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The poor schmuck in rural Nebraska with 25kb service won't be able to play the Xbox One period- MS has already proposed a min speed of 1.5mbps. And if you are in an area (like pretty much most of the US and the majority of the rest of the world) where your service goes down periodically for more than 24 hours, you will be locked out of playing any games while it is offline. Or if MS gets hacked like Sony and their network goes down for an extended period (at least PS3 owners could still play offline!). Or when MS decides to abandon the platform ad turn off the servers... no pulling out your old Xbox One to play some classic games (I still have an old Atari I like to play occasionally!). Or if you have to cancel your Internet for a few months to catch up on the bills or while moving you have to wait a few days to get you Internet turned on- there are so many points of failure in this fiasco. As a (former) Xbox fan and advocate, I won't be going anywhere near this one.

You have elegantly and succinctly described "defective by design".

>of 1.5mbps.

Wow. There's this whole rest of the world that would kill to get that speeds. I'm confused as to why MS would try to alienate basically everyone not in NA, EU with that kind of a minimum requirement. People in Asia and Africa can pay up that kind of money for the console, but there aren't infrastructure to get you that kind of internet speeds in a budget.

There are PS1's being sold until today for people who can't afford the other version. My point is: I doubt XBOX360 will disappear. Got fast internet, crazy TV and can afford it? Get XBOX1. Your internet is really bad, XBOX360 just like always.

AKA: Microsoft does not have a competitive next-gen product for those without good internet connections.

Like Soldiers, 35% of America... and even then, the larger part of Europe won't have servers for the XBox One launch. So even if you do have a good connection in say... Poland or Japan... you can't play XBox One at all.

Are you sure that min. speed isn't just for multiplayer? I don't see why the call-home would know or care how fast your internet is.

You can use a mobile connection to check in, so clearly speed isn't an issue, I'm pretty sure that the 1.5mb min is just for multiplayer gaming

I don't know, my 4G/LTE phone gets vastly superior upload (though expected)/download speeds to my cable connection, far better than any wired internet package I can get.

I remember how Blizzard servers would often lag or go down for maintenance and there would be no LAN option to play SC2 with friends. It sounds good in theory to some people (just be online all the time!), but it's placing blind trust into a third party. I did not buy the SC2 expansion. I literally went back to playing Brood War over LAN with coworkers. (I beat them 1v3)

The thing is I really don't see Sony as being on the "wrong side of history" though since they are still having day-one downloads of all titles. They are just fully supporting both models (traditional discs and one-copy-per-user digital downloads) rather than forcing everyone into one. They are literally doing everything that MS is doing with digital, yet still having discs (and therefore offline play) as an option.

Not only that, they went a step forward and made downloads even more appealing by allowing you to download the minimum possible to play the game, and just do the rest while you play.

The reality is that nobody cares about the poor schmuck in rural Nebraska.

80% of the US population is urbanized. Most of the ones that aren't still have access to DSL, cable modems, or fixed wireless of at least a few megabits.

Of the remaining population, a lot of them don't want to play video games or can't afford them anyway. Some (probably large) portion of those that are viable gaming customers will simply make do with satellite connections.

The "poor schmuck in rural Nebraska with 25kb/s" market segment is just too small to economically justify catering to.

That isn't actually the reality. For example, if nothing else, it's clear that Sony does care about the poor schmuck in rural Nebraska.

But more generally, why are you only talking about the United States? What you are saying might be true of the US, but plenty of places across the wider world are home to people who play video games but don't have an internet connection. Or have a spotty internet connection. Or have a connection with restrictive data caps (meaning digital download only would be impossible).

Much of the first world is better connected than the US. If you're talking about gamers with both money and poor connections, they're far more likely to be in the US than anywhere else.

South Africa and many countries in Latin America can afford to pay $400 for the console. But they certainly can't count on a >1.5mb/s reliable internet connection.

So yeah, MS screwed the pooch on this one and that will now all be Sony territory.

I'm not going to canvass all Latin American countries, but the median per-capita income for South Africa is about US$500.

Are you unwittingly basing your comment on the standards of the still-privileged White minority, comprising less than 9% of a country of just 53 million?

Racial politics aside, 5 million people is a lot of potential MS customers.

Maybe, but Microsoft/Xbox One was not the relevant subject, Steam was.

Am I the only one who actually read the comment I originally replied to?

By the way, even the top 10% of South African households have an average income of just US$15,000, so the actual potential customer base is still smaller than you think.

Having just arrived back from South Africa from visiting my relatives on vacation, I was shocked to find a few highly computer-literate cousins over there who only had a 3G dongle to provide Internet for their entire homes. Another relative had a bandwidth-capped DSL line that was barely faster than ISDN basic rate. Income was not the issue.

you can get uncapped 4mb/s adsl for under R450pm in soweto and most middleclass suburbs from a multiple ISP.

