Microsoft unveils the new Xbox machine

[Vermil]

To put it simply, MS seem to be trying to make a Steam of their own. Steam started off disliked, but is now accepted by the mainstream.

Certinally, both MS and Sony have been dipping their toes in online distribution for ages now, with MS always being a step ahead.

[Gez]

The difference is that on PC we have GOG and a thriving indie scene.

[schwerpunk]

scalliano said:

Sweet, I thought I was the only one :bumpfist:

You definitely ain't. I just got a new AC adapter for mine.

Off topic: I miss cartridges...

[valkiriforce]

scalliano said:

Sweet, I thought I was the only one :bumpfist:

Definitely not. I don't shove my consoles in a garage box; I have everything set up all the time so I can switch from NES Metroid to Xbox Ninja Gaiden in a moment.

It's a good thing a lot of these older consoles have such huge libraries, as it keeps me busy until something worthwhile comes out.

[DoomUK]

schwerpunk said:

Off topic: I miss cartridges...

I miss cartridges, I miss old school box art, I miss tome-ish manuals which could take a whole night to read, I miss the variety of boxes and cases that games used to ship in, depending on the platform.

Ubiquitous DVD-ROMs in plain-looking DVD cases, boringly presented with boring artwork and with 3-page "manuals" inside just don't have the same appeal, as a physical product you go out and buy. I don't care how neatly and orderly they fit onto a shelf. I don't have OCD.

[Technician]

I was actually just pondering today that since solid state hardware is becoming cheaper and cheaper to assemble, if we'll ever see a company like Nintendo switch back to cartridges.

I know disks will be forever cheaper, but I would love to have carts again.

Blzut3 said:

Isn't it basically that already? Any game that uses Steam for activation can only be used once. No one seems to be complaining that the used game market on the PC has been effectively dead for a few years now between Steam and limited activation DRM schemes.

I have not purchased a new PC game in seven years, so I wasn't aware that the PC demographic was so pessimistic and obedient to being fucked in the ass.

[hex11]

My copy of Shadow of the Beast (Amiga) even came with a T-shirt! The box and game manual art back then was often beautiful and amazing, with the kind of style/atmosphere you find on music albums of the same era (in fact, some were by the same dude who did Yes album covers). Some of the boxes were packed full of stuff: maps, manuals, novella/story, poster, even little trinkets (Infocom was famous for this). And of course you got the original floppy disks - you could back them up, install on any machine... Good times!

[Aliotroph?]

Technician said:

I have not purchased a new PC game in seven years, so I wasn't aware that the PC demographic was so pessimistic and obedient to being fucked in the ass.

The thing about steam is it does a reasonably good job of being extremely convenient and always has crazy sales. If you're not buying games right on release you can often get prices that are as good or better than used console games.

Allowing license transfers while taking new money is just dickish, though. Forcing your friend to pay so he can take your license away from you, thus forcing you to pay more if you ever want to play in future, is clever and evil. I'd rather they didn't allow license transfers at all if they're going to be like that.

[Maes]

What's all this "steam" and "cloud" thing everybody's talking about? In the end, computer games are nothing but programs, and programs are stored as bits & bytes on a disk and loaded into transistor circuits called "RAM". How can you restrict that? ;-)

[valkiriforce]

hex11 said:

The box and game manual art back then was often beautiful and amazing

Absolutely, you can't go wrong with those 80's action-flick inspired game/box covers.

schwerpunk said:

Off topic: I miss cartridges...

I don't mind discs, but I kinda miss cartridges, too. They have no loading times and they can't get scratched badly like discs can. I bought a used copy of Shinobi for the PS2 a month ago and it turned out to be a defected copy even though it had few cuts and minor scuffs. I suppose that's all it took to ruin the game.

A friend of mine posted about the Xbox One recently so I figured I'd share it. It's a run-down list of all the negative features of the Xbox One that we know about so far.

