Do people really think Microsoft didnt know this? They were willing to stretch their necks to try and make the next step. Which is DRM controlled by the developers. It backfired pretty bad on them :icon17:

I wasnt blaming Sony for anything. If thats how you and others took it let me explain. People were basically saying how smart Sony was, and how awesome they were at E3 (yet the majority agree their game line up is limp). I was simply saying exactly what you did. Its Business 101, doesn't impress me, I would expect a company to do that on the other end. I was just trying to take away some of the credit people were giving them.

From the PR perspective once again I agree. I think it was saber who mentioned bailing out to quickly. That is exactly how I feel. As you and I both mentioned they should have taken the time to better explain all the confusing details. Man they have 4 more months to do it!

I have never scratched a disc. I am very OCD about my games though, to the point that I freak out if anyone opens the pages of the start up books they come with. If I sell something I have touched I want it to look and perform perfect. I say those things but the truth is I only lend games to my father in law anymore, and I have maybe sold 3 games in the last 7 years. I do not have the time to beat games in one day like when I was a child. So by the time I can trade one or sell it, it makes me feel better to just keep it. Since I usually pick them up on release day/week and pay 60.00 it is to much of a loss in my eyes.

So the revolution to me would be not accumulating anymore discs like I did over the last 15 years or so. It would be nice to take my Xbox One anywhere I want and with a simple internet connection access my games anywhere in the world. Yeah I get that some places do not have internet so being able to play offline would be a nice benefit. This is where my term "pig headed" comes into play. In the last 5-10 years how many places have you been to that do not have internet access? In the next 5-10 years how may of those places do you think will still not have internet? Come on people it just isnt a valid argument to me. It is something to gripe about.

Here is something to think about.

Out of 70 million Xbox owners over 46 million that own the system have Xbox Live. (Reference here: Systems Sold and here Live Subscribers) That is pretty outstanding if you consider the PS3 network being free up to this point. With the new generation that is now an even playing field. Who knows how many out of those 70 million have internet access as well. I would be willing to bet it is a rather large amount.

I can understand peoples excitement with the PS4's support of indie game developers. Microsoft has support for them as well but it costs more. Does that keep a lot the indie developers away? You betcha!

Back to a little Business 101 here. The number 1 goal of any business should be making money, and keeping a money flow in the realm of profits, at least that's what I would do. Microsoft any Sony alike have lost their shirts on the last generation. Read this: 360 and PS3 loses

If we have another 8-10 years of those losses I do not think we will see another round of these debates. 99% of indie games are flops just like the movies. Why eat up resources catering to everyone that can do some simple 2D or 3D animations. Lets charge some money and weed out some of the wastes of time and server space.

Maybe that is why Microsoft went with a little cheaper RAM (DDR3) and a slightly lower performing GPU even though it is currently a 150.00 unit. Maybe they will make 5.00 off the new systems. Shame on them right? :shakes head: I am blown away by so many people thinking things should be free. If everything was free we wouldnt have the things we have today.

Luckily both of these companies have massive revenue in other sectors. This sector will not last for ever though if it continues to be a money pit.
I hope one of these two companies set themselves up for some profit this time around so we can continue to have these items of entertainment.

Once again for the online experience im choosing the Xbox One. You get what you pay for, and if there are profits being made it is only going to be a better experience for me.

Good its hard to read someones text and know their attitude/demeanor. I love the input man it allows me to come back with more response to questions others may have but not asked. SO heres some more spice for your :stirthepot: ;)

Can anyone (and be honest) that has not received Rep points from me yet shoot me a PM and let me know. The response to the thread has been great but I have gotten lost with the 24 hour restriction on giving out the points.

Thanks!

Sony deserves plenty of credit for how they played the media. I don't care if it was "Business 101", they are a business. Microsoft is also a business and should have known better than making a huge PR mistake during the biggest consumer electronics show of the year and on the dawn of releasing their next console. But I can also agree that an informed consumer will judge the consoles on their merits and care less about PR. Unfortunately, the mass populace is not completely composed of informed or objective consumers.

That's just you, then. Plenty of people sell back their disks, because after a year or so, your 60 dollar game just isn't worth that, whether you shine it up and keep it on a shelf or trade it back. YOU might think it's worth that, but you've already spent your 60 dollars and now the game is just a memento of what was. It's a bit ridiculous to me to say that it's a "revolution" for you to not have a stack of disk, when you could have just taken them to a gamestop and sold them for chicken feed. But I also understand cloud gaming advantages. I get that. I just don't buy your "revolution" argument as it relates to clutter... clean your room :bowrofl:

In the last 5-10 years, have you NEVER once had an internet service outage? Not once? Because not everyone falls into that category. Sometimes my internet service has an issue, but I'd still like to play a game. It's a valid complaint. Unless MS was providing and guaranteeing that connection, they shouldn't make your every gameplay experience hinge on it. And if you go to Zdayz or a remote mountain resort, you will not have internet in your cabin.


