Xbox Chief: We Need To Create a Netflix of Video Games (theguardian.com) 142
Phil Spencer, the man who heads up Microsoft's Xbox division, says that if the video game sector is to grow both creatively and economically it needs to start thinking along the lines of a video-games-as-a-service subscription model. From a report: Over the last five years we've seen the emergence of a new concept: the video game as a service. What this means is the developer's support for a new title doesn't stop when it's launched. They run multiplayer servers so that people can compete online; and they release extra downloadable content (DLC) in the form of new items, maps and storylines -- sometimes free, but very often paid for. [...] So being able to build and sustain a community around a single title takes the risk out of development. However, the costs of renting and running server networks and maintaining the matchmaking and lobby infrastructures make the model inaccessible for smaller teams. Should it be? "This is directly in line with what I think the next wave of innovation needs to be for us as a development platform," says Spencer. His solution, it seems, is to make Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform more open to smaller studios, so they get access to a large global network of servers. "They don't have to go buy a bunch of servers on their own and stick them under their desks and hope they get enough players to pay for them," he says. [...] Spencer feels that, from a creative standpoint, we need new types of narrative experience -- but from a business standpoint, it's getting harder and riskier to commit to those games. Is there an answer? Spencer thinks there is -- and it comes from watching the success of original content made and distributed on modern TV services. "I've looked at things like Netflix and HBO, where great content has been created because there's this subscription model. Shannon Loftis and I are thinking a lot about, well, could we put story-based games into the Xbox Game Pass business model because you have a subscription going? It would mean you wouldn't have to deliver the whole game in one month; you could develop and deliver the game as it goes."
sega channel (Score:5, Informative)
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And atari before it with the GameLine (later QuantumLink)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameLine
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For a more recent example, there's Playstation Now. It's not exactly what they're talking about, being for previous generation games specifically, but it's the same model type (and actually does work pretty well, or at least did for the trial period).
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Ah, was not aware of this. Only ran it for the trial period and cancelled (not enough time to play games anymore to justify the cost). Thank you!
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And Nintendo Japan did something similar with satellite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Adding to the list, I was happily subscribed to Metaboli for a fair while.
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Comparing this to Netflix though, and then saying, "It would mean you wouldn't have to deliver the whole game in one month; you could develop and deliver the game as it goes." - This is the opposite of how Netflix does it.
Sooo Gamefly and/or Steam? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Ok. Beyond all the ranting from the peanut gallery that gets hung up over the slightest opportunity to engage in nitpicking word games... is there anything Steam does today that XBox Live doesn't do?
(Seriously guys, it gets old. I know that Steam can drop any game at any time and that if Steam goes under so does your Steam library. We've been down this path and another rant just isn't warranted.)
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That's almost all you can do. The TOS is explicit that you do not own the games, and it is a DRM service meaning it can withhold permission to play any time it wants to
Not entirely true. You can play games in offline mode without logging in and the publishers are free to provide DRM-free games via Steam in the same way that Kindle publishers can provide DRM-free ebooks if they choose. http://steam.wikia.com/wiki/Li... [wikia.com]
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Good Old Games has Civ 1-4. Don't know if 5 or 6 have been (legitimately) released DRM-free anywhere yet. I suspect they'll hit GoG or some similar site eventually after the devs decide that the greater sales exposure is worth the increased piracy risk (given of course that they somehow still believe the piracy risk is 100% regardless of DRM. It only takes one successful crack to take piracy from 0% to maximum and there's always at least one.)
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Steam? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Steam? (Score:5, Informative)
No, steam is not a subscription service. You buy each title you want, once, and that's it. If you want the dlc, you pay a separate unlock fee, once, to get it.
This is a monthly payment, and you get access to all the titles and all the dlc for them (however many your hard drive can hold), and you can swap them out and play them as much as you want....until you cancel the subscription; when you lose access to all of them.
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The difference between a tv show and a game is that I watch a tv show once, whereas I play a single game for many hundreds of hours.
I think a better analogy is a TV Series on Netflix, not a TV show. For example, if you watch all of The West Wing that about 113 hours of viewing, give or take.
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No, steam is not a subscription service. You buy each title you want, once, and that's it. If you want the dlc, you pay a separate unlock fee, once, to get it.
This is a monthly payment, and you get access to all the titles and all the dlc for them (however many your hard drive can hold), and you can swap them out and play them as much as you want....until you cancel the subscription; when you lose access to all of them.
It's going to be more like a Pay/Cable TV subscription. With the basic package, you only get access to a limited set of semi-popular games. To get access to the full catalogue, you need to pay for the gold package. Want DLC, you can pay a nominal sum for a DLC package per game.
