed they would see more sales, enough sales to make up the difference from the price drop. The best thing for the consumer is competition. It's literally the best feature of capitalism. When business competes for our money by offering up better deals or better incentives to pick one product over another everyone wins. Bit of a tangent but I'm getting increasingly worried about the current trend of consolidation. Less competitors in the marketplace means more captive audiences who have little alternative or option but to accept what they're given or told.
In that case, I would agree. I think physical games should remain the same price or "age" as they do now, or else used games would constantly be able to undercut them over and over. Undercutting used games with digital downloads sounds logical but might be a bit harder because of the publishers. I think Microsoft values their partnerships with publishers highly which is why you aren't seeing that just yet. EA Games are pushing their Origin service, while other companies are doing something similar. I can't say it's right, but it's the same business of exclusivity like Project Spark on W8/XBL, or Spartan Assault on Glass. It sucks. The game license was assigned to your account, pre-backtrack. If their was a family plan (even if rumoured to be demo-mode), I'm going to assume you could re-download (even on other systems) without your disc, so long as you were on your gamertag.
I've often wondered why publishers are so keen to hang on to the physical model. What do they have to gain? Retailers, sure, but why publishers? I'd assume the same in logical terms, but I wouldn't assume it specifically because I could well see interested parties (MS or publishers) being more than OK with making you pay again. They could even argue that, since you bought a physical copy, all the money you spent was eaten up by that distribution method, so they don't "owe" you access to their download servers and the costs that would incur to them, however small. Perhaps I'm being cynical, but I still wouldn't have banked on it until confirmation, no matter how much sense it might make.
I'm guessing the answer to that is complicated. Off the top of my head - 1. Digital files are easier to steal (despite the best efforts of DRM) than physical media. 2. Digital carries an inherent devaluation because people don't feel like they're justified by paying for some physical product - even though the combined cost of manufacturing a disc, booklet, and plastic case, and then shipping that case to Best Buy, is actually quite small and you were never really paying for all that in the first place. It's still a psychological thing. They're probably afraid of losing revenue by being driven to ever-lower pricing so people will actually pay for the downloads and not try to steal them instead (or just spend their entertainment dollars elsewhere). 3. As is often the case, these sister industries get in each others' pockets and start relying on each other for revenue. Game companies therefore don't want to lose Best Buy or Gamestop, Hollywood doesn't want to lose movie theaters, record labels don't want to lose Wal-Mart and Target, etc. Even if there's a replacement revenue stream available, it's usually unproven and they are probably worried it won't carry the same load - and they don't get incentive payments from retailers who want to carry exclusive pre-order content or what have you.
The first two are good point, but the third has some interesting nuances as an argument imo. I'm not saying you're wrong, but it does seem odd that publishers are, on the one hand, trying to stay sweet with physical retailers in terms of new games, but more than happy to try and screw them over when it comes to used sales. Giving with one hand and taking with the other seems like an odd approach to keeping them sweet. But anyway, I'd be interested to see the figures for your second point. I could well believe you're right that the profit margins on DD are lower, but then the flipside is that a well implemented system adds to impulse buy figures. Steam is an absolutely fantastic example of this.
I guess it just depends who is applying the most pressure and operating from the greater position of leverage. Physical retailers (particularly Gamestop) will push them to allow used sales, while their game studios push the other way; they're more or less forced to find a compromise that no one will totally love, or choose which side they're going to piss off. And any choice they make is a money-loser on at least one side, so basically they're just choosing the lesser evil. I will add the necessary caveat right here that I was just theorizing on that point in particular - I don't have any hard data. But I do see people complaining non-stop on the internet about paying for digital downloads that cost 80% or less compared to an equivalent physical product, so there are definitely at least SOME people who don't see non-physical media as being equally valuable as the same thing on a pressed disc. (That mentality will probably fade over the next 30 years as us dinosaurs of the 70s and 80s die off or age out of gaming, but by then the damage may be done - our buying dollars may already have driven down pricing across the board.) I know a lot of people that will "pay for the convenience" of downloading an album, for instance - but only if it's like $6.00; if it costs as much as a CD, they just won't buy it, or will head to bittorrent. And then the industry has to contend with the bed they've made for themselves, which is this: 1. The industry currently thrives on triple-A titles; 2. Those titles cost a damn fortune and require a certain, very high gross revenue threshold to be a success; 3. They have an install base, and therefore potential customer base of a fixed and limited size due to competition from other game machines, as well as the overall slicing of the home entertainment pie; and 4. A very large percentage of that base already buys the successful triple-A titles, usually at the full retail price of $60. So you're in a bind if you start talking about reducing prices by very much at all. You won't get that many more purchases just because the game is cheaper. You'll save some costs from not having to physically distribute, but not enough that you can dramatically lower the retail price based solely on the back-end savings. So you either tighten your belt and live with smaller profits and more frequent failures (yeah right), or you start making games that cost less (yeah RIGHT). Or... secret option 3... whatever that is.
