Be Excellent To Each Other

I saw this on twitter


Probably fake? I dunno.

If it is that, the touchpad is stupid.

Edit: Concave analogue sticks would be an improvement, unless you happen to have concave thumbs. The positioning of the sticks on the Xbox pad is better too.

Luls!

The "share" button is ripped straight from Apple. I doubt it's legit, but it's probably fairly accurate regardless. Honestly can't think of anything a little touchpad like that could be useful for.

Touching.

It's a fake, but an plausible fake.

Interestingly, Sony's Dual Analog Controller for the original PlayStation had concave buttons. It was short lived and replaced with the rumble-equipped DualShock.

*slow clap*

http://www.edge-online.com/news/the-nex ... ew-kinect/

Huh, that sucks donkey cock.

It's a positive move IMO.

Hrumph

...still it will work with the 'wait for it to drop to £10 or ask for it as a present' games market.

It's a right cunt's trick. Not too bothered for myself but kids won't even be able to lend each other games any more. Someone should think of the children.

Not really. At all.

I like buying second hand games and live on a yacht, so an always on connection is tricky.

Yeah, hadn't thought of lendsies.

I don't buy second hand games as a rule (apart from stuff that's not available anymore) but I think it's a dirty trick too. So I won't be able to take a game that I own around a friends house to play for the evening? I suppose I could download my gamer profile but that's not the point.

What about in 10 or 15 years time when new games aren't available? It's totally wiping out the retro market.

I can't see this being very popular at all.

Are Sony planning a similar stunt with their next console?

Well I assume it'll work like Steam in that there'll be a fully functional offline mode for games that aren't actually 'played online' as it were.

MrsAE's got Steam installed on her laptop with my logon in offline mode, she can play stuff likes Plants Vs Zombies on my account whilst I'm cheerfully logged into the same account on my PC and playing games online. (It doesn't cheat either, obviously MrsAE's laptop is connected to the internet but if Steam is in offline mode it doesn't seem to do any sort of sneaky checking up when you're not looking.)

Simple fact of the matter is that second hand games are a leech on the bottom of the entire games industry, the more money that gets to the people who actually make the games we play and love, the better.

It's not even like pre-owned is just for poor people, folks who can well afford to buy new buy pre-owned 'cause they're tightarses.

A mate of mine never bought a single brand new game for his 360, even if he could just save a fiver on pre-owned, he'd get pre-owned. He spent hundreds of hours playing 360 games, and not one game developer made one damn penny out of him - that's just wrong.

Microsoft: "Fuck you poor people, we don't want you touching our shiny shiny".

How is it wrong. When games come out they are over priced? The developers have already been paid for the game as it must have bee bought new once?
So you are saying that we should not buy second hand cars as not a penny is going to the manufacturers?

I think I have bought more preowned than new.

This will stop lovefilm and other such..

Another point to Sony in the competition for my money next gen. Although I imagine developers will flock to it for that reason so it could be a winner for MS themselves in terms of having the best game selection on their platform.

If games still dropped in price at a decent rate after initial release it might not have much practical effect (assuming you don't want to loan your games to a mate or play them anywhere but your own fucking home of course) but I'd worry that Xbox games would now artificially retain their value when shops no longer had to compete with a second hand market. We'll see...

I don't exist to put money in game publisher's pockets. Actually,I'm fairly not sure what I exist for, but no doubt a higher purpose will be revealed to me at some point in the future. That notwithstanding, they got their money the first time when the game was bought. Then whomever bought it sells it to someone else and so on. I don't feel particularly beholden to give Ford some money as I purchased a second hand Ka from a dealership in Buckinghamshire for a not at all unreasonable price thankyouverymuch, but it's fucking ridiculous argument and one that only the game publishers propogate, the money grabbing tossers. "But, ah!" you cry! "Now they will have some money to make truly awesome niche games because MaliA spent £15 on a game isntead of £5" but they won't beacuase why do that when that is a quarter of the cost of a Call Of Shoot Them Up In The Face 19 which will make fifteen times the money and when faced with that sort of financial rhetoric there is no argument and someone will say the doctrine of first sale but we will get onto arguments about the buying and selling of licences but until all that happens the EU will stand up like a giant angry elephant in a circus and say "NO! This is not right. here is the judgement of maliA, first sea lord of Atlantia and Intergalactic smuggler and he says it ain't so". Then there will be chariots pulled by women in spandex carrying a flag with my initials on it and in teh chariot, the lead chariot will be me with a scroll from the dead sea, or the reporgraphics department of Leicester University and I will explain why it isn't right and then I can buy a game for £5 again because games that cost more than £20 end up costing less than £20 so there.

Yeha, KC said the same.

Just look at Steam and the PC game market, where second hand sales were eliminated years ago.

PC game prices these days generally go:

1) Launch - £30, perhaps £35
2) 3-6 months down the line - £15 or less
3) 6-12 months down the line - £10 or less
4) Thereafter, routinely £5 or less in sales

(That's just a rough guide, games often come down in price quicker than that. But as a general rule of thumb if you wait 6 months at the most, you'll get AAA releases for £15 or less.)

PLUS - A massive archive of old games available for damn peanuts, either through Steam or GOG or Origin or wherever.

The critical thing is that the games don't need to make all their money in a massive frenzy of full price sales in the first month or so on sale when they command shelf space, before pre-owned just kills it stone dead.

Now of course it remains to be seen if Microsoft use the new console system to rob people blind or create a fairer game pricing structure, the jury is out on that one.