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If you never have to pay anything more beyond the "purchase" price, then it's not renting; renting means that you make regular payments in return for continued use of the item or service in question.
It may be correct to say that you don't "own" your Steam games, but that just means that what you purchased is a license to use the game according to term specified by Steam, rather than the less restrictive (but also not unlimited) terms applying to the use of a traditionally purchased copy of a game.
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I only pay once when I rent a car. Paying monthly (when you don't own) is leasing. Paying once (when you don't own) is renting.
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> but that there are a lot of studios you can't buy through Steam
I mean, he could be saying that, but if he is, he's an asshole.
> . Origin, Blizzard, Microsoft Studios
"Origin" is just "EA". If Spencer wants Microsoft on Steam, he should put ALL his games on Steam, right?
To ask "why aren't all of these guys available in one place" is a stupid question, because he's looking out at a landscape with Microsoft, Valve, Blizzard, and EA each having some kind of proprietary distribution platform, all of the
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This sounds like a model where you pay a subscription fee and can just play whatever games are available through the service. If you quit paying, you lose access, but otherwise you can play whatever game you want through the service. There have already been a few different services that have tried this in the past, and some more recent ones as well (I
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> Wrong. If you break Steam TOS, you lose access to those games. You don't own the game, you lease it.
You lease it, but it is often a one-time lease cost that lasts indefinitely. Sometimes the one-time lease cost is literally zero.
I get your desire to jump on anyone making the mistake between Steam offering you a game, and you actually going and buying the game. But it's still a reasonable analogy to make, especially given that your Steam library will last for years, and probably eventually decades. G
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Or EA Access for that matter. EA Access is an annual subscription service ALREADY available on the XBox that gives you "free" copies of older EA games, early beta access, and 10 hour trials of the newer titles. If you like the games, you can buy them at a discounted price from the EA store.
So, yeah, it doesn't sound like Microsoft is doing much "innovation" here. They are just ripping off and expanding on an existing service already available to XBox customers.
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No, they're describing World of Tanks.
Netflix vs. YouTubwe (Score:2, Interesting)
If a future offering from Xbox is the Netflix of video games, then what's the YouTube of video games?
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What's the public access radio of video games?
Greenlight.
What's the library of video games?
The library.
What's the turn down service of video games?
Your mom.
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... what's the YouTube of video games?
http://www.abandonia.com/
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hear hear
I hope this fucking fails (Score:5, Insightful)
I very much hope this fucking fails.
The business models are completely different. Every mode of distributing games for cash has FULLY influenced how games are designed. If you make a game that sells at a store, it has to fit on whatever media you are selling it on (pretty easy these days), and it has to be complete. If everyone has internet connections, you can ship a halfassed game with a fraction of content instead, and we see that. If you can do in-app purchases, then a science will spring up about how best to trick and exploit your customers- start with a free, fair and fun game, then gradually ramp up the difficulty until it is either an expensive, fair, and fun game, or a free, unfair, and unfun game. And we see this too, and not to a small degree- there's huge expensive studies done about how best to rip people off.
So, what does a subscription based service incentivize? First of all, shitty games that look good enough to justify a subscription, games with artificially long end-points such as MMOs, and of course, the same in-app purchases. Basically, it has the worst commonalities of all the existing models. But wait, there's more! If the subscription is, say, 15 a month, then that's not enough to pay for free access to like 5 good MMOs and two dozen good first person shooters. How do you divide the 15 a month anyway? By the games played by each person? It ends up having the same compensation issues that Spotify does, except unlike performers, you don't go on tour with your game- your distribution is your entire model, full stop.
There's almost no way that, even if highly supported and well liked, this is sustainable. This is just middle-men engaging in huge rent-seeking, and they will be the only ones to possibly make any kind of cash out of this, which will be entirely on the backs of any developers.
A more optimistic view is to offer temporary access to older games, for people who like them but don't want to go through the drama of maintaining their ability to play them separately for long periods of time. That's the best case scenario, and not the one they are talking about. I suspect even that would fail too.
And I'm sure this would be just more Windows-specific garbage (Xbone also runs Windows, AFAIK), as if the world needs more of that.
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Anytime I read 'the Netflix of....' I just chuckle.
I'm working on the Netflix of toilet paper. Its gonna wipe the competition away.
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Fear not, Microsoft is expert at screwing up. Microsoft has years of experience find the best way to create the most spectacular product failures ever. Examples of their long running success of showing other companies what not to do include:Zune,Kin,Windows Me,Windows Mobile. Internet Exploder 6 and their most successful product failure, Microsoft Bob.
