The Big Bad Console Thread - Sway your Station with an Xboner !

Well, this is the disconnect I guess. You admit you only hold this view because of the detrimental effects (you think) are impacting the industry. You are asserting that a fundamental aspect of property rights and consumer rights as it has existed since the beginning of trade should be adjusted and recodified on a per-industry basis, not because it's inherently bad or unethical, but just because you think it's a threat to the industry's health. Which means you are essentially arguing for protectionism for corporations--consumers are free to exercise their consumer rights only up to a certain point, but if that free exercise is perceived to threaten the viability of the industry, then their rights must be limited in order to save the industry.

I don't think I can put into words my disgust at this demeaning display of groveling at the feet of your game developer overlords. Even a die-hard laissez-faire capitalist would not be so subservient, because even a capitalist would accept that sometimes industries die and that's the way the world works. As much as I enjoy games, there is no inherent good in this industry. The ends do not justify the means here; there is nothing that makes the gaming industry inherently worthy of preservation, not to the point that would justify carving out a special exemption for them where used games are somehow magically not OK when they are OK for every other packaged good on the planet. Just because your favored set of content producers couldn't properly adapt does not justify rewriting the rules of what "property ownership" means and fundamentally removing the ability to preserve, inherit, pass on, lend, and share its products.

The industry does not come first; consumers do. I have no sympathy for an industry that cannot properly stumble its way around a viable secondhand market like every other mature industry in the world. Sometimes your old product just isn't good enough, and the way you solve it is by making a better product, not by forcing consumers to adapt to your archaic and myopic business model with your dying breath. If this industry can't find a way to make money off the primary market -- even with DLC and exclusive pre-order content and HD re-releases and map packs and online passes and annualized sequels and "expanding the audience" and AAA advertising and forced multiplayer -- then, if I may be so blunt, fuck it. It doesn't deserve our money in the first place. If an entire industry has its head so far up its ass, is so focused on short-term gains, and has embraced such a catastrophically stupid blockbuster business model in the pursuit of a stagnant market of hardcore 18-34 dudebros that it thinks it has no choice but to take away our first-sale rights as its last chance of maybe, finally, creating a sustainable stream of profits, then it can go to hell. It doesn't need your protection, it needs to be taken out back and beaten until it remembers who its real masters are.

I especially have a hard time having any sympathy because so many of the industry's problems are of its own making. They chose to focus on shaderific HD graphics over long-lasting appeal and gameplay; they chose to focus on linear scripted cinematic B-movie imitations that were only good for one playthrough instead of replayability and open-ended design; they chose to pour so much money and marketing into military porn and fetishized violent shootbang Press A to Awesome titles, exactly the kinds of games that hardcore gamers, the most likely gamers to trade in games quickly were prone to buying and reselling; and perhaps most galling, they chose to give Gamestop loads of exclusive pre-order bonuses while they knew exactly what Gamestop would say to those customers once in the store. They kept making insanely lavish and nonsensical displays of spectacular whizz-bang, despite that being exactly the kind of game most susceptible to trading after one week because there was nothing left to do with it. And now they're discovering that putting so many insanely expensive eggs into one fragile and easily breakable basket is maybe not the most sustainable business model ever.

So forgive me if I find myself not caring one bit when the industry complains that it's just so hard to sell six million copies of Gears of Medal of Battle of Uncharted Angry Dudes VII in the first week and that's why they need to take away used sales for the entire platform. No, the problem isn't at this end.

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Taking away our right to share games will solve none of the industry's enormous financial and business model problems; it may even make them worse

We're far from the end of the story regarding second-hand games and the next generation of consoles. Microsoft promises to have more information to reveal and implies that gamers will be placated by these further revelations; the only reasonable reaction to this nudge-and-wink follow-up to last week's public relations disaster is to raise an amused eyebrow and imagine the chaos within the company as they try to figure out exactly what the hell they're going to reveal when the time comes. Sony, meanwhile, may well be watching with some trepidation - it's entirely possible that the PS4 also restricts second-hand sales in some fashion. Sony has always said that PS4 will play second-hand games, but hasn't been drawn on detail regarding that stance - and the halo the company is presently wearing (no pun intended) will evaporate rapidly if it transpires that it's also planning such an unpopular move.

"An industry which thinks it's reasonable to wage war on perfectly normal consumer behaviour in this way is an industry that's seriously dysfunctional"
Stepping back to consider the wider picture, we're looking at a very bleak future for pre-owned or sharing of software. Steam is already the de facto platform for PC games, and it offers no second-hand sales channel and no method of sharing software with friends (and I mean that in the traditional "borrow my game" sense, not the euphemistic "sharing" as in piracy). iOS and Google Play games are locked to the user account. Now Xbox One (and possibly PS4) games will also prevent you from sharing games with friends and place hefty restrictions (and costs) on second-hand sales.

