Be Excellent To Each Other

Was it the heels?

I didn't know they sold games?

I am getting one of these. I look forward to the resurrection of Bezzie Gaming this autumn.

*pulls string attached to stick*

*drops trap*

Welcome, new guy!

Now all we need is to get Myp back and we've got the set!

No, I'm glad he's gone - he was a dick.

Digital Foundry hands-on comparison between Xbone and PS4 pads: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digit ... -evolution

Both sound excellent.

When I hear about the rumble triggers I keep thinking back to the feedback you used to get on the old arcade steering wheels of yore. For some reason. Sounds cool anyway.

So just to make this absolutely clear... From their website, you need to go through the process of putting whatever games in the basket, then checking out, etc etc, then these games are yours, but you don't need to ever physically download them until you want a specific one? But they will always be there ready to do so?

And good call on the Vita thing, as I think I may ask for one for Christmas, but it would never have occurred to me to get freebie games 'purchased' for it in advance.

Yes, that's it exactly. Once you've put a game in your basket and checked it out, it's yours for as long as PS+ lasts. The download can be done at your leisure. Similarly, games can be deleted once downloaded, and downloaded again in the future.

Excellent, thanks muchly.

I've just 'bought' a load of the recent ones and a few for my probable-future Vita.

What a terrific service, though. I've only had my PS3 since about April, and kept thinking these free games were too good to be true and there must be a catch, but fair play to Sony, and this isn't the case.

I've been happy to let my Xbox Gold sub expire, and while I still love my 360, I just can't justify paying the cost of that when this PS+ service is so outstanding.

I'll be curious to see whether Sony keep up the quality of the offerings if they should 'win' the next gen wars. I say that because it did feel when they started really ramping up the free games that they were trying to catch up with MS a bit. I'm also assuming here that PS+ is a bit of a loss leader because getting all these games for 'free' surely must cost more than the subscriptions bring in but that's just a gut feel on my part, do we have any concrete information about that?

I was thinking about this. I've enjoyed playing a lot of the games I've got through PS+ but I don't think I would otherwise have bought *any* of them, not a single one. So I'm not sure it actually costs much at all. On the other hand there might have been other games which I'd have bought had I not had stuff from PS+ to be playing. In summary, no idea.

It must cost Sony to put out these games for free or are they all first party games?

I dunno, there are a lot of the PS+ games that I've bought which I wouldn't have done if I had PS+ and the chat on Beex implies that's true for other people. If I was publisher is assume that my game going up on the service meant very few further sales on that platform so I'd want a decent chunk of cash for it.

No, far from it. Given how many games go through the service vs how many games Sony themselves actually publish I suspect the majority of games are third party, and certainly a chunk of them are.

Surely they must have to pay for license for them, then? Well, I guess they must, unless they have some really good negotiators!

Well, yeah, of course. Which is why I'm curious to know whether the whole thing is a loss leader intended to lure more people onto their platform or if the subscription costs actually allows them to turn a profit on the deal. I mean I'd be curious about it in general but, also, if it's the former there's a lot less chance of it continuing with the PS4.

A lot of the games seem to have in game purchases available, maybe there is some sort of deal there like increased exposure to these in the marketplace? Off the top of my head, LBP karting has a lot of things you can purchase and is a fairly old game so I'd imagine doesn't sell many copies anymore. Giving it away for free introduces it to a load more people who were never going to buy it and if you get a game for free, maybe you're more willing to spend a couple of pounds here or there for silly hats for your sackboy.
I don't know about Uncharted 3, does that have DLC? Or Battlefield 3?

I didn't realise the Sony pad had a speaker. Huh.

Reasons for devs to want to be in IGC:

1) They get paid money. How much varies from dev to dev. But remember, these are mostly very old games that no-one is buying new any more anyway -- so any money is an improvement over the no money they are making today.
2) It's a way for indie games to build word-of-mouth. That can outlast the month the game is free, or spread to other platforms, making indirect income.
3) It increases (perhaps vastly increases) the pool of potential customers for a game's DLC.
4) It can raise awareness of a game series e.g. put a game on PS+ just before the sequel comes out.

Gamersutrs interviewed a number of devs who's games had been in the IGC. They were happy with how it had worked out.

I also thing PS+ isn't as startlingly good value as it appears to be.

Does it seem outrageously generous to you? Fifty-odd free games a year, split across disc-based bigger titles and downloadable smaller titles, for £40 a year? To the consumer that looks like great value, so logically to the industry it must represent a terrible idea, right?

Here's another way to look at it. It's quite well-documented that the attach rate for most of this generation of consoles hovers at around ten or eleven games. That's across eight years they've been on sale. So the average person buys a game every year, plus a couple of extra across the years. It's a much lower figure than we are used to thinking about, because most of us get through that many games a year. Suppose they pay full price for half of those games and buy the other half for £25; that's a total lifetime spend of £325.

Now consider a position where a person buys a console, gets PSN+, and renews it every year and never buys another game. You'd think this means they're a dead loss to the industry. But actually, assuming they've spent £40 a year on PSN+, that's a total lifetime spend of £320. They're not a loss to the industry at all -- they're actually just a regular consumer. All you need to do is sell that person one game every two years and they're suddenly great customers spending well more than the average joe.

So from the industry's perspective, I don't think PSN+ is the massive value sink it's often presented as. It actually creates value.