This is true of PC software, not consoles. Currently it is impossible to pull a DD game off of your console's hard drive to copy it and sell it. All people can do is pull save files. First thing, shipping and distribution costs are not small. http://www.ign.com/blogs/vapourmave...sis-on-how-ea-ripping-you-off-on-origin-store I've also seen reports on gamasutra of that $4 cost being more and the retailers cut less (GameStop claims they get just $2 from the sale of a new game). Thats $4 per game meaning if they ship 4 million games (not an unreasonable number of units) to retailers it cost the publisher 16 million dollars just to do that. To be "small" it would have to costs cents on the dollar to be considered a lesser factor (and even cents per game adds up to a lot of money). So no, distribution costs are not so trivial as to write them off when talking about digital games that don't require them. This is more of the reason. For all the publishers huffing and puffing about the used game market killing them they are still the first to partner up with retailers when offering "preorder rewards" or special promotions.
True - but I would speculate that the publishers still live in fear of it. We (the internet folk) have a strong history of circumventing DRM. If console games move away from physical media and more toward downloads, I imagine there will be a much stronger effort dedicated to cracking. They're still trivial on a per-unit basis, compared to the total price. $4 per unit against a $60 price tag is nothing in the model I'm talking about. If you eliminate that $4 cost, you can only reduce the retail price by the same $4 if you want the rest of the net profit to be the same. Now if you talk about eliminating the retailer's cut too, that's something meaningful (from a consumer perspective). $40 or so for a game is a substantial discount compared to the $60 standard tag. However, retailers get $15 because it pays for their overhead and employee salaries and so forth; very little of that is profit. And even if the physical retailer goes away, you're replacing it across the board with a digital distribution system that will still have servers, employees, tech support, etc., and all of that scales up as more and more people are downloading instead of buying. So ultimately, while you probably can reduce that cost by some, you can't make it go away entirely - probably not even close. And if the price tag on the game stays within $10 of where it is today, I would argue that it makes basically no difference psychologically to most consumers. A $50 game looks exactly the same to me as a $60 game, and a $10 discount doesn't really compel me to want to download just to save $10 over the copy at Best Buy that comes on a nice disc with a booklet. Again, I think $15-20 is more the range we'd need to talk about for it to make a real difference on buying habits and the consumer's sense of value for their dollar. Yep, definitely so. And money is changing hands both directions often enough that neither industry is in a hurry to say goodbye to the other one. Better the devil you know.
Not to mention when you consider how much of a consumers internet data plan just downloading the game will take. For instance, I'm on about 20gig a month where I am now. To download halo 4 (for example) would take at least half that if not more. And I know I use more than 10gig a month with everything else I use the internet for as well as gaming. Throw in the always online crap and suddenly I'm not able to play the games I buy on a DD system for a a week or so each month.
Both are decent consoles. Depends on what exclusives you want. Example Halo and Gears of War are Xbox only titles, while God of War, KillZone are Playstation exclusives.
http://www.joystiq.com/2013/08/12/xbox-one-wont-require-plugged-in-kinect-whitten-says Apparently the Xbox One will not require the connection to a kinect to function. Now we just have to hold out hope they reverse yet another policy and they sell a cheaper, kinect-less, One.
They probably won't.. just sayin', their interest is in ensuring developers will have a market for their kinect-based games. On another note, I'd love to join the bandwagon and be on the front wave of all of this new technology, but then I remember there's little to no way I could afford One, unless I'm A) done with school or B) use food stamps and never wash my clothes for 5 years
Good one I'm sure they're also interested in furthering the technology. But I don't entirely see why... Maybe a broader audience? Maybe Xbox and Playstation will become virtual reality stations in the future. And then time travel and then the guys from the matrix will come back and make the matrix to warn us of our impending doom with machines. Yep. It's already happened.
yeah, just like every other business that ever existed... I hope they dont sell a kinect-less version. no developers will use it besides the gimicky games if nobody has it. the ps eye is as good as dead now that they decided not to bundle it with the ps4 to beat the price of the one.
I get the humor in it, but like I said, they're not all out for money. They also want to improve their "next-gen technology."