The above article is very long and has two entertaining videos from an Australian perspective. Well worth a perusal.
GOG.com Discusses DRM with AusGamers in the Wake of the Xbox One Debacle
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mikiem2
ModeratorThanks! It was an interesting & heartening read -- it always makes me feel better, makes me more hopeful when someone in a software or related biz has a good head on their shoulders.
Trevor Longino, the guy in the interview from GOG.com, is more diplomatic about the whole thing, but then he & GOG need to be -- no reason to make their biz dealings more difficult.
In the US [as well as a great many other countries] people are used to being manipulated by marketing to the point that they often stop thinking for themselves. It's easy to point fingers at the folks paying a few hundred dollars for a $20 pair of sneakers with a designer label attached, but many people often miss the fact that all sorts of ideas & causes are marketed even more successfully. The people running & employed in businesses are no different than anyone else -- they often buy-in to whatever they're been sold without thinking overmuch, e.g. asking themselves what are the seller's motives? Many often don't realize that behind a great many popular ideas & quite a few causes there are people relying on those ideas & causes to provide them with a sometimes quite affluent income & lifestyle, often requiring little [or at least less] actual work on their part beyond the marketing that makes it all possible.
Thus you have Trevor very appropriately talking about "decision-making by spreadsheet." as well as "the mentally lazy people in the industry", and saying: "However, some companies are just not ready to go DRM-free yet, even if they understand and agree with the numbers we provide."
On the Xbox One I think everything boils down to a company, Microsoft, being very much in disarray... I'd suggest being cautious about considering it a big win against DRM.
Microsoft has a big disadvantage -- they're like IBM & HP when as older, established companies, they hit the wall & went into decline, not so much because they weren't doing their core jobs or functions the same as always, but because the way they were run & did business didn't evolve to suit the changed world where they did that business. It's not so much that sales had dropped off the charts a couple few years ago, but that the MS elite along with Wall St. saw the writing on the wall. The people & culture at Microsoft were ill-suited for the challenge of changing course -- Microsoft never had to compete much in the marketplace, & whenever it looked like a company might offer competition, their strategy was more along the lines of crush rather than compete fairly in the marketplace.
Microsoft found themselves in a world where it looked like they were not only going to face competition, but they were going to face that competition from several companies too big to crush, and worse, they all had/have core competencies that MS has never possessed. Worse yet, this competition from Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook etc., was overall in areas where MS had tried to gain a foothold, & failed.
The only bright spot was the Xbox, where Microsoft only had to go against a company, one of very few giant companies in perhaps more danger of decline than Microsoft, & that was Sony. But now on top of Sony's PS4 there's the likelihood of competition from anything that can run Android, from small USB stick sized devices to TVs & even dedicated game boxes. Yes, nothing Android could beat hard core Xbox games, but as the Wii showed, you don't have to -- millions of people bought the Wii rather than the Xbox or PS3. Half of the Xbox, 1 of it's 2 VMs, is aimed squarely at competing with Android for your living room TV.
Faced with an established Xbox customer base in growing, open revolt, Microsoft blinked. They moved quickly to shore up, even increase the old-style Xbox & related sales, & they backed down on what they'd planned for the Xbox One. Who can blame them? If you consider Wall St. to be one of the biggest, if not the prime mover of recent changes at MS, which many do [including myself], backing down was not just expected but demanded. After the win8 debacle, after problems selling advertising in their app store, & with the possibility that a big partner in win8 phones, Nokia, might wind up in the hands of a company that says it leans Android, not backing down on the Xbox One might have even been considered suicidal.
On 2nd hand games, I think a very big factor is going to be the businesses that rely on them for income. Democracies may or may not change laws & regs to allow new stuff, but they're always hesitant to take anything away, particularly if a biz group is big enough to make large enough campaign contributions to matter. Don't count out these businesses if legislation could have anything to do with 2nd hand sales. And if enough businesses sell used as well as new, they'll have a bit of clout with the game publishers/distributors too. In the US the gov [meaning politicians] is currently siding with the brick & mortar folks vs. on-line retailers, so on-line sales may not be as favorable a distribution channel in the future. I think many game distributors are still going to listen to businesses that put their games on store shelves.
Posted 10 years ago #
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