Console Game Trading (The discs)

[owsf2000]

I've ranted on what Microsoft attempted to do the console industry with their xbone plans a few years back before outcry made them pull a 180 so fast I'm sure some of them got whiplash. But I wonder if Microsoft (And Sony, who had secretly planned to do the same thing until they saw the reaction Microsoft got.) realize how close they came to

Comments

[kane_magus]

Yeah, consoles have taken from the PC A) the ability to patch games, B) the inability to trade or resell games used, and even C) the ability to "offer" digital-only versions of games, with no physical counterpart (which ties back into point B, since such a game that's tied to one console usually can't even be played on another of the same consoles), and they have made all of those things their own, with their own shitty twists applied to them. And I think that has been a detriment to the industry as a whole

[owsf2000]

"(Then again, knowing how video game consumers behave, on the whole, most of them likely would have sucked all of that shit down the sewer pipe into their grinning, slack-jawed mouths anyway, just as they have all of the other asinine shit the modern video game industry has been spewing out for the past decade or two. So... who knows how it actually would have turned out?) "

Actually this is one time I think most (non-super-fanboy) gamers were serious when they cried they wouldn't take that shit that microsoft was trying to pull. Microsoft wouldn't have done anything drastic like a 180 if it was just the normal bellyaching that gamers do before lining up on launch day. I'd have to assume microsoft actually saw lots of preorders for the console being cancelled. And where Sony pulled ahead at the start selling multiple consoles for anything microsoft managed to sell, I'd have to say many gamers were serious.

However. I fully expect them all to be on board with the shitfest next generation.

[kane_magus]

That's the main reason why I still kind of perversely wish that MS and Sony had indeed gone ahead with their boneheaded schemes anyway, because then maybe that would have been the final tipping point that would have brought on the next big game industry crash, at long last, and we'd already be well into the aftermath of that by this point in time.

But, still, things would have sucked ever so much more today if things had gone the opposite way, if gamers had just blithely accepted it in the end, despite the complaints, same as they have accepted every other vile thing the industry decides to shit into their mouths.

If anything, all that the backpedaling has accomplished is to simply preserve the status quo, both the good and the bad, for another five to ten years or so longer than it otherwise would have lasted. As you say, though, we'll just see how the wind lies by the time the next generation rolls around. Like you, I also expect there to be a lot more mouths mistakenly tasting shit as chocolate by then than there were this time