Eeeyup. But also, almost every game I've bought recently is digital, so I can't sell it used anyway. Which is also bullshit, but it hasn't made me leave Steam.
Used games are the only reason that stores like EBgames still exist and they are also the reason things like CoD Elite, overpriced DLC that should be in the core game and Online Passes exist. Besides, stores like EB/gamestop are needed to sell hardware so if they don't like the banning of used games then it won't be included in the hardware.
MS doesn't have the clout to end used game sales, but as a result devs are going to make fewer games that stand on their own.
If I were a betting man, I'd say the Xbox 1080 is just going to be an online service you buy through your PC or TV.
Used games are the only reason that stores like EBgames still exist and they are also the reason things like CoD Elite, overpriced DLC that should be in the core game and Online Passes exist. Besides, stores like EB/gamestop are needed to sell hardware so if they don't like the banning of used games then it won't be included in the hardware.
MS doesn't have the clout to end used game sales, but as a result devs are going to make fewer games that stand on their own.
If I were a betting man, I'd say the Xbox 1080 is just going to be an online service you buy through your PC or TV.
I'm of two minds about used games going away. On the one hand, they're our last bastion of actually paying money and "owning" a game. With Steam, we're basically paying money for the ability to play a game when they say we can. It can be taken away at any point and we lose that money. In future incarnations I fully expect that even the installation locally will be gone, so we'll simply be playing for the ability to play. So I like the idea that console games are still something physical we buy and can resell/trade/barter for poontang with.
However, I don't particularly like all the DLC and additional money I have to funnel into a game after launch to play it more. If this goes away with used games, I'm okay with them going away. But even then (oh no I used but to begin a sentence), I know it won't because they're not going to give up a perfectly good way to monetize something they've already paid for (at least, they've paid for the creative license or the devs' creativity).
So I'm not sure how that feature would go. There's a lot of people making noise about it, but I'm not sure there's enough people making noise about it to make a difference. Plus you'd be able to make the argument that this is another way to fight piracy. Despite how idiotic that argument might be, that will resonate with some very powerful people.
That article is just developers thoughts on a rumor that was circulating a while ago. Unless there is some official announcement or new about the next xbox everything is just rumors and empty talk.
But if that were to happen I wouldn't like it a bit. Most of my non-digital xbox games I have bought I have bought used and most of the rest have been in heavy discounts. For me it doesn't matter is game used or not, but the price is what makes the difference. I happily pay the 20€ to the developer rather than to Gamestop, but if Gamestop is the only one who offers that price I have to go with it.
Anyone remember the PSP Go? Yeah, it died on the vine. So will the next Xbox if they try to make it so it can't play used games because a retailer like Gamestop won't carry it.
I actually wanted the PSP Go to be awesome, like a portable steam-game device thing. If only it actually had anywhere near the total game selection as the regular PSP.
I actually wanted the PSP Go to be awesome, like a portable steam-game device thing. If only it actually had anywhere near the total game selection as the regular PSP.
What about that new Playstation thing? I've not heard word one about it, so much so that I can't even recall the name. Is it doing well, are there decent games?
Nobody on the publisher/dev side of the industry needs to be sold on the idea of "used games = bad". TotalBiscuit's argument that used games are WORSE than piracy is pretty compelling. I can't find the source (one of his recent-ish Mailbag episodes) but it was basically that as far the the publishers are concerned someone pirating a game MIGHT mean a lost sale but someone choosing a used game instead of a new game at the store is a guaranteed lost sale (since that person was intending to buy it one way or another).
But yeah, even if used games go away, the DLC genii isn't going back into the bottle. That's here to stay.
I think Activision releasing CoD:Elite and Skylanders is pretty indicative how how they see the future of games; get people attached to one game and then charge them as many times as possible. Not to mention the spread of Free to Play, Subscription games, etc etc.
Indies will probably fill the need for stand alone experiences but I think video games as they were known from the 80's to the mid naughties is going to become a boutique industry and not the norm.
I am still not so convinced that the Free to Play model is a sustainable business model that nets more than a full AAA title. Of course, this is coming from someone who once bought an extra chapter in an iOS game. That's the closest I've ever come to buying a microtransaction thing.
F2P isn't more profitable than AAA but AAA studios are starting to become fewer and fewer and F2P is WAAAAAAAAY more profitable than most B grade games that are being released. They also, I think, target a different audience and offer a different experience for the most part.
That's a fair assessment. It takes a lot of money to break into that market, too. That, and we're seeing an interesting time when a lot of people who grew up with games and are incredibly passionate about them are willing to go without making huge money to do what they love. Thus creating a lot of extra competition in the form of Indie games.
Yeah, if you have a "AAA" game, you can sell a zillion copies and used/piracy doesn't make much impact. Also, people are willing to pay $50+ for that kind of game.
If your game isn't that amazing, most people aren't even going to even try it, let alone pay $50. They'll want to pay a lower price since they won't be spending much time on it. If you make it free, then lots of people will be willing to give it a chance, good or bad. If you can do ads or in-game shit then you can milk the people who do like the game for as much cash as possible.
