XBox One news

[dc20willsave]

Seriously, it's things like that make me want to never give a company my money out of spite. Microsoft seriously has become Sony from last generation.

[Dan]

The utter inability to figure out how to talk to people you are trying to sell to baffles me. Gameological had a really good article yesterday about this.

[Kenny Evil]

Microsoft seems to have designed everything around what makes the publishers happy. Unfortunately they seem to believe they have a captive audience and they are going to learn that they really, really don't.

[Guest]

This is the result of people looking at numbers and doing focus groups.

They believe they can actually exclude a sector of the consumer base and make money off the one's they're specifically marketing to.

My question is, who exactly are they marketing to? It seems like they are just going out of their way to piss everyone off.

The staggeringly large number of people that bought 360s and almost never put a game in them.

[Venneh]

Holy balls.

Will post the pics later, but if you're not in one of the 21 launch countries (which does not include Japan according to the map), you are locked out of XBone gaming and discs until the console comes to your country.

[Guest]

Japan will not give the slightest of shits. Microsoft is dead over there.

[Venneh]

A good part of Europe is excluded, too.

[Venneh]

[Guest]

Again, this feels very calculated.

They're taking entire groups of gamers and going "we don't need you".

[Stavros]

It's not that these moves would even cause me personally much grief if I got an xbone, but the sheer dickery involved in coming up with these constraints means that I'm just not going to buy it.

Of course, I usually wait a couple of years into the generation before getting something anyway. At that point it's all about who has the better games profile.

[Guest]

[James D.]

Microsoft is simultaneously being Turd Sandwich and Giant Douche.

[Stavros]

I'd vote for either over Microsoft.

It's like they've learned to Ro Sham Bo themselves.

[Guest]

The grand irony in all of this is that they are banking on a majority of XBox One sales to be from people that aren't super connected and following this stuff. The connected console for the 3-5 game a year consumer.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall in a lot of meetings right now.

[Venneh]

Microsoft, paraphrased about its consumer base: "We're counting on most people not giving a flying fuck and rolling over for us."

[Stavros]

I don't know why they think a hardcore gamer base is expendable. It's the cornerstone of a console business.

[Pan-dub]

An honest explanation or furious back-pedalling?

[Guest]

The same thing was posted on 4chan. No one can confirm if the guy is actually who he says he is.

[JackFetch]

Whoever it is, he makes a lot of sense.

[Guest]

He raises interesting points, but they're still flawed in a lot of ways. The whole thing has the tone of "we're just too progressive for you simple-minded folk!".

He points out that Nintendo is too consumer-minded and Sony is the status quo, but ignores just how far Microsoft has become retailer and publisher-minded. They're not out to fuck over Gamestop. If anything, they're giving them more to benefit from, seeing as they'll be one of the "participating retailers" when it comes to the license transfers.

And if anyone actually thinks game prices are going to go down from this... I have some bad news for you.

[JackFetch]

Prices are lower for PC games where there is no trade in market.

[Guest]

PC is a different beast. It always has been.

The fact that the guy mentioned Steam at least a dozen times without any real concept of why Steam is successful is telling.

[JackFetch]

Just because it's different, doesn't make my comment any less true.Publishers went up on their game price because they were losing money from the used game market. Take that away and the publishers go back to competing against each other instead of Gamestop.

[Guest]

There's this grand myth that shutting out the used game market is suddenly going to make Gamestop magically disappear. They've been ready for it. They were ready for it when I worked at one seven years ago. They'll simply adapt. Without used sales, they still have pre-orders, a ton of them. They still have subscriptions; subscriptions to a magazine that is deep in the pocket of those very publishers and gives their games inflated scores.

They've done research on game prices and consumers actually consider a game to be of a lesser quality if it's not 59.99 new at retail. If they were going to lower game prices, they would have made digital downloads of those exact same titles cheaper. And they haven't. Even though digital downloads don't have to deal with that evil used game thing. Hell, digital downloads of older games are still traditionally more expensive on the Live Marketplace than finding a reduced price new copy in a Walmart.

Will prices eventually go down when the industry as a whole goes to all digital and discs cease to exist? Yeah, probably, but it's not going to happen because of used games being shutout. It'll be industry wide and only when they're left with no other choice.

PC went through the same thing music did. Prices dropped and games were made easier to purchase to shut out piracy. That and a very good track record of customer trust are why Steam works.

[KnightWing]

The $59.99 console game price is standard at this point; MS going lower than that just because they can would be a very very stupid business decision. They'll release remakes and ports at lower prices, and have online sales for games that aren't new. But they won't launch Halo 5 at Gears 4 at anything less than the full $60.

Since the PS4 exists and it's still a physical-disc system, there's no reason for MS not to be priced the same way unless they start having serious problems with sales.