Microsoft want to be Valve

[andrewducker]

What's interesting about Microsoft's latest announcement about games on the XBox One is that they clearly want the XBox to work like a Steam box would.

With Steam there's no reselling of games, and no ability to lend them to friends, and most people seem to be just fine with that. Microsoft are basically doing that, except that they also give you a free shiny disk so that you don't have to download gigabytes of data, you can just pop in a disk. Oh, and they'll allow you to resell your game if the publisher agrees. And other people can play on the same XBox the game is installed on.

So, given that people are used to XBox Live (which is more restrictive) and Steam (which is more restrictive), what are they complaining so much? Well, two reasons spring to mind:
1) They're used to having more rights over their games, and taking things away from people is always painful.
2) Console games are more expensive. Not only are PC games generally cheaper (by 10%-20%), but they drop in price reasonably quickly, and Steam has regular sales.(I've got £1645 of games on Steam, and have spent about a fifth of that)

The question is whether those two factors are enough to cause people to abandon the platform. I'm not convinced that the mainstream of game buyers cares that much about either of them, but I don't actually know.

Personally, I think that the main problem they're going to have is that many people can only afford to buy games new because they first sell off a bunch of their old games, and if they can't do that then they simply won't be able to afford to buy the new games.

Comments

[davegodfrey]

I think 2 is intrinsically bound up with the ability to resell games, and the ability to rent them. If you can't do that then many people are going to be priced out of the market. If console games were as cheap as PC ones I don't think people would mind nearly so much. When its £40 for a new game, and there aren't regular sales that concentrates the mind rather.