...and I'm sure you swore up and down that you would absolutely never in a million years use that piece of shit DRM, corporate, etc, etc, etc.
Please go back, read his post again, and reply to what he was actually talking about, instead of inventing things that you're "sure" he did in the past.
Again, the key distinction here is the open vs. closed platform issue. Every publisher has the ability to sell the same, binary-compatible games on multiple storefronts on the PC, and the majority take advantage of it. That ability will never exist on consoles, and most of the benefits people see in storefronts like Steam and GOG emanate directly from it.
Let me see if i understand this. Are you saying on the PC if i buy a DRM free game i can sell that file to a friend and he can play it, no strings attached? So the only thing keeping me from distributing that file and both of us playing it is my own honesty?
Err... that's also the only thing keeping you from doing that with a DRM-free game that you
don't resell to someone else.
Games are the last place this transition is happening and it's long overdue.
Well, for one, you're quite a bit ahead of yourself on this:
video revenue is still primarily driven by discs, and
total disc sales aren't shrinking quite yet.
But secondly, games are so far behind precisely because of accessibility, pricing, and convenience issues in their business models -- i.e. exactly the stuff that's wrong with the Xbox One approach. The success of digital distribution in every medium was tied to the arrival of
specific platforms that a) competed in an open marketplace and b) provided a concrete, easily understandable sales proposition that was equivalently or more desirable to the physical one.
In music, people got a taste for digital music via Napster, then iTMS drove paid adoption by providing a convenient (and eventually, DRM-free) way to easily download music and then play it anywhere. Now the innovation is in streaming services like Spotify that represent a convenient bargain for heavy-volume users.
In video, the only places that have taken off all offer similar value propositions: iTunes again (and to a lesser degree, Amazon) for permanent sales, and Netflix for a low-price and convenient streaming option.
In books, basically nobody took ebooks seriously until Amazon provided both the physical means to read them
and a convenient storefront, while still allowing you to load books from elsewhere onto your Kindle.
On smartphones, apps took off because of their extremely low price, the convenient usage restrictions (any number of devices simultaneously), and the near-guaranteed cross-compatibility that allowed a single purchase to span multiple generations of phones and tablets.
Digital enthusiast games aren't on the level of acceptance that any of these other media have, but the closest they've gotten is via Steam and other PC storefronts, and the reason why is
exactly the same as these other platforms: the right combination of openness, convenience, reliability, and price to make digital competitive with physical. To do that effectively for all content, the console manufacturers would have to make some pretty significant changes to their business models, and I don't think either of them is ready to do that seriously yet.
