Frenetic Pony

Nextbox 1080: The Reckoning

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I bought Bioshock Infinite via retail so I'm not entirely sure the retail market for PC games is 'destroyed'. It was never particularly healthy to begin with, and plenty of people would prefer not to tie up their internet for a day downloading a new release.

 

Isn't that the truth? I thought it was magic when I put Mass Effect 3's disc in my PC, registered the code into Origin, and it installed from the disc. I'm used to having to wait a half-hour before I can play a game that I buy. Of course, I had to wait for the disc to be delivered but I didn't feel like I "owned it" until it came to my door. With digital, the download progress bar is a little more oppressive in my opinion, especially if I'm trying to download it at peak time in my neighborhood when bandwidth narrows by half at times. 

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I used to be pretty big on the idea of having physical cartridges of everything, but I've really come around on digital games lately. I really like the idea of having an always-available digital library and never having to worry about losing cartridges, and the "but digital games won't last forever like cartridges" idea seems silly to me now. Everything ends eventually. Even CDs and cartridges have a limited shelf life. But I feel like those licenses are probably going to be renewed so frequently that it's hard to care about how they'll eventually go away.

 

I agree with you. I don't really have a good argument against digital distribution, I am just particularly fond of having physical stuff. A lot of it probably has to do with the feeling of nostalgia it gives me for my childhood and the wonderment I felt looking at those games with the cool artwork and instruction manuals. There is also something about physically having it that affects me because it is the same physical thing I first played 15 or 20 years ago. For some reason my brain just doesn't process digital content in the same way.

 

I'll come around though. I have no doubt that physical media will go away eventually one way or the other and I don't see a good reason why it shouldn't. I'll be happy as long as I can just have a digital bookshelf to display all my digital games in the same fashion as my physical games. Then I will buy a projector to beam my game collection onto my wall and maybe I can use the futuristic version of Kinect to grab my digital games Minority Report style and float them over to the console to boot them up.

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Since owning my Wii, I've ripped all the games I bought and I'm actually fond of the USB loader's aesthetics. Here's a video of somebody else's collection (I obviously don't have as many games) but it gives you an idea of what a digital game collection might look like. You can download full 3D box art from various sites and it looks quite pleasing -

 

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I bought Bioshock Infinite via retail so I'm not entirely sure the retail market for PC games is 'destroyed'. It was never particularly healthy to begin with, and plenty of people would prefer not to tie up their internet for a day downloading a new release.

Yes. While not such a concern for me now, it was only a month ago that I was on ~8mb/s like most of the UK. Downloading games (and sometimes even patches/DLC) was tedious, and it's only going to get worse now that both next-gen consoles will be capable of holding 50GB per disc — and will likely use it.

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I agree with you. I don't really have a good argument against digital distribution, I am just particularly fond of having physical stuff. A lot of it probably has to do with the feeling of nostalgia it gives me for my childhood and the wonderment I felt looking at those games with the cool artwork and instruction manuals. There is also something about physically having it that affects me because it is the same physical thing I first played 15 or 20 years ago. For some reason my brain just doesn't process digital content in the same way.

 

I was completely like this, but found it to be a surprisingly easy habit to break. A while back I decided to sell all of my books, movies, and games that didn't meet at least one of the following criteria:

 

1) have I used this in the last year?

2) is this item rare or virtually impossible to replace? (ie: games not on virtual console, nifty limited editions)

3) does this item have particular sentimental value? (ie: Super Mario 64, the first game I remember owning)

 

I've since made it an annual tradition, and as of now I generally keep it down to less than ten games per system. It wasn't until I was forced to buy a game digitally (because there were no physical copies left in stock) that I realized how much simpler it made things for me.

 

Since owning my Wii, I've ripped all the games I bought and I'm actually fond of the USB loader's aesthetics. Here's a video of somebody else's collection (I obviously don't have as many games) but it gives you an idea of what a digital game collection might look like. You can download full 3D box art from various sites and it looks quite pleasing

 

This actually looks rad. How do you do this?

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I'm also interested in that. I'd hazard that you need to howyousay jailbreak the Wii first. And then conscientiously only get ROMs of the games you own, because you're no thief.

