But they will complain to Sony that it hasn't been chilled enough.
Differences between xbl and psn(online only)
- Thread starter Alkohallick
- Start date
But they will complain to Sony that it hasn't been chilled enough.
I'm going to give each section a header so people can read the bits they care about if at all 
on demos
Have you ever thought about what that means? Because for me personally, it means that for a game that I'll likely buy directly on PSN, I first download a demo on 360. They'd have a 100% conversion rate, occasionally (very rarely) a demo turns me off. Colleagues of mine only ever download demos for their kids, and only very occasionally buy a full game.
Then there are a few games that I don't think I like, that I'll try the demo of anyway. To date, this hasn't led to a single purchase for me, but then I'm a veteran gamer so by the time I try a demo I already know more than enough about a game from other sources. There's also this other thing that many of us hardcore people completely forget about, but which I still occasionally use, which is the BluRay demo coverdisc that comes with official playstation magazines. They are typically filled to the brim with demos, saving you a lot of download (and they install directly, rather than the somewhat awkward two-step system on the PS3).
The argument that Microsoft wants to make is that demos sell games, but good games sell games also. I have not find any news out there that suggests that games on PSN bring in less revenue because they don't have demos. PSN exclusives tend to do really well, and multi-platform releases often have a demo on PSN as well anyway.
I do however think that there is a significant audience that can in fact be swayed by a good demo. But to be honest, this should be a survival of the fittest issue: publishers should figure out for themselves whether a demo is going to sell their game or not, and how much that is worth.
Still, having a demo always and on principle is a service to consumers more than anything, and I understand Microsoft's approach in that respect - it offers a consistent service on XBLA, where you can always count on being able to 'try before you buy'. It should make the general purchasing experience on XBLA a better one. Taken by itself, no matter on what value I'd place on that personally, we should of course view that as a plus. Maybe I'm guilty of wanting to place it too much in the context of the discussion of the two services in general, and arguments that I think PSN has better exclusive games at better prices to boot, shouldn't reflect on the value of having a demo.
on gamesharing
However, I do currently think that gamesharing is a feature, and a valuable one. It's like being able to lend a friend your copy of a game for a while, or pool resources and buy a game together with one or more friends. The PS3 is completely free from piracy still, and Sony controls gamesharing fully. They can switch it off whenever they want, and as patsu mentioned, they have posed different kinds of limits on it in a few instances.
on online MP player percentage
@Joshua: if the online MP player base is only a fraction, then wouldn't the number of Gold subscribers in Europe be really small, because online play is just about all they get for their money? And reading the comments in this thread from European versus U.S. 360 owners, the answer appears to be yes.
on p2p networking being better than server hosted games because support might drop
Well, I think this is a moot point really. Apart from that you need to discuss the percentage of players that will play a game online longer than that servers would be up, the best option and which I've given as an example frequently, is games like Warhawk which support the three modes concurrently: there are games hosted on dedicated servers, and there are games hosted by users, either dedicated or 'in-flight' (e.g. a player is hosting and playing at the same time). Resistance may currently be the only game on PSN that relies solely on dedicated servers? Though to great effect - it's one of the best online experiences I think out there, no matter what you think about the game itself. MAG I presume will be another server-side game.
on MMORPGs on Live
makattack, the history of Microsoft's live platform in relation to MMORPGs here is long and complicated. Initially, publishers would have to rent server capacity from Microsoft. Later, an infrastructure was put in place where publishers can host their own servers but let Live handle everything before that. Currently there is an issue with subscription methods - 1. MMORPGs will want to be able to charge for their game monthly, and 2. they'll want to do so without users having to also pay for a Live Gold subscription.
@betan:
on demos
Have you ever thought about what that means? Because for me personally, it means that for a game that I'll likely buy directly on PSN, I first download a demo on 360. They'd have a 100% conversion rate, occasionally (very rarely) a demo turns me off. Colleagues of mine only ever download demos for their kids, and only very occasionally buy a full game.
