the be all end all video game thread

See, that is the difference. If Microsoft came out with all their DRM bullshit, but then priced their console at $399 like Sony and said that downloaded games would be $50 while disc based games remained at their usual $60 price point, they might have gotten some support, based on a reduced price offsetting the reduced rights when it comes to ownership of the game. The fact that they were planning on taking away a lot of consumer rights without offering any kind of discounted price was a big factor against them.

Then they acted genuinely confused when people were annoyed with them. They basically said "we're taking away your ability to buy used, rent games, or trade games with friends. For this wonderful privilege, we're charging you $100 more than Sony, if you don't have Internet your console becomes a $500 brick, and keeping games at the same price they've been. Why won't you Let us Love* you!"

*love, in this case, meaning "force our restrictive policies on you"

 

See, that is the difference. If Microsoft came out with all their DRM bullshit, but then priced their console at $399 like Sony and said that downloaded games would be $50 while disc based games remained at their usual $60 price point, they might have gotten some support, based on a reduced price offsetting the reduced rights when it comes to ownership of the game. The fact that they were planning on taking away a lot of consumer rights without offering any kind of discounted price was a big factor against them.

Then they acted genuinely confused when people were annoyed with them. They basically said "we're taking away your ability to buy used, rent games, or trade games with friends. For this wonderful privilege, we're charging you $100 more than Sony, if you don't have Internet your console becomes a $500 brick, and keeping games at the same price they've been. Why won't you Let us Love* you!"

*love, in this case, meaning "force our restrictive policies on you"[/quote]

I also found it confusing that they were forcing it on people. I think people would have loved it as an option. You can share, don't need a disc to play etc, but you'll have to sign in to Xbox Live every 24 hours. If you don't want to do that then you'll need the disc in the drive to play. If they offered it as an added feature instead of forcing it on consumer it would have probably been received by people much differently.

 

The problem with giving customers a choice is that it fractures the ecosystem on which the system depends on. That's why Microsoft is either all or nothing on this.

 

You guys know the $100 price point and the digital content/DRM issues are only tangentially connected, right? The console was $100 more because they were force-bundling the Kinnect with every console.

 

How does it fracture the ecosystem? They were already going to be selling games as digital and physical copies. Which implies that they wouldn't be able to provide the saving that steams does, because publishers would need to play nice with their retail partners. I'm open to an explanation, but I'm just not seeing it on my own.

 

Look at any console that has had an optional accessory. For the most part, they failed miserably because developers could never be sure that a large enough number of the user base had purchased it to make development for said accessory financially worthwhile. Hence why Microsoft is now bundling a Kinect. They want the people developing games for them to know that they'll have the option to put in voice recognition or hands free gameplay.

By pulling the plug on having a required internet connection with the console, I can't imagine developers (not as many anyway) utilizing the cloud infrastructure because they don't know if customers will have their XOnes connected or not. Unless of course the developers themselves say "We require internet at all times". And who is really going to do that other than the companies that were making games for the old "always connected" infrastructure?

 

But how is this comparable to a Kinect? That seems like a leap. If you incorporate the Kinect, it entirely changes how the game is played. Outside of Titanfall ("Um, we literally don't have singleplayer..."), what sort of gamebreaking modifications would there be?

I know the company line is that this was about developers, but there seems to be an absence of examples. Which indicates that it's way more about verification.

 

Say you're a mid-sized publisher like Rockstar. This matters because EA knows that they can get away with making games for Kinect because their yearly titles are pretty much guaranteed and they can afford the risk. If you're Rockstar, given the choice between developing a game just for the Kinect or for the entire 360 system, which one would you pick? As of January of this year, the Kinect shipped 18 million units. There were 40 million XBox Live users, not counting the amount of people that haven't gone online. 66 million 360s have been sold. For all we know, there could be millions of Kinects sitting in warehouses. With that kind of install base disparity, doesn't it behoove you to aim for the broadest market?