Plus, as once a poor schmuck in rural Nebraska, we had decent DSL.

As once a poor schmuck in not-even-that-rural Alabama, we never could and still cannot get decent anything there. Best I could come up with when I still lived there and what my mother still uses is mobile internet with a small cap.

You've checked Hughesnet and Exede?

> You've checked Hughesnet

I say this as a former customer... Hughesnet is an absolute joke. Looking past their incompetent installers (who provided me with a major leak in the roof over my kitchen) and their horrible uptime (clouds in the sky = service outage), at it's best the internet service could only be described as painfully slow. Super high latency, constant dropped connections, poor throughput and to top it all off customer service that I'd rate as equivalent to cell phone providers.

Please, do yourself a favor, and stay far away.

The technology has gone through an iteration or two, with the latest coming in the last year. Your judgement may have been valid in the past (though you're providing a far worse perspective than I've heard from anyone else), but if you haven't been a customer for a while, your past experience is not a predictor of current performance.

As for the incompetent installers, they're probably the exact same local contractors working for Dish Network or DirecTV. Results will vary by area.

Did you read the link? The point is that they AREN'T really worth that much. My brother buys his xbox games (I stick with PC/Steam mostly) from gamestop and trades them in within a week or two if the multiplayer isn't exciting.

So, to him, a game is NOT worth 60 bucks. The 60 dollar price point has nothing to do with him. He pays between 30 and 40 max, usually only playing B rated single player games years after the fact.

Adding DRM isn't going to magically increase the value of a game to the customer. That's not how a market works. The market currently has decided that a video game is worth something per person, on average. Let's call that $40 per game (just an example). So, with the DRM, you sell two $60 games for every three $40 games. Still the same $120 except it all goes to you instead of the first sale to you and the next two to Gamestop.

If MS can assume (or predict, or hope, or whatever) that more of their sales will go directly to them, then they have an incentive to drop the price of their copies of the game because they know that a gamer probably has a fixed budget for gaming and they want to maximize their value.

I don't have numbers but I would be interested in seeing what the average price per console game actually paid by a customer is. My hunch is that the DRM isn't expected to increase the overall sales, in fact they might decrease BY DESIGN. But MS doesn't care about overall game sales. They care about 1st sales. So they might get a bigger piece of a smaller pie and still make out in the end.

Sidenote, Steam's success came from no legit competition, better prices (allowable, in part, by their DRM) and great marketing but I agree that Microsoft's strategy is more likely long term.

....all in all, though, it just feels shitty to have something physical in my hand that I can't really sell to someone if I want.

This is price discrimination at work. It's basic economics 101 that monopolists or duopolists (such as Steam in PC games, or Microsoft and Sony in consoles) in a market will price their goods above the actual marginal cost of their goods, thus undersupplying the market. They would like to charge lower prices to some customers -- they are happy to sell to your brother for $30 because it's certainly well above their marginal costs. Unfortunately, it takes an awful lot of market power to be able to charge different prices to different consumers. Otherwise you will just have people arbitraging away all your profits (case in point, the folks who do a thriving business buying Steam games in the US region and trading them to folks in Australia and Germany).

Anyways, long story short, it's really hard to price discriminate in typical markets, because it's both really hard to figure out which of your customers will pay full price, and it's really hard to stop the people who get discounts from reselling to the full price folks.

But, if your market is digital, flash-in-the-pan pop culture items, then you have a market that's pretty much tailor-made for price discrimination. Who will pay $60 for a game? Well, the ones who buy it on launch, or pre-order for nominal bonuses. How do you stop the the people who buy at a discount from selling to those who pay full price? Two ways -- you attach the game via DRM to an account that is inconvenient to transfer, and you only sell the discounted copies 2 years later. Sales are also a good way to do this -- many people who buy games in sales either were waiting for a sale because the price was too expensive, or heard about the game because of the sale and wouldn't have bought the game otherwise.

The current status quo is that all the profit from the $30 customers is going to GameStop. Microsoft would rather it go to themselves and their developers, so they would rather have digital downloads. Not so they can stop games from being sold at $30, just so that they can sell games themselves at that price without killing their market.

Sony will have digital sales too. But that doesn't mean they will neet to put restrictions on Disc Based transactions. If steam selled Disc Based games I very much doubt they would adopt the same model.

> If steam selled Disc Based games I very much doubt they would adopt the same model.

Valve does sell discs for their games, and they're just ways of delivering bits for Steam. The DRM is 100% identical in every way.

So the PS4 is Steam for consoles with offline support. Best of both worlds.