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Are Game Consoles Ruining DLC?
A round-table discussion at Gametopius looks into the state of downloadable content for games as it has evolved over the past several years, going from an occasional, welcome supplement to being a common marketing strategy for most of the industry, frequently causing irritation over pricing and availability.
"All of the map packs so far released for the Call of Duty games have been $10 each to download on consoles through closed networks, while PC gamers could download those same packs for free off of FileShack or somewhere else. Valve's own Team Fortress 2 has received a significant amount of DLC that's been completely free on the PC. Xbox owners of the same game, however, have only received perhaps half of that content, and they have had to pay for it in $5 packs. Why is this? The idea of this kind of content delivery was scarcely heard of on consoles, so console gamers see no reason not to pay for it. But on the PC, these amounts of content are usually just considered parts of patches. Furthermore, why pay for a few extra maps and costumes when modders are making and offering new ones for free all the time?"
I'd attribute this to a difference in intended audiences between consoles and the PC. Consoles tend to go for the lowest common denominator, whereas PCs have this remarkable ability to get everyone on board for something or other. Consoles have a proprietary system for publishing games, whereas with PCs you can go the normal route of publishing hard copies, or a paid digital distribution, or a free one. Consoles can only connect to one service, that of the console maker's choosing. PCs can do anything you can really imagine doing with electronics. Console users pay for a console, pay for each game, and have this "drop in the DVD and play" interface, whereas on a computer you have a much more complex, full featured one. Consoles are largely locked into what they are when they're produced; PC's are ever-changing, expandable, upgradeable, extensible, versatile machines. Consoles are a toy; PCs are a tool. Is it really a surprise that consoles pay for shit that PC users don't?
Whenever Valve or any other company wants to release DLC on the Xbox 360 or PS3, they have to pay either Microsoft or Sony to certify the content. They charge gamers to make up for the cost of this certification.
Of course, the fact that gamers will pay for downloadable content on consoles is certainly a good reason by itself...
Simple. Stop paying for it.
If people pay money for something, that's because they think it's worth that money (eBay syndrome). If you get "more" for free on the PC, use a PC.
Take that, you console-owning-PC-haters! :>
Life is too good to waste... Read!
That's what you get when you buy a console, or console games.
Think about it. The console is a much better business proposal for a company. Stable platform to develop against, and it's locked down so the can charge for all the extra stuff you would get on a PC for free. If you make the mistake of stepping into their preferred market (i.e. consoles) you get what you asked for. Whether or not you thought about it in advance (or at all) is your problem. Learn to think like a big corporation and you will no longer be surprised or disappointed by them.
What really aggravates me is when game studios/publishers for consoles announce that DLC is going to be available and when it is coming out before the game is ever released! C'mon, guys -- don't rape us and force us to watch. Include the content in the game rather than releasing it later. Or, better yet, let us delete maps/non-needed extras from our game to trade out for other DLC.
Some people speculate that console DLC madness is the reason Left 4 Dead 2 is being released as a new game instead of as DLC for the original.
Consoles are a closed system where the owners have little choice about where they get content (sure, you can hack the firmware, but only a small fraction of owners will), PCs are an open system where owners can get content from all over. It's hardly surprising that users of closed systems get screwed.
This is why every tech company wants to own a closed system.
Lowering the price based on the number sold isn't a good idea. That essentially caps what a game company can make off of a given game.
Oh, and your 15 cent discount will go far. Use it well.
Perhaps it's time for a "bill of rights" supported by a special interest group to advocate what is fair and what isn't. Gaming has become a multi billion dollar market and has repeated the same content distribution mistakes as other types of media. When you buy into a console market, you are essentially committing all of your loyalty at once, with the expectation of fractional returns in service and quality over time. Everything that goes on that platform passes through the approval process of the console manufacturer, opening the opportunity to be nickle and dimed. With a PC, if a pub or dev doesn't take care of you by charging accordingly for product support or add-ons, there are alternatives that don't invalidate the hardware.
DLC is supposed to give to console gamers what we the PC gamers have. Stuff made by entusiast to enhance already good games with more maps, game modes, textures, models, etc..
Since that stuff can't be freely installed in a console, because a console is locked down hardware, to give that cool stuff companies make that stuff thenselves and need to sell it.
DLC is the DRM version of Modding.
-Woof woof woof!
A lot of companies announce DLC for a game right after, or even before it was released. Buy doing this they hope people will not trade in the game, and thus reduce the number of second hand copies that are available.
Prince of Persia Epilogue: Not available at all for PC.
Overlord's Raising Hell: came out on PC months late, through a very crappy channel
Overlord 2's DLC I dont think its even available for PC yet?
It depends on the game type. FPSs and stuff tend to be much more popular on PC, but DLC for other game types is often console exclusive, or at least tends to favor consoles by a lot.
