Just out of curiosity. IF there is a difference, large or small, between the DRM policies available to publishers, between the 360 (more restrictions, more options) and the PS4 (less restrictions, fewer options), does anyone want to take a stab at what MS would get out of the deal? So far all they have done is eat large amounts of internet dung. They have to get something out of this from the publishers I would think.
XBox One, PS4, DRM, and You
- Thread starter mrcorbo
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Deleted member 11852
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It seems Microsoft aren't in the used game re-sale revenue loop but that's not to say they are not being compensated in some other way through in deals with publishers.
It also could be that Microsoft felt themselves between a rock and a hard place; they obviously need publishers who don't like used game sales and they still need retailers who seem to make a good profit from used game sales. Microsoft may have thought that by putting control of used games in the hand of publishers, they could take a back seat in any squabbles between the other two parties and avoid/deflect any shit storm created by consumer angst.
Despite the fact that Microsoft's console is instrument of this unwelcome DRM, they don't appear to greatly care - if so, why wield control?
Speaking of DRM, and our info handled by corporations
Google admits Patriot Act requests; Handed over European data to U.S. authorities
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igenerati...d-over-european-data-to-u-s-authorities/12191
And in a related note
When I want my information to be private, I mean....PRIVATE.
I dont want my entertainment to be linked to any kind of Patriot Act or CISPA bullcrap.
Google admits Patriot Act requests; Handed over European data to U.S. authorities
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igenerati...d-over-european-data-to-u-s-authorities/12191
And in a related note
When I want my information to be private, I mean....PRIVATE.
I dont want my entertainment to be linked to any kind of Patriot Act or CISPA bullcrap.
Averagejoe
Regular
Really then i wonder why so many new ones still pop in you know since 80% of the games fail to be profitable,i guess developers love to lose money.
Publishers abuse of us for to long,i still remember those $80 dollar Snes games like MK2 that cost developers less than 500,000 to make yet make multiple millions.
Not every game is a 50+ million master piece,also direction or lack of it can take your company in a spiral losing tons of millions,that is not the fault of the consumer.
FF7 7 on PS1 cost 40 millions to make and that was 16 years ago,but does that mean that every PS1 game cost that.? What about Shenmue.
There is always and exception to the rule,but not all games cost 50 million,and i am sure than more than 20% of the game make money.
Especially on this age of DLC when one get nickel and dime.
You welcome this thing i don't and i am a normal consumer,i care about how i spend my money and like me many millions do care,this is a horrible policy done in favor of companies like EA so that they can bleed us dry even more.
More new sales equals more money for platform owners.
But really it's like asking why Sony put all the drm in blu-ray. It's because the ip holders want it.
That's free market economics for you! Business are operated to get rich, not to provide consumers with great value at reasonable prices. Like it or not, that's how most of the world's economies are. And to be fair, those multi-million sellers that makes loads of profit are needed to offset the many failures that make a loss.
If you wanted to start up as a publisher with $500 million, what are your options? Make 10 games at $50 million a pop expecting 7 will fail and so looking to making >$500 million from the 3 successful games. This means charging as much as you can for those 3 games (and by extension, all games as you don't know what the 3 successful games will be). What other options are there? The only other option I see is to have a complete grasp of the market, know exactly how many copies your game will sell before you make it, budget to that amount of revenue factoring in retail price so you can price with a smaller profit margin, and never make mistakes as one failure would eliminate your working capital if you have thin profit margins. That doesn't strike me as realistic.
Averagejoe
Regular
Not only my name here is average joe,in real life i am one,and believe me the first thing you will notice when you hook up your xbox one is that without online it will not work.
Then developers should deal with them,not make my life a living hell to play games,because they want to sell more games to those who pirate them.
You mean like xbox live was suppose to be a cheat free environment,that was constantly fill with cheaters and hackers,MS did one thing to ban them,and a month latter they were back online again,still to this point pirates play with illegal copies on xbox live,and MS still fighting them.
DRM will not stop pirates and will make normal people life a living hell,now when you game is not up to you,but up to the companies,your internet and live servers or EA ones..
No you're not average, you're on forums raging about a console. You've excluded yourself. I bet the instructions include connecting to the internet.
Averagejoe
Regular
That's free market economics for you! Business are operated to get rich, not to provide consumers with great value at reasonable prices. Like it or not, that's how most of the world's economies are. And to be fair, those multi-million sellers that makes loads of profit are needed to offset the many failures that make a loss.