This isn't just going to impact on the racks and racks of second-hand games at game retail stores, it's going to have a major impact on gaming culture overall. It means no more buying a game and lending it to a friend when you're finished, or going halves on a copy of something both of you want to play. It means no more going over to someone's house and browsing their shelves for something to borrow - and by extension, removes a major impetus for many people to collect games in the first place. It means no more Lovefilm or other rental services for games, no more communal caches of games in the office that colleagues can dip into. Eventually, terribly sadly, it could even mean authorisation servers somewhere being turned off and an entire generation of games becoming inaccessible - a grim scenario but one which has already happened on a smaller scale with the switch-off of other DRM-backed systems.

There's little point in going into any huge depth about why this is all a bloody awful idea - suffice it to say that as a consumer myself, I don't think I'll be buying an Xbox One if its DRM system turns out to be as draconian, abusive and intrusive as it presently seems, and similar decisions by Sony would equally nix a PS4 purchase. Given that I've bought every console in every generation for almost 20 years, that's a fairly significant departure, but it's no idle chest-beating on my part. If you take out the ability to lend and borrow games, the process of sharing enjoyment and entertainment that's been at the heart of my gaming hobby since it began, I don't know that my time or investment in consoles is justified any more. It's terribly sad to think that key decision makers in our industry are now apparently of the impression that "social" in terms of prancing around like a drunken tit in front of a camera is the future of the medium, while "social" in terms of pressing a game box into a friend's hand with a gleam in your eyes and words of praise and enthusiasm on your lips is to be frowned upon and treated as criminal.

"The cost of developing AAA games has risen and will rise again, but the cost of marketing games has absolutely soared"
What's more useful is to ask how on earth we got ourselves into this position, because an industry which thinks it's reasonable to wage war on perfectly normal consumer behaviour in this way is an industry that's seriously dysfunctional. It's easy, and very tempting, to blame the avarice of publishers and platform holders. There's no denying that some of this market's biggest firms are - like so many modern companies - rather over-padded with MBA-toting examples of human mediocrity whose understanding of the creative industry they've joined is zero but whose capacity to string together meaningless corporate buzzwords into arcane incantations summoning forth utterly rapacious and awful business practices is practically limitless. This is not to say that creative and excellent business minds aren't also at work in games, but they're very outnumbered by sub-par chancers spouting corporate drivel, and as such this entire area of the industry effectively wears a giant "kick me" sign that lights up in bright neon every time something like the Xbox One reveal or an egregious abuse of IAP in a full-price game occurs.

Yet even if swearing about people with expensive suits, MBAs and not a jot of real wit or intelligence to share between them is cathartic, it doesn't actually get us to the bottom of the problem. The reality is that the crack-down on sharing and second-hand sales is part of a wider malaise. A wide swathe of high-end game development is struggling to pay the bills - that's a simple reality. The cost of developing AAA games has risen and will rise again as new consoles demand higher-quality assets and new technology R&D, but the cost of marketing games has absolutely soared - and as Square Enix' Yosuke Matsuda pointed out in a revealing statement this week, the cost of actually getting games into retail and sold through to consumers has also soared. Everyone poked fun at Square Enix' huge sales targets for games like Tomb Raider and Hitman: Absolution, but Matsuda's assessment of what happened to those games is sobering - as are the frankly enormous figures the company had to earmark for marketing and retail-related costs such as returns allowance.

This is reality; something is utterly broken at the heart of the AAA business. It's entirely possible to put a game on the market which sells millions of copies, easily covering its development budget, and still not make enough money to justify the outlay once you factor in all the other huge costs. Developers have always felt screwed when they looked at games selling millions of units while royalties failed to materialise thanks to the creative accounting methods many publishers borrowed from Hollywood. Now, publishers are starting to feel a similar pinch, as games which should have been a safe bet see their profits evaporate in a perfect storm of additional costs and revenue drains. The cost of making a game has risen a bit; the cost of getting someone to buy a game has risen a lot, and unless your franchise is a Call of Duty scale monster, the whole thing is looking increasingly unsustainable.

"Killing off the second hand market isn't going to earn the industry a moment's respite - if anything, it'll hasten the decline and death of the existing business model"
Is the answer to crack down on customers sharing games with friends? No, of course not; that's the frightened lashing out of a wounded animal. Is it to crack down on the second hand market? Again, no. There's absolutely no question but that companies like GameStop and GAME have spent the past decade rabidly gnawing on the hand that fed them, but this ill-conceived crusade against second-hand sales punishes consumers for the industry's own years-long failure to rein in the transgressions of its most cavalier and self-interested retail "partners".