I think the console manufacturer should take it one step further. Not only should it be disclosed that "your online game experience may vary" but they should also mention on the outside of the console package that "additional downloadable game content may incur a cost" and consider including a way to uninstall it for a full or partial refund.
Include the content in the game rather than releasing it later.
Are you implying that publishers should delay releasing the game until all the DLC is finished? Are you further implying that publishers of music games like Rock Band, which depend on underlying works licensed from third parties, should increase the retail price of their products to cover the royalty payments?
Consoles are generally used by richer people (children and adults) who, in addition to owning a computer, can afford to own consoles too (people who own consoles, in all likelihood, own computers before they own consoles).
There's a difference between owning a computer, singular, and owning computers, plural. A family of four may own one computer and one console. But unlike a console, a computer is probably not connected to a large monitor. So when one player is playing on a console, the other players can pick up controllers and join in, but when one player is playing on a computer, the others have to sit and wait. The way most PC games' multiplayer modes work, one would have to buy four PCs and four copies of each game in order to play the same game that one console, one copy of the game, and three extra controllers allow.
Think of it this way:
If every single PC user of Team Fortress 2 was already part of an online 'e-tail' content delivery system with their credit cards hooked up to it, etc, then it would be much, much more likely that they try to release it only on that delivery method. As it is, that is really only found on consoles.
So, there you have it?
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
If the console manufaturer charges the dev and they pass that cost on to the consumer to recoup the cost, I suggest the dev take responsibility for the cost. Include a discount to promote future purchases and maintain loyalty. As I said elsewhere ("Console Bill Of Rights") the consumer is pretty much stuck after the purshase of the unit. It's not like they can use another service if they disagree with the status quo. Gamers need a special interest group to weigh in for them and insist on balanced service. If the system works by purchasing points and spending them through the MS or Sony storefront, your options are already limited. Why not include more tiered pricing for minimal and bulk bonus content and essential patch downloads. Include a refund option that returns points to the gamer within a deadline after purchase.
Every game I've played with DLC has had incremental bug fixes free. I'm pretty sure I'd take up pitchforks to any game dev that wanted cash to fix bugs they made.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Because the market supports it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Something I've never understood about paying for DLC: If you've already purchased the video game, why would you want to pay more money for something that's not equivalent to what your paying?
On game consoles, the average just-released console game costs $60 (I believe the extra $10 is for licensing fees with the console manufacturer). Your average DLC pack costs $10 on Xbox Live or PlayStation Network. So your paying 17% of the original game's cost, but are you getting an extra 17% of a game? In many cases (Call of Duty...), your not.
Meh, it doesn't concern me though: I don't own a game console. Unfortunately, however, some companies have recently asked the question: If console gamers are willing to spend $60 on a game, why wouldn't PC gamers?
PC gamers purchased that PC. Often at thousands of dollars -- mine's just over $7K including the 30" LCD. When I purchase a game, I purchase the game.
Consoles don't cost thousands of dollars. Most consoles cost $300ish. The idea of the console industry is to lose money on the consoles and make it up on the games. So the game publishers pay the console makers. No one pays the PC makers except the person buynig the PC.
Lately, DLC has been an excellent way to make the games cheaper, because there is further revenue to be had on the DLC later on.
Remember, someone has to pay for that $1000 console. Congrats on paying the first $300 yourself. The next $700 used to come as $20 from the $60 games. Now it comes as $15 from the $40 games, and $5 from the DLC. Big surprise.
Stop wanting things for free. If consumers would look at things from the other side, things could be very different. Instead of wanting things cheaper, why don't you try to fund your favourite company, by paying larger prices, so that they have the money to build better things, and can then charge less for better. You don't want the same for less money, you want better for the same money.
But hey, most of my friends spend $20 per month on satelite radio. Because "it's a fine deal, for loads of content, blah blah blah". They forget that if they add up all of their entertainment dollars -- radio, television, internet, movies, restaurants, games, sports, et cetera -- there isn't enough time in the month to get the full value of all the money spent. It's not that satelite radio isn't worth $20/month. It's that television plus radio isn't worth $100/month.
But consumers are too busy budgetting dollars to know how to budget value. I find it interesting.
My thoughts is that PC DLC would be pirated immensely. Also, since distribution is distributed, you don't incur massive bandwidth costs. WoW does bittorrent type patches, for most other games it's mirrored on a dozen sites. Marginal cost to the developer.
With consoles, you have to pay to get certified, and this includes any bugfixes you release. While the cost of DLC certification may be marginal, as someone else pointed out (Just assume $1 out of the 5 that DLC costs), you still have to certify all your patches, which are given for "free." DLC works to pad their expenditures in other areas in order to sell more copies.
Also, you can't really pirate the DLC from a closed network, so it's guaranteed that people pay for it. With every person that purchases DLC, you lock them into owning your game. If they bought it second hand, you now got revenue that you wouldn't have otherwise. If they bought it new, paying for DLC ensures they won't get rid of it, otherwise their DLC purchase will have gone to waste. Less used copies floating around.
