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Console Makers Pushing For More Network Reliance

Posted by Soulskill on from the can't-escape-the-cloud dept.

There's a story on Joystiq about the convergence of games consoles and network play, suggesting that the industry is slowly moving away from physical media, preferring the control and simplicity of online distribution. The article points out that Microsoft's Games for Windows Live, despite being relatively unpopular, has seen continued development with an eye toward interacting with Xbox Live. Quoting: "While it's unlikely that the next generation of consoles will completely forgo disc-based media, downloads are quickly becoming a much bigger part of the experience. Some games, such as Rock Band 2 and Gears of War 2, are now shipping with codes for free downloads. This isn't because the publishers like you and want to give you free stuff. It's part of a larger strategy to increase the importance of the online presence, where content can be tightly controlled and decrease the importance of physical media, and thus, used-game sales and rentals."

22 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. Arrrr by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Plus, any online connection forces you to have a legal purchased copy. But that's not part of it at all :)

    1. Re:Arrrr by Thanshin · · Score: 3, Insightful

      > Plus, any online connection forces you to have a legal purchased copy.

      Or a pirated server on the near-by PC.

      Let's go on with the arms race. We'll see if the result pleases them.

    2. Re:Arrrr by FourthAge · · Score: 3, Insightful

      But then, the value of a network is related to the number of people on it.

      You could pirate, say, Left4dead and then play it by yourself or with other pirates. But you can't take your pirated copy and play with everybody else; the legitimate network is closed to you. Your experience of the game is not as good, because there are fewer players. So there is a good reason to pay up: the game is better if you do!

      --
      The tao of democracy: the government you can vote for is not the real government.
    3. Re:Arrrr by zehaeva · · Score: 4, Insightful

      isn't it the position off the game companies that their games are pirated so much that they are loosing most of their sales to pirates? wouldn't that mean the pirate community is larger than the legitimate community? wouldn't that mean you could conceivably have a larger network of people on the pirated version? this applies more to the pc versions of games atm i suppose.

    4. Re:Arrrr by Thanshin · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You can join a pirated server with thousands of players. How many more do you need to play a four players game?

      Your reasoning only really applies to MMORPGs and yet some people play in WOW pirated servers.

    5. Re:Arrrr by Zironic · · Score: 3, Informative

      You seem to be very confused about how cracking the 360 works.

      The way the anti-piracy works is that they burn the game dvd's in a way that can't be done by a home burner and then they tell the dvd drive in the xbox to check for those signs of it being burned by a real burner.

      The crackers get past this by installing new custom firmware on the dvd reader that tells the console that the dvd was industrially burned regardless if it is or not.

      The reason some people get banned from live is that the live server sometimes asks questions regarding the data on the dvd and badly made copies sometimes have missing/bad data.

      The new firmware you speak off isn't actually new firmware, it's a new dvd drive all together that apparently uses millitary technology to make the firmware tamper proof, the current work around is to just install another dvd reader and I suspect the anti-tamper itself will be cracked eventually.

      The game console itself is never involved in this piracy war,, it's all waged in the dvd firmware.

  2. Preferring by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    the control and simplicity of online distribution.
    control and simplicity of online distribution.
    control and simplicity
    control

  3. Makes Sense by johnsie · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Why waste money producing cd's, dvds or whatever when you can sell it online and make a bigger profit. I hardly ever buy physical games or software for my PC, why should it be any different on a console?

    1. Re:Makes Sense by bigman2003 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      So if you had access to all of today's technology, and you were designing a software distribution mechanism....

      You would put the software on little plastic disks that can't be updated after they are written...
      Put those disks in expensive packaging.
      Put those disks on consignment with a company that will truck/fly those disks around the country.
      To other companies that will put the disks on shelves in stores where consumers can buy them (during business hours).

      That doesn't seem very efficient.

      --
      No reason to lie.
    2. Re:Makes Sense by rolfwind · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's not the physical waste, it's power.

      When you sell directly to the customer, you don't have to deal with Walmart/Target/etc who will take a cut of the action, and bend you over when they feel like it. Of course, in this case "you" being Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft who set up the central gateways - it's they who won't have to deal with Walmart/Target as much. The developer still will have to deal with those three. Reminds me of the high cost of cartridges, especially with Nintendo being the only one making them for their console.

      ATM, only PCs and Flash games put the power in the developer's hands.

    3. Re:Makes Sense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      You know, you're right. Downloads are more efficient.

      While we're at it, markets aren't efficient either. Some people might be willing to pay MORE for a product, but due to everyone buying a game for the retail price, our company Looses all that extra money that the person would have been willing to pay (Consumer Surplus). Lets Find some strategy(Price Discrimination) by which we can get all this money! Then we can drive everyone in the primary AND secondary markets out of business, or buy them.(Monopoly)

    4. Re:Makes Sense by MasterOfMagic · · Score: 4, Informative

      I agree with everything you've said, but I have a slight pedantic nitpick.

      Nintendo of America was the only one to produce cartridges for the North American market (not counting unlicensed games). In Japan, several development houses made their own cartridges, and the Famicom Disk System required only a special floppy drive to publish games. NoA adopted this business strategy because they wanted control over what cartridges were published while still encouraging third-party development houses. They felt that uncontrolled development and publication of sub-par third-party games was a major cause of the Video Game Crash of 1983, and wanted to avoid having a second video game crash.