Is there, however, a problem that needs a solution? Yes. The AAA business simply has to change; the existing model is broken and a new one needs to be found. Matsuda says that Square Enix is going to experiment with ideas like Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight, among others, in the hope of finding a new approach to creating games that makes financial sense. I'm not convinced that crowdfunding is a viable model for big publishers in the long term, but I'm absolutely convinced that something new needs to be tried. How games are funded, created, distributed and ultimately enjoyed is going to have to change radically in the next few years, or there simply isn't going to be a AAA market outside of a handful of established, ultra high-budget franchises. Killing off the second hand market isn't even going to earn the industry a moment's respite - if anything, I suspect that it'll hasten the decline and death of the existing business model. I don't expect that any company which isn't rethinking its AAA funding, development and release model to still be in business five years from now.

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Almost exactly a year ago, at the end of an E3 press conference in which Microsoft heralded fitness software, Kinect, Internet Explorer, Bing and dying action games as the future of entertainment, I wrote that anyone who has paid attention to Microsoft's business over the years should not be surprised by its apparent lack of self-awareness.

"If we are entertained by what Microsoft chooses to do for its own gain," I suggested, "then that is simply a happy coincidence."

Guess what? The coincidence is over.


The fact that Microsoft's policies governing game ownership, sharing and privacy are not surprising does not make them any less devastating to consumer rights, should they be formally adopted and become a standard. They sacrifice our freedom to own and trade games for no other reason than corporate self-interest.

To save you skimming large tracts of condescending prose about how much Microsoft loves and respects you as a human wallet, here is a summary:

You do not own the games you buy. You license them.
Discs are only used to install and then license games and do not imply ownership.
People can play games installed on your console whether you're logged in or not.
10 people can be authorised to play these games on a different Xbox One via the cloud, but not at the same time, similar to iTunes authorised devices.
Publishers decide whether you can trade in your games and may charge for this.
Publishers decide whether you can give a game you own to someone for free, and this only works if they have been on your friends list for 30 days.
Your account allows you to play the games you license on any console.
Your Xbox One must connect to the internet every 24 hours to keep playing games.
When playing on another Xbox One with your account, this is reduced to one hour.
Live TV, Blu-ray and DVD movies are exempt from these internet requirements.
Loaning and renting games will not be possible at launch, but Microsoft is "exploring the possibilities".
Microsoft may change these policies or discontinue them at any point.
There is also a promise that Microsoft Studios games will all allow you to trade them in and give them away for free, bringing a whole new emphasis to the expression, "It's the least we could do!"

The only positive thing in the whole document is confirmation that you can turn off Kinect and its data will never be uploaded without your permission. Let us all applaud Microsoft's "OK, fine!" decision not to intrude on our privacy.

The suggestion that these changes to game ownership have been taken to combat piracy or limit the damage that used game sales do to the primary market do not stand up to much scrutiny - at our most charitable, we can say that the data is merely inconclusive, but analysis of other industries that have dealt with these issues for much longer is pretty clear that the overall benefits at least balance out the risks of allowing piracy and used markets to flourish.

The more likely reason for this unprecedented new attitude to console game ownership and sharing is that Microsoft wants to turn its game business into the equivalent of iTunes. The signs are already there in the merger of Xbox, Windows and Windows Phone app stores and the decision to run Xbox games off a Virtual Machine 'game OS' within Xbox One, which could easily be included in new hardware derived from the same architectural roadmap.

This is a neat business way of getting everything to line up. It is done in service to Microsoft's corporate objectives. It is not even done with any particular malice towards you and I. Nevertheless, it signals the most significant divergence to date of Microsoft's goals for the Xbox business from our own. It also puts an unspecified expiry date on every Xbox One game ever made and gives you no control over it. Yes, at a point in time where consoles are becoming less relevant, Microsoft's solution is to make them less permanent.

The addition of cloud gaming functions, the avoidance of DVD or Blu-ray disc access times, the convenience of global access - these are the rewards we are being offered for our complicity in Microsoft's decision to eradicate the concept of console game ownership. They are not good enough and very little ever will be.

Digital marketplaces like Netflix, iTunes and the present Xbox Live are a good thing, but they should be additive. They allow us to form a different kind of relationship with art - a more convenient, expansive and often cheaper one that includes better tools for exploration beyond the borders of our current interest. We should and I do celebrate these things. But a critical reason that I accept them is that I still have the option to own an untouchable physical copy of the things I find there as well.

You can say this is no worse than what Steam does, you can say that it is no worse than what a lot of 'content' companies do, and those statements are true, but they do not engage with the most important detail of this news, which is what we are being told to give up in exchange for this new arrangement: the opportunity to form tangible, lasting relationships with art that matters to us. If you never had that, then why would you miss it? But we do. And soon we won't.

Collectors will still be able to buy Xbox One games on disc, of course, and we may line them up happily on our shelves so that our friends and families can admire our dedication and taste forever more. But under Microsoft's new rules, we are no longer building a collection of games - we are building a collection of loans that may be recalled from us at any time, leaving us with nothing but distant memories. And that loss will be simple, instant and complete.

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