How the Xbox One could Win Us Over

XboxPweaseAfter the announcement that essentially confirms that Microsoft wants to kill game trades and potentially disk based games in general with the Xbox one’s drm, so it’s not entirely clear how they will try to win customers back (aside from holding 15 new games hostage along with Halo).

As primarily a PC gamer  over the past few years there is a way to prevent us from feeling cheated out of our money when we can’t trade in bad games or just short-lived titles that where flash in the pan at best.

A while ago Steam said they viewed their games and pc gaming in general as a service, this means they can forgo draconian drm, provided constant updates to their games, cut costs and do ridiculous sales with almost no fear of pirates, And now Xbox can and should do some of the same. (not that it couldn’t before)

“Living Games on The Cloud”
SHOULD BE “Games as a Service”

The Cloud itself probably wont play a big part for gaming in general as with Microsoft’s (M$) recommendation of a 1.5Mbps connection speed (192 Kilobytes per second which is about 200 hours to download your average PC game or just quick enough to stream a song without any other data on the line) I don’t see very much going on live, without completely offloading the game to the servers, However I will say that you can take advantage of the required internet connection to continually add new content to your games.

941119_1328067243729_fullI have to say I know where this will go first, Xbox one gamers should expect to get xboned at launch with titles having glitches that need repair post launch but weren’t fixed to meet a dead line.

I’d also expect a great deal of DLC to start being distributed even for single player games, not so much micro transactions but challenge levels maybe even post launch multiplayer (if that still is on the universal checklist for AAA games).

Still I hope Microsoft Realizes that working against trade in’s and used games needs to be accompanied by expanded post launch support in the form of content and not just bug fixing, if for no other reason than game trades proving the average console title isn’t worth extended ownership.

You Can’t Nuke Backwards Compatibility Again

While Nintendo has gotten away with this generation after generation, that the Xbox one being built on PC architecture leads me to be-leave that the next Xbox will probably be much the same or at-least should since I can’t really think of a great reason for it to go one way or the other but part of this goes back to my steam reference.

The DRM people tend to reject is DRM that says your game belongs to your PC now and when you try to upgrade or anything else that DRM feels threatened.

No if we are stuck with games we buy, then we should be able to keep them in a much more permanent fashion.

cssWhen I purchased Counter Strike Source back in 2003 (with my dad), it was a lot of fun to play and now on my latest PC  I can still play the game, community intact and game still entertaining as ever (though I have upgraded to GO).

My point is that its more acceptable for a permanent purchase to be one that we get to keep not one that gets locked away on this console the second M$ wants to sell us a new toy.

[box]And as a side note they need to also reward us for ownership perhaps in the form of a discount on pre-ordering the next game in a series after owning the first few like Saints Row IV on PC or maybe taking the edge off the price of those season passes.[/box]

Halo 4 Cannot be your best first party attempt

This is really just a final note but for all the great reviews it got, I felt let down by what has to be the first, by the numbers, halo clone. The infinity missions felt slapped together, and even the cut-scene story line feels a bit under cooked.

While Halo 4 was much less one-off product more service provided by M$ and a platform first by being a game all but exclusively funded and built my M$ I have to say its a bit lacking and not the kind of thing you can hold hostage for people to want to buy in the future.

1 Comment

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