If you wanted to start up as a publisher with $500 million, what are your options? Make 10 games at $50 million a pop expecting 7 will fail and so looking to making >$500 million from the 3 successful games. This means charging as much as you can for those 3 games (and by extension, all games as you don't know what the 3 successful games will be). What other options are there? The only other option I see is to have a complete grasp of the market, know exactly how many copies your game will sell before you make it, budget to that amount of revenue factoring in retail price so you can price with a smaller profit margin, and never make mistakes as one failure would eliminate your working capital if you have thin profit margins. That doesn't strike me as realistic.
I know but you don't invest on a market where only 20% of the games make profits,you are basically warranty to fail.
I am sure the majority of the game on the industry do not probably pass 20 million dollars,which would be make out by just selling 1 million units.
Sure there are many that cost more than 20 million,but most of them shot for beyond the starts,instead of aiming things more down to earth.
There are massive fundamental differences in the game market. First, unless you are a collection or someone who places significant value on day-one purchase, used games are a new perfect substitute for new games and therefore do not suffer significant depreciation thus GS can sell at new prices - $5. Second, a dominant retailer of new products ACTIVELY promotes against and competes against new products. Third, it is fairly easy to extract 50-100% of the value of most games without addicting multiplayer or extremely long campaign modes in a single day. All of these factors unable GS to extract a vastly oversized market maker return off of used games. If used games were limited to ebay, craigslist and mom and pop second hand stores, I doubt the industry would care.
As a rough guess, pubs probably lose on the order of 50% of the value of their games to used sales in the first couple of months and probably much more than that at catalogue.
The authorized reseller tactic seems like the best solution to a tough problem. It gets funds flowing back into the system through sellers, pubs can harvest value from price sensitive customers, and GS can make decent returns on used games (as opposed to their current outsized returns). Here everyone both wins and loses. Everyone has to give up something: sellers will like see trade values decline, pubs don't get fully blocked used games, and GS loses margin. However, the ecosystem as a whole is probably much better off.
Sure they are..
They are just training people to buy games in Microsoft digital download store, instead of in shop, where MS can get both the store profit and platform-holder profit.
And also by ensuring you are online, they can more easily push items for you to license in their game wich you license access to, until the license run out.
And then they can license the next bits and bytes to your next licensed game.
People have proven they like to pay for unnecesary stuff on 360, wich competitors provided for free, they did with online play.
PSN were much greater than Xbox Live, and paid PSN were much greater than paid Xbox Live, but it still didn't convince people to change service.
So I think this will work fine for them aswell.
D
Deleted member 11852
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Which assumes that enough people, if denied buying a game cheap or lending it from a friend, would purchase that game instead. If someone can't afford it, because even saving £20 to buy a used game occasionally is a real pleasure, then those folks are out. Now you could argue that these folks aren't contributing to the platform anyway but of course people buying new games and trading them in and being supplemented by the used game market. Without this supplement, new game customers have less money to buy games and if the folks who are buying the used games never, or rarely, buy a new game then the platform is facing a net loss of income.
I don't think anybody, including Microsoft and Sony, really have a handle of this because the use game market is entirely unmonitored. Do used games get re-sold once, twice, twenty times? Is there are small number of discs being re-sold a lot, or are a large number of discs being re-sold a few times?
Sony were one of a number of corporations involved in developing the Blu-ray standard but they don't own it, nor do they control it. And we know why Blu-ray discs contact two DRM schemes: AACS and BD+. It's because the movie studios didn't want what happened to DVDs to happy to high-def movies. That worked out well
I can understand the use of DRM techniques as a means to authenticate ownership as a means to fight piracy. But as a means to change the fundamental concept of ownership? That's less palatable. Regardless of what EULA might be in any of my PlayStation 3 game boxes, or what EULA might flash up onscreen, with a few exceptions I can sell those discs to somebody else just as I can sell my CDs, DVDs or my Blu-ray discs. It's this proposed fundamental change that needs to be managed really delicately.
An intrinsic part of the value of anything purchased is the re-sale value on the open market. If I can't sell it it's now worth a whole lot less to me. Now if the intention here is to reduce the cost of new games by say 30% because the publishers expect to make up the difference (and more) on re-sales, I'm more down with that. It still sucks for retailers, but personally, I'd probably be better off.
Averagejoe
Regular
So just because i am complaining in a forum means i am not an average.?
Things of the xbox one that will affect me as an average gamer.
No lending of games.
Online every 24 hours.
Not been able to sell my game to who i one and make the most of it.
