cheetahguy said:
p.s the video is about an interview with the new Xbox's pricing but its revealed near the end that the new Xbox will have DRM.
Is it something specific, though? Because the current system has DRM, too.
If you're a console gamer, the question should be "so what?" Unless there's a radical change.
HalfTangible said:
Can I play devil's advocate here for a second?
Diablo 3 and SimCity's launches failed because of volume that the servers couldn't handle. If a console always had to be online and connected to a server, then publishers would be able to see how many people are online at any given moment and better prepare for games with always-online connections since they would have to be linked to a server.
... Having said that, this one not-quite-braindead idea does not negate anything you said about the poor internet service many areas have, alienating gamestop, the lack of a need for it anyway for many games, etc etc.
This actually dovetails with the reason I came back into this thread, so I'll quote it.
I get the DA position, but companies always play it conservatively with servers, and that's part of the problem here. Microsoft ran like 3 years straight having trouble keeping XBlox Live up over the holidays. That wasn't as big a deal to me when I got started out, because I didn't even have gold and so my online connection was more or less a trivial thing. But at a time when huge MP titles were coming out, it meant that a lot of online players couldn't play the games they had just bought.
Now, picture a service-wide outage because of this. Where not only are Halo 7 fans impacted, but also anyone who bought a game months before. Hell, Kive was having serious problems for almost half of the Double XP weekend for Black Ops 2 this week, and I'd be surprised if the two weren't related.
If Always-online games become common, so will outages.