Then there are a few games that I don't think I like, that I'll try the demo of anyway. To date, this hasn't led to a single purchase for me, but then I'm a veteran gamer so by the time I try a demo I already know more than enough about a game from other sources. There's also this other thing that many of us hardcore people completely forget about, but which I still occasionally use, which is the BluRay demo coverdisc that comes with official playstation magazines. They are typically filled to the brim with demos, saving you a lot of download (and they install directly, rather than the somewhat awkward two-step system on the PS3).
The argument that Microsoft wants to make is that demos sell games, but good games sell games also. I have not find any news out there that suggests that games on PSN bring in less revenue because they don't have demos. PSN exclusives tend to do really well, and multi-platform releases often have a demo on PSN as well anyway.
I do however think that there is a significant audience that can in fact be swayed by a good demo. But to be honest, this should be a survival of the fittest issue: publishers should figure out for themselves whether a demo is going to sell their game or not, and how much that is worth.
Still, having a demo always and on principle is a service to consumers more than anything, and I understand Microsoft's approach in that respect - it offers a consistent service on XBLA, where you can always count on being able to 'try before you buy'. It should make the general purchasing experience on XBLA a better one. Taken by itself, no matter on what value I'd place on that personally, we should of course view that as a plus. Maybe I'm guilty of wanting to place it too much in the context of the discussion of the two services in general, and arguments that I think PSN has better exclusive games at better prices to boot, shouldn't reflect on the value of having a demo.
on gamesharing
However, I do currently think that gamesharing is a feature, and a valuable one. It's like being able to lend a friend your copy of a game for a while, or pool resources and buy a game together with one or more friends. The PS3 is completely free from piracy still, and Sony controls gamesharing fully. They can switch it off whenever they want, and as patsu mentioned, they have posed different kinds of limits on it in a few instances.
on online MP player percentage
@Joshua: if the online MP player base is only a fraction, then wouldn't the number of Gold subscribers in Europe be really small, because online play is just about all they get for their money? And reading the comments in this thread from European versus U.S. 360 owners, the answer appears to be yes.
on p2p networking being better than server hosted games because support might drop
Well, I think this is a moot point really. Apart from that you need to discuss the percentage of players that will play a game online longer than that servers would be up, the best option and which I've given as an example frequently, is games like Warhawk which support the three modes concurrently: there are games hosted on dedicated servers, and there are games hosted by users, either dedicated or 'in-flight' (e.g. a player is hosting and playing at the same time). Resistance may currently be the only game on PSN that relies solely on dedicated servers? Though to great effect - it's one of the best online experiences I think out there, no matter what you think about the game itself. MAG I presume will be another server-side game.
on MMORPGs on Live
makattack, the history of Microsoft's live platform in relation to MMORPGs here is long and complicated. Initially, publishers would have to rent server capacity from Microsoft. Later, an infrastructure was put in place where publishers can host their own servers but let Live handle everything before that. Currently there is an issue with subscription methods - 1. MMORPGs will want to be able to charge for their game monthly, and 2. they'll want to do so without users having to also pay for a Live Gold subscription.
@betan:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but in order to share games on the PS3, doesn't this require that the person who originally purchased the game has to give his/her PSN login information to someone else, so they can login under the original persons account and download the game?
If so this isn't a feature. It's a workaround.
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Login is only needed to install the game. After that it is enough that the account stays in the machine but user does not need to be logged in.
That's extremely doubtful. I've no problem with lag 99% of the time I'm playing, I don't care who or what is hosting it so long as it works. I know the vast majority of people feel the same.
It's not wasted. Demos result in paying customers. It's a simple fact. This brings in money to MS each time someone buys the game, which offsets the bandwidth cost.
MS didn't want those games to be de-listed just because they were bad. Their sales were low -- I'm not sure you appreciate how MANY games there are on XBLA because it does dwarf PSN. When you start having too much content, it becomes too much for the UI design of the stores and it becomes distracting. The push to eliminate those games from the stores was not driven by bandwidth-cost saving measures (even the demo downloads for those games were very, very low), but to declutter the store.