[citation needed]
You do get a discounted price, in the form of added value. Since we're on the topic of Steam, let's talk about that. Yes for the same price you can get the game on disk, but with the disk version do you get free updates forever? This is non-trivial; a huge part of the TF2 experience is the regular patches adding new content and tweaking the game. Check out the release notes for just Thursday's update. This isn't even a class update! Also you can leverage your
to download your games anywhere you want, as many times as you want, without carrying around a library of DVDs with you. You get further value added through community features too that you typically don't get from just buying a disk. Steam community lets you IM your Steam friends, see what game they're playing, join them on that server, join groups with similar interests, join group chat, see what your group-members are playing and join them, see gameplay stats for friends and groupmates.. and you can get screen-corner notifications if you want for a friend joining a game, or a group announcement, or a friend request.. and not only from the Steam application but also from the steam overlay app which can be brought up over any game.. these features cost money to maintain, and you get them for free.
More stuff is free on the PC because more stuff is routinely copied and shared. They know that by giving certain things away, they are securing a customer for other things that are not free. With the game consoles, copying and sharing is a bit more of a challenge and so it is less frequent and common. They have their markets more tightly controlled and therefore the market will bear more.
What I'd like to know is, why haven't we PC gamers received the Grand Theft Auto 4 DLC - The Lost and the Damned? We're still waiting.
Since I am downloading the game, why shouldn't I get a discounted price?
Not only do they not offer a discounted price for buying online, Valve traditionally charges more--see L4D, and pretty much any other game offered on Steam. Although after a period of time there's usually sales for the online store, but I'm pretty sure there's sales in real stores as well. Supposedly this is to make places like EB and Best Buy happy, so Valve doesn't seem to be directly competing against the retailers.
People are stupid and willing to get screwed. Its that simple.
I completely agree with those four points : Small independent games, modding communities, Emulations, Abandonware and better graphics/performance after a short while. Wait... that's five points ...
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
Being a PC gamer of many years, I wouldn't complain about PC gamers having the advantage. It seems that gaming companies are giving up on the PC as a gaming platform and releasing buggy games to us now as an afterthought. So while we may be able to get DLC, your game at least works when you put the disk in the drive.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
Amongst its strong points are such diverse elements as: small indie gamges, modding communities, emulation, abandonware, better performance and nice fancy cases. Oh forget it, I'll come in again.
Even a decent gaming PC shouldn't cost you much more than $1200 these days.
That can be misleading; see my other comment.
There is no "should" or "shouldn't". There's what gamers will pay for and what they won't. And gamers haven't shown a lot collective intelligence in demanding anything.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
DLC is ruining sales of games on consoles, at least as far as I can see.
On the PS2, it was pretty simple: The game was $40-50 new, or you could wait a year or so and buy it for $20 as a Greatest Hits release. Either way, you got the same game. Buying new, you'd pay $50 up front, play the game, sell it for $15-20, overall cost $35. Buying Greatest Hits, you'd buy for $20, sell for $10-15, overall cost $5-10. With buying the game at release costing you maybe $20 more overall, it often made sense to buy games on release day.
On the PS3, the game is released new for $60. A couple of DLC packs are released for $10 each. Then after a year or two, the entire game plus the DLC packs is released as a Game Of The Year Edition for $30. So if you buy new, you pay $60 + $20, but by the time you sell the game second hand it's worth $20 at best because of the GOTY edition at $30, so your overall cost is $60. Buy later, and you get the entire game plus add-ons for $30, resell for $20, overall cost $10. So now suddenly it costs $50 more to buy on release day than to buy and play later.
So basically, there's now a major financial incentive to wait for the Game Of The Year edition which has the DLC bundled in. For instance, I was considering buying Red Faction. However, I just saw on the PSN store that the first DLC has been released for $10. So now, I'd much rather wait and buy the whole thing in a year or two for $30.
Ultimately, I think the game companies are shooting themselves in the feet by penalizing early purchasers to this extent. I wonder if this might be why PS3 and Xbox 360 game sales have been down.
And if we're talking Valve, the way they've treated Xbox 360 owners is nothing compared to how they've fucked PS3 owners. There's no DLC for TF2 on the PS3 at all; we haven't even seen any of the fixes for the initial maps, which means that games tend to be ruined by glitchers. (Yeah, I know the "It's up to EA" excuse, but it's Valve's decision to let EA decide release policy, so ultimately they're still responsible.)
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Because you're locked into only being able to use content that the console dev specifically wants you to have access to, meaning they make the rules, and if they want you to pay for DLC, then you have to pay for DLC. It could be the same with the PC (after all, Fallout 3 DLC also comes from Microsoft through GFWL) but that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be the same.
