What Microsoft Should and Shouldn't Do For the Xbox 720 502
donniebaseball23 writes "Xbox 360 just came off a record November, with more than 1.7 million units sold in the U.S., but behind closed doors Microsoft is planning its next move for the successor to the popular console. Plenty of Xbox 720 rumors have surfaced in recent months, but veteran games journalist Chris Morris has filtered through them to provide a realistic take on what Microsoft should and shouldn't do with Xbox 360's successor. In particular, he notes that Microsoft should adopt the Blu-ray format from Sony. 'A DVD drive as a medium for storing larger and larger games is outdated – and it steps on the toes of a system that bills itself as the high definition leader,' Morris writes. 'Microsoft resisted the move to Blu-ray this generation without any ill effects. It even survived picking the losing side in the format battle between Blu-ray and HD-DVD, but it can't rely on the DVD to take it into the next generation.'"
Never going to happen. (Score:5, Insightful)
720 degrees? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:720 degrees? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:720 degrees? (Score:5, Informative)
That doesn't actually work.
Re:720 degrees? (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe he's a LARPer who saw its reflection in his shield.
Re:720 degrees? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's why it's comedy.
Re:720 degrees? (Score:5, Funny)
Why do they call it the Xbox 720? Because when you see it, you'll turn 720 degrees and walk away.
I knew the moonwalk had a practical purpose!
Re:720 degrees? (Score:4, Funny)
That's not Degrees RADIUS, but rather...
DEGREES FAHRENHEIT.
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Re:720 degrees? (Score:4, Informative)
The joke was "So called because you'll turn 360 degrees and walk away", which almost makes sense for the first fraction of a second before you realise that that would mean spinning on the spot. The joke about the XBox 360 became a joke at the expense of whoever made the comment.
this is extending that joke with a funny image of people spinning round twice.
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Obligatory (Score:2, Funny)
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k277/mrpane911/360.gif [photobucket.com]
Just replace one spin with two.
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Good grief, the whooshing sound is deafening.
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Had me puzzling for a while.
But, you make a 90 degree right turn as you join the roundabout, then 360 degrees left, then another 90 degree right turn as you leave it (in places where they drive on the right)
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2*360 = 720
it's the "Xbox360 2"
Re:720 degrees? (Score:5, Funny)
It's a stupid assumption to think the next XBox will be called the XBox 720.
The first was the "XBox 1".
Then came the "XBox 360", which is 360x the previous number.
It makes much more sense the next one will be called "XBox 129600".
Or, if the naming scheme implies 360^(previous number), the "XBox Out-of-range error".
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Not necessarily (Score:3)
They could use the standard blue ray format but simply use their own encryption on the data it contains. I can't see any good reason for them to spend millions developing a new hardware solution unless they're not confident of their own abilities to encrypt. And even if they did it wouldn't be long before someone plugged the drive into a PC and got it working somehow to be able to get the data off the discs.
Re:Not necessarily (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.gamespot.com/pages/profile/show_blog_entry.php?topic_id=23916169&user=skektek [gamespot.com]
So terribly slow. I mean, look, this Blu-Ray drive is only 4x where this DVD is 12x!
Blu-ray 4x: 144MBps / 18MBps
12x DVD: 66 - 132Mbps / 8.2 - 16.5MBps
I mean, who would want the drive that's not running like a turbo jet to stream data to the device.
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Re:Not necessarily (Score:4, Interesting)
Some games may have game-specific 'install' support; but there isn't a generic caching mechanism.
The Xbox made the 'install' option system-wide for all games if you have the space. Some developers claim that installing their disc to the HDD will cause it to run slower, but it's definitely there for every 360 game. PS3 still requires that the game do the install, so it still varies by game on that platform.
