XBox One, PS4, DRM, and You

Well I can tell you. It was the iTunes Music Store. Apple first got content owners to let them sell music, then DRM-free music, then movies and TV. And it's been working for about 10 years. Note how consumers still have the option to buy CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs. Different media types with different pros and cons. Seems to be working just fine.

Microsoft could have led as platform owner just as Apple did as platform owner.

 

If I'm being confusing, do pardon- it's now 7am here; I've just pulled an all-nighter!

I think the used game issue is huge. CliffyB just threw a rant on his twitter account, and was talking about used/shared games on the current generation. (Gamertags/sales ratio)

Publishers want that problem solved, first and foremost. It's been known industry-wide (see UPlay, EA Online Pass etc) that used games are eating at sales of predictable franchises.

The impasse between the proposed hybrid solution is that used game sales will not be curbed. Physical copies are too flexible, that only legal users who covet the convenience of digital will download. Everyone else who wants a cheap copy will get a used copy.

Now imagine this bunch of "paying digital users"- they're just about to get smaller by a few ten percentages because of sharing!

With digital sharing, publishers might entice more people to switch to download, but the fact remains that if the potentiality for used copies remain, so do unminimizable lost revenues. Used games will just cost a bit more now due to supply/demand, but publishers are still getting $0 out of this arrangement. Hence it is extremely unfeasible.

But will that work though?

Say I have a restricted $60 digital copy of Call of Duty that I can share with the same 10 friends, or a $60 physical copy that I can immediately sell for a nice $40 after completion... for other games!

Which will I choose?

 

At what point did anyone ever actually kid themselves (as is wholly evidenced by the most recent announcements and prior PR debacle) that MS was ever like Apple? lol

They want so desperately to be them, that much is clear.. And as much as I dislike Apple, I cannot deny their success nor the accuracy of their critique of MS: "They're not evil.. They're just soulless".

@Tchock,

But do gamers not spend money they save on purchasing new titles or DLC? I have a hard time believing that this money potential just 'vanishes' out of thin air for a true gamer.

I'm amazed at how many people are taking up a shield and defending MS here.. Were their policies not ludicrous? Sign in once every 24hrs to play your games (lest it prevents you from playing, telling people overseers\soldiers that if they want to play offline they should "get an xbox 360", mandating that Kinect be hooked up and powered all the time..

 

Oh, sure it was Sony fans. Take a read through this thread, the MS/Sony Business comparison thread and the E3 and launch threads for the One and PS4. You can get a very clear picture how many supporters of which console were "up in arms" over the One's DRM. There was maybe TWO people who could be considered Xbox customers that were complaining.

MS incapable of actually describing, let alone marketing, the positive aspects? Sure. "MS Fans" being reactionary? Nope. Dsoup, KB-Smoker, Jonabbey, mrcorbo, go take a look at their contributions to the E3 threads and tell me that they would have ever bought a One or are even thinking about doing so now that these restrictions have been removed.

Baloney.

 

For MS to design the DRM plan in the first place, there must be some projected increase in profit at some future point that can be associated with it. Now that projected income is gone, would anything else be affected?

BTW, I'm intrigued which executives are going to "leave the xbox family" for proposing or sanctioning this DRM plan.

 

Except by ensuring that they could assume some level of connectivity and therby build features on that not having such a backlash when people found out you needed to be connected to use said features as most would be connected anyways. Now with no online requrement no level of connectivity is assured anymore thus some of their ideas may no longer be feasable.

 

For scenario 1 that would be awesome as you and many of your friends will be motivated to buy some games each but you will have access to more as they will be shared between you. You buy digital, you play more, you save money,. It makes sense economically

For the scenario 2? Thats cool. You can get more money to buy more games. Increased sales for the publisher

Yep seems it might work

 

The validation requirement guarantees some miniscule amount of connection uptime in a 24-hour period.
What sane game design is going to quibble over a second a day?

The console still apparently needs an initial online registration, and that will probably take as much time as years' worth of 1 second a day sign-ins.

 

The funny thing about all of this is used game sales will suffer and retailers will suffer more. With DD being now seperated from retail they are taking away a great feature. I for example will go DD only (most likely) and ignore retail. Under the old system my plan was to still buy the disc for fast installs.