      This hit Konami hard - Nintendo of America's guidelines were to only allow five releases per developer in a calendar year, so in order to publish all of the games that they wanted to market in America, they had to start up an American subsidiary called Ultra Games.

  4. My argument against this by erroneus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Let's have a look at the current broadband availability here and everywhere. Now let's compare that to the people who have these consoles. My guess is that there will be plenty of people that will be left out in all of this. This move obviously presumes nearly 100% broadband availability. That can't be smart.

  5. No thanks by Rik+Sweeney · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've bought a couple of games on the PSN recently and now that I'm done with them, what can I do? Here are my choices:

    1. Leave it to fester on the HDD
    2. Delete it

    Great. What's worse is that a couple of the games I bought turned out to be shit so I can't even trade them for something different.

    Make a subscription service instead if you're going to do this. Here's one way it could work:

    You pay a certain amount each year and the amount you pay determines how many games you can have downloaded at a time and each game have a number of points allocated to it, so you could for example have Braid (1 point) and Bionic Commando (1 point) and Geometry Wars (1 point) or just BioShock (3 points).

    When you're done with the games you can delete them to refund the points.

    Good idea? Bad idea?

    --
    Summation 2
    1. Re:No thanks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If you cannot really buy a game, then it should be called rental service, and that's it. What can be seen currently is that vendors try to keep the client to think he buys the game, while the cut his rights to effectively change it to rent.

    2. Re:No thanks by theaveng · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yep. If you buy a crap game, but can not sell it on ebay to recover your money, then you never truly owned that game. You were just granted a perpetual rental.

      With Cartridge, CD, and DVD games, at least you have something you can physically trade or sell. You OWN it. This past year I've sold off about $4000 worth of my N64, PS1, PS2 game collection. Now imagine if that had been downloaded material instead; I'd be $4000 poorer.

      --
      FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
  6. DLC is online activation for consoles by El_Muerte_TDS · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Just like the activation servers for PC games will disappear in the future, and thereby rendering your game useless, DLC will disappear in the future, and thereby render your console game crippled.

    Requiring online activation/DLC actually means you rent the game, rather than buying it. If you want to replay an old game in the future you probably have to rent the remake of it.

  7. "we don's show a record..." by shadowimmage · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Just wait, The day will come when a great game will be made that everyone will want to play, and the company will 'have no record' of you ever purchasing the game, and make you pay again. And what if someone goes to their summer house, or loses their network connection for a day/week, what will those people do if their machines can't 'verify' the game?? Games need to stay on physical media that can speak to the console for itself, so that everyone can play without worrying about losing their legitimate access. And, where would distribution companies keep information? Your credit card that you used to purchase the game? What if you changed cards? In your account? What if you forgot your account, or it was lost or deleted? What if your hardware to store game purchase info was destroyed/lost/failed, and the information that verified that you were you was there? What I'm saying, is that with a DVD, someone can lose it, but that's their fault. They don't have to worry about any of the scenarios above because they have the physical media and case to prove that they OWN the game. And I totally support trade/sales of used games. What if you had a friend who wanted to borrow a game? You can't just FTP your game to them and have that work...

  8. preferring the control and simplicity of online by theaveng · · Score: 4, Insightful

    TRANSLATION:

    Blocking me from my two favorite activities: (1) Buying a game, playing it, and then selling to someone else to recoup my money. And (2) Buying a game, loving it, and keeping it for the next 10-20 years (classic gaming).

    If things devolve to the point where I have to pay full price (versus my current average of only paying $2-3 per game), or where I have to keep buying/downloading Super Mario 64 every five years, instead of simply buying it once and keeping it forever... ...then I will simply stop gaming.

    This is what the music industry is trying to do with perpetual renting of music rather than letting us OWN the record, cd, whatever. The game industry should not follow that same path.

    --
    FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
  9. They are LYING. by Lumpy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They want internet connected and online distribution for two main reasons.

    1 - it instantly KILLS the secondhand game market. you can no longer buy used games, this drives the price of old games back up to retail levels. no more buying Gears of War for $12.99 used at the local EB or on ebay.

    2 - it eliminates 60% of the cost of a game. Packaging and distribution.

    Game prices will stay the same or go up, your Quality of gaming will go down, and you can no longer buy used games or rent games to try them out.

    That is their goal, everything else is pure BS to make the consumer have buy-in to their plans to screw you over.

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    1. Re:They are LYING. by Jedi+Alec · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You're forgetting another very important reason: game companies can keep up the good old "release first, make it actually work later" schedule. I haven't bought a single game this past year where the final conclusion was: "ok, it's fun to play but buggy, let's put it on the shelf till they can be bothered to patch it". Fallout 3, Mass Effect, Civ4Col, all the same thing.

      --

      People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
  10. And you can't sell that game used by elrous0 · · Score: 4, Informative

    It has long been the dream of the media studios to kill the secondary (used) market for media (music, movies, software, etc.). Now they've finally stumbled upon the perfect solution (ironic that they actually *fought* the idea tooth-and-nail back in the Napster days).

    A sad thing for me, too. I buy most of my console games used at a huge discount online. All you have to do is wait a few months after release and you can get most used games for a fraction of their retail price.

    --
    SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.