Since the Xbox One came out, which I have gone into enough tangents now at least for this week, I was thinking about one of the reasons Microsoft is doing this whole thing: Piracy. From what I've picked up, there was a shitload of piracy from the 360 and controllers, etc... So they have made this new system very strict on it's rules because of this. This isn't for just games, I'm talking about movies, cd's, etc... Anything that you can make an illegal copy of and sell and/or give away for free without permission or the patent from the company it was made from. So we all know it's illegal and most likely every single person has done some piracy around here at least once, but do you think as people who buy the systems/cds/movies legally, do you think we should pay and have a lot of rules and restrictions on how we watch/play/listen because of what happens outside our control?
No you can't be punished before you do something wrong. At the same time it falls to the game industry to control it. But we as gamers allow some compromising as we want the industry to keep profitable.. is like the "kickstart" program normal people pay (with no return) for indie games being made because we want new games, even if we may end up paying more.. the thing is that it always must be a line that we shouldn't cross in the abuse.. for me Xbox have crossed, but for many it didn't they are ready to sign up to all this new rules that robs us from the First sale doctrine The sad part is that Xbox one will probably do well at sales, and more abuses will be common like today is normal to pay 10$ to see the "True ending" of a game, at the 90's this wouldn't stand.. as there is no regulation in games the only way to "talk" is by boycott, but Microsoft (and others) belive (and they are right) that even if some people don't by their system a large number of casuals and missinformed or conformed people will so they can do about anything... And after they bleed us dry they can come and say "YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT IS LIKE to be only rich, and not MILLIONAIRE! We don't receive enough and we are going down! IT'S YOUR FAULT T_T!!!" Not taking responsability for all the errors they made. Piracy is a thing that will never end.. you can adapt to it and survive or not.
An interesting note about you and casual gamers: The Wii came in swinging for the casual gamers. I would someone to name more than 10 games that weren't made for party/kid/family/sport games. Including the ones like Metroid, Legend of Zelda, Mario and Pokemon. NOT including Japan which I've heard had a MUCH larger market than NOA, but that's another story. Wii really fell on the short side of this battle and might do okay in the U because of the One being so screwed up. Despite the casual gamers market seeming strong, and Wii was doing great for a while. It doesn't hold together for a long period of time. Nintendo lost 926 million in 2011. 26 million the year before. Overall, that doesn't affect Nintendo much, they can take strong losses and continue, but for Xbox that never hit a monopoly and is competing against a very strong PS4 and Wii U. I think they won't make it. As for piracy, yes, I know it is a problem. Is it crippling? No, the movie industry has had this problems since basically the start of movies, the music industry has hit severe problems with piracy too. Though Apple found a brilliant way of fixing it with Itunes where you can get one song for under two dollars, most one dollar. And they have continued and maybe not thrived, but are doing a strong enough job to continue and make a good profit out of it. Piracy is always going to be around, you can still make a profit with it, and you don't have to force people to be punished for going the legal way and buying your products and actually enjoy it without stealing it.
The thing about movies is that they are so much less expensive than a video game , and so much more universal that is way more easy to be profitable, even if they don't get much money in one country they can try again in the other, and you don't have to have a "specific machine" to see a movie, just go to a theater. The Apple way.. is a reality more and more games will be available through download, I only hope that when it comes to it the digital games becomes cheaper than the physical ones, today when I go to the PSN all new games are sold at full price, so i might as well buy the physical thing as it will save my HDD and I'll have the cover and the stuff to keep. I've found that the next generation solution could be a mix between PSN (PSN +) and Steam... Live sucks, even though it has some cool features like talk with your friends that are playing other games and stuff... it forces you to pay, and gives you little in return. PSN is simpler than Live, though it offers you much more gaming! When you become a PLUS user you get an instant collection so it is just like renting (it is exactly like renting) for the price of a new game you can play dozens of games the whole year... This strategy is great! I hope Sony keeps it! But the thing PSN is short on is sales.. even though the prices are lower for PSN + users they aren't as low as steam, if we could get those sweat deals at PSN I would probably skip A LOT of physical games. Sony even let you download you game in 5 different consoles (even though I don't think they planned this to be used for you to share your games with friends).
