Poetic.Injustice
Member
It was a moment that will go down in the E3 history books.
After a day full of perfunctory fanboy whoops and polite applause for the appearance of all-too-predictable games and characters at the annual Monday slog of back-to-back-to-back-to-back press conferences at the Electronic Entertainment Expo last week, Sony CEO Jack Tretton strode onto the stage to proclaim that PlayStation 4 would play used game discs.
The companies that have fared the best in the technology world understand the maxim that your customers cannot articulate to you everything they want. Yes, you should listen to the people who use your products (and you should listen just as closely to the ones who do not), but you cannot simply ask people what they want you to make, then make it; thats how you end up with The Homer. Nobody asked for iPhone. Even after that, nobody asked for iPad. And nobody-but-nobody ever asked for a Nintendo DS.
Microsoft is playing the long game with Xbox One. Its not content with fighting and scrabbling and inventing new promotional offers in an attempt to get more Xbox owners signed up for Xbox Live and using its online services. Its guaranteeing 100 percent online connectivity by requiring it. Microsoft will also know every single game every single one of its customers own the better to sell them more. And once youre used to the idea of all your games being installed onto your hard drive, they can wean the disc diehards off of physical goods and move them onto downloads, which cut out the middleman and put more money into the hands of the game publisher (and Microsoft).
Sony, in tying the ownership of games to discs rather than accounts, is giving players more freedom but is delaying its own ability to go all-digital.
Its not just Microsoft thats taking a calculated risk here; Sony is too. I reached the conclusion last year that the game console is dead. Microsoft would seem to agree wholeheartedly with this idea, since it seems to be done making anything that you or I would recognize as a game console. If we take Sonys announcements at face value, gamers can treat PlayStation 4 exactly as if it were an Atari 2600. Buy games, pop them in, sell them when youre done. You can opt in to the online services or downloadable games, but these are extra value-adds, not necessary conditions.
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/06/e3-2013-analysis/