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"The Daily GameDev.net" Discussion |
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 |   lmelior
Member since: 6/16/2008 From: Phoenix, AZ | |||
Posted - 11/11/2009 3:07:03 PM | ||||
Quote:Don't forget the 2.5 million orders in the US! I would like to congratulate all 200,000 online petition signers for, umm, successfully, uh...yeah. You really showed Infinity Ward and Activision this time! Quote:I'm actually kinda surprised by this. I mean, it's the right thing to do, sure, but 600,000 paying accounts, that's $30 million a year in subscriptions. I doubt they'll recoup even a significant percentage of that through smaller server load and people going legit. | ||||
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| rian carnarvon
Member since: 10/27/2003 From: Vancouver, British Columbia | |||
Posted - 11/11/2009 3:37:36 PM | ||||
| The EA betting loss in the Wii is karma paying them back for ditching the Dreamcast. Surely that's the most logical answer? | ||||
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| Lord Crc
Member since: 2/13/2008 | |||
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Posted - 11/11/2009 6:30:15 PM | ||||
Quote: The petition is a joke (it's an online petition after all), but from what I read on the IW forums, the PC version of the game isn't ripped away... Quote: From what I can gather the damage done by the wiimotes will be minuscule compared to what this Natal thing can lead to... or am I missing something? :) | ||||
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| Ravyne
Member since: 2/26/2007 From: Kirkland, WA | |||
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Posted - 11/11/2009 7:26:49 PM | ||||
Quote: Well, that depends on how many games those pirates would otherwise buy. I read this on Slashdot this morning and commented how Xbox Live is really Microsoft's biggest anti-piracy incentive. Since most games these days have a strong multi-player component locking the pirates out is essentially locking them out of a huge portion of the game experience. Speaking for myself, most games wouldn't be worth pirating if I couldn't play them online. And sure it's essentially costing Microsoft $30m in subsribers, but how much are those 600k pirates costing them in lost liscense revenues alone? How much are the pirates costing the developer of each title they pirate? If you make the distinction between how many titles a given individual has pirated vs how many games they would have purchased (and I do -- when its so easy to pirate and a black DVD costs less than a game rental you're going to pirate stuff you never would have purchased yourself anyway, if not everything you can get your mits on) I'd make a fair estimate of 10+ lost game sales. Assume Microsoft collects $5 of each sale through liscense fees, and the devs themselves collect $10, then those pirates are costing Microsoft $30m in revenue, and developers a further $60m in revenue. I don't so much care about publishers loosing out in most cases, but since they take the lion's share of profits (lets say they pocket $20, and the rest goes to production and marketting) we can probably assume that's another $120m in lost revenue for them. Then there are the retailers, who make about $5 on a new game, for another $30m -- The bottom line is that Microsoft loosing out on $30m is only a pitance of the $360m that those lost game sales should be generating, which goes into the economy *somewhere* -- and most of those somewhere's are close partners (publishing, development, retail) of Microsoft's, so its in their best interest to protect them. | ||||
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 | Gaiiden GDNet Content Lead
Member since: 8/30/2000 From: Lincroft, NJ | |||
Posted - 11/11/2009 8:52:30 PM | ||||
| what really sucks about the whole banning issue is that these people can sell their modded Xboxes on eBay (for example) and people who buy them will not be allowed online, because the warranty is non-transferable. D'oh!! Spread the word and warn any of your friends who are looking to purchase used Xboxes at deals that seem to good to be true. Also in regards to why MS would do this - wouldn't modded consoles present a security threat to them, never mind the whole pirating issue? | ||||
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| Ravyne
Member since: 2/26/2007 From: Kirkland, WA | |||
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Posted - 11/12/2009 3:37:41 AM | ||||
| Agreed -- Someone had made that point on slashdot as well. Here's hoping that Microsoft will create a registry of blocked consoles that can be checked by their serial number. Granted, that won't stop the ass-hats that don't care about selling borked goods to others (My brother, for instance, once bought a $2000 laptop off ebay, only to find out that it had been repeatedly serviced by dell (more than 4 times in 9 months) for the same issue (overheating), but the seller advertised as "works great!" of course), but at least you'd have grounds for recourse through ebay that what you got wasn't as advertised: mismatched serial numbers. And yes, aside from the financial reasons there are a slew of other reasons -- modded boxes can give a user an unfair advantage with modified software, could aid in reverse-engineering the console itself, or the Xbox-live protocol, etc. The greatest aspect of Live is the relative infrequency of cheating -- keeping the modders out of the service plays a big role in that effort. | ||||
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| lmelior
Member since: 6/16/2008 From: Phoenix, AZ | |||
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Posted - 11/12/2009 12:27:04 PM | ||||
Quote: Whoa! Holy gross overestimate Batman! You say these 600,000 would have each spent $600 dollars on games had they not pirated them. I would wager the real number is closer to a tenth of that. Probably less. I'd be willing to bet that a vast majority of the people doing this are either incredibly cheap or just poor, or both. Like college students. So most of the actual lost sales revenue will go to either Gamestop or some private reseller because they'd buy used to save money, or they would do what I do, wait until the game hits about $20, or (my favorite) simply borrow the game from a friend. None of this is measurable though, so it's all just conjecture at this point. Quote: I saw Microsoft themselves use this argument, but I'm not real clear on it. I've never heard of a security threat from any type of console homebrew, and somehow I doubt that any homebrew could connect to Xbox Live and cause problems. I suspect 99% of modders only use it to play their "backups," since with XNA there is little reason to bother with modding the console for homebrew purposes. | ||||
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| Ravyne
Member since: 2/26/2007 From: Kirkland, WA | |||
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Posted - 11/12/2009 4:34:57 PM | ||||
| Admittedly that number is pulled from thin air, but I don't think that 10 games is unreasonable over the life of the console -- I've probably got 30+ games for my original XBox, and around 20 for my 360 already. If they have money to own a 360 in the first place, and keep up a Live account, then they're going to buy at least a few new games -- as a gamer, its hard to resist pre-ordering the likes of Halo 3 or Modern Warfare 2. I'll concede that many of those games may be second hand. Keep in mind that that stock of used games at Gamestop was largely generated through trad-ins taken as credit toward new games, and that those traded-in games likely came from the same source -- so there is somewhat of a "bubble-up" effect. I disagree that the majority of modders do it because they literally cannot afford to buy the games, but that they simply don't want to spend the money -- I guess its a natural instinct for some people to do things the cheapest way, even if it's not legit, but that's no excuse. In the end its impossible to quantify without real research, but I'm certain that the games industry at large benefits several times more than what Microsoft has lost in their subscriber base, and good on them for taking a financial hit now to make sure their partners see their dues in the future, even if they, themselves, may not recoup the loss. | ||||
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| swiftcoder
Member since: 7/3/2003 From: Boston, MA | |||
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Posted - 11/12/2009 10:31:09 PM | ||||
Quote:Underestimate, more like - that is one game a month for less than a year. Back when we had an Xbox 360 in the apartment, we tended to buy 2-3 games a month, though granted, there were 3 of us sharing the costs, and we defrayed costs by trading in the old ones at GameStop. Quote:Don't know about the college students where you come from, but around here they are not in general poor. Cheap as hell, yes, and many of them heavily in debt, but that doesn't in any way hamper the outgoings on alcohol, video games, and similar luxury goods. | ||||
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