Activision's Kotick Discounts Downloadable Games 62
kukyfrope writes "In a recent interview with the New York Times, Activision Chief Executive Bobby Kotick claims to be optimistic about the future of gaming and the potential revenue of new gamers as many traditional gamers hit their 30's and 40's and are introducing their kids to the world of gaming. While Kotick has a bright outlook, he sees 'full downloadable games' as being 'so far in the future that it's almost incomprehensible.' This would seem to be contradicted by the success of online avenues such as Valve's Steam system, Xbox Live and Nintendo Wii's Virtual Console."
The Wii? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Wii? (Score:2)
Re:The Wii? (Score:3, Insightful)
Small Full Game = Small Full Game
even if it is old
Re:The Wii? (Score:2)
Re:The Wii? (Score:2, Funny)
Has /. suddenly turned time in reverse, and is now duping stories from the future?
Of course not; it's the Wii that's turned time in reverse, and sent back to us news about how wonderful it is.
nice summary of a registration required article (Score:3, Insightful)
Digital distribition is weak because of a lack of a physical product. That will always be the weak point. For consoles full games for download won't take off for a long time because of storage space. PS3s harddrive is barely big enough for one blueray disc. Highspeed internet can't deliver full games that fast either.
Re:nice summary of a registration required article (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:nice summary of a registration required article (Score:3, Informative)
Re:nice summary of a registration required article (Score:1)
Registering new products is fair, but removing functionality from already-purchased old products... that's just low.
Just to play devil's advocate here, what they're doing is perfectly fair. Since you said that you wanted to buy Half-Life used at a thrift store means that you were not the original owner. So your choices were as follows:
1. Buy a new copy for 20-50 dollars in store (if we are talking a few years ago here).
2. Buy a used copy for 1 dollar, re-register it for 10.
Excluding sales tax, yo
Re:nice summary of a registration required article (Score:4, Insightful)
Once Valve introduced Steam, you were forced to link your CD-key to a login username and there is no way to unlink it except by paying what basically sums up to being an extortion fee to Valve.
The guy purchased the game, at the store. It was a transfer of property from one person to another. He is having to re-register something he already owns. And that's a big, big problem.
Re:nice summary of a registration required article (Score:1)
Minor objection: You don't have to register HL1 but it gives a few nice boni. Valve didn't force him to use Steam at all, he decided to do so in order to access additional material like all those free addons.
Re:nice summary of a registration required article (Score:1)
1. Buy a new copy for 20-50 dollars in store (if we are talking a few years ago here).
2. Buy a used copy for 1 dollar, re-register it for 10.
3. Buy a new copy of a game that Steam recognizes as HL1 but that has dropped in price due to lacking sales. Gunman Chronicles is such a game, it's usually sold for less than HL1 or CS and the key will be recognized as HL1.
Re:nice summary of a registration required article (Score:2)
Re:nice summary of a registration required article (Score:2)
But xbox live has already demonstrated that you can download small games and be sucessful. Geometry Wars is what, ~20MB, and it is the funnest game I've played in years.
Define "Full Game" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Define "Full Game" (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Define "Full Game" (Score:1)
Re:Define "Full Game" (Score:2)
I would agree, even if they just stuck to re-releases of already exisiting SNES games for the moment - Playing some of the old games via emulator [wikipedia.org], it's amazing how nice they can be with sharper [hiend3d.com] graphics, better sound, and high framerate.
HD + connectivity + OS = piracy (Score:1)
It's not only incomprehensible, but quite ignorant as well. After all, it's only a matter of time before owners can download illegal copies of games using the very console they're going to play them with.
If I were Activision's
Re:HD + connectivity + OS = piracy (Score:3, Funny)
This already happens with any console that has a mod chip or other way to load CDR/DVDR backups. PS1, PS2, Dreamcast, Xbox and even Gamecube games are pirated online via both torrents and newsgroups.
Re:HD + connectivity + OS = piracy (Score:4, Informative)
Direct2drive (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Direct2drive (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Direct2drive (Score:2)
Chris Mattern
Re:Direct2drive (Score:2)
Scott Miller chimes in (Score:2, Informative)
Taken out of context (Score:4, Informative)
The original NYT article has the following quote (emphasis mine):
So, as you can see, his words were taken a bit out of context. His opinion is that small downloadable content like expansions will sell, but not an entire 5GB game. Still a bit misguided, considering the success of Steam, but not as bad as the article makes it out to be.
For consoles perhaps (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:For consoles perhaps (Score:1)
Of course, manuals worth a crap are few and far between in boxed games these days.
stuck inside the box he knows (Score:3, Interesting)
"The idea of full downloadable games using our current bloated development practices is so far in the future that it's almost incomprehensible as an opportunity. I really can't imagine any new developers producing games targeted for digital distribution. The fact that they could produce games with a tighter art pipeline (or increased code-generated art) on a much smaller budget would mean they would eat our profitability for lunch. ('small' is a relative term here, most people would say $1 million dollars is a pretty big amount of money, but for activision that's a very small budget). Hmmm.... you say that's already started to happen in the PC and XBOX Live space? I'm just going to pretend I never heard about that and continue working my army of devs like the wage slaves I know they love to be."