No, I don't work at MS. Neither do you. All we can do is apply rational thought and analyse the situation logically. I don't believe you are doing this at all. You call the demo bandwidth "wasted" while apparently ignoring the fact that demos are demonstrably impacting sales, meaning demos are increasing XBL revenue which means that they've more money to offset the cost. The main reason XBLA is as vibrant as it is is because of the demos. It's not only a service to increase sales, it's helped build the entire brand!
No, it just means they were not very popular and the interface was not handling the burden of the games. It doesn't mean they were "not positive". In fact, not being popular means there were very few demo downloads also. It was purely a clutter and UI issue.
You do when you recognize the opportunity cost. They weren't very good games, the UI was becoming harder to use for all games due to how many games there were. This is potentially a cost issue because it hurts usability of the marketplace, but this doesn't mean those games in particular were costing them money directly, especially in bandwidth costs. This is absurd and unrelated to anything we are discussing now.
The language you use here really belays your bias on the issue. You keep talking about how demos are "wasted" bandwidth and now you're referring to the fact that XBLA games have to have demos as "baggage"? The vast majority of Xbox Live users here are telling you how much they love the demos and it's one of the reasons they use the service, but you still portray it as useless, wasteful, and "baggage"?
This is a fundamental marketing phenomenon, and it's not just related to video games. It's well-known and well-understood. If you are going to argue AGAINST the general understanding of the marketing community, you'll need to provide links to demonstrate demos do nothing to help sales. Which is, frankly, absurd as an assertion.
I haven't seen you posting links to back up your assertions that demos are wasted bandwidth...
What's to keep somebody from using your login for ill? There would be no way I would be giving somebody my gamertag information for fear of them ruining my online rep, gaining achievements/gamescore, getting my account banned, spending my MS Points or getting access to my credit card information. Definitely sounds like a workaround & was never really intended to be shared with other people, but instead intended for a max of 5 consoles that one consumer may purchase over a lifetime.
Tommy McClain
I'm not sure you understand the nature of MS' CDN. It's not just a CDN. MS is spending massive amounts of money buying bandwidth and building datacentres all over the world. These datacentres are all flexible in what they do. They can act as CDN hubs, they can act as Windows Azure hosts, they can act as Hotmail backends, they can act as Bing Search nodes, they can act as Bing Maps processing centres/content servers, they act as nodes for the Zune Store/Xbox Live Marketplace, they are Office Live servers, etc.
Microsoft has sunk infrastructure costs not just for Xbox, but for virtually every service they have. This is a huge amount of infrastructure that's a shared cost between tons of their businesses, one that is operating at nowhere near their max capacity at any given time. This is why in the past several years XBL has gracefully handled the "insane peak demand" periods (CoD over the holidays, etc). They've got massive infrastructure they can loadbalance with as demand warrants.
So the cost of serving up these demos? They're practically nothing. The payouts of hosting them are much, much higher.
Not bad, bordering a tautology though.
You can create dummy accounts for the purpose of sharing, but it still is a workaround otherwise Sony would simply provide a proper interface and let people tie in friend's psn to purchases.
ps: Also 5 is not a max as people understand it. You can download to as many consoles as you want, only not at the same time.
Show me figures then. Because that's what demonstrable means, literally. You're saying demos are
a) demonstrably impacting sales and
b) increasing XBL revenue
So show me figures, particularly of the latter. And if those figures are available, then why doesn't every game release with a demo regardless of the platform or regardless of being an AAA-title etc.
I also had to giggle a bit while watching this Forza 3 presentation, when they started discussing online:
http://www.giantbomb.com/giant-bomb-at-pax-09-forza-motorsport-3-demo/17-1315/
16:08 - "We've our own dedicated servers now, so we've kind of caught up to where modern day shooters are. We've got server driven games, server driven maps ..."
@betan: I agree that game sharing may be an accidental result, but if you think about it, it's also not that easy to achieve the same thing the way you're saying. If you'd allow yourself to tie in with friends PSN accounts, then couldn't you create dummy accounts that everyone shares with and can use to download games?
I don't have figures, because AFAIK they're not public. I do have obvious observations, anecdotally, from this very thread of people discussing demos making them buy games they wouldn't have before. That alone is enough evidence to support the claim that they demonstrably impacted sales (at least +1 from me) and increased XBL revenue (I bought games I wouldn't have otherwise).