Re:Not necessarily (Score:4, Insightful)
As best I understand from some cursory googling(coming from PC-land, where we haven't really worried about optical media speeds since the difference between a 2x and an 8x DVD writer was some pretty serious stuff, man) "1x" in Blu-ray land is 4.5 MB/s while "1x" in DVD land is 1.4 MB/s. This would suggest that a first-generation blu-ray drive, pitted against some cheap and mature 24x DVD drive, will be feeling the pain; but that blu-ray's far higher data density would give it a superior speed ceiling(since the rate at which you can spin a cheap, questionably balanced, polycarbonate disk on a cheap, questionably balanced, spindle is fairly limited and should be roughly similar for the two disk types) and that at ~8x, BD-ROM should be absolutely faster than DVD.
Regardless of absolute best case stream speeds, though, optical media are always going to have random access times that make HDDs look positively snappy, and HDD seek times are pretty damned miserable compared to flash, which is similarly un
Re:Not necessarily (Score:5, Informative)
Optical drives are SLOW.
slow slow slow.
So slow, this is the reason you need to install so many PS3 games. slow slow slow.
FTFY
Why are they so slow you ask? (and I'm glad you did)
They are slow because of a little thing called centrifugal force. If you've ever ridden on a merry go round you are familiar with CF. The same CF that threw you off of the merry go round is at work on spinning platters. Go beyond a certain spinning speed and the polycarbonate [howstuffworks.com] material the BD or DVD or CD or even the aluminum/glass ceramic the HDD is made out of will disintegrate. That's why the XBox 720i (in partnership with BMW) will have an SSD for running it's core and a HDD for booting games that actually run "In The Cloud".
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disc formats are dead for the new generation (or should be). Flash drives make more sense in every area. Faster read, scalable cost (crappy games can use crappy flash drives, games that push the limits can use quality ones), can be sized to fit the game, more durable... etc. Heck, the music industry wants to switch to them to replace CDs - they make a lot more sense for games.
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oh and I forgot to mention: It would make the consoles cheaper to produce and less prone to failure. Optical drive = high heat, lots of parts, requires a lot of physical space, etc. take that out and you could see $99-150 consoles a couple years in.
Re:Never going to happen. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Never going to happen. (Score:4, Interesting)
Plus it opens up digital distribution to those out in the sticks through kiosks at the local Walmart/Gamestop/Whatever. Store the images on hard drives in the machine (which can be updated via the store's internet connection), fill it with generic Microsoft flash drives, customer comes up, picks their game, it dumps the image to a flash drive, prints a label and sticks it on, dumps it out the slot, and there you go.
They can offset the costs to the consumer by charging more for the physical copies than they do for the downloaded one, while getting around the whole "what about people that don't have a fast internet connection?" limitation that keeps them from eschewing physical copies entirely. Plus, instead of the 20 games that Walmart keeps on hand to choose from, the customer would be able to buy any game, at any time, via the kiosk. No more shelf space taken up with 50 facings of Dudebro: My Shit Is Fucked Up So I Got to Shoot/Slice You II: It's Straight-Up Dawg Time [wikipedia.org], and 3 months later when they're sitting on 187 unsold copies, no more shipping them back to the distributor to end up buried in the Arizona desert under dark of night.
Seems to me like it would be the most efficient way to go.
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No, they'll go with blu-ray. Anything else would drive up the price of the console dramatically, and yield only a competitive disadvantage since it won't allow them to play movies.
Re:Never going to happen. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah , online great idea. I mean why bother just putting a disc in a tray and waiting 30 secos for the game to boot when you can wait 48 hours for the 50GB to download first instead.
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1) Sit down to play new game.
2) Put in nice shiny new game disc.
3) Wait 1hr for the 'updates' to install.
4) Play game.
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Re:Never going to happen. (Score:4, Informative)
It just isn't as cheap and fast to mass-produce multigigabit cartridges as it is to stamp optical disks.
It's basically start-up speed vs game cost and game content volume tradeoff. N64 and PS1 has shown this well.
And download could be even cheaper and game data size then could be limited only by space available on user's device, but with current state of broadband it's just not viable yet.
