Be Excellent To Each Other

I agree that the Xbox marketplace is fucked up (its prices are insane, as is what you can and can't get on there), but that doesn't mean that digitial distribution is broken.

It remains to be seen how the stranglehold of the platform holders (MS/Sony/Nintendo) will play out when it comes to digital distribution on the next-gen of consoles, and yes, it could all pan out terribly badly.

Personally speaking I'd say that Steam (and Origin and the likes of GoG) have given me hope that digitial distribution can work really well.

Not only do you get all the advantages I listed above, but you also get publishers taking a genuine interest in supporting and updating their old games, even if it's just to make sure they're compatible with modern operating systems. (Case in point is the massive strategy bundle that included all the ancient X-COM games, all of which were checked and tested and tweaked to make sure they were compatible with Vista/Win7.)

Compare and contrast that with the, ahem, 'patchy support' we've seen for XBox and PS2 titles on the 360 and PS3.

It just depends what road they want to go down I suppose, the TOTAL DOMINATION approach they appear to favour in their little walled gardens, or the more open platform of Steam.

No one's saying that digital distribution is inherently broken, nor that it can't be done well; just that I don't think any of us trust MS/Sony not to implement it in a horrible, backwards-thinking, short-sighted way that begins and ends with the question, "How can I use this new paradigm to fuck as much money as possible out of people in the short term?"

Oh, Steam is totally superb, no question of that. I just don't ever see a situation where the console owners would open up the ability to sell games for their consoles to third parties. And once you've dealt with competition, there's not really any price pressure to give them a reason to do a decent job of it themselves. Unfortunately.

Yeah, what Bamba said.

I agree APOD, sort of already answered that point to Craster but yes, the prices on the 360 marketplace don't inspire you with confidence. (I paid £20 for Burnout Revenge last year on my 360 which IIRC was basically a fucking launch title. I only bought it off XBLA 'cause I couldn't source a physical copy locally.)

I honestly can't tell you why the gulf that exists between Steam and XBLA is there at all, maybe it's a competition thing. Certainly when Origin started up a few months ago their prices were a fucking joke on older stuff, but already they're doing sales and special offers and offering some juicy offers on high quality games.

It depends which way it goes, but ultimately on the consoles the big guys 'own' the platform so they can do what the fuck they want. If you've got a 360 you have to use XBLA for games and that's it, if you've got a PC you can use Steam or Origin or GoG or physical copies or whatever.

The only chance I could see it would have to work is if, like the current situation with Steam, games were being released both physically and digitally. Then the pre-owned market would exert a price pressure of sorts because it represents customer money that no one upstream of the single shop selling the game is seeing any of. Money they could be getting in directly if they did some good digital distribution deals on older products (like the regular Steam sales) to counteract that.

Mind you, reading that back, that precisely describes the situation we're in with the current gen and they're still stubbornly leaving money on the table by acting like fucking idiots with their pricing aren't they? Um, okay, I dunno then.

Which you now can't even play online, thanks to EA.

The thing with Steam is that it gives the publishers a chance to get a really good head of new sales on games that are 12 months old or more, even two years old or more.

Console games simply DON'T GENERATE REVENUE outside the initial sale period, once you've got past the massive day one and week one and month one sales, that's it, pre-owned takes over.

But on a platform like Steam, a publisher can re-release a really good game, at an incredibly tantalising price point, and generate a huge new volume of sales that would simply never have existed before.

The variable here is whether or not MS/Sony/Nintendo will try to embrace that model or they'll just try lock down and keep prices as sky high as they think they can get away with.

Unfortunately I think we can all guess the answer to that one.

myp is a twat. *runs off cackling*

I'm not sure why they would be short-sighted about it. They've made mistakes but Microsoft haven't been short sighted with their console strategy so far, they have the funds to play a longer game. Obviously it's about extracting the maximum amount of money and I reckon they've probably got more of a clue about how to go about that than any of us.

This "second hand games are killing development" is such bullshit it is unreal.

It is, though. It's going to be just like when home taping killed music.

Have you listened to popular music lately?

Bit late to the party (as always), I prefer my GS to game in Telford, the staff has always been helpful especially the mangers.

Hence I bought both my xboxs and 95% of my games from them.

Quick, DocG, come and tell him that back in the day, people who were Grim...'s age now hated the stuff young Grim... liked!

