The future of console gaming

[Jobydrone]

Some new details about "family sharing" on the XBone:

"Since its announcement, there has been some confusion over the details of sharing your Xbox One game library with up to ten "family members." Mehdi couldn't give comprehensive details but he did clarify some things.

For one, a family member doesn't have to be a "blood relative," he said, eliminating the extremely unlikely possibility that the Xbox One would include a built-in blood testing kit. For another, they don't have to live in the primary owner's house—I could name a friend that lives 3,000 miles away as one of my "family members" Mehdi said.

You'll be able to link other Xbox Live accounts as having shared access to your library when you first set up a system, and will also be able to add them later on (though specific details of how you manage these relationships is still not being discussed). The only limitation, it seems, is that only one person can be playing the  shared copy of a single game at any given time. All in all, this does sound like a pretty convenient feature that's more workable than simply passing discs around amongst friends who are actually in your area"

This could be an amazing, groundbreaking feature if implemented the way it seems they're talking about it now. 

[ElfManDan]

Personally when these new gaming consoles come out I think I'm gonna get myself a 360 (finally). I've been very behind for many years on gaming, been busy with college and being a poor college student. I've always been a few generations behind on consoles anyway, and I don't see the point in changing that for the time being when there are so many awesome 360 games I really want to play now that I have a little more time to do so, and can get for so much cheaper with the X-Box One coming out.

Eventually maybe I'll catch up with the times and get a current gaming platform, but I'm thinking I'm gonna be a pretty happy gamer for a while with some awesome classics.

[Jobydrone]

Personally when these new gaming consoles come out I think I'm gonna get myself a 360 (finally). I've been very behind for many years on gaming, been busy with college and being a poor college student. I've always been a few generations behind on consoles anyway, and I don't see the point in changing that for the time being when there are so many awesome 360 games I really want to play now that I have a little more time to do so, and can get for so much cheaper with the X-Box One coming out.

Eventually maybe I'll catch up with the times and get a current gaming platform, but I'm thinking I'm gonna be a pretty happy gamer for a while with some awesome classics.

There's an amazing amount of fantastic gaming in store for you...I think I saw that over 1000 games have been released for the 360 over its lifecycle.  Wait a little while after the holiday season and you can probably pick up a 360 for $99-$150

[charlie epsilon]

I'm a little late to this thread, but I'd like to present my perspective as a gamer for 30+ years.

I've owned virtually every console ever released (yes, even the Neo*Geo), and I've always been a platform agnostic person.

However, I'm also very pro-consumer, and what I saw at E3 coming from Microsoft is somewhat disturbing. Even more disturbing to me is how easily so many people are accepting this anti-consumer stance. Have a look at this blog post, it summarizes the argument much better than I probably could.

LINK

Sure, most people have stable broadband. Many don't even trade in or buy used games. These things seem pretty trivial to some on the surface, but the truth is, Microsoft is caving to publishers who want to control how and when you play their games. They are not only caving, they are hand delivering a hardware platform that is built to maximize publisher's ability to control what you do. Publisher greed is influencing the design of consoles, plain and simple.

What other industry do you know of that gets to double dip on sales? I can't think of one. If I buy a Batman Bluray for $30, it's mine. I can do whatever I want with it. I can sell it at a garage sale, a pawn shop, craigslist, or ebay. Warner Brothers doesn't say "Whoah, stop right there. We're going to need a cut of that. If you buy this Bluray used, you're going to need a $10 unlock pass to watch it." That's ludicrous.

Personally, I find this intolerable. I refuse to support any company that treats their consumers this way. Thankfully, Sony has heard the public, and is providing a next gen console that won't have these restrictions. If they had followed Microsoft's lead, I would not be purchasing their platform either.

Isn't it a little sad when all you need to do to "win" E3 is give us things we currently have? I think it is.

Both consoles are virtually the same, hardware wise. One allows you to be in control of the games you own. The other essentially licenses them to you. To me, the choice is pretty easy. I already game a bit on the PC, but console-wise, I'm sticking with PS4 and Wii U this coming generation.

[ElfManDan]

There's an amazing amount of fantastic gaming in store for you...I think I saw that over 1000 games have been released for the 360 over its lifecycle.  Wait a little while after the holiday season and you can probably pick up a 360 for $99-$150

Yeah, I've got a nice list of 360 games I've seen and really want to play. I'm positive they will keep me busy for a while.