It's even wait within the games (Score:3)
From my old Magnavox to the N64, I barely had to wait at all to go between games or parts of games while booted. Now I can wait up to several minutes for the next part of the game to load (especially when it's caching itself on the hard drive). It screws up the flow.
I can't wait until flash is so cheap they distribute 50 GB games on a card. Then we may finally get close to the no-wait we used to have. 1 GB SD cards already cost pocket change in the bulk amounts game makers would be buying them (sad to think
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In my experience, the PSPs sleep mode pretty much fixed this issue though. Sure you have the occasional level loading, but take for instance a largely open world game like GTA or AC, i would play for half an hour on the tram, put the psp to sleep, in my bag, and at the end of the day be gaming again within a second of pushing the button.
Re:Never going to happen. (Score:4, Funny)
We have 100/100 fiber
I love your fi..., I mean, you. Can I move in?
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Top average inet speed by country: Lithuania with ~35 Mbps
Average speed in US: ~15 Mbps
1x Blu-ray: 36 Mbps
4x Blu-ray: 144 Mbps
"Game console with no media" is still 5-6 years away from being universally acceptable, best they could do is a no-drive option.
Oh, and don't be surprised when this model comes with "Your internet is down, nyah-nyah-nyah! Can't run this game, you dirty pirate."
Sadly, it's the trend even for games on physical media, but pure DL games make it seem much more acceptable.
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Small country. Easier to lay fiber across the country when that means 160 miles than when it means 3600.
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Being small does not help. If you split the US into tiny bits, average speed will still be the same. Population density helps, but Lithuania is at 47 km^-2 and the US is at 32 km^-2, so that does not really explain the difference.
Re:Never going to happen. (Score:5, Interesting)
They should dump the optical drive entirely and move to a cartridge-like system using encrypted flash drives. For the majority of people with a solid internet connection they can just buy and download directly to their console from their living room, but for those with crappy/capped bandwidth, the physical flash drive is there for them if they want it.
Hell, they don't even need to really produce pre-made flash drives with the games on them, they could just switch to a kiosk method of distribution. You go down to your local Walmart, go up to the Microsoft kiosk, pick which 'Xbox 720' game you want, it copies that to a generic, proprietary Microsoft flash drive right in the machine, prints a label on it, and shits it out the slot on the bottom, ready to go. The cost of producing that physical copy could easily be offset to the consumer while at the same time giving incentive to people to switch to direct download by allowing for cheaper prices there
No more discs to press on their end, no more discs to get scratched up by the consumer, and it goes a long way towards moving the digital distribution method out of the city and out into the sticks. The games are always up to date (the kiosk can just keep the disc images updated) and not only that, but they can literally offer every single game they produce at every kiosk. A few TB hard drives in the unit and a web connection and you've got access to everything. Hell, they could even combine the unit with a demo machine like the 360 ones and let people play the games before they buy right there in the store!
Seems like it would work well for both them and consumers. Which is probably why it won't happen.
Re:Never going to happen. (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, the only places I see people complaining about optical discs in game consoles are on technophile sites like this one.
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The next XBox will have an optical disc drive that can read DVDs if only for backwards compatability with the huge library of XBox 360 games.
Optical? (Score:4, Insightful)
I wonder whether the next generation of consoles from Sony and Microsoft will use discs at all. Perhaps we are not yet at the point where it is practical to download 30GB of game data, but with incremental background downloads it might be feasible in the 720's timeframe.
Ultimately the OnLive model is clearly what we will all be using, but it'll be a while yet before low-latency broadband is ubiquitous.
Re:Optical? (Score:5, Insightful)
Discs will remain as long as broadband speeds make downloading 50 GB (on a blueray, not 30) an irritatingly slow process. Besides which , not everyone wants to rely on always having a net connection just to use a piece of equipment.
Re:Optical? (Score:5, Insightful)
Discs will remain as long as broadband speeds make downloading 50 GB (on a blueray, not 30) an irritatingly slow process
How long would it take to only download the title screen and first level? You don't always need to have everything ready to get started
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Even a level is probably quite a large lump of data for modern games and sods law says that just as you're about to do something crucial and the machine needs to download some more level data the broadband connection will go down.