\o

Actually, isn't there some kind of EU 'first sale' ruling the means you have to be able to resell something? We were talking about how that ruling was applied to digital goods in a thread here a while back but that was because there was noises of changes to force allowing resale of digital goods, so does that mean physical goods are already covered and need to be resell-able? Or am I confusing 14 different things here and just generally being an idiot?

http://www.gog.com/catalogue

Retro alive and well.

Ah, brilliant.. Thanks.. I'll just pick up a copy of Daytona USA to play on my Sega Saturn.

Erm... I've run into a bit of a problem...

I had wondered this myself, but the lack of action regarding re-sale of digital items made me think they'd just ignore the physical too. Rules, laws and taxes are for the poor.

You can probably imagine where my suspicion lies here...

Steam's about digital stuff though and we're talking about physical boxed games (or I am anyway) so I'm not sure the same principles can be applied. If a market for physical games remains, and I can't see why it wouldn't, I'm worried that without a second hand market shops will have much less incentive to drop prices as a game ages so the situation you see with clueless supermarkets trying to charge £45 for Ass Creed 3 months after release will become the norm.

I think you are right. actually trsut the EU to do something here, you know.

Fuck knows why AE thinks "not being able to buy second hand games is a good thing because publishers deserve money the poor lambs" but y'know.

Good point. yes. Agree, strongly. There is no reason to drop prices unless to shift volume.

Brief googling

The legal status of second hand game sales in the European Union - A game changer for the games industry?

Although the conclusion is a little "hmm"

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/06 ... al_resale/
Amazon have patented digital resales

If it means that I don't have to put the disk in to play every time, then I'm happy with that one.

I'm quite happy with stuff being always on, less happy with my supply of XBox games for less than a tenner drying up.

Probably because no-one would buy a second hand copy over just pirating the game.

EU case

reading it now, dull.

I'd guess they'll be some sort of account management to allow some portability but obviously this depends on what they decide to do. Also isn't Sony going to install a NFC chip into every CD with the aim of doing the same thing?

This seems pretty unlikely, even if only because of the horrendous rise in duplication costs that would result. Also I wouldn't like to have to design a drive that could handle a far from equally weighted plastic disc spinning at massive speeds without things going to shit.

You wouldn't, you'd design a ring-shaped chip.

@me. This is (one of the almost infinite number of reasons) why I'm not a hardware engineer.

Instead of a ring chip could you not use an onion ring?

A hula hoop or possibly a ringo ?

Well for starters I don't think games are overpriced, as someone who well remembers paying £30 for Amiga games that came on a single floppy disc, or £60+ for SNES games that turned out to be shit and could be completed in a day, I don't think that £40 for blockbuster 360 titles that can deliver weeks if not months of entertainment is at all overpriced.

(Even going back to the Speccy and C64 eras, there were games that cost over a tenner, and if you wanted the game on a couple of floppy discs for C64 instead of tape, you'd be looking at £14.99, and this is in the mid to late 80s!)

Moreover, second hand cars (and second hand lots of things) are intrinsically different to second hand console games.

A new car is better than a used car, you get to own it brand new, you get a warranty, you get to feel smug 'cause you've got this year's brand new model, you don't have to worry about previous owners having picked their noses and stuck the boogers to the underside of the driver's seat - you pay a premium for a better product, and there will always be people willing to pay that premium 'cause they like having new cars.

However, when you start talking about console games you're just talking about a load of 1s and 0s, yes you may need a physical disc to deliver those 1s and 0s to your console, but fundamentally there's no difference whatsoever between a brand new console game and a used console game, except the used one is cheaper and the developer/publisher sees no revenue from it whatsoever. The 'owner experience' is identical.

When you have stores like GAME selling pre-owned copies of brand new AAA games for a fiver less than a new copy, and give them equal if not more prominence on the shelves, it's easy to understand why the publishers want to cut that shit out.

Games are cheap, in real terms games have never delivered more bangs for bucks than they do now.

There is absolutely nothing to moan about if pre-owned gets killed for the next-gen, mercenary retailers and cheapskate players have hammered the nails into the pre-owned coffin themselves.

I must admit, I don't buy second hand games. Very rarely, anyway. I agree that they're cheap, too. Relatively. And let's not pretend that they don't come down in price. There are a few exceptions, such as CoD, but most games are £20 or less NEW within 6 months of release these days. And besides, head into GAME and try to buy a second hand copy of CoD or whatever - you only save a few quid on new and you run the risk of it being all scratched.

There are exceptions to everything above, of course, as I'm sure will be pointed out, but I generally agree with AE.

I am offended that I won't be able to sell my physical property, though. That's the bad thing about it for me.

It costs a tenner to go to the cinema for 90 minutes. Games are cheap!

I don't necessarily think this is a "good" thing, by the way. It just won't bother me personally.

I think it is a bad thing as 2 quid from amazon buys a lot of second hand games. Also, f i had bought edf for full prices it would be awful. Most impulse buys of mine have been second hand.

But the car manufacturer / game dev don't get the money in both cases.

The thing is that software has a licence attached to it so it's different to anything physical (stealing one is a cream, the other is a civil matter)

Malc

Yeah, but one can/cannot transfer these at times depending on. Stuff. The eu case sort of deals with it. I asked mrsa about it but it got complicated in my head so i will ask her via email tomorrow. It dors not have to be a tangible object to sell. Or something

I preferred the big Xbox pad as well. I don't find the PS3 pad particularly uncomfortable, it's just a bit shit in general. Slightly too small, shit triggers, shit analogue sticks, makes using it more of a chore than it needs to be. I like the 360 pad.

Something about cat burglars? I dunno. Er'one pretend I said summit funny.

I was gonna try an eric clapton joke, but couldn't think of one.