Video Game Chatter

[Bob Roberts]

I've never felt that way with any game. You should all see a Neurologist.

 

[Bob Roberts]

 

[boozeman]

From a Microsoft employee...

1.
It's 4am and I'm still up, some hours ago, we at Microsoft had to basically redact on our Always Online infrastructure and dream. Being part of the team that created the entire infrastructure to include the POS (point of sale) mechanisms I must say that I am extremely sad to see it removed. But the consumer knows what is best, I can place the blame on no one but us here at Microsoft. We didn't do a good enough job explaining all the benefits that came with this new model. We spent too much of our time fighting against the negative impressions that many people in the media formed. I feel that if we spent less time on them and more time explaining the great features we had lined up and the ones in the pipes gamers and media alike would have aligned to our vision. That stated, we felt the people we would have loss would have been made up by the people we would have gained. We have 48 million Xbox 360 users connected online nearly 24 hours a day. That is much more than any of our closet competitors and vastly more than Steam. The people that we would have left behind I feel would have eventually come around as they saw what advantages the platform had to offer. But as I previously stated we at Microsoft have no one to blame other than ourselves for failing to convince those hesitant to believe in our new system. Microsoft might be a big company, but we at the Xbox division have always been for the gamer. Everything we've done has always been for them, we have butt heads with the executives many times on what we've wanted to, some times we lost (removing the onboard processor from Kinect 1.0) and other times we've won (keeping Gears of War as an exclusive).

2.


3.
While publishers have never come right out to us at MS and say "We want you to do something about used gaming" we could hear it in their voices and read it in their numerous public statements. The used gaming industry is slowly killing them and every attempt to slow down the bleeding was met with much resistance from the gaming community. I will admit that online passes were not well received nor were they well implemented, but I felt given time to mature it could have turned into something worth having as a gamer much like DLC (we went from pointless horse armor to amazing season passes like Borderlands 2!). Videogame development is a loss leader by definition and unlike other forms of media videogames only have one revenue stream and that is selling to you the gamer. So when you buy a game used you're hurting developers much more than say a movie studio. Many gamers fail to realize this when they purchase these preowned games. It is impossible to continue to deliver movie like experiences at the current costs without giving up something in return. It's what gamers want and expect, the best selling games are blockbusters, the highest rated are blockbusters, the most loved are blockbusters. How can developers continue to create these experiences if consumers refuse to support them? Many will argue the development system is broken, and I disagree. The development system is near broken, it's used gaming that is broken, but regardless I think more emphasis on this from both us at Microsoft and publishers would have gone a long way in helping educate the gamer, but again it is us who dropped the ball in this regard for that we're sorry.

4.


5.
Going back to Xbox One's feature set, one of the features I was most proud of was Family Sharing. I've browsed many gaming forums and saw that many people were excited about it as well! That made my day the first time I saw gamers start to think of amazing experiences that could come from game sharing. It showed that my work resonated with the group for which I helped create it for. I will admit that I was not happy with how some of my fellow colleagues handled explaining the systems and many times pulled my hair out as I felt I could have done a better job explaining and selling the ideas to the press and public at large. I'm writing this for that reason, to explain to gamers how many of the features would have worked and how many of them will still work.

6.


7.
First is family sharing, this feature is near and dear to me and I truly felt it would have helped the industry grow and make both gamers and developers happy. The premise is simple and elegant, when you buy your games for Xbox One, you can set any of them to be part of your shared library. Anyone who you deem to be family had access to these games regardless of where they are in the world. There was never any catch to that, they didn't have to share the same billing address or physical address it could be anyone. When your family member accesses any of your games, they're placed into a special demo mode. This demo mode in most cases would be the full game with a 15-45 minute timer and in some cases an hour. This allowed the person to play the game, get familiar with it then make a purchase if they wanted to. When the time limit was up they would automatically be prompted to the Marketplace so that they may order it if liked the game. We were toying around with a limit on the number of times members could access the shared game (as to discourage gamers from simply beating the game by doing multiple playthroughs). but we had not settled on an appropriate way of handling it. One thing we knew is that we wanted the experience to be seamless for both the person sharing and the family member benefiting. There weren't many models of this system already in the wild other than Sony's horrendous game sharing implementation, but it was clear their approach (if one could call it that) was not the way to go. Developers complained about the lost sales and gamers complained about overbearing DRM that punished those who didn't share that implemented by publishers to quell gamers from taking advantage of a poorly thought out system. We wanted our family sharing plan to be something that was talked about and genuinely enjoyed by the masses as a way of inciting gamers to try new games.