Speaking of which, that piece of music we all loved from the Borderlands 2 trailer? The guy next to me on the train at this very moment is playing it full blast, what a pl... *gets stabbed*

Their 'console strategy' as it pertains to hardware and the Xbox Live service itself is fine and I doubt anyone's accusing them of short-sightedness there. But what we're specifically talking about here is their strategy for selling non-XBLA games online. In that arena their prices are ludicrous and show no understanding of reality at all; they're focussed on trying to get a handful of sales at £silly rather than the fucktons of sales they could get at £reasonable which is short-sighted in the extreme. As for them having a better idea about how to get money than the rest of us: how many non-XBLA games have you bought from them? Indeed, how many have you even heard of people you know buying? I'm willing to bet it's damn close to zero. Conversely, how many older games have you or people you know bought cheap or second hand from places like Amazon, GAME, etc? It's going to be shitloads, right? So already MS are demonstrably failing miserably to 'extract the maximum amount of money' from anyone and I think we're all worried they'll fail to learn that lesson when it comes to the next gen, because god knows there's little enough signs of them learning it in this gen. Which they easily could, there's nothing at all stopping MS right now going on a drive to add loads of titles to their download service, slashing the prices and then promoting the shit out of it. I honestly believie people would be all over it and shedloads of cash would be made. Or they could just carry on trying to charge thirty quid for Fable III...

I own stuff from steam that I've not even played but thought "wow that's cheap, might as well get it now at that price in case I want to play it later".

I'm an idiot.

My computer and my house are full of games like that.

I suspect that the prices on XBLA are down to negotiations with various publishers and outlets. PC games don't really sell on the high street so for example Steam don't particularly need to worry about making a price cut one day and making millions of pounds worth of stock sat in high street shops effectively worthless. Console publishers are still reliant on sales of boxed games, this will change but not straight away.

It's why I own three copies of Madworld.

I carry my gaming spreadsheet around on my phone so if I see a bargain of a game, I can check to see if I already own it.

Mental.

wow.. just wow!

I do this but with a Google Docs file. Whenever something comes out I want it goes on the list so whenever I'm swapping games or checking online deals I know whether it's worth picking up or not. Somewhat sadly, the same file has a list of all the games I've played broken down by whether I still own the or not. I'm not really sure why.

I’m just admiring my spreadsheet now and apparently, I own Doom 5 times. On the Xbox360, Ps1, 32X, Dreamcast and SNES.

I think that’s my most owned game.

Doom came out on the Dreamcast?

It's not an official release but a homebrew version. It's nicely done though if I remember correctly.

Great. Now I'm wondering what my most owned game is. I think it might have been Doom at one point too, but I don't seem to have any copies of it at all now.

I also own 4 copies of Resident Evil. I think that's my second most owned game.

Gamecube, Saturn and two on the PS1. One of which is the Directors cut.

I like my games collection.

That doesn't seem unreasonable. Mind you, I've got Die Hard Vendetta five times (all on Gamecube).

I have GTA IV on the PC and the xbox

PS3 and 360 for me.

I also have two copies of Need For Speed: Most Wanted, but I can't find the disk for either of them

I don't know that I've ever bought the same game more than once, I don't even tend to bother with "HD" reissues of old games. I already stupidly buy more new games than I can actually play so it never really occurs to me to buy old ones again.

I don't have any games twice. I did once, but not now.

I hope that helps.

Threw them away?

If you ever find one and you don't want it, I'll take it - shit needs deghosting.

Isn't steam available on the PS3? are the prices for games more expensive on the PS3 than the PC?

Portal 2 on the PS3 uses Steam for some stuff, but there is no Steam for PS3 that you can buy games from, and Portal 2 is the only game that uses it.

If we are talking about multiple copies of the same game, then I have Peggle all up the shizzle, or whatever the slang is these days.
Don't forget XBLA and iOS people!

Yeah, culture was better with Black Box, Big Fun and Curiosity Killed The Cat in charge.

Black Box were awesome.

Dreamland was perhaps the first ablum wot I evah boughted.

Now that's a bit fucking cheeky:

What am I not seeing in that picture?

EDIT: It isn't the stickers to disguise Arse Effect 2, is it?

A pygmy hippo.

Yes. They've put ME2 in the No1 chart spot, covered the '2' with stickers, and are selling it for double the price they're selling it for on the website.