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> that there is one, singular, successful subscription MMO: World of Warcraft
I mean, that's not quite true. It's close to true, though. Final Fantasy XIV is subscription based (they have a free-to-play trial up to level 35, similar to WoW's free-to-play trial up to level 20 or 30 or I forget). They use the EXACT same model as WoW, with a real-money store for a few cosmetics (they don't offer a level boost, or the ability to buy in-game currency, but they may eventually- both of those things are thing
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one, singular, successful subscription MMO: World of Warcraft
Define "successful." If you mean "makes a profit," then you're flat out wrong. If you mean "as successful as WoW" then well yeah, I guess that's true.
You also need to define "failure." There's plenty of MMOs that closed or tried F2P (or some other model) because they were starting to lose money -- but that doesn't negate all of the money they made before they started going downhill. An MMO that made $100m over its life and shutdown after deciding a loss of $10m couldn't be turned around is still a $90m
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> First of all I see this as a platform that can host everything and is cloud based so they are only transmitting what you view to you.
Latency. So much lag. There's actually services that offer this right now, and they all tooootally suck. A modern client uses a lot of power on your side, but as a result, it is displaying the server state, and also making predictions based on that. This cuts dramatically down on the amount of latency you personally have to deal with. But if your input device and you
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This service already existed. It was called OnLive, and it was actually quite a bit better than you'd expect in terms of image quality and lag. I'm not really sure why it failed, but my guess is that people just don't want to consume video games the same way they consume video content - the replay value of many games may make consumers of a subscription service feel like they're double-paying for stuff.
Anyway, if the same factors are in place, I expect a microsoft version of OnLive to do just as well as the
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> it was actually quite a bit better than you'd expect in terms of image quality and lag
It was clear that eliminating lag was their #1 priority, but they still were off by over a factor 2 on their promised lag.
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Latency. So much lag.
Yeah, would be easier, simpler and better for everybody if they just let you download the games and run them locally.
Much as Steam does.
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I mean, no, it's not simpler for the player to run the game locally. It's merely vastly better. In theory, you could play on ANY device with a good connection, as long as it supported a controller you liked enough. You could play on an old iPad, some pre-Core x86s, anything that was able to drive a video stream and read your inputs.
The problem is that latency. Everything else is a problem on the remote side, which, presumably, they would be highly motivated to run efficiently.
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Voting with money as an extension of our time (down to hours) is a not the best idea for games. This is because now games will be designed toward length rather than content.
Have you seen idle games like farmville or Clash of Clan? hardcore players probably don't even consider them fun or interactive, but under the money per time, those games will earn the most. Players leave their game on for the day in exchange for rewards.
Even MMO or FPS games will end up with farming or loading screen before you get to
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After posting, I've already notice a number of AAA titles that would take tokens that is worth per year instead of per month. An example would be bioshock. Here the 'funding' just gotten harder to resolve.
They have this (Score:5, Informative)
I already pay Microsoft about $60/year for a subscription service that allows me to download and play games. It's called XBox Live Gold. Perhaps no one told the new boss at XBox about?
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Bundle it with Xbox LIve (Score:3)
I'll take a modern service that gives me all my content+new content for a very low monthly rate.
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"Why can't it be both?"
If the subscription model is optional, then that's fine, but I'm worried it will become mandatory. There's no reason why I should keep paying for my small selection of games forever because people like you keep buying tons of crap that isn't good enough to play more than once.
Let's milk our customers for as long as possible (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me translate this marketing talk into something that average people would understand: "Let's milk our customers for as long as possible by first selling them an early alpha and then, while solving critical bugs, adding some missing features so that the game doesn't look and feel like a demo product".
Sorry, this is such a shitty concept it must die. Games in 80s, 90s and early 00s were released as complete final products and rarely if ever received any patches or DLCs. Now with the advent of a high speed Internet connection, even operating systems are offered as beta products (I'm looking at Windows 10). This is all done to save money on QA/QC and to increase the profits of game publishers (not, not developers) - the companies which basically do nothing, except clever often misleading marketing.
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Marketdroid: "Users are not willing to pay more than $60 per game."
Bright Idea Guy: "I know! We will sell games as a service and charge $10/month. Our customers will LOVE it!"
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I spend more than $10/month on games. Shit, I spend $10/month on games just with one retailer, and they're nowhere near my primary source of new games.
Anything under about $30/month for access to 80% of the games released more than six months ago and I'd be far better off.
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There's got to be more to it than that. Very few people play one (and only one) game for 6 months straight, so right off the top the math you're providing is a losing equation. If you assume say, 1 week per game playtime on average (across all users and across all games,) then that means you're charging the user $2.50 for a $60 game.