8.


9.
The motto around the offices for the family plan was "It's the console gaming equivalent to spotify and pandora" it was a social network within itself! The difference between the family sharing and the typical store demo is that your progress is saved as if it was the full game, and the data that was installed for that shared game doesn't need to be erased when they purchase the full game! It gave incentive to share your games among your peers, it gave games exposure, it allowed old games to still generate revenue for publishers. At the present time we're no longer going forward with it, but it is not completely off the table. It is still possible to implement this with the digital downloaded versions of games, and in fact that's the plan still as far as I'm aware.

10.


11.
Another feature that we didn't speak out about was the fact we were building a natural social network with Xbox One in itself that didn't require gamers to open their laptops/tablets to post to their other friends nor did they need to wrestle with keyboard add-ons. Each Xbox Live account would have a full "home space" in which they could post their highest scores, show off their best Game DVR moments, what they've watched via Xbox TV and leave messages for others to read and respond to. Kinect 2.0 and Xbox One work together and has robust voice to text capabilities. The entire notion of communicating with friends you met online would have been natural and seamless. No reliance on Facebook, or Twitter (though those are optional for those who want them). Everything is perfectly crafted for the Xbox One controller and Kinect 2.0 and given that shine that only Microsoft can provide.

12.


13.
We at Microsoft have amazing plans for Xbox One that will make it an amazing experience for both gamers and entertainment consumers alike. I stand by the belief that Playstation 4 is Xbox 360 part 2, while Xbox One is trying to revolutionize entertainment consumption. For people who don't want these amazing additions, like Don said we have a console for that and it's called Xbox 360.

 

[Smitty]

From a Microsoft employee...

Can't you just hear the heartbreak in his voice. This poor guy isn't some rich MS exec, he's one of us! Just look at this finely timed leak we just discovered and distributed...

It's 4am and I'm still up, some hours ago, we at Microsoft had to basically redact on our Always Online infrastructure and dream. Being part of the team that created the entire infrastructure to include the POS (point of sale) mechanisms I must say that I am extremely sad to see it removed. But the consumer knows what is best, I can place the blame on no one but us here at Microsoft. We didn't do a good enough job explaining all the benefits that came with this new model. We spent too much of our time fighting against the negative impressions that many people in the media formed. I feel that if we spent less time on them and more time explaining the great features we had lined up and the ones in the pipes gamers and media alike would have aligned to our vision. That stated, we felt the people we would have loss would have been made up by the people we would have gained. We have 48 million Xbox 360 users connected online nearly 24 hours a day. That is much more than any of our closet competitors and vastly more than Steam. The people that we would have left behind I feel would have eventually come around as they saw what advantages the platform had to offer. But as I previously stated we at Microsoft have no one to blame other than ourselves for failing to convince those hesitant to believe in our new system. Microsoft might be a big company, but we at the Xbox division have always been for the gamer. Everything we've done has always been for them, we have butt heads with the executives many times on what we've wanted to, some times we lost (removing the onboard processor from Kinect 1.0) and other times we've won (keeping Gears of War as an exclusive).

Why not have awesome features for those connected, but still retain the ability to play games offline?

Too hard I guess, despite the other amazing accomplishments they have been able to develop. It has to be either all or nothing, apparently.

This guy sounds like he's lamenting that the Jews just killed Jesus. Forgive them, Father Gates... they know not what they have done!

While publishers have never come right out to us at MS and say "We want you to do something about used gaming" we could hear it in their voices and read it in their numerous public statements.

We don't give a shit. Not being able to re-sell a hard copy of a piece of media that you have purchased is wrong. There is no other way to put it.

The used gaming industry is slowly killing them and every attempt to slow down the bleeding was met with much resistance from the gaming community. I will admit that online passes were not well received nor were they well implemented, but I felt given time to mature it could have turned into something worth having as a gamer much like DLC (we went from pointless horse armor to amazing season passes like Borderlands 2!). Videogame development is a loss leader by definition and unlike other forms of media videogames only have one revenue stream and that is selling to you the gamer. So when you buy a game used you're hurting developers much more than say a movie studio. Many gamers fail to realize this when they purchase these preowned games. It is impossible to continue to deliver movie like experiences at the current costs without giving up something in return. It's what gamers want and expect, the best selling games are blockbusters, the highest rated are blockbusters, the most loved are blockbusters. How can developers continue to create these experiences if consumers refuse to support them? Many will argue the development system is broken, and I disagree. The development system is near broken, it's used gaming that is broken, but regardless I think more emphasis on this from both us at Microsoft and publishers would have gone a long way in helping educate the gamer, but again it is us who dropped the ball in this regard for that we're sorry.

