| CDiablo said: When/if it comes out its probably going to suck cause 3rd parties dont even want you sharing games physically. They dont even want you to watch videos of their games on youtube without getting a cut. |
Pretty much this. EVERYthing in the VG industry is calculated by monetization, and they hate people being able to buy used games. HATE it. But, they trust that model (the devil you know), because it's predictable, and digital only in the realm of 20-40GB games only reaches so many people. The vast majority of hugely popular PC games are fairly small in size by comparison. Part of the reaons that consoles are so popular to begin with is the relatively easy setup and go process (admittedly this has taken a hit with gen7/gen8 stuff from Sony/MS with day 1 updates/mandatory patches that can be annoying, I actually know people that never connect their consoles online because they just want to be able to play SP games in peace without being forced to download a massive update when they stick their new game in the system).
Digital only works great for some people. However, it is FAR from a great solution for many, and the reasons are myriad. If you follow ISP and net neutrality news, along with digital IP legal maneuvering, you'll know the US internet situation is mired in the 7th circle of hell right now. If you have a no-cap 20mbit+ connection, you're in great shape, but for more and more americans, that's just not the case. You have tons of crap internet connections out there with packet-shaping, throttling, data caps, inconcistent speeds, outages, and by far the biggest challenge facing us is two pronged :
The big ISPs are now dedicated towards their absolute dismantling of net neutrality. What that means is that content that they have a higher $ compensation for will get preference, and content that doesn't, gets nerfed in speed or disallowed altogether on their network. The second part of this is all the idiots out there that gleefully pay massive phone bills for 2GB of LTE monthly, etc, have them all salivating over implementation of similar models for home ISP access. No more infinite access per month at your max speed, not even infinite speed up to your 300gb cap or whatever somewhat-generous cap might be. No, the new model desired is something like : $50/mo for 30mbit, tier gives you 5GB of data. Every additional GB costs you $5. Oh, and while Netflix may pay the fees to give it top or 2nd tier speeds, smaller sites (like let's say VGChartz and a few of your other favorite sites) will get nerfed to dial-up speeds or not even allowed.
You don't have to believe me, do the research yourself. And of course it also comes down to the conversation between Microsoft and the publishers.
MS : "Hey we want to do family sharing for digital titles"
Publisher : "So do we get an extra cut of every shared game?"
MS : "No"
Publisher "Screw you!"
All the publishers will see is even more lost revenue. I can guarantee that the only reasons publishers might have initially accepted the previous family share plan was if there were huge caveats to the situation. #1 being of course that physical discs were basically useless in terms of used games, they'd have to go through a re-monetization routine through the official channels to be transferred to a new user. and #2 being that shared games weren't shared in an unlimited way.
It's insanity to believe otherwise, because from the publisher's point of view many games are purchased because you saw one of your friends playing the game and you go buy it yourself. With family sharing, you would just get clusters of friends sharing their titles, all diluting/reducing these sales.
"Should I go out and buy Sunset Overdrive"
"Nah, I already pre-odered it, you can play it, I'm still playing Destiny for now"
"Cool"
Etc.
Trust me, if anything called 'Family Sharing' comes to pass, it will come with exceedingly silly restrictions that aren't anything NEAR like "10 people can share all their games with the only limitation being only 1 person can play a title at the same time". Frankly, that would be a stupid thing for the publisher to agree on anyway.
And the final note is that the pricing will NEVER be competitive with phsyical used copies unless some extremely brilliant people start getting promoted to high positions. There really needs to be something of a more liquid model of game pricing. Maybe every game should have 45 days of premier pricing or whatever, but after that, digital prices need to adapt to true market pricing. It's WAY too common to see 6 month or even years-old games selling for $39, $49, or $59 digitally, when you can go buy a new disc copy in store for $19 or whatever.
