Xbox 720 rumours: internet required, no used games.

The tools have gotten better, just not enough to offset the increases in detail wanted =)

I can't find the article, but I read something recently about how Gamestop is already planning for this imminent used game ban. Basically they're counting on people with who can't get credit cards (bad credit, youngster, doomsday prepper) to buy digital content with cash at their stores. There's no way in hell this makes up for the used game profits, though, so they'd have to start offering some other services.

Man, thinking about Gamestop makes me sad. I remember going to the EBx in Redmond Town Center back in the late 90s/early 2000s. They were awesome, more than once I bought a game there, didn't like it, and returned it with no hassle at all. I used to do a ton of business with them. Then Gamestop bought EB and it all went to shit.

For all the people bitching about used games: Do you actually buy used games? I got sick of the grimy pawnshops GameStop turned into years ago. I don't have the patience for eBay bullshit anymore because, as Cubit noted, I grew up. That and everything from eBay smells like emphysema.

I guess there's Gamefly, but Gamefly sucks. If a game's on Gamefly and actually available for rental or whatever, chances are the PC version has been in a Steam sale for $5 already.

Essentially, who the fuck is this affecting aside from the marks GameStop can trick into paying $55 for a used copy of Call of Madden 2014?

I saw some article about GameStop trying to expand into phone subscriptions.

Oh yeah, here it is. And they're also planning to sell "vintage games".

I don't see how you can use the "this is just how things are and Steam is the ideal solution" argument when Steam was at the forefront of bringing most of those things about. Online activation, account tie-ins, and game clients were very rare before Half-Life 2 was released.

And yes, it is fortunate that Steam is run by Valve as opposed to EA or Activision, but can you ever have faith in a company to always maintain policies that you feel are in the customer's best interest? Leadership changes are inevitable (paging Brad Wardell), and your investment into the service is only going to grow. I know a lot of people don't care if it does go to shit because they have no problem walking away from the money they've sunk into their Steam collections. And that's fine. They view it as basically a subscription service like their Cable package, and that's certainly one way to view it. But I can't help but think it's folly to trust any company to maintain a particular standing on anything in the long run, especially in an industry that has always been rife with turnover and buyouts and general asshattery.

That's absolutely true, but why is it one of the better ways? It's because people want to use it. Even Gabe Newell will admit (and has, in interviews) that it's not the DRM that reduces piracy nearly as much as the quality of the service. So why is it made mandatory? From what I understand, Steamworks as a post-release DRM is not effective from a technical standpoint. So if you took away that DRM, would people stop using Steam? Of course they wouldn't. Because they use it for the social aspects and because of its convenience; not because of its DRM.

And there have always been EULAs, but not nearly as harsh as those we have now with Steam and Origin. And more importantly than that; back then, companies had little to no authority to enforce them. Now they control not only your access to that particular game, but every game you've ever bought on the service, which they can easily revoke access to for whatever reason. And oh yeah, you're forced to agree to whatever changes they happen to make to the EULA in perpetuity lest you lose access to those games anyway.

Aside from a dozen little things that we could trade anecdotes back and forth about (and are largely irrelevant); the main problem I have is that level of control. I have little problem with Steam as a service, game store, or client, apart from its mandatory nature. It's a great service, and I would absolutely use it save for the fact that I'm forced to (stay with me here). No company should control PC gaming or PC gamers' libraries, and I believe the majority of gamers would agree with that if it were EA or Microsoft holding the keys. The difference is, I don't feel Valve is any more or less deserving than them, or any other company for that matter.

That's all great, and certainly a nice benefit to using the service, but it is just that: a service. They'll tell you before I will that you're not actually buying a product, but a subscription to use it. And while you get benefits for using the service, you do also lose out on benefits from being forced to and not actually owning the product (like being able to give it to someone else, for example). But whatever. I promise I won't quote-finger anymore!

That's exactly right. You weren't given a choice, but people bought it in droves anyway because it was Half-Life 2 (much like people accepting Origin because it's Battlefield 3, and the bullshit Blizzard is pushing because it's Blizzard). But I wonder if you're okay with EA making Origin mandatory for its games. After all, it's exactly what Valve did with Steam. And you may say Origin sucks now, but holy shit did Steam suck back in 2004.

And I've never complained about Steam offering games, so I'm not sure where you got that from. I just thought it was funny that the other guy I quoted thought PC gamers won some kind of war because they get to buy more cheap games now.

If not Steam, then I would ask what should be the target of choice for these complaints I've listed?