More passive aggressive bullshit. "We here at Microsoft are so sorry that you didn't see how awesome our ideas were; it's ok, it's not your fault that you didn't recognize our genius, you're all just a bunch of troglodytes, barely more intelligent than cattle. You don't know what you want until we tell you, it's our fault for not telling you more forcefully."

Yeah, the used game industry is wrecking video games as we know it. Translation: Profits don't grow by quite as much as they want.

I'm terrified that we're gonna have to go back to playing with 16 bit graphics. Somehow, I don't think Naughty Dog is going to be hurting for profits after the cinematic experience that was the Last of Us. I wanted that game bad because it was exactly what this guy is claiming is going to die out. You know what? I ran out and paid $60 for it immediately.

You know what game I refuse to pay more than about $10 for, and will no longer buy at full retail? Call of Duty.

Good. I hope the used game industry kills that bullshit off. It's called the free marketplace, survival of the fittest. The used game industry isn't killing video games. It's weeding out the shit that no one wants to pay full price for. This guy expects me to get all weepy because game developers who sit on their asses and don't come up with new ideas but rely on the same old Michael Bay bullshit are going to go out of business.

That's not the death of the game industry, dude.

First is family sharing, this feature is near and dear to me and I truly felt it would have helped the industry grow and make both gamers and developers happy. The premise is simple and elegant, when you buy your games for Xbox One, you can set any of them to be part of your shared library. Anyone who you deem to be family had access to these games regardless of where they are in the world. There was never any catch to that, they didn't have to share the same billing address or physical address it could be anyone. When your family member accesses any of your games, they're placed into a special demo mode. This demo mode in most cases would be the full game with a 15-45 minute timer and in some cases an hour. This allowed the person to play the game, get familiar with it then make a purchase if they wanted to. When the time limit was up they would automatically be prompted to the Marketplace so that they may order it if liked the game. We were toying around with a limit on the number of times members could access the shared game (as to discourage gamers from simply beating the game by doing multiple playthroughs). but we had not settled on an appropriate way of handling it. One thing we knew is that we wanted the experience to be seamless for both the person sharing and the family member benefiting. There weren't many models of this system already in the wild other than Sony's horrendous game sharing implementation, but it was clear their approach (if one could call it that) was not the way to go. Developers complained about the lost sales and gamers complained about overbearing DRM that punished those who didn't share that implemented by publishers to quell gamers from taking advantage of a poorly thought out system. We wanted our family sharing plan to be something that was talked about and genuinely enjoyed by the masses as a way of inciting gamers to try new games.

Great, so family sharing means that a family member can play the game for half an hour instead of having the game lent to them in a physical copy like we can do now.

Wow, what a revolution in gaming! Yeah, a revolution for your pocket books, and a revolution in airing out our assholes.

How is this experience a positive for gamers? It's a fucking marketing ploy. You are asking us to do your advertising for you by teasing our family members into buying a game. Yeah, that's how I want to treat my loved ones... by trying to part them from their money for Micro$oft$ benefit.

The only thing that this system does is basically make a free demo for every game on the market. WGAS.

If Microsoft was smart, they'd create a store very much like Steam's online store. Meaning, it is attached to an online account that they manage. Now, when there is no internet connection, I can still play my games locally. However, when I am online, I can literally log in to any computer that has steam installed on it, sign in, and access my games. Of course, I have to download them again to the new machine (maybe this is where the "play-as-you-download" technology can come into the picture). But here is a system where I can access my digital library from anywhere as long as I have access to a PC and the internet.

At the same time, I can only be logged in at one place at a time. So it's not like I can be lending out my password to a bunch of friends and therefore be promoting unlimited piracy. Is it possible that maybe 1 or 2 friends could play the game with this loophole? Yes, but this can be capped by doing what Apple does with iTunes -- a 5 device limit can be "activated" at any time, and you get one re-set to zero for activated devices in a year.