I somehow doubt that new releases would be on the service for a few weeks/months until the initial purchasing rush is over, and this is just a way to get you to pay $10/mo for
DLC is the key (Score:3)
Sorry, this is such a shitty concept it must die. Games in 80s, 90s and early 00s were released as complete final products and rarely if ever received any patches or DLCs. Now with the advent of a high speed Internet connection, even operating systems are offered as beta products (I'm looking at Windows 10). This is all done to save money on QA/QC and to increase the profits of game publishers (not, not developers) - the companies which basically do nothing, except clever often misleading marketing.
DLC is the name of the game.
My sons are pre-teen, and they play various free games. They are amazed that they are free, cause they are sooo cool. (they suck) They see these youtubers (my least favorite word) prattling on about these games, and sit and watch them play them, and talk incessantly while doing so. But those games become popular, and if you get people hooked on it, you can sell them things. Upgrades/costumes/other levels, etc. It doesn't work on my kids, because I don't let it.
This isn't a
Looking forward (Score:2)
Looking forward to games being randomly pulled in and out of the catalogue while I'm in the middle of playing them, at whim of always changing agreements between the streaming service and the publishers.
Eliminate used game sale, reap more profit (Score:3)
Let me play devil's advocate here (Score:2)
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Basically, it's a return to the Video Arcade: you walked in with a pocketful of quarters, and left with your pockets empty.
I kinda take issue with how you phrased this -- as though the arcade gamer simply gave away his money for nothing. At the arcade, you were paying for the time you spent playing the games. Like many other things in life, sometimes money is exchanged for an experience alone, and just because you don't have a tangible good to show for the exchange doesn't mean you were cheated..
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Seems like a bad deal (Score:3)
Besides, this already exists and is called Gamefly.
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On the flip side, the lowered barriers to entry caused by not needing to go through a traditionally restrictive publisher have resulted in a modern renaissance for indie games. Low budget titles available through gog.com or Steam have some real gems among them. Granted, there are a lot of terrible low budget games and "in development" games that never get finished too, but I'll accept that as a price I'm willing to pay for really imaginative and refreshingly fun titles being regularly released by people o
Weird futures (Score:2)
Weird how all the big companies seem to believe the future lies with us continuously paying them for the privilege of their services without them actually suppling a permanent product.
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Weird how you think this is weird. You may dislike it, but there's nothing inherently strange about it and there can be some pretty big benefits. Netflix of course being the prime example -- there's no way I could possibly afford to purchase everything I've watched on Netflix for full price, but between volume purchasing and amortization across shows, Netflix is able to provide a product that I wouldn't otherwise be able to obtain, even if its not "permanent."
Whether or not this will work for video games
And... (Score:1)
Like Netflix, you need to do it in a way that's, more or less, invisible to a consumer's monthly expenditures. If you roll something like this out at $20-30/m, people are going to tell you to kiss their ass. This is the #1 reason these buffet-style services never work. They are ALWAYS too expensive. $30/m will get you just about any game you want, if it's a bit older, and you get to KEEP it.
$10-12? Now you're talking. Enjoy your paychecks.
Basically PS+ (Score:2)
With PlayStation Plus you get an initial "instant game collection" and then they add about 6 games a month to your list and as long as you're subscribed you can keep playing all of them. Pretty much sounds like we already have that....
And Steam has PC pretty well covered
erm (Score:1)
please dont (Score:1)
It's time, Gamefly is too slow (Score:2)
I Guess MS Is All-In On AWS Too? (Score:1)
Meh (Score:2)
This is exactly why I didn't get neither a PS4 or an XBox One. They already require a subscription for full functionality. The only reason I'm considering a Switch is because it sounds like it'll still be reasonably functional without having to pay for subscription too, even though Nintendo finally caved in and decided to join this crappy trend.
Also, Spencer must have his head under a rock or something if he's just now realizing this crap . Playstation Now already exists, nVidia has Gamestream/GRID, Gaikai
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PS4 doesn't require a PS+ subscription for general console-like functionality (ie: you can play games, including online games, without it.)
PS+ primarily gives you cloud storage and periodic discounts/freebies in the PS store. Its not like XBox where you're practically forced into it.
That said, I'm pretty sure the PS4 does at least require you to create a PS account. Which is annoying but its free.
Already done (Score:2)
"Over the last five years we've seen the emergence of a new concept: the video game as a service."
It is absolutely not new, it was called an 'arcade' forty fucking years ago. Guess what happened to the majority of them?
They shut down as home gaming became possible/affordable.
Just great! (Score:2)
Unfortunately it also means a game could get "cancelled" before it's complete if there aren't enough players to support it.
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The opposite is also true though. A game that would have traditionally been cancelled because its over budget/time/whatever may be able to hang on if there's enough players supporting it.
Random speculation is fun.