Here is something to think about.

And again, out of those 70 million, how many have had an outage now and again, but still have power on?
Advantage: PS4
So now it's good business practice to throw away indie gamers?! lol wow, that's stretching. Would it not be prudent to encourage more and more young and emerging developing talent to develop for one's console and market their experiments on there? Doesn't that bode for a brighter future? XBox took advantage of that in the last generation and are now ignoring it, and you're praising them for it... Now who's pig-headed?

They went cheaper. Their product is cheaper but costs more. Here's business 101 for you.
Online experience isn't a big sell for me. I will miss my XBL friends, but I'll make others in PS land.

What I find hilarious is how "not having disks cluttering my house because I refuse to sell them" and "having multiple remote controls" constitutes reason for a "revolution in gaming" by using cloud games and having a voice activated Xbox control your various systems. If that does it for you, then great, but I don't find anything revolutionary about that, in the least. So revolutionary that a PC with steam has been capable of doing it for how long? And is Sony totally ignoring cloud gaming? Any word on that?

There are people who enjoy game consoles for being, well, game consoles. To me, there's little beneficial about making them into less capable computers and entertainment centers that also happen to play games.

:tiphat:

Your volley :roflpuke2:

NSFW

I'm ready for you to defend the Wii U. Go! :stirthepot:


:drama:

Sony deserves credit for certainly going into this with a clear gameplan. Microsoft deserves to be reamed a bit for going into this with a very vague gameplan. I'm not sure I would say Sony played it, but sort of in a rock-paper-scissors facedown, they had the scissors to Microsoft's paper for E3.

Playstation 4 FTW... but Ask any gamer... Any real gamer. You're not a true gamer till you own both systems.

http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/__...480196_gal.jpg

i preordered both.
Each side has their pros with the exclusive titles.

:bowrofl:

I wouldn't hold a 'vague gameplan' against Microsoft at all. I think Microsoft was just poor in execution of a very sound, progressive gameplan the conservative market isn't ready for. Steam is JUST BARELY going mainstream, and Microsoft sought to duplicate it on XBox.

They see the market winds and know things will go fully digital sooner or later, and they wanted to jump the gun.

Sony, to me, is playing the kiddy role of volleying insults back Microsoft's way every chance they get. Their entire conference home run was built on "Oh hey, look what we're NOT doing compared to those idiots!" Their E3 conference was long, confusing, light on games that interested me (and many others I think), and just not that interesting to me at all.

But it's just a very different approach to Microsoft. I think Sony is still smarting from the failure of the PS3 (relatively speaking to the pure awesomeness that was the PS2), and they wanted to make sure they got their core demographic appeased. It's a strong position, but I think years down the line, the potential in the XBox One will be more easily harnessed than the potential of the PS4.

edit: I really am disappointed that Microsoft had to fold their hand amidst public pressure. XBox One had the potential to be Steam-like, but the general public just wasn't ready for it. I think it was a brilliant idea that, with a little more aplomb, would have been really cool...even though region locking meant I would have never been able to leech my Japanese XBox games off of my friends. Assuming they do release in Japan...haha

XBox Gold membership: how much are you guys (who have XBLG) paying??? I'm really confused now, I pay a one time fee of 50 bucks every year and I have XBox Gold. What is this $15/month nonsense??? I can stomach $5/month...and especially if it'll give me access to all sorts of TV stuff! :tup:

(I MIIIIIGHT have accidentally convinced myself to buy an XBox One...)

I would say, the extent that Microsoft knows this or cares is debatable. It certainly did seem that they were more interested in catering to the developers. I'm not saying that the developers shouldn't make money, but a balance does need to be struck. The way the whole Xbox One reveal has been handled so far did have quite a bit of hubris.

I think Shadoquad covered this one pretty well already. All I'd have to add is, this isn't Microsoft's first rodeo. This is their third gaming console, not to mention countless other product releases. Sony may not deserve a ton of credit for doing what businesses do, but Microsoft should receive a ton of blame for not doing what businesses in their position should do.

Personally, I sold a bunch of my old video games a few months ago and was able to turn a pile of discs sitting on my coffee table into a new Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 at Best Buy. They had an extra 50% trade in offer, and I took advantage of it. So I see the value of trading in used games. If you don't, you don't have to. I just like the option of being able to, and having choice amongst locations to trade them into for a better price.

Using your example, isn't it just as easy to take your console somewhere and then play those same games without an Internet connection? As for me personally, I've been tons of places in the last decade that did not have Internet.
When I was stuck at Camp Shelby in Mississippi for several months before being deployed. Then at Kuwait, and then in Iraq. Granted, those are extreme cases, but hey, you asked. I'm also going to with my g/f to visit her grandmother in Alabama in a few weeks, and she doesn't have Internet in the mountains either.