James Johnson: No, you inbred fuckmonger. Gamestop's spectacular deals are not what people are worried about.

What's worrisome - at least for me - is what I'll do when I want to play something that's no longer printed.

Maybe it's a game that didn't sell very well, so the first print run wasn't followed up with any others. Maybe I'm just buying something I missed, a decade after the fact.

Imagine if the only way to play Super Mario Bros. was via Nintendo's shitty online stores.

And, them, you have anything that doesn't get reissued. No one who didn't play Earthbound while the authentication servers were still up gets to! Anything less ubiquitous than Call of Madden 2014 can very easily be lost, at least to most users.

Have some fucking foresight.

I never buy used games. It would be mildly annoying not to be able to lend them to friends, though.

Yeah, stupid marks, buying the same product for five bucks less with no ill effects. Suckers!

I like where this thread is going!

ha yeah who would want to play that dumb thing probably nobody more like lametendo right

To put in Charles terms, what if Xenoblade couldn't be played used.

Or whatever the fuck. Bubsy fucking 3D, if you want. The title isn't the important part.

The important thing is that we are talking about pieces of the medium being lost. Their future accessibility at the whim of monolithic entertainment corporations.

That's the future man. What happens if Facebook's data center gets EMP'd? All that important information about what people ate, where they got drunk, what they think about Obama, lost... FOREVER.

Same thing, only different.

I would really dislike it if next gen consoles did away with the ability to play used games. Picking up a used copy on the cheep has been a great way to see if we like a franchise or not. If we don't like it we blew $10 no big deal. If we like it chances are good we'll buy the next game in the series new so that the developers get our money so that we will have more great games to play. If we have to buy a game at full price impulse purchases won't happen very often and we'll end up missing out on good games that we might have given a try otherwise.

ffs

The issue is not in the here and now! Authentication keys attached to a backbone that isn't shit probably won't cause any huge problems during the console's lifetime.

Eventually, the developers will stop selling the titles. At that point, with this sort of system, it's up in the air whether they'll be playable in any form - original Xbox titles are still essentially unemulated right now, for instance.

Unless you're one of the HERP DERP DON'T NEED NO OLD GAMES people, in which case go suck a fuck.

Well there very well could be ill effects such as scratched disks, lacking user manuals and already used game codes. $5 isn't much for some peace of mind.

What if they made mandatory demos for all games a thing, as it is now with XBLA games?

If either of the first two happens you return it. If the third thing is relevant it's because the publisher included that specifically to inhibit used sales, so... yeah don't buy those used. That's a tiny fraction of games.

Also, if you buy a game used at Gamestop you're allowed to return it just because you don't like it and get something else that's also used. Stupid marks.

Why not do what they do for XBLIG then and just give you a time-limited version of the game instead of a feature-limited demo?

Emulator development cannot simply be assumed. Architectures are growing more and more complex; to emulate a modern console to the same degree of accuracy as something like BSNES would take insane amounts of time and manpower, and then the hardware requirements would be horrifying. This will only be exacerbated as time goes on. Eventually, any given platform will probably be emulated to a usable degree - but it may never be hardware-accurate, and there may be years between its death and the creation of an emulator that even kind of works.

Is that true? I was under the impression you couldn't return it but could trade it in for about 20% of what you paid for it moments ago.

I haven't shopped at a Gamestop/EB in ages. I tried once because I wanted some exclusive content or something and they didn't have any unopened copies left but had a shelf full of opened "new" copies. I left empty handed because there's no way I'm paying full price for an opened product, especially one that had codes for DLC included in the box.

It's absolutely true. I don't go through that many games, but my brother does this all the time. You have a week or ten days or something, and if you don't like the second thing you get either you can do it again.

Almost everything? What the hell are you talking about? Almost none of the games I might want to go back and play from the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era have PC ports available.

You're excused. However, modern games for your definition of the word modern are not the only games that matter.

"This is not an issue for the games I want to play."

I don't know, you're the one who brought it up. Afti is talking about going back and playing games you missed, not replaying games you've had sitting around in a drawer for a decade.

I'm starting to get scared now. How am I going to play Dark Souls in 10 years if they stop me from buying used games?

Sure, but can you really argue from the position that digital distribution was not nor would ever be the future otherwise? Without Steam we would most definitely be stuck choosing between MS's/Sony's/Nintendo's/Gamestop's (ugh) options, which as they are vary from "okee-doke" to "oh fuck you man, fuck you." They'd still be there, there would just be no acceptable bar set that Steam set.