If you don't like having to pay for DLC, then bitch to Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. They're the ones making you pay for it. Don't whine about PC users not getting similarly screwed, because Valve and company control their own destinies on this platform and they're reaping the benefits of not being complete douchebags about it.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
I respectfully disagree. Owning a computer and owning a gaming computer are two different things. I would argue the less financially off would order the cheapest computer he/she can for e-mail/surfing/facebook/etc. and a game console that can possibly play dvds or other media up to the tv. The less well off only want to buy one system that works and doesn't have to be upgraded.
open source sub sim. I might start coding again for this. http://dangerdeep.sourceforge.net/contribute/
Let's modify this a bit. Consoles are generally used by casual gamers, who own a computer but don't use it for gaming because they likely have neither the time nor the patience to learn how to game on it. Otherwise, why pay another huge sum of money for a gaming platform when you already have a gaming platform that can run just about anything? No, they buy consoles because they're idiots. They don't want to learn the system, they just want to play the games. Convenience comes at a cost, and they're fine with that cost up until finding out that those of us who bothered to learn how to game on PCs don't necessarily have to pay for the same content that they do.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
I'd rather have the convenience of choosing any control setup, with any controllers, than have the convenience of plug-and-play. 5 minutes of setup for a better 20-hour experience is worth it.
Well, that's riotously offensive.
Your sig sucks and so does mine. Now watch my videos.
, they tend to know that $10 is way overpriced for 3 maps
What should a map cost? Do you know how long it takes to make a good one? One sunny afternoon I bet, right? Jesus.
The reason they are free on PC's is because preventing piracy would be nearly impossible. This is why for the most part, you only have free third party content, done by hobbyists.
For all they know, it takes a team of 50 people a month to make a map.
WOW, that is what it would take for you to pay $10? 50 people working for a month, and you'd pay a measly $10. So what, you get to decide where the publisher's break even point is now? You decide how many units must be shipped before someone is allowed to make a profit? What the fuck makes you feel so privileged?
We pay a dollar for a few cents worth of soda, but paying $10 for something that took a handful of designers a few months is outrageous, it should be free?
. They might not have ever even played a game on a computer other than solitaire,
So you belittle people who use consoles, and feel entitled to free content for PC games.. just because.
Console players tend not to be as well versed as PC gamers in anything relating to electronics.
You know jack shit about designing game content. Mind explaining how that's related to electronics? No, don't, you're fucking retarded and you don't have an explanation.
Where do people like you come from? Have you had a lobotomy?
Theres a new type of DLC on game consoles that many people dont know about and its practice is becoming frequently used... Its basically where all the contents of the game and dlc are ALREADY on the game disc. but force you to pay to unlock new things that are fully on the disc... Some examples of this are Soul calibur 4... Darth vader(ps3) and yoda(xbox) were console exclusives xbox and ps3 however the code for them was fully on the disc along with all the costume packs and everything else. ALL OF IT WAS ON THE DISC when you bought it. yet they charged 5 bucks each for all the unlocks.
does a 4 map pack, *really* need to be priced for $10?
Does the next life in an arcade game REALLY need to cost $.50?
Apparently so, because enough people pay it.
When^H^H^H^HIf people stop buying it, it will drop to $4.99, then $2.99, watch.
Next up:
I don't want to pay a premium for lakeside view, because I hate water.
Followed by:
I demand my $.95 back because this soda only cost Coca Cola $.00X to produce.
Indeed, and there are quite a few console exclusive games that could not be considered casual games. Also consider that some games like DDR, guitar hero, Smash Bros., etc. can be played either casually or not so casually. The expert levels on some of those games are at least as difficult as expert difficulty is some more traditional genres.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
Then why's it such a big deal in the first place? You own a console, you pay for content, and when more content is released, you pay for that too. It's the nature of the platform, and you damn well knew that when you bought the console in the first place. Just like with the PC, you damn well know that you can get, for free, just about anything that rivals what you'd have to pay for, even operating systems, and no one entity controls everything that you have access to. Again, it's the nature of the platform. So I'll ask you again, why is this such a big deal in the first place? Why all the whining over having to pay for DLC on consoles and not on PCs? Isn't that the tradeoff for paying a fraction of what a PC costs up-front?
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
Whoa there. The predictable hardware and software base with a console may be an asset to its stability and overall ease of use, but it is by no means ironclad. Have you ever played Quake 4 on the Xbox 360, for example? Terrible frame rate. I don't have any consoles, but some of my friends do, and they're always complaining about how game X has some bug that prevents them from getting to the next level, or how their save got corrupted.
When a game is buggy on a PC, there is sometimes a community-made patch to fix it, or a modified config file you can download to solve it. If it's a hardware or software problem on your end, you have at least some chance of addressing it yourself.
With a console, you put in the disc, and it either works or it doesn't. You can't upgrade it or tweak detailed configuration settings.