Yeah, although I would imagine that the average console owner who actually buys just a game a year probably doesn't have a PS+ subscription.

There's also probably an amount of unsustainability to it in so far as if it carried on like it is now then it might begin to affect new sales as people hold off buying them in case they are free in a few months.

I think it's not as generous as it appears but also that Sony are probably taking a bit of hit on it to gain goodwill ahead of the new consoles. If they aren't then it's certainly a happy accident. In either case when the new console launches there will be no catalogue of older games to give away so I guess we won't know one way or the other for a year or two how it will work out.

It's already confirmed that a cut-down free-to-play version of Driveclub will be available at launch for PS+ subscribers. If Sony get the Gaikai game streaming running, it could also offer PS3 games to PS4 owners.

Exactly, not the sorts of things I would bother stumping up £40 a year for.

On that note, has there been confirmation from Sony what they're going to offer via Gaikai? I haven't noticed much chat but I might've just missed it obviously.

Sony said it'd support selected blockbuster games in early 2014, and expand from there. There's been very little detail so far.

I suppose it's all a matter of perception as to what you 'feel' you're personally gaining, if anything.

I've just let my Xbox Gold sub expire and have basically switched the fee I was paying Microsoft, to Sony, for the PS+, so for me I see it as Microsoft were essentially giving me nothing in return for that money, whereas Sony are now giving me six (or whatever it is) free games per month.

I fully accept I'm likely to go ahead and spend more with Sony in time, maybe from buying more games from their online store, etc, so they will make their money from me in that way, but I'm fine with that as for now I just compare the PS+ cost to the Xbox Gold cost, and I know I'm better off.

Still, aren't Microsoft now slowly starting to offer a couple of free games each month with Gold? I suspect it's too late for many of us though.

Fable III is free at the moment although it officially starts in a few weeks time and you'll get 2 free games a month - the only 2 which have been mentioned are Assassins Creed and Halo 3 and yes I think for many people its too little , too late

Don't forget though that you can't play online without paying for it on the PS4.

They're only doing this until the end of the year though, they're not saying that free games is now an integral part of the Gold service so it still doesn't really compare to Sony's offering.

Also, the only confirmed games (and you'd surely assume Microsoft would lead with the best games it could) are from 2007 and 2010. Games on PS+ are often much more recent than that, like Hitman: Absolution and Catherine from 2012, or Uncharted 3 and Saints Row 3 from 2011.

Yep. X-com and sleeping Dogs were two other recent ones.

Demo footage of Outlast, a horror game that will be free on PS+ for PS4. Shades of [REC] or The Descent, with lots of peering through a camcorder with night vision. So that's one part answer to the 'how will free PS+ games work on PS4': indie games.

Pretty much all of the PS4 launch games are now available to preorder for sub-£40 via play-asia. Handy SavyGamer link here.

They are the USA versions, but region free.

And as if saying they will do things right for the end user isnt enough

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/1962 ... expect.php

How self publishing works / pricing / planning etc - all laid out up front and basically all in the hands of the devs

At this stage, I'm starting to wonder whether or not the Sony top brass have been replaced by alien clones.

I think Sony are in humble mode at the moment and they've been forced to have a bit of a rethink after their incredible arrogance in the wake of the PS2's success saw them playing second-fiddle to Microsoft for the entire 360/PS3 generation - as such they're pulling all the stops out to make the PS4 the console of choice for both gamers and devs.

The fact that Microsoft decided to embark upon a campaign of quite remarkable self-destruction at the same time is of course a very happy coincidence for them.

And whilst Nintendo don't quite operate in the same 'space' to an extent, them sticking the bag of bums that is the WiiU out of the door has given Sony a nice boost too.

Certainly amongst the people I know, the PS4 is the console we've all agreed we're going to buy, there is literally nothing Microsoft could do now to persuade us to buy an XBone, short of personally dropping them off at our houses along with big sacks full of cash, and even then we'd probably just sell the Boners on eBay and keep the cash.

It's not even like Microsoft can play the 'Ahhhh yes but our console is the most powerful!' card, because it has a very clear performance deficit compared to the PS4, and it's not even like they've decided to have a go with 'Ahhhh yes but all your old XBLA and 360 games will work!' approach either, so any loyalty that folks such as myself may have had in terms of carrying over our existing catalogue of games, is destroyed as well. (Back-compatibility with XBLA alone would have been a factor I'd have to weigh in quite heavily, but as that's not on the table, I can't think of ONE SINGLE REASON why I'd choose an XBone over a PS4.)

Unmissable exclusives would be the only thing that could make me buy an Xbone, but even then, it would be years down the line after prices have fallen.

I think Sony are doing whatever makes the most business sense which is where Microsoft miscalculated so badly. Right now that's torpedoing the competition. I expect that in a few years time the whole thing will more closely resemble Microsoft's vision than all this hippie bullshit Sony are spouting. Digital downloads will have become the norm and questions about what you can do with disks will be an irrelevance. Maybe.

That's what I did in the current generation; picked up a 360 and played that until such time as the PS3 had built up a decent number of exclusives I was interested in and the hardware had dropped in price then grabbed a PS3 and blew through everything I wanted to play on there.

Me too, except I haven't had any time to blow through anything...

I am, however, watching loads of blu rays after I got a PS3.

Your mum has.

It's not your mum's first time.

Then clearly, you should post more.

ok.