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The Internet is angry.

That's because Microsoft is finally starting to pull their head out of their asses (albeit ridiculously slowly) and actually try and market their features, rather than just listing off horrible, horrible restrictions without even bothering to highlight how this could work for the audience.

I don't like Always On DRM when it is actually just in place for DRM. But if an online connection is integral to the core experience of the game, that makes sense. That's why it's fine to have MMOs require you to be online, but it's not okay for a solely single-player experience to have the same requirement.

If Microsoft can come up with some system that makes the online connection something substantially desirable in its own right, their problem goes away. They get their free DRM slipped in with this "feature." Even better, they can get the essence of DRM without actually mandating the online requirement. People COULD play a game used, but then they lose out on the super awesome online bonus stuff.

Of course, that means they need to come up with something that's intrinsically linked to being online that makes the whole experience better. And you know what? I can think of plenty of things that could be that cool, at least in the context of RPGs.

But bluntly forcing it into the public's eyes, purely for the sake of DRM, is an absolutely idiotic move. They didn't even bother trying to cage it in terms of what the connection was doing for you - they just announced it would need to connect and that was that.

[EDIT]

Also, used games aren't nearly as important as the amount of attention they get suggests they would be.

According to Gamestop, in 2012 they made:

Global sales: $8.89 billion.
Gross profit: 27.4%
Percentage of those sales which are used games: 27.4%
Gross profit from used games: 41.8%

So, of that $8.89 billion in sales, it was a profit of 27.4%, or $2.43 billion. 41.8% of that was from used games, or $1 billion, globally, across all games. NOTE: This also contains all systems and peripherals, and new hardware represents 15% of their sales ("other" is 17.3%).

The vast majority of their sales are in the form of new games. The problem is that selling new games isn't that profitable. And they aren't in control of that, because the publisher sets the price.

Globally, the video game industry brings in $65 billion a year. That $1 billion that one company is making isn't making or breaking anyone.

For one, because there's absolutely no reason to think that 100% of that $1 billion would enter into the pockets of publishers anyway. We'd need to know what the percentage of people would buy a game at full price, even if they couldn't get it at the $60 price point. So you can already remove a fair amount of that cash out of the video game industry.

Then you need to remember that there are people buying new games using the profits from trading in old titles. I have no clue how common that is. I've only ever traded in games when strapped for cash, but I also know people who trade them in when done, for credit, which they later use to buy a new game. The publisher makes the same amount of cash regardless of if you hand Gamestop cash or use credit.

And considering you get a MUCH larger return for games when using credit, I imagine that it's not an insignficant population. So there's some formula along the lines of "For every X games traded in, Y new games are purchased." I have no clue what it is.

But even if we say it's $600 million being taken out of publisher pockets, globally, across all games, that's really not that much. And I'd wager that the end sum is less than that.

/shrug.

Edited, Jun 14th 2013 1:04pm by idiggory

Yeah, but "if they were smart" is really the issue with that argument.

You try convincing an executive to drop $5 off the price of their most profitable item (since digital release cuts out the distributor).

Hell, "if they were smart" games would:

-Get an appropriate level of marketing support, particularly where social media is concerned, rather than relying entirely on gaming news to do the bulk of the work.
-Launch at a market-appropriate price, instead of defaulting to $60, and actually drop in price over time to encourage new sales.
-Disconnect digital prices from physical price, reap the benefits of laziness.

I mean, think about all the pre-launch marketing for Mass Effect?

The distribution of social media marketing is free, and the ROI for all associated costs are generally huge. But for whatever reason, the gaming industry is atrocious at capitalizing on it. Which is really, really odd, considering the demographics they typically market to.

Twitter and Tumblr campaigns, alone, would be huge for driving up sales.

I don't think graphics is the motivator for moving on to the next CoD game. I think the motivator is being on the leaderboards, the new maps, the new guns, etc.

Once again, I'm going off my anecdotal sample size but the kids in my bailiwick all talk about the graphics. And, even if the improvements aren't great, they all seem convinced that it's a huge jump each time.

Then I point, call them dirty console peasants with their 30fps 720p resolutions and laugh and laugh and laugh.

Im no programmer but its something like this:

if not joph
then {random user ID}
end

oops

Edited, Jun 14th 2013 2:35pm by Jophiel

I dunno, it's almost as if there's a bit of an internal struggle how exactly they wanted to portray their product at the conference. I suppose on one hand coming out and saying "this is a premium product, we're only targeting about 10% of you people" wouldn't go over very well at E3 (not that it'd really be any worse at this point...). So how do you not put off the unwashed masses while at the same time not marketing to them? Maybe they were expecting to have more exclusive content ready to show how "awesomely premium" their product is, but it wasn't ready on time? On the other hand, there could be internal debate over whether or not they really want to try and get one in every home, or what exactly they even have they're selling, or whether or not they have squirrel nuts for brains.

In the end I suppose the mere fact we're even having this debate is a sure sign of poor marketing.

Edited, Jun 14th 2013 1:28pm by someproteinguy

Neither is a good example, like I said. No other indie game is selling close to 20 million copies. No other franchise is taking in a billion dollars in sales in its first two weeks. The only point of the comparison is to say that the most popular "ugly but fun!" indie game still doesn't hold a candle to the most popular AAA franchise title.

I don't think anyone would say that the graphics in Portal 2 aren't better than in Portal 1. The environments alone obviously took far more work than the Portal 1 test chambers.

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