Business Approach Comparison Sony PS4 and Microsoft Xbox

...that require a Gold membership. You can't even get the new Doritos Crash Course game without Gold now.

 

You dont know Batman the Animated Series which won like 4 emmys or the Xmen animated series? How about Super friends which aired for 13 seasons?

Marvel and DC based cartoons have showed up in one form or another for forever. The Dark Knight, Xmen, Avengers, Iron Man and Spiderman franchises had huge successes because of all those comics and cartoons catering to children.

Presenting adults with mature adaptations of stories and characters that those adults experienced in their youth is a pretty common endeavor.

 

If you self publish you are a publisher. EA self publish their own games.

 

what? is that true?
MS really pushing away from me. Xbone getting less interesting if its going all gold too.

lucky for me... i always download free games ASAP
got doritos, harms way, and the most interresting are Kinect Party

 

Sounds like this gen with the gold membership you get your whole house hold included and you get dedicated servers.

 

For how much? $120? $160?

 

well I currently pay $100 for a 4 person subscription . I don't see the price changing much.

 

I think you need publisher status before you can self publisher. I don't think indies can set themselves up as a publisher to publish their own game, otherwise there wouldn't be these complaints against MS.

 

This is true, but as I've said before for about 5 years a friend of mine ran a publisher for low budget titles, and it wasn't a "high end" operation, I think including the 2 partners it was a grand total of 3 employees.
I don't see why a number of indy's couldn't band together and do it.
Of course we're presuming no policy change on XB1 vs 360, I would expect at least a change to allow F2P titles, since everybody I talk to is convinced it's the future of game monetization.
FWIW there is a lot of dicking about with paperwork to publish on any of the platforms.

 

What constitutes a publisher in MS's eyes? As you say, sounds easy for indies to form their own publisher identity in principle, so I guess there's reason not to such as financial requirements.

 

wasnt there a rumor they were doing away with family plans and you could just have multiple people under one $60 account now?

for people like you it could be a boon.

not sure how they would enforce that against abuses though, i've seen for example my sisters friends repeatedly log into her account from elsewhere while she was playing at my house once. as i guess a way she allowed them to use her gold.

 

Yeah, I am expecting Live Gold would now be tied to a console or maybe even an ip adress?

PS4 now already at 5 MMOs, apparently, most of hem at launch.

 

I've never asked him, but I can't imagine the financial burden was that unreasonable given what he was paying for games and the size of the company.
The did do Disk based games as well and that might have been a requirement for XBox Live, there is a significant risk involved in that because there are minimum orders and you pay upfront.

 

We've seen nothing on price yet but I'm predicting $120 since it'll include all the new TV shit and probably the Cloud shit too.

 

Unverified, but it should give some idea as to what MS considers a "publisher". Based on that, it's clearly about the publication of physical retail discs:

 

I'd imagine that's likely to change going forwards, MS have announced all titles day and date and it isn't a huge step from there to allow download only.
I could still imagine them requiring some minimum guarantee or commitment, there is a cost to MS for every game they release, so they really don't want everyone an their dog just throwing shit out there to see what sticks.
I wonder what the break even point in sales is for MS on a title.
I hava a rough idea what the sales volume was for my friends company and it was low 10's of thousands of units for most of the titles.

 

Seems an odd restriction seeing the nature of digital distribution. Perhaps its just legacy thinking that was reasonably sound when the platform launched and just hasn't been updated yet?

Are we anywhere near confirmation that XB1's Indie channel will effectively become Windows 8's appstore with, I presume, Android-like freedoms of publishing? That seems to me the most logical way forward. MS probably still need to update their official games platform to be less convoluted, but the focus on the new platform may solve a lot of problems for a lot of MS's business battlefronts.

 

I'm hoping for the same for XB1 regarding WinRT (would be perfect for me), but that would not be suitable for everything, and I am still waiting for their vision on availability of Live features such as multiplayer, achievements, and most important of all, input method support and requirements.

 

I would be interested in seeing the results if someone go with an advertisement sponsored model for console (and game) pricing. Like TV can be supported by advertising revenue, why not consoles and games?

Instead of the commonly suggested paying monthly subscription fee, you watch advertisements to earn your play time. Especially with Kinect being good enough to even detect your heartbeat, it could be the perfect machine for ads. In principle, they can make sure you actually watch the ads for a certain amount of time.

No more ads shown to an empty room because people go to toilet during commercial breaks. You have to be sitting there looking at the TV in a way consistent with what the system detects when you're playing games for the time to count. You go make a sandwich, you doze off and close your eyes for a few seconds, and the machine will pause the ads for you. No need to fiddle with buttons. When you're ready to resume, the machine will automatically let you continue where you left off.

The more people you can bring in to watch the ads, the sooner you'll earn enough credit to start/continue playing. Bonus points go to those who look happy and show excitement during the ads and then upload reaction videos to the internet for the great products shown. There should be software to make overlaying your face on the ad videos and upload to internet one voice command away. ("Record and upload my ads/ass".)

The possibilities are very interesting. May be games can show commercials before/at every save point.

 

Patents for stuff like that have already been in the news from both Microsoft and Sony. I am not interested personally, as I avoid tv channels with ads like the plague, and like iOS because I can buy off ads, but as long as this choice remains ...