Tiger woods 360

very interesting.

you may be onto something there

 

What if we flipped around the cost though. What if, instead of $60 for the base game, +6 or so courses, it was only $20 but you only got one base course. Then, each additional course was 7-10 dollars, but you only bought the ones you wanted.

The major benefit to the publisher would be pushing down game prices into the impulse buy range while delivering a potentially renewable revenue stream. Consumers get to try more games for less cost--though possibly spending more on a game they are hardcore about.

People have been talking about "episodic" delivery for years, and microtransactions brings it much closer, imo.

.Sis

 

Very risky strategy if you ask me!

 

Well EA would not offer such tools because that would just be creating competition to themselves, if they had any plans to sell additional courses for downloads. And to a certain extent, you make the mod tools too good and maybe there's no reason for gamers to buy a new game every year.

Wouldn't it be nice if it was just wide open and you could download files from any site, anywhere? Of course that would just bypass XBL and their little microtransaction system so MS would never enable that.

Now with the PS3, what if you mounted an SD card on a PC and downloaded stuff and then loaded it onto the PS3? That's assuming there's no direct connectivity on the PS3 to sites like Gamefaqs, although Sony has talked about surfing on the PS3 (but they talked about surfing on the PS2 and PSP too and we know where that went).

 

micro transactions are just going to be a small bonus that you CAN do if you want to. it's not like they're going to affect game designs or the prices of games themselves. I'm sure you'll still have plenty of golf shoes to choose from

This is a good thing, having new levels downloadable for a old game is cool, downloading new weapons and characters is very cool. It just helps add more value to a game if a developer decides to release some extra content.

Then you have games like Forza, with a decal editor that a person could spend hours designing decals for. So, what you'll see if people customizing cars, spending a few hours creating really cool custom cars, and then other users will be able to buy them.

I expect this whole "customizing" thing to get pretty big, especially as online competition ramps up, with cash tournaments, people will like to have a unique ride/character.

Here's some cars people have created, this kind of stuff is pretty neat:

http://www.tabwin.com/forza.htm

So you might see the same kind of thing with characters in Tiger, for example buy Mr. T or Hulk Hogan as your golfer, just cool bonuses you can do if you want to.

 

And more remember things like Gotham/KillTV, will alow tournaments, with prices and spectators, I want to see a 1/8-final from that, in probably modified maps with coca-cola/nike ads or have the chance to win (as allard said) a 1M price, that is a hole new market, then the winner can sell their suit/car to a lot of fans.

MS, Rare(...) and the user should all make proffit (1/3 ?).

I think that the future of XB360, is very promessing, exiting, and can do a nice revolution, if they can do what they want.

 

That is pretty nice.

 

the other thing about X360 LIVE that I think is interesting is the new spectator mode.

On console games (especially sports tournaments) it will be huge to have a couple of the other team owners tuning into to watch (not sure if they can comment or not).

I was in a n NFL2k5 league last year and we all wanted this feature.

Also in other games (FPS) you can watch the best players and learn their strategies.

 

Micro-transactions are good unless its abused and/or exploited intentionally.. and sometimes that's asking a lot of companies who's entire goal is to make as much money as possible. How do we know that without these micro-transactions, a game will not have come packed with as much features, maps, etc .. as possible to increase its marketing appeal, as opposed to these extras being held off so that it can be released little by little to guarantee a revenue stream? A game may retail for 50.00, but a few bucks here and there and it may end up 80.00 in the final tally for the same game that may have come packed with all these features in the initial price.

 

The "conflict of interests" in this scenario are very clear and daunting.

 

Wouldn't it be awesome if they had $5 or $10 golf, football, hockey and basketball tournaments?

For example, Madden 2006- 32 person tournament. $5 buy in, 1st place wins $75.

I'd love it.

 

so far as I have seen work on the current version of LIVE, the extra content that I have downloaded and paid for has all been designed after the retail game shipped.

Sure they are using existing assets but they still are investing programmer time to create new maps/courses/skins/rosters/cars etc.

They often announce the downloads in advance and even give updates as to it's progress prior to being made available.

Of course it could happen as you have described it but i have to believe that developers have their hands full just getting the game out as full featured as possible as is.

 

I think Devs will try and release the best game they can by release date, period.

It would be a dumb risk to hold back content simply for resale later, it makes much more sense to release the best game you possibly can so that it will hopefully sell as many copies as possible. If that happens, you have a gauranteed market for downloadable content, and they can spend 6months after launch developing new stuff.

Everyone wins, gamers get more gameplay, dev's get some more revenues.

 

One of the things the publishers are fighting is a rapidly declining Average Selling Price for games. If a game doesn't sell well, the publisher will be under pressure to discount as they risk losing shelf space to competitor titles. Game sales seem to resemble the movie business where most of the revenues are made in the first few weeks of release.

So microtransactions may be a way to recoup some of that declining ASP but it could also tempt them to put more content off the disc so that they have more to sell by downloads.

Spectator mode is interesting but not new. Old multiplayer PC games allowed that. For instance, AOE let up to 8-players join a game but any number could resign the game and watch, at which point they could see everything every active player was doing.

It sounds like for XBL, they will have some tournaments people have to enter (pay extra fee for?) and it's in these events that they will have some kind of spectator mode. But is it accomplished by connecting x number of spectators to the game? Or is it not real-time or slightly behind, as they stream what's happening in the game slightly afterwards?

I would rather see them work on multiplayer online modes so that you can hook up to 10 players in a hockey game, as they did with NHL Rivals, where I think up to 4-different consoles could join a single game.

EA has been real lazy about multiplayer modes. NASCAR only supports at most 4 players online, maybe just 2, while other racing games support 6 players from 6 different consoles. The PC versions of NASCAR however supports 16 or 32 different connections.

 

wow, that is cool


I know Allard talked a lot of PR rhetoric during E3 but seriously to ME, LIVE makes the biggest difference in gaming choices right now.

I believe the more people that use it (and no CC is going to be huge in upping subscriber rates) the more people may see it as the future of gaming.


People that never gamed online with their PCs due to lack of knowledge or fear, can now sign up, sign in and play.

 

It will be interesting to see if the US government actually allows this. If the government says that online poker (amongst other online "gambling" activities) is illegal, why not on-line computer sports, for money, too?

Presumably these activities would generate income for the organiser, and ultimately one player walks away with the prize fund. What's the difference between online computer sports and poker?

Jawed

 

Not only gambling, but gambling open to minors.

 

I would expect this would be a prime area for advertising based revenue. Think Mountain Dew Presents the Halo 3 Tournament Finals or something to that effect.

If you have to pay to play, I would then expect (as a gamer) some kind of payout.

.Sis

 

Sure, but the 2K sports games proved that $20 dollars is a good price point. In broadening the market, you would think that $50-60 is not a sustainable price for the majority of games.

Majesco also seems to be doing well targetting some of their games to this range--though they are still full featured games.

My point is that another way to get to the 15-20 dollar range is to offer less with optional add-ons.

.Sis