Nextbox 1080: The Reckoning

[dibs]

It's so if you have sex on the couch you can just hit the super easy share button to send the vid to your bros.

[DanJW]

Share button? You just make the share GESTURE (thumbs up, wink and cheesy grin).

[Sno]

  On 6/20/2013 at 3:16 PM, I Saw Dasein said:

How do you figure? I love digital media products. I don't have to worry about losing them, breaking them, or having them stolen. If I want to play something (be it an album or a game), that something is literally a click of a button away. I have a huge crate of a couple thousand CDs under my bed that absolutely depresses me, because I have no interest in ever again digging out a disc for any reason if I can avoid it. For this consumer, at least, digital games are a great.

Putting aside that digital media is only a wonderful convenience if you have an excellent and reliable internet connection, the matter i would find more present and concerning is one of control, in that you have virtually no power when dealing with these content providers.

You are beholden to their services, their servers, their licensing deals. There are still so many digital services that do not allow you to trade or even keep your product as you may please, you essentially have no ownership of the thing you've paid for. You have access to it for only as long as they allow, with whatever further restrictions they may apply.

 

Given how many major security issues many of these services have had over the last few years, i wouldn't actually argue that it's safer either.

[Zeusthecat]

I'm not really too fond of the "games as a service" concept. Maybe there are some cases where that is ideal but I like the idea of actually owning something much more than the idea of licensing it.

[I Saw Dasein]

  On 6/21/2013 at 9:07 AM, Sno said:

Putting aside that digital media is only a wonderful convenience if you have an excellent and reliable internet connection, the matter i would find more present and concerning is one of control, in that you have virtually no power when dealing with these content providers.

You are beholden to their services, their servers, their licensing deals. There are still so many digital services that do not allow you to trade or even keep your product as you may please, you essentially have no ownership of the thing you've paid for. You have access to it for only as long as they allow, with whatever further restrictions they may apply.

Most digital media is totally fine without a reliable internet connection. For example, when I travel I load up a bunch of kindle ebooks and digital music on my tablet and I have no trouble accessing that material. The same is true of movies through the Google store. Of course, DRM can be done intrusively or badly, but that doesn't make digital media bad per se, nor does it make it inherently "anti-consumer".

In terms of licensing, frankly I don't care. I am totally happy to purchase a software license, even a highly restricted one, as long as it is offered at a discount when compared to the "purchased" version of the same media. So I will happily spend $25 on a license that I can't transfer and might one day lose instead of spending $40 bucks on the hard-copy of a game that I can in theory trade or sell (not that I regularly do either of those things).

Basically, I think it's unfair to label all digital media as "anti-consumer". It feels arrogant to label it in that way, because for many consumers digital media are not at all anti-consumer. They offer ease, convenience, and value, and if that comes at the cost of giving up some control over the product, then that's a trade-off that many are happy to make.

I think that consumers are capable of deciding for themselves whether or not a software license is a good deal. If some consumers think that a software license is a good deal, then I don't think it's fair to call that model "anti-consumer". It just means that some consumers value certain attributes of a product (e.g. ease of access, lack of depreciation) over other attributes of a product (e.g. ownership rights, resale).

[melmer]

Fuck owning video games. Yuck

Just pull that bandage off. you are not what you own. Set fire to your game collection you'll feel better for it I promise.

I feel inspired, I'm going to go take a photo of my video game collection

What more could a gamer ask for (god I didn't realise I had so many, I might go randomly post some around my neighbourhood)

Where's the post your video game collection thread I can't find it :/

[Dewar]

Ew, God of War 2? Looks like you can do some more trimming

[Frenetic Pony]

  On 6/21/2013 at 9:07 AM, Sno said:

Putting aside that digital media is only a wonderful convenience if you have an excellent and reliable internet connection, the matter i would find more present and concerning is one of control, in that you have virtually no power when dealing with these content providers.

You are beholden to their services, their servers, their licensing deals. There are still so many digital services that do not allow you to trade or even keep your product as you may please, you essentially have no ownership of the thing you've paid for. You have access to it for only as long as they allow, with whatever further restrictions they may apply.

 

Given how many major security issues many of these services have had over the last few years, i wouldn't actually argue that it's safer either.

 

I've seen this argument everywhere, and understood it mostly as utter paranoia. "They're gonna take our games away!" And invite their entire business to crash as people abandon the platform immediately and en masse to avoid such things. And yet, now that I think about it, there is indeed precedent. If you bought Too Human, could that court order wipe out your purchased copy digitally? Amazon has certainly been guilty of deleting peoples books off their own Kindles.

 

I guess it does come down to the amount of trust you place in the system. And while most every single one of the doomsday scenarios seems utterly paranoid, I guess I can say that from the perspective of me gaming on a PC. Any game I have is always "backed up" by pirates. I've happily downloaded Baldur's Gate 2 off TPB when I lost one of my BG2 cds. But of course, that's a great example of how your "physical" media can be no safer or more secure than, or even less, than a digital copy. If you break or lose your disc you are completely SOL; which is something you don't have to worry about with a digitally purchased game.