Frankly, all of the whining about needing to see figures is pure deflection. We're never, ever going to see those figures. People need to stop obsessing over it.
Instead look at the situation analytically. Look at it anecdotally. Think about it in basic Marketing 101 principles. You don't think product demos sell? My colleague just bought a $2000 massaging Panasonic chair because of a demo over the weekend. He was at The Ex (a big fair in Toronto) and they had a booth set up. He'd never thought of buying one, but he wanted to sit down. He sat down, he loved it to death, and he impulse bought it. A demo that generated sales -- what a foreign concept?
It's general consensus and common wisdom that when you can do a demo, you do it. Unless your product is really bad. If someone wants to argue against the general case for demos, which is really an absurd assertion, then they will need to provide the evidence that flies in the face of common sense and conventional wisdom and our anecdotal evidence.
If Sony truly doesn't believe in the power of demos, they wouldn't set up all those kiosks in stores for the PS3. I'm sure Sony would love to mandate demos like MS, they just can't. They force their publishers to pay for all bandwidth, so all of the sudden telling publishers they HAVE to make a demo and they HAVE to pay for the bandwidth would be quite a deterrent to many. On the other hand, I don't think they've got the cash flow to foot the bill themselves to pay for EVERYONE's demos. They're in a rock and a hard place. That's why the PSN is so Wild Wild West anyway.
I'm not sure I follow.
You shouldn't tie in accounts to accounts, you should link purchases to accounts.
(There is already a link with your account and your purchase with a little counter saying 4, why not link another account to your purchase, decrementing your little counter, and incrementing the other?
The end result would be syntactic sugar, same semantics simpler syntax.
Also anything that's based on dummy accounts is also a side effect of PSN's open account policy.
What I usually do is when visiting a friend I login with my psn id, load the game, install. PSN can be told to not save the password and the person having my account on his ps3 can do absolutely nothing bad to my account. The game works just fine as long as my account is on the machine(no need to login). Ofcourse we do the opposite too, i.e. friend visits me, logins, loads, installs, logs off.
edit. And naturally you play as the user who is logged in which is the friends account then not my account... So there is no messing around with trophies or anything.
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There are definitely demos that have hurt game sales. I think Fight Night Round 4 is a good example. The game did not perform as expected. When the demo came out there was a HUGE outcry at the lack of button controls for punching. They did not listen and released the product to tepid sales. Recently there was a patch issued to add the button punching hoping to spur sales.
From a consumer perspective, having demos is still the best option. Would you rather play a demo and find out you hate the controls or buy a game for $60-70 + tax and find out you hate the controls?
The developer/publisher perspective is obviously going to be different, but they should be confident enough in the product their selling to put a demo out. If you have a good game, allowing people to try it out will get them interested and get people talking about it.
Oh, and back to the topic of why MS charges money for Live, and what exactly you are paying for? You're paying for the ability to play games online, simply because they can charge for it. People seem to be willing to pay. Maybe that money goes back into infrastructure (equipment, bandwith, etc), and maybe it goes into a Rolls Royce fund for a bunch of directors and VPs. Who knows? Either way, they've monetized the system because they are not threatened by the competition, and the popularity of online gaming on 360 seems to validate their stance. They always have the option of reducing or removing the cost, but I don't think there has been any reason for them to do it.
Personally, I'd rather it was free, but PSN does not have all the features I want or expect for online play.
From a consumer perspective, having demos is still the best option. Would you rather play a demo and find out you hate the controls or buy a game for $60-70 + tax and find out you hate the controls?
The developer/publisher perspective is obviously going to be different, but they should be confident enough in the product their selling to put a demo out. If you have a good game, allowing people to try it out will get them interested and get people talking about it.
Oh, and back to the topic of why MS charges money for Live, and what exactly you are paying for? You're paying for the ability to play games online, simply because they can charge for it. People seem to be willing to pay. Maybe that money goes back into infrastructure (equipment, bandwith, etc), and maybe it goes into a Rolls Royce fund for a bunch of directors and VPs. Who knows? Either way, they've monetized the system because they are not threatened by the competition, and the popularity of online gaming on 360 seems to validate their stance. They always have the option of reducing or removing the cost, but I don't think there has been any reason for them to do it.