[Jobydrone]

Nice post Charlie, I agree with the majority of what you said.  There seems to be a number of factors influencing the mis-steps Microsoft seems to be making with the next generation Xbox hardware.  Of course it's still too early to tell, but there has certainly been a huge outcry and Sony has been able to reap the benefits so far by just keeping things the same as they've always been.  They were even able to eliminate the potential negative reaction to their news of putting most multiplayer functionality behind a paywall due to the perception that they're putting the gamers above all else with their new console.  That was a gift Microsoft handed them on a silver platter.

I'm not as negative as some on the XBone, I will probably get one, though it does concern me that through purchase of their console, it shows tacit approval of the direction they wish to take in the future of console gaming...not all of which I agree with.  Sony's policies allow me to breathe a sigh of relief, that the potential for a few huge companies exerting iron fisted control over the hobby I love so dearly, is not necessarily happening in at least the near future.

[Feathers]

We've got a 360 but that may be the first and last that we own.

I live on the second hand games market. If that goes away the. I won't buy games...or at least not at a rate to make console ownership worthwhile. Heck, even second hand I'm still playing the games I got when we got the console.

[ChrisMC]

Pretty funny article at Cracked about what companies get wrong about gamers:

http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-every-game-company-gets-wrong-about-gamers/

[KingIsaacLinksr]

Pretty funny article at Cracked about what companies get wrong about gamers:

http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-every-game-company-gets-wrong-about-gamers/

Really starting to tick me off that Microsoft is continuing to lie about its products like Sega did with Aliens: CM.

[billybob476]

Paul Thurrott of Windows Weekly/WinSuperSite/WindowsITPro tweeted this. It was posted by a supposed XBox One engineer over at pastebin. Reposted before it's taken down.

note there's a few mild curses in the text.

>The thing is we suck at telling the story. The whole point of the DRM switch from disc based to cloud based is to kill disc swapping, scratched discs, bringing discs to friends house, trade-ins for shit value with nothign going back to developers, and high game costs. If you want games cheaper then 59.99, you have to limit used games somehow. Steam's model requires a limited used game model.

    >The thing is, the DRM is really really similar to steam... You can login anywhere and play your games, anyone in your house can play with the family xbox. The only diff is steam you have to sign in before playing, and Xbox does it automatically at night for you (once per 24 hours)

    >It's a long tail strategy, just like steam. Steam had it's growing pains at the beginning with all it's drm shit as well. [...] For digital downloads steam had no real competition at the time, they were competing against boxed sales. At the time people were pretty irate about steam, (on 4chan too...) It was only once they had a digital marketplace with DRM that was locked down to prevent sharing that they could do super discounted shit.

    >Think about it, on steam you get a game for the true cost of the game, 5$-30$. On a console you have to pay for that PLUS any additional licenses for when you sell / trade / borrow / etc. If the developer / publisher can't get it on additional licenses (like steam), then they charge the first person more. [...] If we say "Hey publishers, you limit game to 39.99, we ensure every license transfer you get 10$, gamestop gets 20$" that is a decent model... Microsoft gets a license fee on first and subsequent game purchases, compared to just first now? That's a revenue increase.

    >Competition is the best man, it helps drive both to new heights. See technology from the Cold War. If we had no USSR, we'd be way worse off today. TLDR: Bring it on Steam :)

    2/4

    >Yeah we passed that around the office at Xbox. Most of us were like "Well played Sony, Well played". That being said they are just riding the hype train of ZOMG THEY ARE TRYING TO frak US FOR NO REASON. Without actually thinking about how convienent it would be for the majority of the time to not find that disc your brother didn't put back... [...] just simpleminded people not seeing the bigger picture. Some PS4 viral team made them all "U TOOK R DISCS" and they hiveminded.

    >Everyone and their mother complains about how gamestop fraks them on their trade ins, getting 5$ for their used games. We come in trying to find a way to take money out of gamestop, and put some in developers and get you possibly cheaper games and everyone bitches at MS. Well, if you want the @#$@ing from Gamestop, go play PS4.

    >The goal is to move to digital downloads, but Gamestop, Walmart, Target, Amazon are KIND OF frakING ENTRENCHED in the industry. They have a lot of power, and the shift has to be gradual. Long term goal is steam for consoles. [...] If you always want to stay with what you have, then keep current consoles, or a PS4. We're TRYING to move the industry forwards towards digital distribution... it'sa bumpy road

    >Publishers have enourmous power. Microsoft is trying to balance between consumer delight, and publisher wishes. If we cave to far in either direction you have a non-starting product. WiiU goes too far to consumer, you have no 3rd party support to shake a stick at. PS4 is status-quo. XB1 is trying to push some things, at the expense of others. We have a vision, we'll see if it works in the coming years

    >Living room transformation. We want to own the living room. Every living room TV with an XBox on input one. It's the thing that gives the signal to your TV, everything is secondary. The future, where games, TV, internet telephony, all that shit happens magically on some huge ass screen with hand / voice gestures... That's our goal.