And there are quite a few PC-exclusive games that can be considered casual games. So what? The point is not whether the games are casual versus non-casual, it's whether the consoles themselves are casual versus non-casual. You sit on a couch in front of a television to use a console. Not necessarily so with a PC. You play games on a console, and that's pretty much it. Not necessarily so with a PC. You pay a small up front cost to get the console. Not necessarily so with a PC. You're stuck with whatever content the designer of the console wants you to have access to. Not necessarily so with a PC. You are trading functionality and freedom for convenience, and convenience always comes with an attached price tag.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
I realize there's some bad DLC, but you're not forced to buy it. The expansion pack to Pixel Junk Monsters was definitely worth $5, and I wish I could actually sell back many of the songs that came with Rock Band, and replace them with downloaded ones. Would I have paid $500 for Rock Band so it could included all the tracks I have now? No. The DLC was a selling point.
That said, I don't see the point of buying costumes for Little Big Planet, but apparently someone does. I think it would be wise to differentiate DLC that is essentially a patch, vs. DLC that adds to the game.
I could quote a study that compared gaming consoles owned to the job of the main earning member of the family. Problem is, it was taken by a print magazine in Pakistan (where I live), and I couldn't refer you to it. But I admit I may be wrong to generalize it for the rest of the world, particularly US.
Life is too good to waste... Read!
Since we're on the topic of Steam, let's talk about that. Yes for the same price you can get the game on disk, but with the disk version do you get free updates forever? This is non-trivial; a huge part of the TF2 experience is the regular patches adding new content and tweaking the game.
If you buy a Valve game like TF2 on disc, then yes, you do get free updates forever. The disc only saves you from having to download the game in the first place: once it's installed, it's just like a copy from Steam. But, in the stores I've checked, you'll pay around 50% more for a boxed copy of The Orange Box than if you just downloaded it from Stream.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
What games are you playing that need five minutes of setup? Hardest to setup in my experience are race sims and setting up my wheel. That takes a couple of minutes at best.
Flight sims, with my analog stick, about the same.
anyone familiar with this?:
http://futureoftheinternet.org/
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Yes for the same price you can get the game on disk, but with the disk version do you get free updates forever?
Yes. Of course, you got free updates forever on PC games even before Steam existed, but you do realize that you can register retail CD keys on Steam, right? Upon doing so you get the exact same functionality as with the digitally distributed version, but with the bonus of an official hard-copy of the game. There's no reason for games to be the same price on Steam as they are at retail besides the fact that the publishers can get away with it.
Rob
As I said higher up, I don't mind paying if it adds something to the game, like Big Surf Island in Burnout Paradise.
But you get situations like Resident Evil. I think there was some DLC on release day to unlock something that was very clearly already on the disk. Lot of people got mad about that but, as always, the furore dies down and it returns to business as usual.
The problem is not whining. It's complacency. People get annoyed, angry, "I won't stand for this" and then after a few days it'll be situation normal and the business of gouging the player continues without so much as a word.
It only happens because the customer lets it happen. Want to see evidence? Go check out Xbox Live.
The new update that dropped on the 11th lets you buy, as in pay hard currency for, outfits and items for your avatar. Already in games like 1 vs 100 I'm seeing folk who have these new outfits. Outfits that cost 400 Microsoft Points. (Around $5 or so, depending on where you are in the world.)
If you ever needed graphic proof of people having more money than sense, there you go. These people are absolute morons, buying virtual clothes for a virtual character with REAL money!
even though I use my XBox for gaming a lot more than my PC lately, I still consider PC gaming superior.
Modding will always be king, and until consoles open up and stop their ridiculous notion of content control, PCs will always be the superior option. And as PCs continue to be smaller, cheaper, and more connected, they'll eventually knock consoles right back where they belong- why have a console if you can send wireless video to your TV just as easily?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Strategy games is also another strong point. I wouldn't play Supreme Commander on a gamepad.
Not only do you have to pay for downloadable content but that's on top of having a Gold membership for multi-player content.
No one seems to want to admit it but the business model that Microsoft employs for console gaming is seriously flawed. Sony's is a little better because at least you get onto the network for free.
Microsoft brags about their success but what they don't mention is that they need to over charge you for accessories (ie wifi adapters and hardrives) and they need to charge you for any little thing you do online.
One reason the 360 has no browser (and mouse / keyboard) is to stop them from being accused of trying to make their own closed PC. But I suspect the other reason for a lack of a browser (and therefore a lesser experience than all other consoles online) is to keep the system as closed as possible so they can nickel and dime you to death all so they can eek out tiny profits which they've only just started to do recently.
The Wii is the cheapest system all around and part of the reason for that is because Nintendo makes a profit on the hardware. They don't need to fuck you about to make up for selling unprofitable hardware. The Wii also has a browser which gives you access to free browser-based games. They do charge you to download new games from their shop but that's understandable imo and even then you get to earn points from buying games which result in free games to download. This is despite the fact their games are cheaper and yet they're still making money hand over fist.
The old system, which MS works under, doesn't work well when every system has some success. It relies pretty much on there only being one big success per generation to make great profits. Had Sony not cocked up in a few areas it would probably be worse for both them and MS with numbers being more evenly divided.