No, but there is no company where that is 100% and yet there are so many companies where I am relying on them regardless. It's that or I go live in a shack in the woods. We both know that.

I do not know these people you know who would literally shrug at losing all their Steam games one day. Everyone I know would be incensed and I don't mind telling you I have all my Steam games downloaded because if it did ever happen, it'd take all of a few months at most for hackers to crack all those games to make them playable. So I am not particularly worried despite the fact that I'd be wound up over such a thing and it'd ruin DD services in my opinion forever.

OK, well that is not really a hit against Steam, is it? You just admitted the reason Steam works so well is because most people like it. People liking it isn't a bad thing. We are not talking about legions of drone PC gamers who don't think. A lot of technical and professional criticism has been applied to Steam and it has come up shining in almost every case. Few people ask "Why Steam?" After using it, they ask "Why not Steam earlier?" Also whether or not Steamworks works as a DRM it certainly does its job as unobtrusively as possible, and DRM has a gamut that runs almost as wide as digital client services, with Steam again on the good end and stuff like Ubisoft's garbage at the bad end.

Again, another issue with high variance in regards to what it means to you, the consumer. You can't make the argument that Steam is suddenly going to lock you out of all your games because you wore white after Labor Day or something likewise as innocuous. Does that mean accidents won't happen or another client won't be as good at preventing problems like that, no.

Obviously an agree to disagree moment here. Valve has proven they deserve it because when they were practically the only kid on the block selling direct download lemonade, they did it as right as anyone could and most would. They could fuck it up next week but it's been 10 years now and next week still hasn't happened. Can you think of a luxury sector company you've relied on to the extent you do Steam that hasn't let you down for 10 concurrent years? I can't.

Heh, ok! Honestly I am over most of those luxuries. Again Steam hasn't penalized me for not owning the game physically and nowadays I gift games via Steam to people. Yes it's not free but eh fuck it, so many of my friends live 100s-1000s of miles away and GOOD GOD IT WAS A HASSLE SHIPPING XCOM TO MY FRIEND, POST OFFICES, GROSS only slightly kidding

Nope. I fuckin' hated installing Origin for SWTOR STOP LAUGHING IT LOOKED COOL AT FIRST and then ME3. I still hate it and I never use it otherwise, fuck that piece of junk. I read all the news about it and how it was almost worse and still ended up terrible. I used Desura a bit and it was ok because it caters to indie stuff and I like to play shitty HL mods (which then activate on Steam and I never have to go back to Desura, funnily enough). I used Gamefly (ugh) because that's the only place I could get Pathologic aside from some sketchy mail order place (I had been using a warezed version because it was so hard to get and I felt bad because I love Ice-Pick Lodge, the developer). That client blows fat smelly gorilla cocks. God I hate it. It's stupid and unintuitive and clunky and it installs games in Documents. Are you kidding me?

Surprise twist to that rant: in all cases I am thinking Why aren't these assholes more like Steam? Without Steam, I can't expect better. I have no metric.

Oh I thought when you said "But hey, you get to buy more of their products now! Take that, big game publishers! We win!" that was coming from you, my bad.

"Every single other DD platform but Steam to varying degrees." Complaining about Steam is just complaining about DD as a business model. You needn't name names using Steam if you hate the business model, because you only argue against yourself.

1. "Pretty well" means there are still games that don't work. Let alone getting a hardware-accurate experience.

2. Who the fuck are you to decide what people should replay? "YOU DON'T NEED IT BECAUSE THERE ARE PORTS AND WHO CARES ABOUT THE THINGS THAT DON'T HAVE PORTS" What if someone wants to play one of those titles you don't care about? What if they want to play a particular version of a title? Is Metal Wolf Chaos an objectively less worthy game?

3. What we're talking about here is the next Xbox requiring disc media to authenticate online, and making it useless if it doesn't. Not Steam or iOS or whatever, where, yes, piracy works just fine for archival. There are all kinds of problems, but archival is not among them. This is a console, which is a different fucking environment.

Random brain thoughts...

Ok so if everyone has to buy a new copy of a game then wouldn't that mean prices could go back down to $50 or less, since sales would drastically go up due to no resale?

I wonder what % of a game being played is composed of a used copy? 40%? That would be like 4 in 10 people trading in their game and someone else getting it second hand. That number seems low, maybe it should be 60%?

I await the crushing boot of the responses.

I bought it, learned my lesson, and wouldn't do it again. Not getting SimCity 5 for this reason.