As for how a developer decides how to use a Kinect, that would be up to them, obviously. But the fact that they have Kinect's camera and microphone available to them could mean anything from voice commands, head tracking or tons of crap we haven't even thought of yet. I think it'd be kinda neat to be able to lean around a corner. Or be able to look at my side mirrors while play Forza. Is it completely implausible that a developer would pass on spending creative energy on a peripheral because developing for it didn't make financial sense?

 

As a counter-argument I present the Wii. AFAIK, the Motion+ and Balance board did fairly well. The bigger problem with the Kinect is that a lot of people just don't want it. The technology is crazy impressive, but I don't really see any reason I would want it in my game system. Again, look at the Wii. The gimmicky games are kind of neat for a while, but the tacked-on motion controls in games like Mario are more annoying than anything else. No one is going to be dancing in front of their TV to play Call of Duty for 3 hours, and voice controls are just a reason I can't play without being rude to the other people in the house, especially late at night. Hell, the commercial for voice controls in Madden specifically points out one way the idea sucks.

 

Jimmy, you're missing the point. I'm talking only about the Kinect since it's brought up as an analogue for the online check ins.

We're told this check in system is for the developers, that they need it to do new, cool shit. Well, besides Titanfall, what is that shit? What can they do with it, that they can't without it?

 

Welp

 

Developers can offload computational tasks to the cloud instead of relying on physical hardware to do the heavy lifting. Necessary game computations for physics, rendering, and the like could be immensely enhanced with a connection to servers in the cloud. Imagine a game like Total War with true to life battlefield AI with 10,000 units on the screen at once, in HD at 60 fps. It's that kind of thing that's theoretically possible. Imagine a single player game like Skyrim where your actions could potentially affect another player's experience in another country. One day, when you fire up that game, you find that the king you were fighting for has been assassinated by another player. The ability to seamlessly switch between a single and multiplayer experience is the kind of possibility we're looking at.

And then there's the whole "taking your digital library with you everywhere" bit. This article explains what could have been better than I could. For all the vilification that Microsoft has gone through, remember that Valve was taking it up the ass when Steam first started. It was only after they essentially banned sharing and reselling that they were able to offer discounted software sales. By going digital only, Valve made a hell of a lot more money selling fewer units.

Anyway, I read somewhere that a publisher can make the call to require internet access for their particular game. Given the choice between that or having to check in every day, I choose the former. I don't know. I guess if I were a developer, I would feel better knowing that any work I put in towards cloud processing would be appreciated by the most amount of people. Having my potential sales reduced because Microsoft didn't require an internet connection would suck.

This console won't even be out until November. If last week has taught us anything, anything could happen.

 

The issue that you failed to mention again in your post (I didn't read through the links much) was that Steam has an Offline mode, which works rather well in my experience and has been available for some time now. I've used it with CoD MW2, Fallout New Vegas, GTA4, etc. when I have not had internet access at home and the games have run perfectly (obviously in single-player mode). Sure, it doesn't always unlock the "Achievements/Trophies" but who honestly cares about that, apart from the under-18 set? Microsoft were not going to build an Offline mode into the XBox One until gamers forced them to through voicing their opinions. Yes, the publishers *can* make it so you can only play their games if you were online at the time, but they most likely won't because the model Steam has works pretty well. Why change it if it isn't broken? My guess is that the game developers would continue to build an Offline mode into their games for the forseeable future because the internet does NOT always work. Valve did get hammered at the time for the reselling of games but I think most people would accept that the current model they have developed for digital distribution works well and doesn't need many changes - Offline mode is what makes this viable. Once someone has paid for a game, they won't be interested in being told under what circumstances they can play it (aside from piracy, of course - no company could allow that to take place) - once someone has paid for the right to use it, they should be able to use it when they want to without a huge restriction like having to be online to play.