    3/4

    >Google TV + PS4 + Minority report level gestures, that combined with a sick second screen experience (which is really hot for TV, I know I know.. tv tv tv tv tv... but it's fraking sick when you have it). Games will be the same, there are more exclusives to MS then PS atm, and Kinect 2 makes Kinect 1 look like a childs toy.

    >By default it's on, listening for "Xbox On". You can turn it off tho, and turn the console like OFF off. OFF off is required for Germany / other countries that require it (no vampire appliances) [...] It has to be plugged in for the console to post. You can turn off everything it does from the settings. Think of it like airplane mode for the iPhone. You can't just unplug the cellular radio, but you can turn it off.

    >Instead of 10mins, is 24hrs for your console, and 1 or 2 at a friends house. Really the majority of people have a speck of internet at least once a day. And if you don't. Don't buy an Xbox 1. Just like if you didn't have a broadband connection don't get Live, and if you don't have an HDTV the 360 isn't that great for you either. New tech, new req. This allows us to do cool shit when we can assume things like you have a kinect, you have internet, etc.

    >Current plan is basically you're fraked after 24 hours. Yeah... I know. Kind of sucks. I believe they will probably revist the time period and / or find a diff way to "call in" to ensure you haven't sold your license to gamestop or something... but there is no plan YET. I'm hoping the change it, but I don't work on that so I don't have much influence there /sigh

    >If the power goes out you ain't playing shit. I'm assuming you mean the internet goes out but you have power for TV and Xbox. Yes, You're fraked for single player games. Again, that's the PoR (Plan of record), but I expect it to change after the e3 clusterfrak

    >What fee? There is no fee to play your games at your friends house. Never has, never will. Even x360 digital downloads could do that.


    4/4

    >The cloud capabilities is the shit they like the most. We basically made a huge cloud compute shit and made it free. What people are doing with it is kind of cool. THe original intention was to get all the Multiplayer servers not requiring 3rd party costs (Like EA shutting down game servers to cut costs), as well as taking all the games that servers hosted by the clients (Halo, etc), and have all that compute done in the cloud allowing more CPU cycles for gameplay. That will really expand what developers can do. Anything that doesn't need per frame calculation and can handle 100ms delays can be shifted to the cloud. That's huge.

    >SmartGlass + IE is going to be pretty freaking sweet. 1 finger cursor, 2 finger direct manip. Basically if you think of a laptop trackpad where your phone/ slate is the trackpad and the monitor is your TV... it's that. The tech is there, just needs to be applied. There is some really cool shit going on with Petra + controllers that pairs people with controllers. So if person with controller two trades controlers with controller 1, their profiles magically switch. It's sick. What does this matter? Now if you lean left/right it knows which person is leaning, even if 4 people are all int he same room. It's awesome.

    >New service using Azure for cloud compute. Allows developers to not use clients for hosting multiplayer servers, or other tasks that do not require per frame calcuations. It's pretty sweet.

    >Honestly, if you care about anything other then pure games AT ALL. Xbox 1 > PS4. If all you do is play games, and nothing else, PS4.

    This was all from the Microsoft engineer that was on /b/ last night.

    >It's not worth my time to prove it, or risk my Job. I work in Studio A, 40th ave in Redmond, Wa. The thai place in the studio cafeteria has double punch wednesdays. Go ahead and call them and verify if you want.

http://pastebin.com/uCmdh9jB

[Dangelus]

Somehow I doubt that consoles games will become cheaper if Microsoft succeed with the Xbox one for some insane reason...

[Jobydrone]

Wow the arrogance in that post is a perfect example of what's hurting Microsoft the most this week.  Instead of listening to what people are saying, understanding what people are feeling, and considering changes that will give people what they utimately want, this guy is clinging desperately to his vision of the future and calling anyone who disagrees with that vision simpleminded drones?  Appalling.

On paper it's a nice idea to be able to go over to your friend's house and have access to all your games via your Xbox live account.  But in practice I'm not sure it works.  With current consoles, if you want to play a game at your friend's house, you bring the disc, pop it in their console and play.  With Microsoft's proposed model, you go over, log into your account, and start downloading a 10GB-45GB file (or more if those next gen games are much bigger, another thing that hasn't been discussed is the amount of data on these discs.) Two hours later, assuming yours and Microsofts download/upload speeds are pretty good, you can play.  They haven't said anything at all similar to Sony along the lines that you'll be able to play a game before it's completed downloading.

