The Next-gen Situation discussion *spawn

And how do you mark games at retail with this approach?
It's fine when everything is download only, but were a few years away from regularly downloading 50GB disk images.

 

Subscriptions would be their dream but what's in it for the consumer?

Nobody wants another monthly bill.

 

Yep, a subscription for what?

I'm not seeing the consumer case.

 

Yes this has absolutely crippled cell phone growth. What planet are you from?

 

We will give you a brand new console for a big discount (or free) if you agree to sign up for Xbox Live for x years. Sound bad?

Ensures a much larger portion of their customers are online(Gold), consuming online content. You get to bring home a new console paying very little to nothing up front. It's how smartphones are sold.

 

People are conditioned to pay monthly for cell phones.

For consoles? If parents were buying Billy a console, they don't expect it to be an ongoing bill.

Plus, most of the cell phones sold in the world are without a subsidy. It's only in the US and perhaps Canada where people are in effect buying a subsidized product up front but end up paying a lot more over the life of the contract they sign for that subsidy.

 

Ok let me posit this, you can subscribe to my premium service for $30 a month and play any playstation game any time you want with early access to new releases.
Or you can buy discs for $50 a piece

To me that subscription seems like pretty good value.

From a platform owners standpoint they make more money out of the first model because lifetime attach rates are so low.
Obviously it's hard to actually do, in part because network connections still suck and in part because distributing proceeds requires business agreements from everyone involved.

 

How do you get conditioned?

Seriously, people CHOOSE to pay monthly for a lot of things.

 

Subscription is here to stay..as well as death of second hands games and cloud gaming generation next.

People quite happily pay for gold membership for a superior service to competitors...if you throw in added functionality and features and consolidate another box (dvr/cable)into the xbox as well as take out the pc from the lounge...of course people would get the wallet out..
People subscribe to all sorts of things..
News, films, music, cloud storage, phone, insurence etc etc

 

People do this with furniture, cars and houses. It's not exclusive to phones. People like to get things they can't afford right now and pay for them later. And IF they do contract buys, that doesn't mean you won't be able to buy the console outright if you want to.

 

That won't end well. Unless Kinect 2.0 is well beyond Kinect 1.0, the chances of casuals having a Wii like attraction are minimal.

 

Raw power won't get me to buy a 360. My PC from 2 years ago is already more powerful than the "leaked" 360 specs currently sending the net wild.

If Kinect 2 is good I'll buy one though. I want to be able to flip off my boss in a game, because he wants me behind a desk doing paperwork instead of being out on the streets stopping crime.

I also want to be able to talk to NPCs using natural language, even if that means needing a net connection and Live Gold to access a Siri like game server. God knows that bad matchmaking and a dashboard that rams 4 or 5 adverts per tab down my bell-end isn't worth paying for Gold for.

So yeah, bring on Kinect 2 (and a HDD as standard) even if it means reducing the raw processing power of the system. If I want the best version of a generic, vanilla multiplatform game I'll just get it for my PC.

 

Good point. I hadn't thought it all the way through.

 

It's been done with retail PC games for a long time. As long as games developed for the next 5-6 years can run on 2013 consoles, people shouldn't complain too much. If a new console comes out in 2013, 2015 and 2017 and games made for the 2017 console are still playable in the 2013 console with lower res textures, and maybe lower overall resolution a lot don't care and are just happy to stick with their old console. To use the iPhone analogy, some hardcore Apple fans need to upgrade every year, and most only upgrade every few years. But for this to work, R&D has to be very cheap, almost as cheap as Dell updating their XPS line which they do every year. You want people into your ecosystem so you don't have to fight from scratch every new generation. Imagine if Apple had to do a reset every 5 years. The entire concept of console generations seems antiquated in the face of smart phones and tablets.

If you think about it, we've only had two gaming models. Consoles with one fixed hardware for years, and PCs, which have crazy amounts of continuously changing configurations. That's two complete ends of the spectrum.

 

Sigh, so much misinformation. Because it is buried in E&D, we will never know how much the 360 profited, but a reasonable guess is between 3 and 5 Billion in the black. Live alone is probably over a billion a year in profit.

 

Yeah, they used 360 profits to fill in billion dollar pot holes like Kin in their books.

 

Am i remembering wrong? As i remember it the first console ports from XBOX/PS2 and 360/PS3 did not run like butter at all. They required stupid amounts of power to keep up with the consoles framerate.

Halo, MSG and GTA4 is good examples. Yes i am aware that the resolution was higher on the PC ports but considering the power advantage on paper i was surprised just how bad something like GTA4 ran on my PC.

But on the plus side, with a new Console generation the PC can finally get some better assets since they all are born and created with consoles in mind. And i would not be surprised if the first ports will run like crap, for whatever reason, all the theoretic power advantage that PC's have seem to go down some black hole when it comes to the first console ports in a new generation. And even later in the consoles life it's not like you can always see the big power gap between the consoles and hardware.

 

So the PS2 and the Wii never happened?

 

You seem to have a rather low opinion of SONY and Japanese companies in general - and that's probably exactly the kind of hybris that lead Microsoft to make Durango what it's rumoured to be. Ironic, isn't it?

Furthermore - how exactly does Microsoft have a "non windows monopoly" in console gaming? Do you consider a few years of good competition a monopolistic legacy? They're basically neck-and-neck with SONY right now. That being said, their first XBOX was a disaster - and Sony was already very successful selling gaming consoles when Microsoft was still busy selling Windows 3.x ...

If anything, Microsoft's succes with the 360 is the anomaly - not the fact that they're (potentially) "screwing up" (as you put it).

 

He didn't say MS has a monopoly in console gaming. The monopoly word was attached to only Windows and Xbox was the only "thing" they had success other than Windows. The wording is a bit confusing though.