[Zeusthecat]

  On 6/22/2013 at 10:38 PM, Frenetic Pony said:

But of course, that's a great example of how your "physical" media can be no safer or more secure than, or even less, than a digital copy. If you break or lose your disc you are completely SOL; which is something you don't have to worry about with a digitally purchased game.

 

That is a fair point that I find hard to argue against. I guess for me it comes down to a preference towards physical media. Pros and cons either way I suppose.

[syntheticgerbil]

Mington's games sit on a shelf that is a city for tiny people and tiny cars.

[Thrik]

Jesus Christ, I totally missed that whole Epic vs Silicon Knights thing. They got totally arseholed!

 

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-11-09-silicon-knights-has-a-month-to-recall-and-destroy-all-unsold-copies-of-too-human-x-men-destiny-more

 

A great reminder that sometimes getting overly ballsy with who you throw lawsuits at can bite you in the face a million times over. Considering that every other studio has seemingly been OK, it was probably a development team having to answer for their game being a bit shit to the big bosses and they decided to blame it on the engine vendor. And then the big bosses thought they'd go after some blood.

[melmer]

  On 6/24/2013 at 11:25 AM, syntheticgerbil said:

Mington's games sit on a shelf that is a city for tiny people and tiny cars.

I actually live in a miniature village.... i wish

 

no, it came with the house. Its a make shift cabinet come tiny town, the previous occupants did offer to knock it down but i was like nah you can leave it there ( )

[tegan]

Mington, I see that you do the same thing I do: keep a console around but only have a couple of games for it.

[melmer]

sooooo, no free headset/microphone for the xbone, instead you just scream at your kinect sensor, hopefully that'll be easily mutable (or default set to off) or all multiplayer gaming on xbone live will be full of annoying background noise... music, babies crying, racist youths, et al

 

[melmer]

  On 6/24/2013 at 12:16 PM, tegan said:

Mington, I see that you do the same thing I do: keep a console around but only have a couple of games for it.

 

i also have a gamboy advance and DS with zero games    and a second xbox360. I'd sell them but its really not worth the effort. If anyone can get to my house i'll give them a console of their choosing for free... actually no, i'd want some baked goods as payment

[Thrik]

Unless it has some seriously good filtering technology, how would Kinect be able to distinguish between you speaking and the noise the speakers right next to it are making? Especially if other people's voices are being emitted from them.

I think that Microsoft rep might be paying a bit too much attention to specs rather than practicalities.

[toblix]

They probably have some very good echo cancellation that filters out speaker noise, including chat from other players. They may even try to determine who's speaking based on mouth movement.

[Thrik]

That'd be nice, although I can still see in-game dialogue and stuff tripping it up. It'd require some seriously advanced shit to work as well as you describe.

 

It'd be great if you could impersonate the person who the Kinect belongs to by copying how they talk, and tell their own XBone to turn off.

[dibs]

Wasn't it a thing that you could cause damage you use windows install my playing certain command from a sound file long ago?

There is some pretty nifty noise cancellation, filtering and beamforminntechniques about the place. I don't think it would actually be that difficult to filter out a known signal.

[tegan]

  On 6/24/2013 at 12:28 PM, Mington said:

i also have a gamboy advance and DS with zero games    and a second xbox360. I'd sell them but its really not worth the effort. If anyone can get to my house i'll give them a console of their choosing for free... actually no, i'd want some baked goods as payment

 

:0

 

How did you end up with zero DS and GBA games? Those are two of my favourite platforms ever made. I'm still scooping up GBA games now more than a decade after it came out.

 

 

  On 6/24/2013 at 1:28 PM, dibs said:

Wasn't it a thing that you could cause damage you use windows install my playing certain command from a sound file long ago?

 

I have been trying to parse this sentence for like five full minutes now.

[melmer]

  On 6/24/2013 at 1:34 PM, tegan said:

How did you end up with zero DS and GBA games? Those are two of my favourite platforms ever made. I'm still scooping up GBA games now more than a decade after it came out.

 

i only had mario kart on the GBA and i 'lent' it to someone like 6 years ago. And the DS um... well... i kinda had one of those R4 pirate cartridges /hangs head in shame

[dibs]

Me too Tegan:/

What I think happened was (and I may have imagined or misremembered) but a version of Windows shipped with nifty voice command software. For a while there were sound files going around that If played out loud by your pc could command the pc to delete very important Windows files.

Probably apocryphal, but I still love it.

Edit: oooh, get the GBA Fire Emblem!

[Niyeaux]

I also totally had an R4, and it was awesome. I don't normally pirate games, even on PC, but hot damn it was awesome to have all the DS games show up on rom sites on launch day and just be able to play them.

Is there an R4 equivalent for 3DS?

[Sno]

I bought my DS games, i hold the moral high ground! Bahaha!

*Glares disapprovingly, shaking a pointed finger.*

I own seriously way too many GBA and DS games, i've always been a huge sucker for Nintendo handhelds.

[elmuerte]

I also have a R4, and it contains games for which I also have a cartridge.