What's hard to figure out is just what Nintendo's 1st party studios have been doing all this time, since support for the Wii effectively ended a long time ago.
Look at their 3DS lineup. It's REALLY solid now and I fear they saw the sales looking really bad at first and doubled down on that to keep it going. Hopefully they didn't pull TOO many people off Wii U to help fix their portable sales.
The problem is that when I pull out my old PSOne I can put the disk in and sit down and play a game without any issues where as with the newer consoles if you have online activation the life cycle of that game is tired to the activation servers which might be turned off a year after the game came out. Since a lot of people that grew up with the NES, SNES, and similar systems are now having children of their own, they can sit down with their kids and introduce them to a game that they enjoyed as a child. Will the children that grew up with the Xbox One be able to do the same thing? For that matter, a year or two after you played a game would you even still be able to play it if you wanted to?
Nope, and this is the "poison pill" that will keep me from buying one. I routinely play retro games and at some point in the future MS will turn off those authentication servers which means I'd have an entire generation of games being unplayable. I can understand online multiplayer servers being shut down, but most of those games have a single player campaign, not to mention the single player gamer or those with offline multiplayer I'd like to go back to. If they don't change their mind on this single "feature" it's enough for me to skip it entirely, regardless of what games they have on it.
so it can check in too see if any updates are available without drawing much power
Depends on what you call "much power": it uses about 10W in "online" standby mode. That might not seem like a lot, but it draws that 24 hours a day, so it adds up over the years.
My Wireless router draws 15W (24/7), so IMO 10W for the Wii's Standby isn't bad.
Maybe one day (pipe dream), Steam will set up an e-Used Game Market that Steam users could buy, sell, and trade games around with. I have no idea how legal it would be for them to do that (i.e. certain publishers might not like it, be able to stop it, etc.), but it would certainly alleviate a lot of concerns.
Actually I'd just love to have concurrent (account) logins. Like, if I want to play L4D2 but my son wants to play Sonic... let that shit happen. I'm good with locking it to "only 1 copy of a game at a time", but at least let me "Share" use of the account over my local lan.
If you have someone who has never seen the Star Wars movies before (yeah right)...
People are born all the time. I have a 5 year old who's seen Jedi, but not the rest (though he does like the Clone wars show).
Even the excellent Deus Ex where I absolutely took my time to finish it yielded only about 30 hrs of game time. When I look through my Steam library I find any game that I have finished has about the same play time on it as Bastion. I've stopped buying AAA games. They are not good value for money and I will rather pick them up in a sale together with all DLC if at all.
Agreed. You can pick up great AAA titles for $5 or less if you wait long enough. Rather than buying the new Tomb Raider, I picked up 3 old-ish ones (Legend, Anniversary & Underworld) for $2.50 each. A good game is still a good game a few years later, it isn't produce, you don't need to consume it the 1st week it's available.
"Money is the root of all money." -- the moving finger