[Nomad]

Blzut3 said:

No one seems to be complaining that the used game market on the PC has been effectively dead for a few years now between Steam and limited activation DRM schemes.

If by a few, do you mean... I don't know, decades? I'm not sure if I even remember a time where you could buy used PC games. Not from a store anyway, just from eBay or something.

[darknation]

uh, pretty sure that Game and HMV do secondhand sales. They do in scotland, anyway. Plus there has been a rash of glorified, kidz friendly pawn shops (not be confused with pr0n shops) due to the economic bullshit we're putting up with atm.

Not that game and HMV are going anywhere other than down the toilet, but yeah.

[Blzut3]

Nomad said:

Not from a store anyway

I've bought Duke Nukem 3D Atomic Edition used from a local used game store. Granted it was a section as large as the Dreamcast section is today, but it existed. I guess PC gamers just never really thought too much about trading in games.

That section has been gone since retail games have mostly become activated through Steam. I guess the store doesn't want to deal with determining which licenses can be transferred and which can not.

[Avoozl]

I wish steam didn't take over and enforce heavy internet requirements, I have to give up gaming because of the poor internet available in my area.

[hex11]

It hasn't been quite that long. Even in the late 90's, not everyone had Internet access, and there were plenty of stores in all the cities I lived in that sold used games. In many cases, they also sold used books, music CDs/tapes/records, movies, etc. I found a lot of cool stuff those days, usually at very good prices. There were also a bunch of mail-order places that advertised in magazines. You'd just call them up, give them a list of titles, and they'd look in their DB to find out availability and price (again usually very good discounts compared to new releases).

[scalliano]

Systems I have set up in my spare/PC room are as follows:

Atari 2600
Mega Drive/CD/32X
SNES
PS1
Saturn
N64
Dreamcast

All plugged into a shitty (but fully-functional) CRT TV which physically can serve no other purpose at this stage. At no point have any of them bitched at me for trying to load a used (or indeed, import with a bit of coercion) game because Sega/Nintendo/Sony/Atari didn't score any extra revenue from me.

I am hoping that, with the increase in capacity and reduction in costs of flash-based media, that we will eventually see a return to proprietary cartridges. If anyone is going to pioneer this idea, it will probably be Nintendo. Given that they seem to be the least concerned with the multimedia aspect of consoles, it seems only fitting. Carts load faster and are not easily copied. That said, I have Everdrive flashcarts for pretty much every cartridge system I own :P

Oh, and for the record, Steam has an offline mode.

[Carnevil]

Snakes said:

Indie devs won't be able to self-publish.

This just keeps getting better and better.

Indies are pretty much fucked on this console. Not only can you not self-publish, but even you did have a publisher to back you so you could get on there, there aren't any more XBLA/XBLIG sections. Now, the online marketplace shows you recommendations based on what's popular, what your friends are playing, etc. (aka COD COD COD COD COD) so getting exposure for your new indie title is going to be pretty much impossible.

Here's to Steam - the way of the future for indie developers! *looks at Steam Greenlight* ... fuck.

[Technician]

Carnevil said:

Indies are pretty much fucked on this console. Not only can you not self-publish, but even you did have a publisher to back you so you could get on there, there aren't any more XBLA/XBLIG sections. Now, the online marketplace shows you recommendations based on what's popular, what your friends are playing, etc. (aka COD COD COD COD COD) so getting exposure for your new indie title is going to be pretty much impossible.

Here's to Steam - the way of the future for indie developers! *looks at Steam Greenlight* ... fuck.

Too many indy developers were making it rich over night without labels, so it's not surprising that big business is stepping in to impede them.

[Acid]

The Xbox One feels like an independent gaming computer with its own OS and underpowered specs that you plug into a TV.

[schwerpunk]

BloodyAcid said:

The Xbox One feels like an independent gaming computer with its own OS and underpowered specs that you plug into a TV.