I think the biggest problem with F2P games now is that there are too many of them. If we assume that F2P games are not as well produced and polished as non-free games, they are less worth your time. The people who are going to play them are people with more free time and less money.
That's a lot of punk kids playing the game for free. You can't get $50 each from them, but maybe you can get $5 each and make bank. In the olden days when there were few F2P games you could get a gigantic number of players on it. Now there are so many F2P games, that any individual game has a vary hard time getting that same gigantic volume of players.
Even I played Ragnarok online for a couple weeks when it first hit the scene. A graphical action MUD for free? ZOMG. Nowadays there are a zillion such games, and they aren't even worth a look. You can pick any one of them to devote your life to. If a new one hits the scene, they're lucky if anyone even notices. Whereas Ragnarok got a huge influx due to their mere existence because they were one of the only games in town.
Used anything is "worse" than piracy in the modern world. Used bookstores are a huge problem for booksellers. Used CD stores really hurt primary retail outlets for music.
We're entering a new era of media. Piracy was just the barest tip of the iceberg. The real threat to the industry is not piracy, but ubiquity.
Every piece of media today must compete with the entire human history of art.
Making a jumping 2D platformer? You're competing with Super Meat Boy, Super Mario Brothers 3, and Donkey Kong. You're also competing with Citizen Kane, The Lord of the Rings novels, 46 odd Superbowls, and Youtube.
No one was every truly afraid of piracy. Not in the big media. They were afraid of a democratized creation and distribution market. They were afraid of VHS tapes that never wore out. They were afraid of everyone in the world already owning a copy of Star Wars.
Piracy is nothing compared to the collected wealth of 40,000 years of human evolution and expression.
I think the biggest problem with F2P games now is that there are too many of them. If we assume that F2P games are not as well produced and polished as non-free games, they are less worth your time. The people who are going to play them are people with more free time and less money.
This is accurate, but I think people play F2P games and/or social games because of who else is playing. Look at the case of Cow Clicker; dude intentionally made the worst game he could possibly imagine AS A JOKE in three days and got 50,000 people following it, even when he was trying to drive them away. People weren't playing it because it was fun, they were playing it because their friends were playing it. He even made money off of it. Imagine if he'd doubled down and tried to grow it?
It's long tail economics. If you can get a following of a few hundred thousand people playing your cheapass game consistently and support their community then you'll make money. You just won't get rich. Didn't Scrym have a whole thing about communities and games?
That's a lot of punk kids playing the game for free.
Yup, even the "good" F2P games only convert people into paying cusotmers about 3-4% of the time. As long as you can manage the "HUEHUEHUE" effect you want as many punk kids playing as possible.
Used anything is "worse" than piracy in the modern world. Used bookstores are a huge problem for booksellers. Used CD stores really hurt primary retail outlets for music.
We're entering a new era of media. Piracy was just the barest tip of the iceberg. The real threat to the industry is not piracy, but ubiquity.
Every piece of media today must compete with the entire human history of art.
Making a jumping 2D platformer? You're competing with Super Meat Boy, Super Mario Brothers 3, and Donkey Kong. You're also competing with Citizen Kane, The Lord of the Rings novels, 46 odd Superbowls, and Youtube.
No one was every truly afraid of piracy. Not in the big media. They were afraid of a democratized creation and distribution market. They were afraid of VHS tapes that never wore out. They were afraid of everyone in the world already owning a copy of Star Wars.
Piracy is nothing compared to the collected wealth of 40,000 years of human evolution and expression.
The other half of this is economic ephemeralization. Even if we throw out all the old stuff, we are going to get to a point where there's not enough "real industry" left to be done. Basically over time we learn how to do more work with less labor, up until the point where you just cannot legitimately employ most people in non-ephemeralized labor. Or at least, that's the premise of my RPG distopia in which you farm gold in games for food.
F2P is using the same model as online dating pay sites. Free users enhance the experience for paying members by their mere existence. They also bump up the user base numbers which allows the publisher to claim a high number of users.
Suck part is when you join and find out the difference between total and active users.
David Jaffe at DICE 2011 talking about how telling stories with video games is a bad idea. My favorite quote from his talk is "Yaw just made an old lady orgasm".
David Jaffe at DICE 2011 talking about how telling stories with video games is a bad idea. My favorite quote from his talk is "Yaw just made an old lady orgasm".
It's so weird that I pretty much don't like anything about this guy at all, or any game he has made. But at PAX he made that same point about trying to tell stories in games. It might be the only thing I agree with him about, but I strongly agree.
It's so weird that I pretty much don't like anything about this guy at all, or any game he has made. But at PAX he made that same point about trying to tell stories in games. It might be the only thing I agree with him about, but I strongly agree.
I sort of agree with my exceptions being that I like God of War and I agreed with him a few years back when he got mad at a reviewer for the review they wrote. I agree with why he was angry even though the game was still bad.