So this new system could/should lead to lower disc sales which cuts the $5 to $7 margin per game from retailers along with less used copies. Only getting worse as internet speeds improve.

Longterm I think this system hurts retail much faster than the old system. IMO

Depending on how this policy shakes out over the coming weeks I will cancel my disc based pre-orders. So just looking at this from another angle as GS stocks goes up.

 

This is my fear, yes.

For example, the online only game...look at the backlash that inevitably happens ala sim city.

With Xb1 being a "online only console" no such backlash would have happened prior to removing the 24hr check.

So, now there will be no online only single player games, aka no games that use cloud for anything good...if you make your single player game online only you risk a firestorm of backlash.

It is the exact same argument as "hard drive in every box" (PS3) enables things "hard drive in some boxes" (X360 core pack) does not. Somehow everybody understood the argument back then...

Always connected console as a baseline might have been really awesome.

 

We're not talking about the consumer here!

Scenario 1 is what your purported publisher aims for- which is just about right. Sharing is considered an acceptable compromise...

if scenario 2 didn't happen. Scenario 2 doesn't reward the publisher or developer directly in any way (which is I suppose, merely neutral) but also contributes to the used market (which is toxic- somebody had to say it).

Publishers are not going to cede security on both sides, that's my take.

PS. If digital was selling at $40 vs physical $60 (made up price numbers) to recoup this supposed "lost revenue" of used games, there could be a point; but that would piss Gamestop to no end I guess... so we're back at square one.

 

The console itself needs an online registration to work.
What's the point now?

 

I've been saying that MS could make this a customer choice since before MS's epic backpedal, but this has been continually dismissed (or rather flatly ignored) by the MS cheerleaders even on a reasonably reasonable board like B3D.

The MS cheerleaders have been every bit as guilty of creating the impression of a false dichotomy as the people who hated MS's proposed system, and the people who could have fixed this situation - MS themselves - stuck to their deeply unpopular and seemingly arbitrary selection of enforced restrictions in such a moronically inflexible manner that they dug a grave for themselves.

Even now you have people - mostly the cheerleaders - trying their damnest to maintain this false idea that if you want to allow offline play from a disk (or from a DD) then digital sharing cannot happen. That is not true. That was never true.

I don't know why people who like owning games and lending games and giving games are now taking shit for "spoiling things" in this thread, like MS are some spoilt or bratty kid who have the capability to give both parties what they want but refuse to out of spite or cowardice, and that it's somehow someone else's fault that they are that way.

 

hell no...

Kinect, voice to control entertainment system, TV in, 100% servers provided for all games, cloud compute provided free to devs, LIVE experience... all mean it's worth the extra $100 over PS4 and besides they will sell out a launch and can add value like pack in game later

 

Maybe they don't have time to remove that element of the system's behaviour? Or maybe they want to keep it (hardware registration and account linking etc) so they can add some kind of online based DRM (sharing, giving etc) when they think they've worked out what in hell's name it is that they should have been doing all along?

 

actually they did say it, just not a launch

 

Indeed and it seems Microsoft was building their whol;e Ecosystem ariound it. I didn't like it now but I might of liked what it would become in the future. Now all those future plans are dead and they have to redo their whole ecosystem which is a terrible risk and will be confusing to people who watched E3 expecting some feautures which now may longer be supported at least in a meaningful way.

 

Does Steam allow these things? Why is MS held to a different standard by you?

It seems entirely possible all the former benefits of MS scheme will be eventually retained for digital purchases, anyway (they seem to be hinting at it). Which would put them massively better than PSN or Steam, which I dont see you focusing any anger on...

Anyways, you truly dont think people like you wouldn't create a firestorm of faux-rage if MS now said you could opt-in to the former scheme???? Talk about confusing, muddling, what needs to be a clear message...the message on forums would be "omg, MS is backing out again! Kill them!". Regardless how stupid it would be...

Hell logic never enterred this anyway, do you know how many people would just lie to me on facebook or the like and say "MS banned used games"? They specifically did not ban used games. But that doesn't matter.