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So, basically, it's Mass Effect's elevators again, but with 30 minute rides this time.
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Don't need to load the level or even the games code. Just need to stream the video. The next xbox could follow the Onlive model and be a dumb client.
Awesome. Then, assuming I have 60 ms lag to the server, every action will have effective 120 ms lag as an image is sent (60 ms), I respond (instantly, of course), and my response is then sent back over the wire (another 60 ms).
Count me out. Lag in MP games is bad enough; I'm not going to put up with input lag in single-player games.
Re:Optical? (Score:4, Interesting)
I haven't noticed any large increases is game size in the past decade.
That's because a lot of games are ports from the Xbox 360, which is limited to a DVD unless the publisher is willing to go to the hassle of splitting it across multiple DVDs.
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They'd take a huge step if they always offered both as an alternative. It's already this way with many Steam-required games today, you can buy them on DVD but you really only need the activation code, you can download the whole thing from Steam if you don't have the DVD handy or feel it's less hassle just to download it. It wouldn't be for everyone but I know some people with >20 Mbit Internet connections that would. If you do preloads so you only need the decryption key on release day a lot of people mi
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They'd take a huge step if they always offered both as an alternative.
have you run into a lot of games that you can't get from XBLM?
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Or they could do a thing where the games are available on flash drives, and on $5 or $10 cheaper blu-ray disks to people who have pr
Re:Optical? (Score:4, Informative)
I pay 24€ a month for my TV, phone and 100/50 Mbit/s internet. No caps, no restrictions, no throttling.
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In -some- countries sure. But actually on the average, the opposite is true. Compared to other countries of comparable wealth and development, USA has poor broadband-penetration and low average speeds.
25 Mbps symetrical, is the lowest available speed from my ISP, the other alternatives being 50, 100, 200 or 400Mbps, all symetrical.
This sort of thing is fairly rare in the USA in my experience. (either that, or my US-friends just have bad luck)
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Of course, there could be a middle ground in this case.
Stores can get a licence from a distributor, which means they get a server that games are downloaded to when they are released.
Those with internet can download directly, or they can take an SSD / HDD to the store and download it from there to put on the console.
It'd require more security, and no doubt Sony would try to force a proprietary solution instead of using encryption, but it is doable.
This is more likely to happen than eliminating stores entirel
Re:Optical? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/97047-thank-you-farmville-pc-gaming-will-soon-overtake-consoles [extremetech.com]
For the last couple of years, the revenue from console video game sales has stagnated at around $23 billion per year. PC game sales, on the other hand, have grown from $13 billion to $18 billion over the past two years.
I'd say that's booming.
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If you're going to stretch the definition of "PC gaming" to include Farmville and other Facebook games, then I'm going to stretch the definition of "console games" to include games for pads and smartphones.
"to the cloud" (Score:2)
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You then have the issue of having adequate hard drive space. The size of DVDs was keeping the games down in size, but without that limitation, they're going to grow a lot. The PS3 certainly had no issue reaching 8GB for their games.
Smart enough to milk it? (Score:5, Funny)
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I picked up the 250 GB slim model just after Christmas this year for $199 CDN. No game bundle or other extras, but it was still $100 less than the normal price. I haven't seen the Xbox (with a hard drive, not the crappy 4 GB model) for a reduced price since, however.
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And it didn't work for a lot of games - I had stuttering music on Guitar Hero and Psychonauts would crash. Then they dropped it for software emulation, and then they dropped that.
I had better luck playing Xbox games on my 360, and they still work.
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No, they dropped it like a rock made from licensed technology that they didn't own, and could never profit from.
Quote from John Siracusa (Score:5, Funny)
"What's wrong with Blu-ray? Everything except the fidelity of the content."
