Bleak Future for Videogame Customers 399
jvm writes "A recent commentary on Curmudgeon Gamer speculates on the future of the videogame market. Among the predictions: no more rentals from video stores, no used games market, no lending games to friends, less upgradeable computers, pay-as-you-play software subscriptions, and other consumer-unfriendly changes. In all, less gaming value for your hard-earned dollar."
Best gaming value out there... (Score:2, Informative)
For those of you considering a subscription, give these three games a try - Project Gotham 2, Crimson Skies, and MechAssault.
It's a blast, I promise.
Re:Physcal media is dead, long live the bit... (Score:5, Informative)
The article has it's strong points (Score:5, Informative)
Yes games that allow you to play on OTHER people's servers are more restricted, because it is THEIR servers. Granted there are plenty of public Half-life servers, but they still are indexed by VALVes master server. In doing so they get people playing on their server, and VALVe is assured the people playing on these servers are using legitimate products.
If one has a problem with the 1984 style, then don't play on the servers, instead use other servers like one can use with open battle net. You can connect without any legit CD key, but you also are playing with less people; more then likely. As always a trade off.
As for Steam only downloading the parts you'll "Use in the near future" the author does NOT know what he is talking about. Steam downloads the levels as you play them, yes, aside from the core levels that come with the mod you are playing (or the original game). By core levels I mean, if you download half-life it downloads all the game content you need, but no added developer levels unless you go on a sever that has them, then it downloads them and you keep them on your hard drive.
It is for two reasons. To be gentle on VALVes bandwidth, and also if you never play any other levels/mods (like Counter strike, or Day of defeat) then there is less Hard drive space taken up on your computer.
As for the rest of the author's comments on making everything non-tangible, I doubt that will happen for a few reasons.
One of which is people like to have a product for convince they can grab and install if their system crashes.
Two people would want more for less, if they don't have that solid backup to go back to.
Example. Through steam, you either buy the game in the store or get an unlimited subscription to steam, or you pay 5 dollars a month for the same service.
I'd love to hear arguments against what I've said, so please...
I won't pay, I won't pay... (Score:5, Informative)
To do any significant game-related downloading, you need a fast internet connection. A LOT of users (self included) are still on dial-up, simply for cost reasons. If you add the cost of a required broadband link, plus a pay-per-play or subscription model for games, people will decide it's simply not worth their hard-earned money. I know people who pay $80/mo for their cable TV & internet, but they're double-income, middle class families. Students, young workers, and other lower-income people will not - often can not - pay through the ass just to play video games.
Re:Physcal media is dead, long live the bit... (Score:5, Informative)
Discs are much more corruptable (Score:5, Informative)
If you have a scratch on your plastic disc, you'd better hope that the disc specifications put enough error correction data on at manufacturing time to fix the problem. If you're transferring data over a network, during most of the transfer you only need enough data to reliably perform error detection, since over a noisy link the client can re-request corrupted blocks and the server can increase the percentage of ECC data dynamically.
Re:Physcal media is dead, long live the bit... (Score:4, Informative)
The Good...The Bad... (Score:2, Informative)
So, the bad is that it is too expensive and nothing to show for it, and I won't be playing any of these games that I otherwise would have played. The good is that it might make games open source, or free, and/or target other platforms besides Windows.
Re:Pay to Play is a viable model for Games Softwar (Score:2, Informative)
want to play? get the new game that require the new hardware!
Re:Physcal media is dead, long live the bit... (Score:3, Informative)
If you can't find the CD on an old microsoft application, try anything where the last 7 digits are a multiple of 7. e.g.
111-1111111
7777-7777777
11111-11111-1111
more details [omnitechdesign.com]
Re:Physcal media is dead, long live the bit... (Score:3, Informative)
Believe me, everything can get cracked, and if it's not in the client, then it's the server. It's always going to be a cat-and-mouse game. But, basically the copy protection works anyway, at least for me, because unless you're very very poor, you'll probably decide it's worth the money to have a version of a good game that actually WORKS consistently (Yes I baught quake3), however, I think that it's less true for non-online games where one doesn't care about patches of expansion packs.
CD/DVD delivery is not consumer friendly (Score:2, Informative)
Firstly I have done my own analysis of TRSTS Data [npdfunworld.com] on the console market. It is very interesting to note that for the period I was examining (last year) 84% of the money was being made by 16% of the titles, which is a very high degree of polarisation for a market. For me this was indicitive that:
- there are a lot of bad games around
- that games are too highly priced for consumers to feel safe making 'impulse' purchases.
The other piece of research that is relevant, was looking at the gaming habits of gamers, and was written at the end of the 90's. There they showed that on average 80% of gamers make it to level 2, and that only 10% of gamers will complete a game.Online delivery has the opportunity to change all of that, as finally we can adopt a pricing scheme which is able to cater more fairly to ALL of the players, and no longer just to the hard-core. The effect of that should be that we are able to get more game players, as more people will be able to purchase at a value they think fair.
There are at least 2 models which can be applied to online delivery, subscription and micro-payment. These are not mutually exclusive, and cater to different sorts of player.
Subscription is very analogous to Pay TV channels. For the most part there would be a catalogue of titles available to play within your subscription each month. This caters to the person who has a given amount of time for video games each month, however allows this player to enjoy a wider variety of titles than traditional delivery. Like in the PayTV realm there is still the option of having special one-offs, which can charge what they want. That's just life.
With micro-payments, then you would only pay for what you actually play, and would be presented with an account at the end of a period. This model caters to the lighter gamer, who probably has other uses for their leisure time. However by offering this, then a distributer is able to significanlty lower the cost of entry, thereby making gaming finanically acceptable to a whole new set of people.
The original author seems to fear change - and automatically assumes that because the pricing model changes he will be worse off. I believe that nothing could be further from the truth. Capitalism protects us as consumers, because if one company starts building in unreasonably high profits, then another company will come along and take away all of their business! The costs of digital distribution are already significantly cheaper than opening up physical shopfronts, and this is only set to get cheaper.
Bringing new gamers in to play would be (and should be) where game's companys are able to increase their profits. Anything that gets more couch potatoes doing something stimulating, and away from the TV is a very good thing.
Re:Physcal media is dead, long live the bit... (Score:4, Informative)
The point of all of this being, is that it goes to show how secure the current key-master system that Q3, UT2K3, etc is - at best, crackers can only unlock a portion of the "world." And this is why such a system is staying, as even after 5 years, it's largely held up, something no other system so far can claim. One only has to look at UT(CD protection) vs. Q3(key-master) to see why this is ideal - in the age of online games, must buy your game in order to play it, piracy just won't work.
Re:Physcal media is dead, long live the bit... (Score:2, Informative)
Technical Answer (Score:3, Informative)
Because the hash the company uses is the hundred-gazillions hash. See, it works on two levels. The company creates a key generator that can make a hundred gazillion keys. It runs it one hundred million times, and actually creates a hundred million keys out of the possible hundred gazillion. It then uses only those hundred million for valid keys. So, when the hacker breaks the hash, he gets a hundred gazillion key generator, and generates a key. However, if the hacker's one-in-hundred-gazillion key doesn't match one of the hundred million actual keys the comapny generated, then the company rejects it as a hacked key. That means that even if the hash is broken, someone has only a hundred-million per hundred-gazillion chance of generating a vaild key.
Virg