Risky business: the next Xbox versus PlayStation 4

February 7th, 2013, 00:53 Posted By: wraggster

You’ve got to admire Microsoft’s bravery. News that its next Xbox could shut out the second-hand games market has caused strong reactions across social media today, and it has impacted upon the real world too. GameStop’s share price took a dent following the publication of our story earlier this afternoon.If our sources are correct (and we’re confident they are), Microsoft has made the move that publishers and developers have been asking for. Microsoft’s next Xbox will do what Steam and the App Store have been doing for years, and very successfully, too – a download-first, one profile, one purchase, one storefront system. Overnight, it’ll stop GameStop and GAME from selling on games without a penny heading back to its publisher, let alone its creator.In recent years, online passes have allowed publishers to recoup some of the cost of maintaining servers for online play, but they have always been something of a half-measure. With the next Xbox, Microsoft could go all the way.The key differences between Steam, the App Store and the next iteration of Xbox Live are in pricing and that ‘always-on’ detail. There’s good reason no-one really cares that you can’t trade in Steam and App Store games – often, they’re so cheap it barely seems worth the bother. One can easily call into question whether download-first next-gen games will actually be any cheaper because they skip costly manufacturing and distribution processes. One would expect they won’t be. On first impressions, Microsoft is taking a huge risk in cutting out a second-hand games ecosystem which keeps gaming affordable and its players interested in the box under their television.But it is worth remembering that in adopting this download-first policy, Microsoft is free from existing pricing models. One can easily imagine premium prices for those titles deemed still worthy of a retail release. Service-based subscriptions for bigger, costlier games will play a part, too, and middle and lower tier games will sell further down the pricing scale. And let’s not forget free-to-play.Microsoft has also, rather more sensibly, surmised that the kind of consumer happy to pay for a next-generation console is going to have a decent internet connection. It is not a portable device; there’s little harm in keeping the next Xbox connected, as long as the next iteration of Xbox Live is implemented in the right way. Past experiences with always-on services have been disappointing – just ask Ubisoft and Blizzard – but that’s current generation technology. Microsoft must take note of its contemporaries’ mistakes and make its always-on Xbox service as unobtrusive as it can.

http://www.edge-online.com/features/...playstation-4/

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