Improve Build Quality (Score:5, Insightful)
I know I amount to anecdotal evidence but when I see that large a collection of device failures (and the friends of whom I speak are spread across multiple countries from coast to coast so it isn't a local phenomenon), I have to think I'm actually not anecdotal evidence - I feel I'm witnessing a significant trend.
The most important thing Microsoft needs to focus on with a new XBox is build quality. Everything else should come a distant second.
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Now imagine how many more would be sold if there was no failing systems.
Yes of course some of the sales figure comes out of the fact some failed and were replaced but everyone knows bad news has a larger effect than good news. So they'd still MASSIVELY gain sales if they didn't have the failures they did.
Man, if they pulled it off, I could imagine sony pulling outta the game now.
What Microsoft Shouldn't Do For the Xbox 720 (Score:5, Funny)
What Microsoft Shouldn't Do For the Xbox 720:
Re:What Microsoft Shouldn't Do For the Xbox 720 (Score:4, Insightful)
1- People will confuse 720 for 720p and think that's the only resolution it goes to.
2- The next one after the 720 would have to be 1080 or 1440. Those are awkward names.
3- They should do like everyone else and call it "Xbox X". Or adopt the animal naming meme and call them something like "Xbox Rhino", "Xbox Elephant" and "Xbox Landwhale".
Use memory cards instead of optical discs (Score:5, Insightful)
Since I don't own games like PlayStation, Wii or X-Box, I have no ideas on what other improvements or pitfalls should be there.
Re:Use memory cards instead of optical discs (Score:5, Insightful)
Cost of flash as a medium is not comparable to a sub $1 bluray disc. Microsoft would burn a lot of game studio karma if they roll out a system which adds extra cost to deploy.
What about a thumb drive? (Score:2)
A few of my own (Score:5, Insightful)
DO: Make a sensible sized hard drive standard for every model. The 360 suffered early cycle because games were tentative about assuming that they could use a hard disk (the "core" model didn't have one). The 4GB drive that ships with the current model is also inadequate. 20GB for the bottom end model should be considered an absolute minimum.
DO: Pack in the RAM. Of all of the factors that are driving developer frustration with the current console generation, RAM seems to be at the top of the pack. It's worse for the PS3 (with its awkward memory-split and larger OS footprint) than for the 360, but still... RAM is pretty cheap and packing plenty of it in will pay dividends in 5 years time.
DO: Continue to develop what you've been doing on voice controls for the console's UI. I have mixed feelings about Kinect, but voice activation is really great - and has an appeal to a wide demographic.
DON'T: Worry too much about making a loss on each unit sold for the first year or two. MS's objectives should be to get a large installed base early on and to make sure that their machine is fairly future-proof. This probably means selling at a loss early on. The real profits from a console come later in the cycle, when component prices have fallen, so you can reduce prices and still sell at a profit, and when you have third party developers giving you free money, by putting out games for your system (and paying you a fee on each copy sold) without you having to invest in development.
DON'T: Allow your dev team to push out firmware updates every 5 minutes. The 360 has had a few too many firmware updates for comfort, but perhaps not to the extent of being a deal-breaker. With the PS3, the sheer frequency of updates (and the length of time they take) is intensely frustrating, when you just want to fire up the console and play a game.
DON'T: Allow region locking. Sony have already ditched this and it did them no harm. MS knows region coding is junk; it doesn't use it for any of its first or second party games. Take the option away from developers; its time for them to grow up. It also reduces the incentive for people to get consoles mod-chipped - which in turn means they may be less likely to look into a bit of piracy. Which brings me onto the final point:
DO: Assume that whatever copy-protection you put into the machine will get broken sooner or later and plan accordingly. Reduce the incentive for people to mod their consoles, rather than going for the punitive route. Don't region lock. Do offer up an "other OS" walled garden. Do make it as easy as possible for indie developers to get their software onto the platform.
Re:A few of my own (Score:4)
You might get all you ask for except for your walled garden. Microsoft is not going to go to the effort of troubleshooting a hypervisor so that you can install a competing operating system.
