There has been a rumour swirling around the last day or two
regarding the next Xbox console and that it will require an always on internet
connection and that there will be no second hand games allowed with an
activation restriction preventing the discs having any value apart from when
they are first sold or possibly no discs at all.
Well. Pigeons. Cats. Amongst. Set. The! Now of course this
isn’t a hard source of information (although the mighty Edge did a piece on it
and other publications followed suit) but of course we all recognise that this
is probably the eventual future of gaming (as seen by the games console
manufactures and developers and all the other hangers on who currently hate the
second hand games market). There were even similar rumours surrounding the
release of the PlayStation 3 although these obviously came to nothing. It’s not
even as if the technology doesn’t exist as it would be basically a gimped
version of Steam with frontloaded DLC codes. Personally I think these are
rumours that have been floated by Microsoft themselves in order to gauge the
reaction amongst fans. Well, I hope they are listening as the reaction has been
universally terrible for a number of reasons.
Firstly, 35.9 million of all current Xboxes have not even been on the
internet let alone played online. Now things move on so I would expect that
number to come down in the future for a new xbox but it is a chilling statistic
for a company wanting to build things around having Xboxes totally online all
the time. Secondly, most people’s internet connections are pretty ropey anyway.
I think the average connection speed is about 2Mb in the UK and something
similar in the US. We live in an age of data caps and fair use policies so will
people really download 50GB blurays? Really, Microsoft?
Steam is always on DRM but people don’t actually mind it.
Why? Because there is an offline mode which is decent now although it didn’t used
to be. And because the games are damn cheap when the sales come around which
leads me to my next point. MS and also Sony haven’t quite got their heads
around digital pricing for AA games. New games are routinely at full RRP
(£49.99 or even £55) even when the games have been around for ages and the
second hand copies are £0.99 in the ASDA bargain bin or free with the purchase
of a spare pair of false teeth. Not only this, but second hand games form the
currency to buy the new games with people turning around games quite quickly
and using them to part exchange. Now, the games shops are guilty of a little
profiteering here. Ok, gouging basically. Try buying an AA game and then trying
to sell it back to the shop a week later for something even approaching the
original price and you will be laughed out of there. They will buy it off you
for a song and then sell it for £5 off the brand new price. People are well
aware of this which is why the game shops are in trouble anyway (see below).
There is also denying people the right to sell their own
goods which is a well established legal principle in the US (First Sale
Doctrine) and it is something the EU are actively looking at at the moment
(with a test case in Germany underway). Software companies in general have been
keen to deny people the right to the software and hardware that they buy by
stating that consumers only have something under licence. This is true but
their control was very limited when they still had to flog pieces of easily
sold and swappable pieces of plastic but easy to control when it is merely bits
and bytes that are floating around the ether that require verification with
central servers.
If Microsoft do implement this then I am not sure where
people will even buy games consoles as there will be literally no games stores
left. They would be destroying an industry that is already falling apart due to
myriad of other factors but including digital downloads as a minor subset of a
reason. Despite all of these reasons, I think that most people would be ok with
it if the games were cheap and you could play offline and you could gift or
give games to other people. Sadly, I think Microsoft just won’t do this and will
keep the game pricing static (possibly even raising the prices due to “development
costs” and a large chunk of people will miss the next generation or become one
with the PC Gaming Master Race or even lower cost alternatives like the OUYA
console which is coming out soon.
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