The Bridge

@kalina "that's what steam does" is completely irrelevant to whether or not they will have sales

what, whether Microsoft will have sales?

That's like saying MS will start making Half Life since Valve also has DRM and now the Xbone will too

well they did, Microsoft's Half Life is called Halo

The argument was that because of the DRM Microsoft would suddenly have steam-esque sales despite never at any point even remotely hinting towards doing such a thing

2:03 PM

@BenBrocka I've never made this argument, but now that they've removed the always on/digital sharing stuff you'll never know how the story plays out

FEichinger

The story plays out with more people assuming the position in the article: "You whiners ruined it for everybody!"

Which, again, is bullshit.

It's not ruined for me, I wasn't going to buy an xbox one

Fluttershy

Keep in mind that the Humble indie Bundles are just that. Indie developers. Which MS has more or less shunned. The only HiBs that weren't indie were because the company providing the games was shutting down and liquidating their assets.

I highly, highly doubt MS would have offered Steam-level sales. Hell, the current sales on XBL are shit. I've never really seen a great deal on an XBL sale.

@Fluttershy yeah, Xbox's digital policies like that are exactly why they weren't "moving forward" in any way

Fluttershy

I've had my 360 since launch, and the only good deal I've seen on anything was when they had Dark Souls for 50% off. Amazon had it (at the same time) at 67% off for the PC version, which was already $10 cheaper and included the DLC.

In short, am I dissatisfied with my 360? No. Do I think they were "moving forward" with the Xbone? Not at all.

2:12 PM

PSN has sales with reasonable (every couple months I'd say) on a limited selection of games, but they price things from 25%-50% off to 50%-75% off, usually with PS+ people getting an extra 25% off

It's not steam, but it seems to be more than XBLA does

Wouldn't really make me buy a console though. PS+ might, had I known I'd get piles of free games with it.

Also the "OMG you don't need your discs anymore!" argument is insane. They've said all retail games will be available as downloads. Just buy the downloadable versions.

(which is something you can do with 360 without an internet connection)

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2:31 PM

I think it's pretty hard and disingenuous to argue that the second hand market isn't a primary source of upward pressure on game prices (and the move to a more DLC-centric pricing scheme), and, perhaps more importantly, that the lack there of is also not a huge source of downward pressure on sales of PC titles.

I mean, no, it is not a linear path from DRM to Steam Sales.

But it's equally disingenuous to deny the fact that DRM is a pretty clear prerequisite for that business model when talking about AAA-level overhead.

Grumpy Lazers

0

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emulation

Competition is a huge source of downward pressure on the sales of PC titles though. Used sales (and other consoles) are effectively the only competition in console titles

If MS says Halo 5 is $60 and no one else can sell Halo 5 ever there's little reason for them to drop the price until people stop buying. There's no need to have a sale to undercut used copies or make owning a new/digital copy more appealing

@BenBrocka This is true for digital titles, but not for disc based titles, which is where any of this matters anyway, because digital titles have de facto DRM on consoles anyway, and always have and will.

MBraedley

The problem with the Xbone was not that what they had bad ideas and planned policies (although their planned policies weren't great), it's that they had extremely bad messaging that didn't get gamers excited about the possibilities, and didn't offer work-arounds for those without a persistent internet connection. They should have started with "You can do all this if you have an internet connection, but unfortunately, we need to limit you to disk based games without an internet connection."

I highly doubt the disc versions will ever have "steam sale" prices

2:41 PM

@BenBrocka No, of course they won't.

Can you imagine the logistics of trying to say "hey every retailer across the globe, Halo 5 is 50% off but only for one week" (and doing that on a regular, near constant basis, like steam)

But there's been steady upward pressure on those prices thanks to the secondhand market that can be alleviated, and which, in turn, could result in some decrease.

So really the only way the restrictions on physical disks help a Steam model if they kill physical discs in the process

@BenBrocka You don't need to do coordinated global events to see that sort of pricing.

Now you're just being obtuse.

The arguments for "steam sale" pricing is that they can't do that now because they can't undercut physical retail prices or retailers will get mad at them

if that's true, they either can't do their digital sales (PS3 does this anyway) or they have to coordinate absurdly frequent steam sales with physical retailers to suddenly make that happen. Which it won't

2:45 PM

@BenBrocka Right, and part of the reason they can't undercut retailers is that the secondhand market puts such huge upward pressure on retail prices.

I mean, I give an approximately similar number of fucks about the XBONE as I do about the Albanian Womens Curling Team in a non-olympic year, and it's clear that their marketing team are not very good at explaining shit, but the level of outrage over needing an internet connection is way out of proportion to the level of harm it causes. All the OMG WHAT ABOUT DUDES ON NUCLEAR SUBMARINES shit is just incredibly dumb and really overblown.

@MBraedley Honestly I don't buy that either. Digital games currently don't need an internet connection. It's still a straight negative with no benefit for the user

Honestly I kind of think the reason they wanted the 24 hour checkins was so they could say "hey developers, EVERY xbox one user has a persistent internet connection and kinect, go nuts with Kinect and online only features!"

Which is really a much better selling point than anything they actually said

@BenBrocka Well of course it is. And, to be honest, there's a lot of things Devs can do when told to go nuts like that.

Also, searching for 'Albanian Womens Curling' led me to this, which is incredibly fascinating, and has nothing to do with a sport that only Canadians care about.