| endimion said: there is many ways to make it a viable thing.... those 10 players can't play the game when they want if it was only one other person that can play... it also becomes impossible to play if the owner sells the game.... finally I'm sure DLC would have been inaccessible.... so even if it would have eaten some revenue from initial sales (and I doubt it would have been much bigger than second hand and disc based lending already does) it could have generated more direct revenue to the devs through second hand fees + more DLC bought than with current state of things.... but I believe nobody knew exactly what would have been the consequences of that model for any party since it hasn't been tried on a large scale.... but I believe it could have been viable if done correctly.... I believe they cut it because the entire logic was based upon devs getting a share of the resold games.... without that new income the sharing plan is therefore less viable... so it's not a technical issue it is a economical one.... |
They cut the sharing feature because devs no longer got a cut of used game sales in stores? So it subsidised the 'loss' they might make people freely sharing games like they always have. Difference here is distance. Game sharing was usually done between younger audiences because they are kids and can't afford both and they live near each other. The digital game sharing would have been possible over thousands of miles between nearly 2 completely strangers who just didn't want to buy the same game at full price.
The whole system is extremely flawed. Nice idea in principle but a mess.
Although one this jsut struck me, they never said they had removed their 'devs get a cut from used sales from stores' thing. They just said the DRM and sharing had been removed. There might still be a deal with bigger retailers which would allow devs to get a cut of used games sales.
Hmm, pie.