This ^^ doesn't just affect me,it also affect like 7 of my friends,who trade games with me,like 3 don't have online.
Oh did i mention that some times we actually split the cost of a game between 3.?
There are so many games right now that it would be impossible for most of my friends and me to pay for them.
Example i bought Halo Reach with 2 other friends,i bough Gears 3 with another of my friends,and bough Uncharted 3 and the last GOW by 3 split.
In fact we will buy TLOU that way to but on a 2 split,i represent an average joe more than you ever believe.
In the context of this thread, Bluray only has Copy Protection, not DRM. We own the disc untethered and unconditional.
Sony is one member of BDA's 19 board members, which includes many studios. The way it would have worked, is that the studios wanted a Copy Protection scheme to be used, and I expect the consumer electronics companies refused any request for a tethered DRM scheme. (which some studios might have wanted, like divx, but if they were requested, it obviously never passed the board).
For the PS4 and Xbone, Sony and Microsoft are in a balancing act between publishers and gamers. Microsoft tilted strongly toward the publishers, and it's expected they got something in return for it. But Sony needs gamers more than microsoft does, so it's unclear which direction they will tilt. For sony, more gamers means more money for everybody.
D
Deleted member 11852
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People are already buying games digitally from Microsoft, Minecraft sold 6.1m and it's digital only. The DRM doesn't change this, you can still buy digitally with the content locked to you, your family and friends or you can buy a disc which can be traded if the publisher consents - so just like now. Microsoft don't profit from disc re-sales and nothing the DRM changes introduced change this.
Again, this isn't related to DRM. If Microsoft have advertising in their platform, they'll want you online so they can update and delivery it. DRM doesn't affect this.
First off if you put ten people on your family list, yes you can let them "borrow" your games. It's just that now instead of unlimited sharing it is reduced to a little more controllable and less rampant.
I keep seeing this around and I have to say, considering this is not music which most people listen to repeatedly and for years and years and often does not lose it's appeal, a game, is a limited entertainment medium (for MOST) whereby once experienced is considered, beaten, played, done.
How can we expect anyone to invest millions into making the entertainment and then not expect each person that experiences that game to not pay for the full ride...
It would be like purchasing one ticket to ride a roller coaster and because you have the ticket you pass it on to you friend so they could ride it next and then their friend rides it next all on the same ticket... makes no sense.
Illogical to me and just because the technology was not easily applied in the past to prevent it, we now feel it is our right.
I always bought new; I support developers, always had for decades, and I always will.
I buy full price games constantly and when I can't buy full price I buy NEW when the price goes down, which is surely not perfect for the devs but to me is better than not giving them a cent at all. (this is a personal point of view)
I too care about how I spend my money and in-fact I also choose my games carefully; I think before buying and it worked perfectly so far.
DRM is not the end of the world for me, is not the end of my rights as customer because it only asks me to do what I have been doing for decades.
We can always choose not to buy so if you don't like/want DRM you just have to look elsewhere.
MS and Sony needs us more than we need them anyway.
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I raise you Books! Magazines! Movies! Unlike GAMES they don't have the option of adding value as they/the game gets older, you know all these arguments, you ignore them.. see you in the correct thread...
That's free market economics for you! Business are operated to get rich, not to provide consumers with great value at reasonable prices. Like it or not, that's how most of the world's economies are. And to be fair, those multi-million sellers that makes loads of profit are needed to offset the many failures that make a loss.
If you wanted to start up as a publisher with $500 million, what are your options? Make 10 games at $50 million a pop expecting 7 will fail and so looking to making >$500 million from the 3 successful games. This means charging as much as you can for those 3 games (and by extension, all games as you don't know what the 3 successful games will be). What other options are there? The only other option I see is to have a complete grasp of the market, know exactly how many copies your game will sell before you make it, budget to that amount of revenue factoring in retail price so you can price with a smaller profit margin, and never make mistakes as one failure would eliminate your working capital if you have thin profit margins. That doesn't strike me as realistic.
Don't forget the shareholders who want to see quarterly earnings, which means funding enough titles to compensate for inevitable delays.
There are other ways to handle used games than selling the customers a product that is inferior compared to what the customer is used to. Raise the price on the discs, sell DD cheaper. Easy and the consumers has the choice.
If the numbers are correct then gamestop earned an estimated 2,394 million on used games and "handed back" 1.200 million to gamers, most likely as games/consoles etc (yes they make a profit on that as well).. So lets say they earn 1.2billion dollars on used games. Is it worth giving up the what we have now?
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