Additionally, M$ could take it another step further than what Steam does and it could have an "Auction House" similar to what Blizzard does -- except in this case, it could be digital game trading. Right now, once I buy a digital game on steam, it's mine forever, but since there is no hardcopy and the game is linked to my account, there is no way to transfer it to anyone else. Microsoft could set up a store that they run (like Blizzard does) where I can advertise a digital game that I no longer want, sell the activation key to a buyer, and then Microsoft could disable the game from my account and transfer the key to the purchaser's account. On top of that, they could take a 10% cut of my sale.

Bam. Used game sales problem solved. MS finds a way to get a cut (which it could share with the third party developers). It cuts out gamestop. And it protects gamer's interests.

But I guess "unnamed MS employee" didn't stop to think about how Steam actually revolutionizes gaming.

We at Microsoft have amazing plans for Xbox One that will make it an amazing experience for both gamers and entertainment consumers alike. I stand by the belief that Playstation 4 is Xbox 360 part 2, while Xbox One is trying to revolutionize entertainment consumption. For people who don't want these amazing additions, like Don said we have a console for that and it's called Xbox 360.

No one wants your "revolution" which is only a thinly veiled insult to our intelligence because it's really only a way for you to make more money off us while giving us nothing extra.

 

[1bigfan13]

I played a couple of games of the new NCAA Football demo. I didn't see anything special that makes me want to go out and get this one.

There were some new animations and I did notice the improved blocking system but I'll probably pass on this one. I bought last year's version and don't see a need to upgrade.

One thing that I noticed when flipping through the "What's New" menu is that recruiting is supposed to be faster this year. Recruiting took way too long in last year's edition.

 

[1bigfan13]

I agree with you about the family sharing, Schmitty.

I was thinking pretty much the exact same thing as I read this guy's comments. Family sharing sounds like it's no different than any other demo that's out there.

 

[Smitty]

I knocked out Bioshock Infinite this afternoon and someone is going to have to explain to me WTF I just witnessed because I don't have a friggin' clue what just happened.

 

[Texas Ace]

I knocked out Bioshock Infinite this afternoon and someone is going to have to explain to me WTF I just witnessed because I don't have a friggin' clue what just happened.

I didn't play any of the Bioshock games but that about checking this one out because it got so many good reviews.

What would you rate it?

 

[Bob Roberts]

Mr Video Game fan has never played Bioshock. FAIL

 

[EZ22]

I didn't care for Bioshock. I got a few hours into the first one and was bored to death.

 

[Smitty]

I didn't play any of the Bioshock games but that about checking this one out because it got so many good reviews.

What would you rate it?

8 out of 10? It was solid but way too confusing. It's worth a play but I doubt I'll play it again.

 

[Carp]

I played a couple of games of the new NCAA Football demo. I didn't see anything special that makes me want to go out and get this one.

There were some new animations and I did notice the improved blocking system but I'll probably pass on this one. I bought last year's version and don't see a need to upgrade.

One thing that I noticed when flipping through the "What's New" menu is that recruiting is supposed to be faster this year. Recruiting took way too long in last year's edition.

Agreed. Nothing with that game makes me want to go get it.

 

[boozeman]

Alright fagmos, I got Last Of Us, it better be good.

 

[Smitty]

Alright fagmos, I got Last Of Us, it better be good.

After a bang-up intro, the game moves slow for an hour or two. Wait until you start getting some supplies and crafting stuff, it really gets fun in a hurry.

 

[Texas Ace]

Alright fagmos, I got Last Of Us, it better be good.

Wise choice.

You won't regret it.

 

[Texas Ace]

Mr Video Game fan has never played Bioshock. FAIL

I'm not big into first-person view type games.

I play the shooters, but only for the MP. But in general I'm not big on first person games and for that reason, I didn't play other highly regarded games like Far Cry and Dishonored.

 

[boozeman]

Wise choice.

You won't regret it.

It is frustrating the shit out of me so far.

 

[EZ22]

It is frustrating the shit out of me so far.

Play it on easy the first time through to enjoy the story.

 

[Smitty]

Play it on easy the first time through to enjoy the story.

Or even normal.

Definitely not on hard.

 

[Cowboysrock55]

Wise choice.

You won't regret it.

Maybe it's just my TV but I found it infuriating during some of the darker scenes because I couldn't see shit. I'll mention a subway and water that was annoying as hell. The game certainly moves fast. Not much lul in the action that is for sure.