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As a rule, I never pirate new games and generally only get ROMs of games that I either already own or will never be able to own. I do have the Homebrew Channel on my Wii, but I've only ever used it for Earthbound, Sweet Home, a failed attempt to emulate Beetle Adventure Racing, and one wild night of Advance Wars 2 multiplayer on a fourty inch television.

 

Incidentally, if anyone knows a hack to make the Wii main menu compatible with a Gamecube controller, that would be a huge timesaver for me.

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Yeah, you need to mod your Wii. It's a bit of a tedious process, but I'd say it pales in comparison to something like jailbreaking an iPhone or rooting/installing a custom ROM for Android. I stumbled through a handful of guides since there's fairly limited resources out there and a lot of it is out of date, but I managed to find this toward the end of my quest -

 

https://sites.google.com/site/completesg/

 

Follow that site's process and you'll be good to go. All told, it took my about an hour or so to go through the whole process. After installing the homebrew channel on your Wii, you can use a USB flash drive or portable HDD as a WBFS drive to store the Wii ROMs. I actually got all my ROMs directly ripped from games I own, so you needn't deal with piracy to enjoy the benefits of this. The program that is in the video, USB Loader GX, has a built in ripping program as well as simple automated art downloading that makes creating a snazzy library quite easy. That said, I did once pirate ROMs of all the NES and SNES games I own and it's also good for emulating those systems since all of the controllers are obviously quite analogous to older Nintendo consoles (as evidenced by Virtual Console).

 

I did all of it a few months ago to a Wii that I bought really late in the lifespan of the system, so it's been quite a good way to make me excited about playing games on it. Plus, I don't have much shelf space in my house so I've neatly packed away all my Wii games in a closet.

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Not sure if you remember the Sony conference but they described a very similar premise. 

Thank goodness the rumor mill is still cranking post-reveal:

 

The Xbox One can talk to you, will feature remote play

 

Polygon is reporting that the One will have a feature where a friend can connect to your game remotely via Skype and "help one another get through sections of the game when they're stuck". If that's true, it seems kind of like nothing we've ever seen before. Sure, we've all couch co-op-ed a single player game before, but in this scenario you could both be playing separate instances of the same single-player game across the country from one another and help each other in a "oh man, I remember how to do that part" way. Kinda neat, if true.

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So something weird is going on. Take-Two's CEO, Strauss Zelnick, spoke about the used game sales thing on the XBone and it didn't sound good. He said that if MS is going to profit from used game sales, Take-Two should as well. It heavily implies that MS has not established any communication with video game publishers (probably aside from EA) about how this will work out. If it's true, that is monumentally fucked up that MS is snatching up all the money and none of it is going to the people who are actually making the games. It actually sounds criminal.

 

Going from there Zelnick also said that the right way to address the used games 'problem' is to make games more worthwhile.

 

http://www.gamespot.com//news/gta-parent-publisher-talks-next-gen-used-games-6409049

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Excepting the angle that it was another way of underlining that GTA V is a product of the highest quality, is there any merit to the possibility that MS is waiting to see how Sony will handle used game sales before negotiating, to ensure they have the upper hand?

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Excepting the angle that it was another way of underlining that GTA V is a product of the highest quality, is there any merit to the possibility that MS is waiting to see how Sony will handle used game sales before negotiating, to ensure they have the upper hand?

 

Oh fuck yes, I want to do a video on youtube for this I think, maybe try one tonight. Sony and MS are caught in a near perfect prisoners dilemma. Outcome A. Both block used games, both get more new games sales and their cut, both benefit. Outcome B. One blocks used games, the other doesn't, more customers go towards the one that doesn't, that one benefits. Outcome C. Neither block used games, neither benefits.

 

Of course it's not that picture perfect. Microsoft could go through with its "we get a cut of all used games but publishers/devs don't" thing, in which case publishers/devs could say "Fuck you Microsoft" and choose to only release as digital on the Xbone, no used games at all. Or Sony's possible ploy of letting the devs/publishers decide how the DRM works, in which case no used games because why should they give a fuck about used games customers?

 

Or maybe, maybe Microsoft's scheme goes through but devs/publishers get a cut too, crashing the profit margins of used to the point of uselesness and folding gamestop et. al. anyway. Or maybe, maybe something I haven't thought of yet. The point is it's a hugely complex decision, that for both parties would best be made once the other party has already made their decision. Considering their releases might be like a week apart from each other possibly, it's sort of like a game of chicken playing out.