That is certainly a large number, depending on how you look at it. Numbers can always be misleading. 70 million Xbox owners, does that count for 70 million unique owners, or are the people who had to buy multiple Xbox's counted more than once? Either way, I don't see it as that impressive since if you bought an Xbox, you are pretty much forced to pay for Live unless you only want to play single player games. You can't even use the browser or stream videos without paying for Live.

Do most Indie games fail? Sure. But, you mentioned you wanted a revolution in gaming. The DRM thing in my opinion would create more business as usual. It would create a safety net for developers. If you make a game with limited replay value, no big deal. Everyone still has to pay you full price to play that game. The way I view used games is simple. If I sell my Z, I do not have to go back to Nissan and give them a cut. Why should a used game be any different? Developers are trying to shift the risk onto the consumers. Its their problem if they buy a bad game and they have no way to recoup any of their losses. Developers are the business, if they can't make a profitable game, they need to learn to cut their costs and create better games more efficiently that people will not want to resell. Adding Indie developers brings in new talent and new ideas, not just ideas on how to take more money from consumers.

They may be losing money on the actual console itself, but they make that up in other areas.
Sony still selling PS3s at a loss | PLAY Magazine
Initially, Sony was losing 13 cents per dollar on the PS3, they drove that down to 6 cents per dollar. So they're currently only losing 18 dollars per PS3 sold. That is on the console only. They make up a lot of money selling extra controllers, etc. They also make money selling the licensing to developers. Having a system also allows them to keep their first party studios in business, which also makes money. They sell the consoles at a loss, so they can make up their money from selling you games and accessories.

I also don't think Sony is wasting massive resources on Indies, I think they're just not getting in their way.

I don't think anything should be free, and neither do Sony or Microsoft. They're businesses, and they've calculated the risks. They've felt that taking a small loss on the console is easily made up elsewhere. An 18 dollar loss per console is not a big one. Do you really think that a controller costs them 50 dollars to make? They sell you one controller and they've most likely at least broken even. Everything after that second controller is profit, including licensing fees from third parties.
All in all, I agree with a lot of your points. You have certainly spent a lot of time in your research. As you said before there's more than one way to skin this cat. Which way works best will be playing out over the next few months. If anything, the fact that people can argue and debate it so much indicates how close the two products actually are.

Challenge accepted.

Well, one thing you can say about Nintendo is that they certainly have a large selection of first party games that are exclusive to the Wii U. Secondly, they do have backwards compatibility, which is something none of the other "next gen" consoles can claim. For all the credit that Sony has gotten for sticking up for the gamer and saying no to DRM, Nintendo did it first this generation. Motion controls and the Kinect and Move would also be nowhere in sight if Nintendo hadn't led that particular gaming revolution. They also were able to draw in more of the casual audience into video gaming, bringing some much needed life and especially money into the video gaming industry. They were also able to get some overweight people off of the couch and help reduce our rising healthcare costs :roflpuke2: As far as being profitable, reports suggest that the WiiU is profitable after only a single game sale. So they've got that going for them too. In closing, Mario, Zelda and Smash Brothers.

Nintendo has backwards compatibility because their sh*t hasn't changed since the Wii was released. :rofl2:

WiiU will make back all of their developer cost because there was no development :roflpuke2:

Smash Brothers got weird on the Wii. That controller...goodness that was awkward.

I personally cant believe the wii is still around.

I get it! I agree the PR sucked lets move on. I am just trying to say lets think about it not sounding bad in their heads until they said it. We know we have all done that before :icon17:


I never said I think its even worth a 1.00. It isnt worth it to me to let someone else rip off me and kids that dont know any better. These trade in places have ruined the resale of our used games. Almost how eBay drives down prices of collectables because you can hop online and find a bunch of the same item and people driving the prices down.

You think someone that worries about finger prints on a book no one sees has a dirty room? :shakes head:

Yes I have. This is another one of those topics that was blown out of proportion. The odds of not having internet for more than 24 hours are slim to none. So up to 24 hours without internet you could game offline. Worst case your system validated 23 hours and 59 minutes before the outage. If your internet is down for more than 48 hours your probably without power as well. Plus if you dont have internet you can get a 360 :p

Edit: The last thing im going to be thinking about on a vacation in the mountains with my Z is internet.

Read Above

Agreed, but read above.

They are not throwing them away just forcing some of them away. No I do not have a problem with that.

They went cheaper but the higher costs is to still off set the loss on the system. Parts alone are not the entire manufacturing process.

You said it your self. It has never been done on a gaming console. No matter how you look at it, that is a revolution for this market. No word on Sony cloud, their heads are still up there from all their pre-sales. Which I am part of :tup:-

I do not like the social integration but that is just me as well. The new younger generation does want these things to happen. We are just getting older and dont like the change. Understanding it has made it easier for me. Whether we like it or not the changes are coming and as long as we enjoy video games its something to deal with.