I also take issue with the statement

"Honestly, if you care about anything other then pure games AT ALL. Xbox 1 > PS4. If all you do is play games, and nothing else, PS4."

My PS3 uses Netflix way more than any other device in my home.  It has many of the video apps that the 360 has, a music service, a video library...It acts as a media center for music, video, and photos streamed over my network from my computer to my TV.  If he's talking about Kinect functionality here combined with Smartglass, well...both have been out for a while now and I haven't seen anything for either program that made me prefer the experience over traditional methods of control.  Maybe they have some great ideas for the future of Kinect but I haven't seen any sign of it yet. 

Honestly I sense fear here.  I have to wonder if they're suddenly terrified of being in a situation like the WiiU is right now, where very few people have bought the hardware so publishers aren't interested in spending millions of dollars to provide software for the platform...which essentially ends their game before it gets a change to even really begin.

Time will tell if this strategy works for Microsoft.  If I see identical AAA titles launching at $40 on XBone and $60 on PS4, as this guy suggests might "possibly" happen, then after my heart attack from shock I will definitely buy the XBone version, DRM or no.  I might even write Microsoft a letter of apology for doubting them.

[billybob476]

In a way I understand his reaction, he's an engineer/developer who's been pouring his heart and soul into this thing for who knows how many years. It comes out, people react negatively towards it. God knows I've reacted defensively at times when I hear negative reactions to something I've worked on. I just don't go post it online for all to read.

He's not right, but I can understand the reaction and tone. To the person on the inside, it's so obvious. The hard thing to understand is why "outsiders" don't get it.

[X]

Wow the arrogance in that post is a perfect example of what's hurting Microsoft the most this week.  Instead of listening to what people are saying, understanding what people are feeling, and considering changes that will give people what they utimately want, this guy is clinging desperately to his vision of the future and calling anyone who disagrees with that vision simpleminded drones?  Appalling.

On paper it's a nice idea to be able to go over to your friend's house and have access to all your games via your Xbox live account.  But in practice I'm not sure it works.  With current consoles, if you want to play a game at your friend's house, you bring the disc, pop it in their console and play.  With Microsoft's proposed model, you go over, log into your account, and start downloading a 10GB-45GB file (or more if those next gen games are much bigger, another thing that hasn't been discussed is the amount of data on these discs.) Two hours later, assuming yours and Microsofts download/upload speeds are pretty good, you can play.  They haven't said anything at all similar to Sony along the lines that you'll be able to play a game before it's completed downloading.

I also take issue with the statement

"Honestly, if you care about anything other then pure games AT ALL. Xbox 1 > PS4. If all you do is play games, and nothing else, PS4."

My PS3 uses Netflix way more than any other device in my home.  It has many of the video apps that the 360 has, a music service, a video library...It acts as a media center for music, video, and photos streamed over my network from my computer to my TV.  If he's talking about Kinect functionality here combined with Smartglass, well...both have been out for a while now and I haven't seen anything for either program that made me prefer the experience over traditional methods of control.  Maybe they have some great ideas for the future of Kinect but I haven't seen any sign of it yet. 

Honestly I sense fear here.  I have to wonder if they're suddenly terrified of being in a situation like the WiiU is right now, where very few people have bought the hardware so publishers aren't interested in spending millions of dollars to provide software for the platform...which essentially ends their game before it gets a change to even really begin.

Time will tell if this strategy works for Microsoft.  If I see identical AAA titles launching at $40 on XBone and $60 on PS4, as this guy suggests might "possibly" happen, then after my heart attack from shock I will definitely buy the XBone version, DRM or no.  I might even write Microsoft a letter of apology for doubting them.

They are listening to the people on this. I am 100% onboard for it. I totally like what he had to say and I respect his efforts.

I think you also missed the part released far earlier where you can start playing the game while it downloads.
http://www.joystiq.com/2013/05/21/xbox-one-lets-you-play-immediately-during-installs-suspend-an/

I'm not seeing anything wrong with their model and I actually support it. Hell, it even confirmed what I theorized on this thread about lower costs because you don't have to bump up the price to make up from the losses on the used games side.

It's also funny because Sony is going to also have DRM, they are just leaving it to the publishers.

At the end of the day, I will always take Microsoft over the publisher.

[billybob476]

That all holds true, if we see savings because of the model.