And ideally, that's all it would be. Honestly, nothing would make me happier. Unfortunately, Microsoft has delusions of becoming a general entertainment deck with heavy restrictions on how you can use the game 'licenses' that you lease from their approved third parties.

I'm more surprised they beat Sony to it. But I'm sure Sony will catch up, and then we'll see a real race to the bottom.

[Maes]

BloodyAcid said:

The Xbox One feels like an independent gaming computer with its own OS and underpowered specs that you plug into a TV.

If you change/remove the "own OS" and "underpowered specs" parts a bit, then you get the classic definition of a gaming console or dedicated arcade machine. Those typically had no OS to speak about: they just ran the game, exclusively, and everything they needed for I/O was part of the game's code. Very rarely there was some sort of mini-BIOS or low-level utilities built-in, but those were seldom needed.

As to whether they were underpowered compared to computers of their same era...yes and no. They typically had less addressable RAM (didn't need it, they had plentiful ROM storage), less expansion opportunities, but their CPUs were on par with those of affordable home computers of the time, plus they often had way superior video hardware and gaming-specific acceleration (multiple CPUs, hardware scrolling, hardware sprites, etc. and later hardware 3D acceleration, before those features became mainstream on PCs).

[Sokoro]

Technician said:

Too many indy developers were making it rich over night without labels, so it's not surprising that big business is stepping in to impede them.

So they need to give share of profit to steam/microsoft and even 3th party publisher? that is stupid..

They can always make a game for computer (fuck consoles) and use their own distribution method..

[Avoozl]

I'm glad at least CD Projekt Red know drm is not necessary. :P

[Gez]

Sokoro said:

So they need to give share of profit to steam/microsoft and even 3th party publisher? that is stupid..

Sharing profits with the publisher (be it Steam or any other) isn't stupid. There are costs for the publishers (did you know bandwidth is expensive? It's true! Getting hosted on the Internet isn't gratis, as surprising as it may seem) and they need to have a reason to want to publish you in the first place.

If you don't want to, you are free to self-publish. It's a lot easier than before, but you will still need to have a website, enough bandwidth allowance to support the traffic you'll get (not a guarantee if you are more successful than you expected), a secure transaction system so people will pay you money to get the game, and so on.

[Jodwin]

360 and PS3 were already terrible for indies. It was even more difficult to get attention on the XBLA than it's on PC without Steam, and to update your game you had to pay huge sums of money to either MS or Sony to get the patch validated. There's a reason why games such as Awesomenauts haven't had any new content on consoles since launch while the PC version has like doubled the playable characters, had balance patches and more.

[Kontra Kommando]

I'm probably going to buy it once the price drops, and they work out all of the initial bugs in the hardware. But I plan on building a better PC for gaming before that as well.

[Radon]

Breakthrough my ass,

PC is already just getting ready for the next advancements in hardware and consoles are showing up to the party atleast four years late.

[printz]

Bah, as far as I'm concerned, consoles are redundant. I think you can connect your desktop to your wide-screen TV these days.

[Maes]

Radon said:

PC is already just getting ready for the next advancements in hardware and consoles are showing up to the party atleast four years late.

I has always been like that -but this didn't preclude a console from beating PCs that were actually affordable by the average consumer at games and only at games, at a fraction of the price (e.g. compare price of a new Playstation in 1995 vs the best Pentium with the best graphics card you could have at the time...).

This factor, plus the fixed hardware specs and optimizations and the software support, is what keeps consoles afloat longer than e.g. "PC building standards" such as "Multimedia PC" 1, 2 and 3, which had become irrelevant in a matter of months. If you want a device which is GUARANTEED to play all the latest games (through the SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS' EFFORTS) for at least a decade, and you don't have to upgrade every 6 months, then consoles are for you.

[Suitepee]

Meh, I think I'm done with consoles for the most part. Not at all interested in XBox, since for me it's just a PC with less features.
I'm going to stick with my PC from now on, although I might consider picking up a PS4 if I still feel like playing Dynasty Warriors from time to time.