20happyballs said:
Scoobes said:
There are some minor but fundamental difference between Steam and Xbox One:
1. There is no cost of entry with Steam. You already have PC or Mac hardware and you can download Steam for free. The actual puchases cost money but the service is free at the point of entry (and can remain free in its entirety if you only play F2P titles). Xbox One is a console where you have to pay in excess of $300 before you can access any content.
-If you're gonna game on your PC, you're probably gonna buy more expensive parts than what you really need just so that you can play the games on your PC.
2. Related to 1, on PC, Steam isn't the only service available. Off the top of my head there's also gog.com, GMG, Origin and GFWL. All are free at point of entry and competing for the same consumers. This drives the different services to provide sales and lower prices.
- There's also the PS3.
3. On PC there are plenty of workarounds for people who don't want to use Steam. You can purchase a game on Steam and download a crack to play fully offline whilst having all the advantages of keeping the game tied to your account. Or you can use a different service altogether that has less restrictive DRM.
-Um. That's probably against the user agreements you digitaly sign. It's not intended...maybe even illegal.
4. On Steam, I can play games I've purchased from many years in the past. I have Half-Life 2 from release on there as well as older games from earlier generations. With XBone, when the next generation ends, what happens if the hardware is no longer compatible (e.g. due to another change in chip architecture)? The XBone can't play 360 games, so games that are tied to an account are not going to translate across generations as they do with Steam/PC. The next part of this is what happens when MS turn off the XBone based servers? Are those games going to be accessible at all?
- True. No disagreement here.
5. PC and console markets are quite different and have diverged a fair bit. Digital took off on PC because normal retailers greatly reduced the amount of PC games on their shelves. There was a gap in the market that digital services fulfilled so players are/were more forgiving. However, it's not like people don't still complain about this, but as I said in point 3, workarounds and competitors exist due to the open nature of PC.
- This is not really an argument against used sale implementation.
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1. Not really, the forums might be filled with people who spend large sums on their hardware but general PC gamers don't. The Top 10 GPUs in the last Steam survey featured 4 relatively under-powered Intel GPUs, with the remaining 6 being mid-range GPUs from 2-3 generations ago (which you'd probably get when purchasing a new desktop 2+ yrs ago). Many game on PC simply because they have one and are willing to put up with lower settings; the best selling PC games tend to be the ones that have the lowest required specs/are the most scalable.
2. But again, you need to spend money on a rival product. The point is that there are multiple free services that make DRM policies more palatable. If you don't like the ToS of one company, it's fairly simple to use another. With consoles, you have a $300+ barrier that prevents you from simply changing once you've jumped in.
3. Of course it's not intended but my point is it's very easy to do this on the PC, to the point where people will do it regardless of the legality of the situation. People won't complain if they can use loopholes.
5. Second-hand sales have never been a big element of PC games and the sharing of games has gradually reduced since the late 90s (well, legitimate sharing). On consoles, second-hand sales and game sharing have been a big part of the consumer ecosystem for the last 20+ years that MS are suddenly saying will completely change on XBone. It's a forced consumer change rather than a natural one.
What I'm basically saying is that this system is taking the worst of PC gaming whilst giving virtually none of the benefits. What's worse is it takes away from some of the foundations, culture and ecosystem that console gaming has been built upon.