Actually, from what I heard Steam is going by the way of the console: They're making used games available. Steam even with the lower prices has a massive advantage. I checked out Steam in curiosity because I heard so much about their discounts. I can get things 75% off the original price. Every single game there is on sale on the front page. They say you can wait a WEEK and get a brand new game half off. I have seen this once in a blue moon in say Amazon, but not that early in say, a Halo game or COD. The reason Steam is booming and is getting great press from gamers is because it's $40 for a brand new game, and then they slash the prices with discounts, they let you lend games, but you have to share accounts, and I've heard they're changing that, too. If they ever go into the console business, they will win by a landslide. Microsoft is trying this with the price of games at $60 dollars a shot. Though I heard rumors of it lowering, not sure. Maybe movies are more cheaper to make, but I have to disagree because they still have to do the work of making games be translated to other countries like it is from Japan to other countries. I'm guessing very soon if it hasn't happened yet, the games will hit the same playing level as movies with amount of cost. Movie production is hideously expensive, if they don't do well in the U.S., yes, they might do well in another country, but it's the same with games. I don't know how much that applies to the system, but I know most likely they make the consoles a mass production for all countries because you're asking for a lot more expenses if you don't. You do bring a point about theaters, but the price of a movie ticket is getting sky high in itself. I know places where they do false advertising for 3D movies to make you pay the extra price. (Angry Joe got that when he went to see The Last Airbender). I remember in the 1990's and early 2000's they said the movie and music industry was dying because of the piracy and it's been going strong since then. The consumers paying more for movies, music and games because they say: "We're getting ripped off." Is not the right solution. Making all these restrictions and rules is not the right restriction.
I didn't mean cheaper to make, but to watch.. even if the tickets go as high as 20$ it still will be less than buying a console (200$-500$) plus the game (60$), and be forced to play only the games from whichever console you have.. so the basic public of movies is EVERYONE, the basic public of Halo are Xbox owners.
I' m not so sure casuals at large won' t mind the Xboned consumer unfriendliness at all, I know a lot of casual gamers who pirate more than I do (or, to be accurate, who actually pay much less stuff than I do) and/or mostly buy used stuff. Economy is a fickle *****. You can' t experiment at will and crash the system on purpose to make it a rocket science, you can only relly on past history and make a wild guess about what does or doesn' t work. Piracy is the umbrella term the industry blames its problems on when things go awry. You feel import hurts localization firms ? Call it piracy and region lock everything. Apparently buying or selling used games counts as piracy now. They haven' t openly labeled it as piracy yet, but they sure act like it is. Can they prove "piracy" is actually hurting them ? Nope, not in the big picture, but I can understand why they' d intuitively perceive it as harmfull. To counter all that the devs could have improved their distribution models, especially on-line. I would have been more than happy to buy digital if it was actually cheaper than buying a hard copy. It would hurt local business, but on the other hand it' d be more ecologic. You' d think they' d realize the cheaper their games are the more copies they would sell, or at the very least that selling digital at full price would be percieved as an obvious rip-off, but nope ... I' m not sure whether devellopers will adopt friendlier digital prices or not, but Micro$oft is biting the hands that fed them in too many ways for me to count anyway, Piracy and the used market are counterpowers to the cartel the video games industry essentially is, dicking around with useless DLCs wasn' t exactly the wisest way to prove they have a sound judgement on their products' worth. Personally if I' m stuck with them dictating how much what' s worth and exploiting it (which they' d be naturally inclined to do) I' m out, I' ll just boycott them. Whether most consumers feel the same way or not ... only time will tell.