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Good list. Although honestly, one of my biggest fears is that they'll abandon their controller design. It's my absolute favorite console by far to play on, and the console is largely responsible for that.
Why bother with a DVD/Blu-ray drive at all? (Score:2)
Re:Why bother with a DVD/Blu-ray drive at all? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not just have a 1TB HDD? Or a swanky SSD? That's the inevitability anyway. Store games in the cloud a la Steam and download them at your convenience. Don't fear the cloud. These days, such a move isn't bound to exclude many as it would have in the past.
This would be a disaster as the XBox experience would be out of control of Microsoft. Instead they would be at the mercy of ISPs. This cannot be overstated. Regardless of the availability of fast Internet connectivity there is a lot to be said for the immediacy of plugging in the XBox, slapping in a disc, and just playing.
Steam is an interesting experiment, and does work, but if you have issues with access to your account you can easily lose an hour or two sorting it out by which time you've lost your time to play.
720 only? (Score:5, Funny)
I'll wait for XBox 1.44
What MS Shouldn't do is prevent purchases. (Score:5, Insightful)
I have three Xbox360s, each for a different room of the house. In addition to game consoles they function as media consumption devices for Netflix and for my mountain of movies on the NAS. However, It is such a pain in the ass to migrate between them (and you must, if you want your gamer profile & saved games to interoperate), that I've actually disconnected TWO of them and replaced them with smaller quieter Linux media centers (screw it, If I can only play games on one, I'll only play games on one).
The DRM they employ is hurting their business. I'm thankful that I can re-download my content on different consoles, or swap my hard-drives around, but the fact is, I can only be signed in to XBL in one room at a time, and my Netfilx bandwidth isn't tied to XBL servers except artificially. When I want to play a game online, no one else can watch the movies or surf the marketplace which I pay to access. Yes, I can use separate accounts, but I shouldn't have to fragment my usage needlessly. Besides, I tried that already, trying to find the right drive or profile to play a specific game or movie is RIDICULOUS.
Also, this "online pass" bullshit that's bundled with games has to stop. I already pay for XBL services, MS provides the matchmaking API, its XBL. Dear Epic, I've bought and played every game you ever made from Zork to Gears, but when your activation code prevented me from playing the game I purchased, because another player had used the online pass first, I decided to boycot you... We have 1 disc. Only one of us can play at a time online anyway. You once did produce truly beloved Epic MegaGames, but this bullshit attempt to rape the used game market has caused me to hate you.
In short: SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY! People will spend a lot more if you make it easier us to do so. Get rid of the DRM, or at least make it marginally usable.
Until then, I think I'll start investing in your competitors: The DRM free, truly cross platform, charity supporting, indie games [humblebundle.com].
Re:What MS Shouldn't do is prevent purchases. (Score:4, Interesting)
For the first issue, MS has heard, and is addressing that on the 360, so I would assume that they would keep it in for the next version.
Basically, if you're an XBox gold member (which from your post you are), with the most recent dashboard release, they allow you to save your profile, and game saves to the "cloud". So now, when you finish playing something downstairs, you can go upstairs, and continue playing from there, without needing to migrate your existing gamertag. (Although I've not used it, I would expect that you can only use your gamer tag on 1 Xbox at a time.)
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Yes, exactly this. Let me explain how playing multi-player works: Matchmaking finds clients you can connect to via P2P (for voice), it selects a host Xbox360 that isn't behind wonky or mis-configured NAT (it tries UPNP to config your router at this point). Once you're playing, everyone you can hear via voice chat is connected directly to you in a "star" topology using UDP. The connection to the host box is usually UDP as well, but it may have negotiated to (or explicitly selected for) TCP depending on y
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No. I did not buy the game used. I unwrapped it fresh and pristine. My brother was visiting and he was allowed to play it first while I went on a beer run. As instructed, he entered the "online pass" from my CD (while signed in to his gamertag). 30 min later, he's cooking a pizza and I sign on, to see for myself the cool things he's telling me about. Brand new disc. MY Disc. My Xbox360, My Gamer tag.