It's only going to get worse and that's why they want to move out of physical sales and into downloadable games. It'll make it much easier for them to jerk us around even more.
Of course it's complacency. PC users don't stand for this shit, because they know they have alternatives. If you don't want to pay for content that should've been in the game in the first place, then you're probably going to pirate it despite whatever protections the publishers think are going to prevent that from happening. They're slowly wising up to this: companies like Valve, Bioware and Stardock release updates/"DLC" for free on the PC knowing damn well that it's going to generate more interest in the core game, equaling more game sales.
Owning a gaming PC might be considered graphic proof of having more money than sense, at least until you start seeing just how fickle PC gamers are when it comes to what games they're buying and WHY they're buying those games. Console gamers, despite the argument that consoles are cheaper, will inevitably demonstrate that they'll buy just about anything available on the service because they're starved for content and don't realize (or care) just how hard they're getting screwed.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
I wouldn't play Supreme Commander on a system with specs as outdated as a 360 or PS3. Hell, I had trouble convincing myself to play SupCom on a PC until I splurged on computer hardware that's way overkill for what the game requires.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
Hey, wow, adding new chunks of content that are half the size of the original game for free sounds like a GREAT business proposition! Yeah, those console releases suck for wanting to be paid for something that took ~50-60 people several months to make!
Plus, we would've gotten tons of stuff for free from modders working for love if we had the PC version! ...so basically, "PC users are really really cheap" is the message I get from this piece.
egypt urnash minimal art.
If you go to The Sims 3 website and look at some DLC that was user generated and do the math on the costs in euros for say a colored funiture set... well, then you head over to the piratebay or whatever and download the extra's instead. Or stay legal and use pure-user created content from free sites that do NOT charge 10 dollars for a funiture set.
The problem is greed. The first sign is the POINTS system. Don't matter what you call them, they exist for one reason alone, to hide the dollar/euro cost.
There is NOT a single other reason for them, you can just say this DLC costs 10 dollars and not 2000 M$ (MS dollars).
BUT then it would be far to clear just how bloody expensive DLC is.
It wouldn't be so bad if DLC were like the old school expansions but often they are nothing more then an extended patch. Some extra maps, maybe a quests that didn't make it into the main game.
Take the DLC for recent Bioware games like Kotor and Mass Effect. It is nice but barely a fraction of the original gameplay, so why is its price NOT a fraction of the full price?
Mostly it is pure greed. Not just by the game publishers but by the console owners. ALL the console companies LOVE the idea of the media-center. They have a wet dream of the consumer hooked into their grid for their entertainment with their wallet hooked up as a constant infusion of cash. Watch a show, pay. Play a game, pay. Download a trailer, pay. Listen to music, pay. Download a ringtone, pay. Watch an ad, pay. It is the dream behind the AOL and all the portal ISP's that dreamed of selling you every bit of content and it is the dream of Sony (why do you think a hardware company has a media division?) and MS (MSNBC, X-box, media-center etc etc) and to a lesser extent Nintendo (they don't want to sell you media, just games).
The console companies are VASTLY different from the PC companies. You will NEVER see a console company release old titles for free just for the hell of it. It is not the way they work. The console companies and those that produce for them are USED to demand payment for everything and get paid for everything. Think just how odd it is that a game publisher has to pay a console company to be allowed to produce a game for its platform. That would be like the canned anchovy company having to pay the frozen pizza companies to be allowed to release their product. Decal makers to pay car manufacturers.
But that is the way consoles work and it is the reason that console owners pay often a HIGHER price for their games despite the fact that the producer saves himself a fortune for not having to test it on a hundred different configurations. Console owners pay the price for the system that allows consoles makers to reap fast profits on all fronts.
Remember, ID does NOT make a profit when their game forces you to upgrade your PC to the next generation. But Sony does make money if you upgrade your PS2 to a PS3 to play the latest EA game that EA is already paying them for. That is a nice deal!
The problem is that console makers have little choice. They picked a format that is produced by companies that want to milk every last cent from them.
PC gamers are on the whole not going to put up for it. We pay more for our hardware but expect a different attitude from our suppliers. So far it seems clear that a LOT of publishers understand this and we get the silly situation that Console owners pay MORE for their games, have to pay for any DLC and not get any user-made content while PC owners pay LESS for their games, get DLC for free and tons of free content made users.
It would be a real tragedy. If I owned a console.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Developers are starting to omit game content just to sell it back to you after the original purchase, increasing the total cost for the full experience. This also allows for deceptive pricing tactics.