I'm not sure about all this stuff about gaming in the cloud - wouldn't it cause a LOT of lag in multi-player games? I, for one, have a pretty slow internet connection - it often takes me days to download a game (a week in the case of GTA 4 and Episodes From Liberty City - about 24 gigabytes in total, purchased through Steam) and multi-player for most games is really slow on my end (a few TiB people I've gamed with can attest to this). I can only think how poor the connection would be if 20000+ people logged in with different speed internet connections from different locations in the space of a few minutes to play the newest game through the cloud. You keep forgetting that not everyone has hugely fast internet or the reliable internet that cloud gaming would require and, until everyone has identical internet speeds globally, I don't think cloud gaming is an especially viable solution for developers. How many games can you think of that have shit the bed in online mode due to poor/insufficient server connections and, as a result, received some bad press? Quite a few, I think.

 

Hate to break it to you, but recent news has it that the "family" plan was only allowing others labelled as "family" to play your game for 45 minutes to an hour before they get the option to buy the game themselves.

Last time I heard so much rhetoric about the "cloud"and its computational bullshit was the disastrous launch of the new SimCity. They had that cracked and working offline without the cloud in about a week so I'm a little skeptical when the could is touted as some way make graphics or gameplay better.

 

That would fucking suck. You realize some people like single player right?

 

I'm extremely skeptical of the idea that cloud computing is going to increase the average user experience because ultimately, it still has to be communicated online. Look at your average video hosting, or the computational level of your average MMO. Look at the sort of lagging that occurs in multiplayer environments. I don't think that technically, we are at the level of online content delivery that would surpass local processing.

A huge part of the whole reason to play something like Skyrim is because it's not WOW. That honestly sounds terrible for me, personally. I enjoy my single player games have a functional plot and not having to deal with other people's bullshit actions.

I entirely agree about the digital library, but that's my point: I suspect this is all about verification rather than actual developer needs.

 

I only mentioned Steam as a comparison of what Microsoft was looking to go for.

Considering that we've never seen computing done in the cloud before when it comes to gaming, I have no idea how it'll perform. I have no idea how data intensive it is. What I am saying is that it's theoretically possible. As to your second point, quoting Joystiq, "At its Xbox One reveal event today, Microsoft announced that it plans on having over 300,000 servers powering the console's expanded Xbox Live service. The server bump represents a significant increase over the 15,000 servers that power Xbox Live currently." I would imagine that kind of processing power should be enough to handle the workload, and I would also imagine that Microsoft can simply spin up more virtual servers to handle spikes in usage. Besides, how much bandwidth did Folding@Home and Seti@Home take up?

Quoted from arstechnica.com "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."

No mention of a time limit. However, you're probably thinking about how the check in would increase to once every hour when you're gaming on a console you don't own. Sounds reasonable to me, otherwise you could just sign in on a console and ostensibly give your entire library to someone else. Irrelevant now, since there's no check in required anymore.

EA's servers weren't equipped to handle the enormous demand of having hundreds of thousands of people downloading and running the software all at once. That's not an indictment of cloud computing. It's an indictment of EA's poor planning and infrastructure. Also, I think the original idea of building your own city, while working with others on a more global scale is still a neat idea, but that's neither here nor there.

These are all theoretical applications. I have no idea if something like that will ever be released. What I can say with 100% certainty is, "YOU DON'T HAVE TO FUCKING BUY IT!"

I think the problem here is a lot of misinformation going around, and the fact that people can't see the forest for the trees.

EDIT:

It's my belief that putting computations in the cloud (for AI/physics) would work differently than a server in WoW being a persistent world where it has to know where everything is and what they're doing at all times. The bulk of the game will exist locally on your hard drive. The computations to make those assets work can be done in the cloud, freeing up your console to handle more assets with potentially higher graphical fidelity.

And before anybody says that this doesn't match up with what I said before, I also qualified everything with, "theoretical". I imagine the developers themselves don't have a firm idea on how they're going to use this yet.

 

Who exactly would be paying for the servers in the cloud in your theoretical model? Crunching numbers gets expensive pretty quick at the sort of scale a semi-popular game would get. The hard computations for WoW are done on the local client for that very reason. Keeping track of state is pretty small potatoes compared to the stuff you're suggesting.