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Excepting the angle that it was another way of underlining that GTA V is a product of the highest quality, is there any merit to the possibility that MS is waiting to see how Sony will handle used game sales before negotiating, to ensure they have the upper hand?

 

I could see that, but why on Earth is Microsoft adopting a reactive strategy now when a proactive one is what won them the last console generation?

 

 

EDIT: Well, I think Frenetic Pony explored the possible reasons pretty well. That's the problem with anti-consumer practices, isn't it? A strong vision isn't as much of an asset as otherwise.

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How / why would you develop a business strategy and put it into effect without discussing it with your business partners?

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Field of Dreams thinking, I guess? Build it and they will come?

Yeah I guess that's what it is. But they're gonna be screwed if publishers walk because they don't get fair deals.

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Yeah I guess that's what it is. But they're gonna be screwed if publishers walk because they don't get fair deals.

What if we reverse the situation, and assume that publishers are in fact getting their cut, and it is just GameStoreTM that's getting cut out of the loop. The reverse situation could arise where publishers say to Sony, and maybe from there Steam - enforce the same policy or we won't release the game on your platform. We may or may not be better off (prices can go down, but if they don't we may make less money reselling our copy/licence), but it may become a choice of suck it or forego the game.

I personally don't mind if things stay as they are with disc games, but that the EU concept policy that would force DRM publishers to allow end-users to resell their licences. Think of this as a company (real example that the Court ruled on) that bought an expensive lifetime Oracle key, switches to SQL and resells that key to another company. Oracle tried to block that, but afaik failed, with interesting implications.

Such a solution may not solve all problems and publishers will likely fairly easily find loopholes like rent-style or per-use licencing formats and such, but in an increasingly digital world it is certainly worth a serious discussion. I would personally, if I hold a licence to a digital game, make it legal for third parties to create virtual machines that can play the game after the hardware has died, at the very least if the platform holder didn't do it, and disallow forcing you to rebuy a game (not dissimilar to how Nintendo is doing right now). Perhaps implement a grace period of, say, 5-10 years or whenever the platform dies and the hardware can no longer be purchased, whichever comes first (last would allow loopholes like manufacturers artificially lengthening the hardware availability and/or increasing the price).

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The daily Internet authentication has been confirmed, as well as publishers controlling whether used-game sales will be allowed. Smells of dumping bad news before E3 so it's at least a little bit old by the press conference (which is the same time as the WWDC keynote too).

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Today has been a bit of a revival in the outrage over the whole thing. There's more details, and more unanswered questions.

 

As it stands, MS is claiming to not take the cut for used sales; it will go right to publishers. And the whole system of used games on the XB1 being relegated through the Live service is an opt-in for publishers to use at their own discretion. Which means some of them won't use it at all. But you can bet your ass Electronic Arts is all over that - it replaces their Online Pass thing, as was previously discussed.

 

Some of the bigger news today came from Patrick Klepek. I think he was the first to drop the bombshell that, aside from the press roundtable being canceled for E3, Microsoft is now canceling one-on-one interviews that were scheduled. And Microsoft's response did not help the situation, because two separate responses were given; one was that it was isolated scheduling conflicts, and the other was, "Yes, all executives are no longer available for any interviews."

 

Meanwhile rumors hit the shit at NeoGAF regarding the operating system and it continuing to drag ass in development. Apparently the OS on display at the presentation was faked. I mean, the Kinect responses being faked and all, whatever, I expect that shit. But the OS itself being faked because it actually lags and stutters and all that? This is bad.

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To translate "Ohhhhhh god, ohhhh god, someone get J. Allard back, no one talk to anyone, please god, everything's canceled. Every word that comes out of our PR guys mouth sounds like praise for Hitler."

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This is a disaster. They're going to immortalize the notion that Xbox One is flailing and a weak player, rather than decisively dispelling all fears before E3. Yikes.

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Remember way back when people were ripping on the PS4 for being a nonentity post-announcement? Turns out there's something worse, and that something is multiple mixed messages from Microsoft execs creating a Frankenstein's monster of mistrust and despair. Sony's silent strategy suddenly seems smarter, somehow.

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