Twinstiq, game news
As it stands, Team Fortress on the Xbox 360 is nothing but a demo. I bought the Orange box for the 360 when it came out. I still consider it a good deal for the Half Life series and Portal but in the case of Team Fortress I felt like an idiot for the endless updates and addons available for free on the PC version. I learned my lesson and got steam, had to re purchase TF2 but the advantage is that I can play it in any computer and after testing the new enviromets, I am afraid that the xbox 360 can't handle the demanding levels of physics and graphics of Team Fortress 2. Even with a limited number of players, xbox always looks laggy and the new maps are bigger and more complex. So the lesson here is that multiplayers from valve will ALWAYS be better on the pc, other non multiplayer titles like Mass Effect, Bioshock, or GTA with occasional updates are ok on the 360.
Maybe he was referring to the large spew of console ports to the PC rescently, the last few I've tried have been pretty good but some are down right awful.
I got pretty used to the config files of the Unreal engine (since that's what most of them seemed to use), a lot of the time it was probably easier or only possible to change keys through the config files directly.
But most of the ports wern't even worth playing to be honest.
And WHY on earth has Slashdot stopped allowing line breaks with pure text, and ignoring the BR tag when I change it to HTML coding >:C
I don't know where you can legally require the Windows installation needed to play most PC games. Or where you can legally acquire games for free. Especially the ones not even released on the PC. Or the controllers.
Well, if a console game performs poorly, it's pretty much going to perform poorly on everyone's machine uniformly. It means the developers / publishers knowingly shipped a sub-par game, and should get appropriately slammed in reviews. Likewise, if they shipped a game with crashing bugs, that means that they can't really blame any configuration issues or unstable drivers that they never tested.
So, no, nothing in life is "ironclad" guaranteed, except death and taxes. But overall, it's much easier deliver a stable, well-performing game on the consoles than on the PC (having developed games for both).
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I'm not sure where he starts counting, but it's easily over 5 minutes. If he's starting at installation, you can easily lose 15 minutes right there (though, fortunately, most well-designed installers are closer to 5, and usually even less than that). If he's counting from first boot, I usually have to go through all of the available options. Default graphics options are nowhere near as high as my system can comfortably handle, and most "automatically detect best settings" buttons fall short of what I can handle, too. The sound options usually default to low-quality stereo, so that needs boosting to high-quality surround. Minor gameplay changes, like enabling subtitles (seriously, why aren't they default?) and then going through and making sure the default controls don't suck, or changing them such that they don't. It's a lot of little things, but I find that they add up to about 5 minutes for most of my own installations.
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
Of course, on the flip side I'd point out the endless Sims add-on packs which choke the top positions of the PC gaming sales charts, despite the fact that there are large communities modding clothing, furniture etc for the game.
Between the falling angel and the rising ape
Or even - is DLC ruining Console Games?
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
For PS3 and 360, it takes about as long to install the games as it does on a computer. I was going for how long from main menu > options menu > all options the way I want > game started. For graphics, I usually hit their highest default level, and max everything, taking about a minute. Audio is usually only about one or two dropdowns to set up, and it's much faster than graphics. Controls I actually don't set up (most of them) until after I'm in-game, as it's hard to tell what exactly you need to have on-hand. Granted, WSAD is going to be handy. But, for example, in Aion I severely underestimated how useful having the spread and fold wings buttons very handy would be. I ended up putting them on the two side buttons on my mouse by my thumb (G5), but I couldn't have known about that until I actually played.
Pfft, when I was a kid we used to get up off our lazy gaming asses, get jobs, and buy our own rigs and games.
When you were a kid, there probably weren't strict regulations against child labor. What kind of job should a kid take over summer vacation?
In other words, get off my lawn!
Don't tell that to the kid mowing your lawn.
I'd say that by now pretty much all PCs have an analog TV-out.
My ASUS laptop didn't have an S-Video output. Neither did my cousin's Acer laptop or my boss's Dell desktop. What do these have in common? Intel GPUs, which show up in a lot of entry-level PCs. There is a fairly easy way to connect a PC's VGA out to a TV, but it involves a $40 adapter that is neither sold in stores nor advertised in the mainstream media.
I agree that most people probably don't have their PCs connected to the TV, but that's not because anything is preventing that.
Then what is preventing home theater PCs from becoming more popular?
As for controllers, most fighting or sports games (basically, the only genres that aren't a huge pain to play with more people) support more than one controller.
But there are plenty of multiplayer console games other than sport sims. What PC game would you recommend for fans of games like Mario Kart (4-player cartoon racing), Smash Bros. (4-player platform fighting), or the various 4-player minigame collections on Wii?
If they don't that's just a design choice on the side of the developers, and not a limitation of the platform.
If a given design choice is a limitation of the vast majority of games on a platform, then it's a de facto limitation of the platform.
Look, if you don't like what they're offering, or the price they're asking for it, or the terms under which their offer is extended, exercise your ultimate power.
Don't buy it.
If you REALLY don't like it, personally blacklist all products from that maker.
You have ALL the power. You just have to have the fortitude to exercise it.
With HDMI the connection issue is a thing of the past, you nowadays can hook up a PC to a HDTV without quality loss and computer monitors also become bigger over time (26 inch is quite cheap nowadays)
But I agree one machine multiplayer is not previvalent like it is on the console, but it exists.