Hu? Online pass code? Whut? Why? OK... (enter the same code). Nope. That won't work. Says "
Why not HDDVD? (Score:5, Interesting)
And, most important:
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I still have a lot of PC games with 4-5 CDs before DVDs hit it big, and I know plenty of consoles that used multiple CDs... it's a little bit of a pain in the ass, but far from a deal breaker for most people wanting to play a bigger/fancier/longer game that takes multiple discs.
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Some Xbox 360 games are already shipping on 2, 3 or 4 discs and it doesn't seem to bother people that much.
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AFAIK the Java Requirements is only for Blu-Ray Movies. For Storing Game Data, you dont need Java.
These days people expect their Blu-Ray player to have a network port, and sing and dance and give blowjobs. Well, maybe not the last part. But if you have a blu-ray drive it's retarded not to play movies, and you ought to support all the functionality if your hardware is sufficiently capable. Having a DVD-ROM but not playing DVDs only worked for the Wii because it was so much cheaper than the competition, and because Nintendo customers have been trained to expect a system that only plays games for years.
Re:M$ don't like blue-ray (Score:4, Funny)
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Recently released benchmarks from Sony suggest the PS4 will do them all*
* some benchmarks may be aggressively inflated
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sproketboy != Slashdot
Re:M$ don't like blue-ray (Score:5, Funny)
Re:M$ don't like blue-ray (Score:5, Funny)
One drink for reading a post from an Apple/Microsoft/Sony fanboy or anti-fanboy
One drink for grammer and speeling natzis
Two drinks for "First" in first post
Three drinks for reading a post responding to an AC.
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It will almost certainly have an optical drive. Broadband penetration in the US is craptacular. Unless Sony and Microsoft sign a blood pact to both abandon the optical drive at once, which is not going to happen due to Sony's involvement with Blu-Ray, the manufacturer who fails to include it is going to lose massively. Nintendo could probably go to flash media, though.
Re:So, Microsoft should do the obvious. (Score:5, Interesting)
The WiiU is already confirmed to use a proprietary optical disc (probably based on blu-ray).
Re:So, Microsoft should do the obvious. (Score:4, Informative)
From what I understand it's essentially BluRay - 25GB for a single layer disc, but they won't pay the licensing fees so it won't be called BluRay and it won't play BluRay movies. Just like the Wii discs are exactly the size of DVDs, the same capacity as DVDs, but technically they're not DVDs and it doesn't play DVD movies. I think you can be pretty sure both the drives and discs come from the very same factories that produce BluRays...
Re:Optical Media? (Score:5, Insightful)
A pressed optical disc is a matter of a few cents. That's significantly cheaper than the cartridges of yore and flash memory of the same amount. If you are implying user brings their own key to a kiosk, that *could* work, but I think you'd have a low attach rate for stores carrying the kiosks as most of the potential customers would be net connected and with the store being no different than buying it via network, the market is too small.
In terms of going full download over the internet, that really depends. First, you have to ascertain what percentage of the market has the capability to reasonably download the games. I suspect the percentage is relatively high, but I know of a few anecdotes of rural areas with no reasonable high speed internet option. Second, you have to figure of those that can, how many prefer optical media. On tech sites the community gives the feeling of being all in on download-only distribution models, but in the market I know several people who buy movies and games on disc even when they have downloadable options. If that is a large chunk of the market and MS dumps optical media and Sony doesn't, this could be a significant differentiator.
Finally, your options for backwards compatibility are limited. If your older library games just won't physically fit in the system, that's a problem.
Re: (Score:3)
Remember all those people who claimed to not be able to tell the difference between 480p and 1080p? Well, the difference between 1080p and 4k will be REALLY difficult to spot.
Indeed. I sit 10 feet from a 60" and the benefit from a 4K would be so negligible I wouldn't bother (although my vision is in its middle age decline).
Sony has already started pushing a higher capacity 4K capable blu-ray variant through the standards process though. I believe it is quad layer.