Super Mario Galaxy Super Mario Galaxy 2 Sonic and the Secret Rings Sonic Unleashed Sonic and the Black Knight Sonic Colours New Super Mario Bros Wii Metroid Prime 3 Metroid Other M Little King's Story Xeoblade Chronicles Pandora's Tower The Last Story The Legend of Zelda Twilgiht Princess The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings No More Heroes No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle The Conduit The Conduit 2 Arc Rise Fantasia Monster Hunter Tri Okami Final Fantasy the Crystal Bearers Super Smash Bros Brawl Pretty sure some Marvel VS Capcoms and stuff were on there too Off the top of my head
I think we actually agree on something for once, Patman. :P The biggest part of the piracy is that they had years to adjust to it. Yes, the used game market is booming, partly because in my eyes, the games aren't as good as they used to be at least from the big publishers. Though there are games taking their place, like Catherine, Infamous, and other such games. The big industries who are still relying on the same old formula except for a few like Nintendo franchises mostly and the debatable Halo franchise if you look at 4 and consumers reactions, it's not working as well. Square except for Kingdom Hearts is depending heavily on their Final Fantasy series which with XIII and XIV though it was liked by some people, was still badly received by consumers. XIV reached a point where they did a public apology for how bad the game was. Rare which was FAMOUS for a TON of games on SNES and 64 is now last I heard recently making Kinect games. There are companies coming on their own, Ubisoft, the makers of Catherine, Infamous, companies like that will probably do well soon. But either it's people who don't buy those games often, (I haven't really heard of either Infamous or Catherine before this week.) or the fact that so many bad games are coming out from other companies consumers are hesitant to buy new games when they can get them cheaper used.There is more going on than: "This is piracy with used games and we're losing money due to easy access to piracy and used games." Maybe it's the cost of the system, the systems last I checked is still 200-300 dollars. That's a lot of money especially with the economy going as it is right now. Maybe it's MS just being an *******, Sony recently said: "We're not doing half the stuff that MS is doing with the PS4." Maybe they don't see piracy as a big enough threat to worry about it, or they see this despite the fact piracy will be easier because of the risk, the backlash against the One will be worth it. You have to have something to strongly compete in this kind of market today. You have to have something that really sticks out. Nintendo has it's brand name, Sony has the fact that they're riding on MS's bad publicity and the fact that they're trying their damned hardest to please the gamers this one. Microsoft is depending heavily on the casual gamers, the fans of games that are being made exclusive, and the poor schmuck who doesn't know any better and spends 500 bucks on a system not realizing what they're getting into. Will that work? Maybe, a lot of the fans are hoping it's not. Will it be popular as PS4, probably not, they'll lose money for this, and most likely blame piracy for that, too. Maybe it will at some point in the future it will get as cheap as Steam and as easy to access as Steam. Hell, it might be what it is like for Apple at some point and itunes. Or what the DVD player is like for movies. If it does, I still have a feeling we'd be blamed for bad sales.
I don't think piracy is as big problem as it were before! At 80-90's there where PIRATE CONSOLES that were consoles that could play games from different consoles like sega and nintendo. By 2000-2006 in the Ps1 and Ps2 era it was easy to download a game and burn a cd and play it bypassing even region locks. Ps3 until now is almost piracy free (there are some mods but you have to give up updates so you lose all new games), with systems updates the piracy issue is way more contained them it was in previous years.. sure Xbox 360 and Wii can be hacked , but I don't think it is so problematic as it was before as they sold so well. The major "problem" in game industry , is that today the game market is divided , in the previous generation Ps2 was everywhere so if you made a medium-bad game for Ps2 it could still sell pretty well (not to mention it was cheaper to make games back than) .. today when a publisher / developer does something bad it comes back to bite on their assess . THQ made good games, but had the WONDERFULL idea to make that Wii tablet/draw thing that made them break, Lucasarts made the most expensive game ever (that MMO of Starwars) and it turn out to be just "ok" , i think is a free game now.. so it was sold than closed. Square spend millions in the making of Spirits Within (that i enjoyed, but FF fans didn't) and that was a risk that they took. The problem is.. in every investment go well or not, and usually if you fail in one of these the next game has to be great to save you so mediocre publishers/developers close... mostly developers as publishers take all the money and leave the developers be slaughter.
Keeping inflation in mind it' s not that pricey compared to the systems that came before. And although it' s not a golden rule recession times are usually a boon for the entertainment industry : the grimmer the outlook the higher the need for escapism.
The Xbox One part does make sense since I've also heard about the pirating for the console. I still think it's not a very good idea and should have been done differently but it makes some sense. I feel that if you pirate you're really cheating the creators of a product out of the money they worked for. So, something like a small fine (not something unpayable) would be okay imo. The problem is there's always going to be a way to pirate and always a way to get around being caught. Most likely, people will even find away around the Xbox One checkups.