But it is not as dominant on consoles either, it is mostly on sports titles and racers, and if you can find those titles on the PC you have the one machine multiplayer mode as well. Most console shooters do not have split screen multiplayer either.
I really don't have a problem with DLC....most of the time. For burnout paradise the developers gave us quite a lot of DLC for free. It was only recently that they started charging for it. Things like big surf island are worth the money. You can see that it was made after listening to what people would actually want in a DLC. It really pisses me off though when DLC adds a "feature" to the game that to be honest should have been present from the start. Its almost like as if that the feature had already been present on the disk but you had to pay extra to unlock it.
Owning a gaming PC might be considered graphic proof of having more money than sense, at least until you start seeing just how fickle PC gamers are when it comes to what games they're buying and WHY they're buying those games.
But then you look again, and see how much they spend on hardware, despite them being gamers, and games are software. So, rather than pay for what they love, they'd rather pay some completely unrelated hardware company, rather than the software companies that make their beloved games.
Somehow, I don't think that's going to work out so well for them.
... and then they built the supercollider.
L4D2 will not use a new engine. Will use the very old now Source engine.
Valve need to retire this engine, and create a new one (Source 2)?, because Source is starting to look outdated.
I hate wen people "invent" new engines just to promote a game.
Here is my quake family tree:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Quake_-_family_tree.svg
--Tei
-Woof woof woof!
From my point of view, large-footprint downloadable content for console-based games is both lazy and deceptive on the part of game publishers. Game consoles aren't generally designed for long-term storage of files in excess of a few megabytes per game. In the past, such content would have been packaged and sold as sequels. Nowadays, the publishers are foregoing the work and expense involved in manufacturing physical copies in favor of downloads tied to a single system.
Don't be fooled by the arguments that this is done solely to get the game out the door sooner and into eager players hands. Instead, DLC is merely the first stage in bringing modern game consoles in line with the phantom's locked-down digital only approach to game distribution. Next, we got smaller download-only games (Virtual Console, PSN, XBLA) to test the waters with content tied to the user. That was followed by publishers working in "exclusive" content included on the disc of new games but accessible only once by the original buyer via codes obtained from the retailers... again, tied to the user. Now, we're entering the fourth stage... full retail games repackaged as downloads at a "budget discount"... but still tied to the user.
There's only two stages left until we're fully in line with the phantom... simultaneous release of new retail games as downloads, followed by download only releases of new, big-budget titles.
This is all an elaborate effort to stamp out the used game market by making the only "used" games valueless "digital" copies tied directly to the user with no option to transfer ownership later on... all done under the guise of "added value" and "convenience".
Enjoy it now if you want, but just remember where that money all disappeared to a few years down the road, where having physical copies of those titles could be saving your ass from a night in a cardboard box.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Microsoft have recently released an update for their Live service on the 360. This update allows you to buy 'clothes' and 'themes' for your avatar. That is what I don't understand...so I can get a Quicksilver themed t-shirt for my avatar (with MS spacebucks) and it will cost me?
But...it is just pixels on a screen that look like a Quicksilver logo?? I don't get it, why would I want to pay for that?
Right, plus 8 copies of the game?
Seven of us played Halo the other night. One Xbox, TV and stereo were already on site. Brought the second Xbox and projector in a small bag. Quick to set up and everyone was in the game and killing away. Of those seven, maybe three of us would have laptops and probably two would've had copies of Halo 3. And who can't shoot and turn around at the same time in a console FPS?!
If you don't like it, don't play it - just wake up to the fact that console gaming is popular, there are reasons for that, and that FPSs can still be great fun without a keyboard/mouse combo (hell, for a long time back in the Doom/Quake days I would play without a mouse and generally win games).
Mountain biking is still a popular sport despite the existence of faster and louder motorbikes. *shrug*
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
With HDMI the connection issue is a thing of the past, you nowadays can replace the CRT SDTV in your living room with an HDTV and then hook up a PC to a HDTV
Fixed that for you. The latest numbers state that two-thirds of TVs in U.S. living rooms don't have VGA or HDMI inputs because they were purchased before the late 2000s, when TVs with VGA or HDMI inputs became affordable.
But it is not as dominant on consoles either, it is mostly on sports titles and racers
Would you consider martial arts a sport? If so, what PC fighting game would you recommend for people who like the style of Super Smash Bros. series better than that of Street Fighter series?
Total cost of eight gaming laptops: £8000 (roughly)
Total cost of two 360s and two HDTVs: £1500 (again, roughly)
Control issues in FPS games on consoles are a non-issue, it's the same for everyone and part of the game. On CoD4 for PC you can spin around instantly and aim very precisely, on 360 turning round takes longer. You can argue that one is inherently better than the other but in terms of game balance and fairness, it's a non-issue.
I wish to remain anomalous
It plays quite nicely on my laptop.