Yeah, I think he makes a half way reasonable point. I also think he tries to make an case for an extreme viewpoint using poor arguments. The big ones that stick out are, good is what sells, old games (sports) don't involve drama, other things to this better now so why should we, I think he makes one or two more point but I'm lazy. Pretty much all of his points are shaky at best so it makes it hard (for me) to take his thesis/talk seriously.
If his thesis is "game play first, narrative second, and where possible express by doing" that's great. He does not get that point across particularly well though.
I think the problem is that we don't have a shorter word for what I'm calling "Interactive Media Experiences", like a JRPG or Elevator: Source. I would put those in the same category. They can be fun, but I would hesitate to even call them a game, let alone put them in the same category as, say, Counter-Strike, or Mario. They're more akin to an enhanced movie, where I create my own by playing. That's still a valid form of entertainment.
Comments
WELL GUESS WHAT.
IT'S BACK, IT HAS A RELEASE DATE, AND IT'S GONNA BE FREE TO PLAY.
Fuck that and fuck the dev that agrees with it: http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/121/1218051p1.html
MS doesn't have the clout to end used game sales, but as a result devs are going to make fewer games that stand on their own.
If I were a betting man, I'd say the Xbox 1080 is just going to be an online service you buy through your PC or TV.
However, I don't particularly like all the DLC and additional money I have to funnel into a game after launch to play it more. If this goes away with used games, I'm okay with them going away. But even then (oh no I used but to begin a sentence), I know it won't because they're not going to give up a perfectly good way to monetize something they've already paid for (at least, they've paid for the creative license or the devs' creativity).
So I'm not sure how that feature would go. There's a lot of people making noise about it, but I'm not sure there's enough people making noise about it to make a difference. Plus you'd be able to make the argument that this is another way to fight piracy. Despite how idiotic that argument might be, that will resonate with some very powerful people.
But if that were to happen I wouldn't like it a bit. Most of my non-digital xbox games I have bought I have bought used and most of the rest have been in heavy discounts. For me it doesn't matter is game used or not, but the price is what makes the difference. I happily pay the 20€ to the developer rather than to Gamestop, but if Gamestop is the only one who offers that price I have to go with it.
But yeah, even if used games go away, the DLC genii isn't going back into the bottle. That's here to stay.
I think Activision releasing CoD:Elite and Skylanders is pretty indicative how how they see the future of games; get people attached to one game and then charge them as many times as possible. Not to mention the spread of Free to Play, Subscription games, etc etc.
Indies will probably fill the need for stand alone experiences but I think video games as they were known from the 80's to the mid naughties is going to become a boutique industry and not the norm.
If your game isn't that amazing, most people aren't even going to even try it, let alone pay $50. They'll want to pay a lower price since they won't be spending much time on it. If you make it free, then lots of people will be willing to give it a chance, good or bad. If you can do ads or in-game shit then you can milk the people who do like the game for as much cash as possible.
I think the biggest problem with F2P games now is that there are too many of them. If we assume that F2P games are not as well produced and polished as non-free games, they are less worth your time. The people who are going to play them are people with more free time and less money.
That's a lot of punk kids playing the game for free. You can't get $50 each from them, but maybe you can get $5 each and make bank. In the olden days when there were few F2P games you could get a gigantic number of players on it. Now there are so many F2P games, that any individual game has a vary hard time getting that same gigantic volume of players.
Even I played Ragnarok online for a couple weeks when it first hit the scene. A graphical action MUD for free? ZOMG. Nowadays there are a zillion such games, and they aren't even worth a look. You can pick any one of them to devote your life to. If a new one hits the scene, they're lucky if anyone even notices. Whereas Ragnarok got a huge influx due to their mere existence because they were one of the only games in town.
We're entering a new era of media. Piracy was just the barest tip of the iceberg. The real threat to the industry is not piracy, but ubiquity.
Every piece of media today must compete with the entire human history of art.
Making a jumping 2D platformer? You're competing with Super Meat Boy, Super Mario Brothers 3, and Donkey Kong. You're also competing with Citizen Kane, The Lord of the Rings novels, 46 odd Superbowls, and Youtube.
No one was every truly afraid of piracy. Not in the big media. They were afraid of a democratized creation and distribution market. They were afraid of VHS tapes that never wore out. They were afraid of everyone in the world already owning a copy of Star Wars.
Piracy is nothing compared to the collected wealth of 40,000 years of human evolution and expression.
It's long tail economics. If you can get a following of a few hundred thousand people playing your cheapass game consistently and support their community then you'll make money. You just won't get rich. Didn't Scrym have a whole thing about communities and games? Yup, even the "good" F2P games only convert people into paying cusotmers about 3-4% of the time. As long as you can manage the "HUEHUEHUE" effect you want as many punk kids playing as possible.
Suck part is when you join and find out the difference between total and active users.
If his thesis is "game play first, narrative second, and where possible express by doing" that's great. He does not get that point across particularly well though.