This week’s podcast is kind of boring, since there’s little to talk about, but Jonah and Scott are game. Most of the entertainment comes from Scott talking about his Fallout 4 adventures.
This week’s news includes:
Let us know what you think.
Jordan Lund and Jonah Falcon finally get back together after an eventful E3 2013, as Jordan finished his not-so-stellar review of The Last of Us. Part of the podcast was from Jonah’s live television show on MNN, which recapped Microsoft’s decision to reverse its online policies with the Xbox One.
The news this week includes:
This week has a contest: win a free Large T-Shirt of Titanfall, by answering the question: What game at E3 impressed you the most?
This week, the gang follows up on Tim Sweeney from last week, and also discuss Dark Souls 2 modding, the “photorealistic” ant RTS Empire of the Ants, and Resident Evil 4 Remake crossing 7 million copies sold.
The news also includes:
Let us know what you think.
David Braben, founder of Frontier Developments, says retail outlets that buy and sell pre-owned games are “essentially defrauding the industry.” Although multiplayer gaming might not be a huge threat, the single player experience in games may die out because gamers play the game quickly and resell it back to places like GameStop for others to buy.
Developers don’t get a dime when a game goes traded, many gamers will “share” the single player experience with a single copy of the game by reselling it over and over. The end result, retail outlets make a good penny for marking up old games while developers see nothing. This is really how game retail outlets survive because the margins on video games is so damn low.
The story has been heard before, developers want a piece of the action so they’re taking steps to entice people to keep the game with renewed downloadable content on old games; you can’t experience the new content without keeping the game around longer. In the world of low margin games, high cost development and short-lived story lines the solutions to this problem aren’t exactly obvious.
Braben’s idea of a solution is to offer two versions of the game, a not for resale/rental version at a high price, say $160, and a low priced version that cannot be shared (heavily DRM’ed?) for $50. In essence, gamers would no longer be able to trade in games because the idea of spending double for a game so you can resell it makes no sense to most gamers (including myself.)