Re:stuck inside the box he knows (Score:2)
Re:stuck inside the box he knows (Score:1)
I don't know... (Score:1)
Re:I don't know... (Score:1, Flamebait)
Most games are such a waste of bandwith and generally boring.
I really can't believe people pay for that crap.
Re:How so? (Score:3, Insightful)
Direct 2 Drive [direct2drive.com] has a much larger selection of games including recent full blown titles like Hitman Blood Money and Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. I'm not exactly sure why people would pay for games this way as the price is the same as a store bought one.
Stardock's Totalgaming.net [stardock.com] offers full games for purchase, including Galactic Civilizations 2. While a number of
Re:How so? (Score:3, Informative)
It must also be pointed out that all of the games offered on Totalgaming.net are devoid of DRM.
Re:How so? (Score:2)
I did buy an MMO off of D2D but I was concerned about the copy protection on the other games. I noticed that some of the games use Starforce.
I do like not having to put a CD in the drive to play games which is one reason I'll put up with Steam despite it's occasional wonkiness.
Re:How so? (Score:2)
"Direct2Drive games are not compatible to retail bought expansions unless stated otherwise on our website."
Standard patches won't work:
"Direct2Drive games are pre-patched when you download them. Any patches made after your purchase will be available on Direct2Drive's website as soon as possible"
Re:How so? (Score:1)
These So-Called "Horseless Carriages" Are a Fad. (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps Kotick is correct that the games which his company are producing are not yet suited for download, but that doesn't mean that nobody's games are suited for download.
Here's the key quote from the article, in my opinion:
This is exactly the strategy which has, at times, nearly destroyed the music and film industries -- focus only on copying the last big thing and don't spend any effort at all looking for the next big thing. I truly hope a bunch of net-aware $5-per-game upstarts eat their $50-per-megatitle business for lunch. It'd be the best thing to happen to gaming since I don't know when..
Good! (Score:2)
Re:Good! (Score:2)
I see on your site that most of your games tend to sell for $19.95. I'm sure you've done the research, but have you considered lowering the price for your games to something more reasonable, like $5-10? If you were to do that, do you think you could make 2-4 times the sales? I'm wondering because I don't think a game like Geometry Wars would have sold well at $19.95. I've wanted a few indie games (Gish), but the relatively steep prices have kept me away (when you consi
Re:Good! (Score:2)
Piracy : it's inevitable, and it's always a balance between making it hard for pirates and not making it painful for legit users (see Starfox!). In the end we do what we can to stop casual piracy but determined crackers and warez operators will pirate your games no
Re:Good! (Score:1)
I think to most people an indie game is inherently perceived as "low value". 20$ is outside of the impulse buy range for me but perhaps that differs for other people. Also I have a feeling that the upper limit for indie games is more the number of people who know about them than the number of people who like the price.
Piracy : it's inevitable, and it's always a balance between making it hard for pirates and not making it painful for legit u
Re:Good! (Score:2)
Stay away from the download market activision, you have absolutely no idea how it works. Keep churning out the 'triple a' crap.
Damn misleading titles (Score:5, Insightful)
So stop using homonyms in the article titles, especially confusing ones. I get dissapointed enough with the shit going on in our world, I don't need slashdot making me think I can get my games cheaper and then dashing my hopes with an opposite story...
P.S. this Kotick guy is an idiot.
Re:Damn misleading titles (Score:1)
I thought misleading headlines were Zonk's speciality?
Misread the headline (Score:1)
Re:Misread the headline (Score:1)
Re:Misread the headline (Score:1)
Scared much? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like articles where some publishers/companies discount so-called "retro-gaming" as being insignifigant in their eyes.
Well, I spent about an hour yesterday playing "Super Mario Brothers 3", and it was just as fun now as it was fifteen years ago. All of the suits making comments like this are so out of touch it's almost comical. They keep going after that shrinking "gotta have the newest, bestest, prettiest game NOW!" market and fail to realize there are tens of millions of us who gave up on gaming years ago because we were sick of all the "shitty but pretty" games where pretty pictures rank far above gameplay.
If only these guys would realize that spending enough to make a feature film on a game just isn't necessary, that paying 50 artists for every 1 actual game mechanics programmer is silly.
They need to look outside the box. Problem is, they created the box, and seem so lost in it that I don't know if anything is going to demonstrate otherwise for them until the box just busts apart and disintergrates.
AE
Retail, not publishers, fears downloads. (Score:2)
1) The company which actually codes the game provides most of the value to the customer. They get a teeny tiny sliver of the profits. (~10% of retail price is a number I've heard batted about)
2) The company which publishes the game absorbs much of the risk of the venture from the developer, does marketing, and perhaps help secure the big-name license that sells a zillion boxes. They get a pretty decent section of the profits. (~30% of the retail price)
3) The retail store provides
Savage 2 (Score:2, Informative)
-Skavj "s
Where's the damn surprise (Score:2, Funny)
Welcome to obvious land. Oh wait, it's slashdot. Or Digg. I can't really tell anymore.