Personally, I'd rather it was free, but PSN does not have all the features I want or expect for online play.
Your logic fails when you take into account that there are many medicore games (hello EA) with high marketing budgets that would probably sell a lot less if there was a demo to show how crappy the game was. Works both ways.
Demos ONLY SELL IF THE DEMO IS GOOD. Release a demo of a bad game,
and it will sell WORSE.
I tried the demo of Lair. It showed me that the game was piss poor. I passed on it. Foreign concept?
Its just as absurd as your arguing for a general case for demos. Demos doesn't automatically sell anything. Demos sell if your product is good. If its bad (and lets face it, most games out there aren't particularly good) it will NOT SELL.
Simple example: If i release a piss pooor game but market the hell out of it (and for good measure dont send review copies until the game is out) i could probably get quite a few sales. If i release a demo, nobody that tried the demo will buy it.
Im not sure you do?
I can rent a 10mbit server CS server for $1,24 a month per player slot. This is undoubtly much cheaper if your microsoft and wants to do things on a large scale.
larger the scale, the cheaper it becomes. (basic economics, but perhaps you really are a marketing guy?)
Setup 1 farm of dedicated servers on the West coast. One farm on the East coast, and that would cover USA. In europe, we could probably put all the servers in germany or something. In asia, well, there is like 3 people in asia with a x360 outside of japan (and not that many more in japan) so the obvious choice would be jpn.
Considering that all the games are designed to be hosted by a X360, a proper single server could easily host 3-4 instances of whatever X360 game you want to host (after all, you just need some RAM and cpu power).
There would obviously be quite a significant initial expense, but you wouldn't need all that many servers. Lets say there are 10 million online XBL users. They aren't online at the same time. You dont need to have 100% coverage.
(this is how any ISP business model works, they dont have bandwith for everybody to be online and download at max speed, but they are betting on that just a % of the people will be online at the same time. Thus the amount of bandwith that they sell, doesn't match the amount of bandwidth that they actually have)
Seeing that they get 50 million USD in cash every month from XBL gold users, this is not a particularly big stumbling block. The bandwith will be cheap (considering that i can rent a 10mbit server for 1,24$ per player, im pretty sure microsoft could do it in atleast 1\3 of the price).
In conclusion, i think it would be entirely possible for MS to make money and offer dedicated servers for popular games.
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That's only a plus to me, as a consumer. It should push studios to make higher quality games, and make sure that the demo captures the essence that is the best parts of the game.
If they fail at that, that's their own fault and they should learn from it. If they don't learn from it, they deserve the lower sales.
I'm fairly confident that the success of demos, as a whole, outweighs the negatives. If not for the businesses, definitely for the consumer. And the vast majority of us here are consumers.
If they fail at that, that's their own fault and they should learn from it. If they don't learn from it, they deserve the lower sales.
I'm fairly confident that the success of demos, as a whole, outweighs the negatives. If not for the businesses, definitely for the consumer. And the vast majority of us here are consumers.
You do realize that demos are only a natural extension/expansion of those in-store kiosks where vendors/publishers supply a demonstration disc for the store to keep in the console to attract users? Why not get rid of those demo kiosks in stores if developers/publishers are so afraid of demos?! It's simply natural for anyone who has a product they want to sell to allow people to try it out. I coach a masters swim team. I tell everyone before they even pay a single dollar to try it out first to see if they'll like it; otherwise, it's not worth it.
I don't really get those people who think demos are bad. For me as a consumer demos are always good, I prefer to test before I buy. It's not my problem if a game maker makes a bad demo out of a good product(grhm... heavenly sword for example).
I might even be willing to pay a little for the demos if I get the money back when/if I buy the full product.
I might even be willing to pay a little for the demos if I get the money back when/if I buy the full product.
I've suggested that before elsewhere. That's about the only way I could forsee paying for demos. Does Qore do this? If not, maybe that's an idea for Sony to implement.
Tommy McClain
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