Sony grovels, offers freebies after PlayStation network spent Xmas TITSUP Sony has offered free membership and discounts to its console gamers after the PlayStation Network fell off the interwebs for several days over Christmas. The troubled entertainment giant said it would offer those whose free trial of PlayStation Plus was interrupted by the outages five more free days, while all PlayStation …
As Xbox members that were down for longer, they get naff all.. Presumably because if Microsoft did offer them something, they too would get a negativly spun grovel based story here. Best brush the problems under the carpet, pretend Xbox live wasn't down for nearly a week, pretend Xbox live is now back to normal (, it's not, achievements are still not syncing for most)
There is very little I would actually buy from the P$4 or the M$ Xbox stores.. They want £55 for GTA5 - You can get if from eBay for £35 (for the PS4), likewise once its released for a PC, you'll be able to get it online for £25-30.
I'm really a bit gutted the Steam Machine has not materialised yet, whilst its not everybody's cup of tea, I do think it would force both Sony and Microsoft to take a reality check.
Sony would love it if the prices were cheaper as they make more money percentage wise on the digital versions than they do the disc based versions. Unfortunately though the pricing is partly controlled by the studios who they would need to approach to ask them if they can reduce the price. Also, there is the fear that making the games the same price or cheaper than disc based versions will hurt the brick & mortar stores.
People who state that there is nothing worth buying on PSN obviously has not bothered looking as there are a few good indie games out there that are also fairly cheap. A remake of Resident Evil also comes out this month which is digital only, afaik.
"Also, there is the fear that making the games the same price or cheaper than disc based versions will hurt the brick & mortar stores."
From a customer perspective whether this is Sony/Microsoft price policy is largely irrelevant, its just part of the supply chain. But customers do understand that whilst purchasing a physical product they have an asset they could sell on, additionally there are media and production costs which a customer will understand - when it comes to buying an electronic only product, there is absolutely no resell value in it, and the only cost to the store is bandwidth. So customers expect that to be cheaper.
I'm not aware of the commercials Sony operates on with the studios. But this is the a similar argument to books. eBooks are predominantly cheaper and co-exist with brick-n-mortar stores, there have been a few casualties, but that is evolution weeding out the old.
From what I remember the raison d'etre of the SteamMachine was to move developers away from DirectX to something more OS agnotic as Valve didn't want to be beholden to MS's new Win8 app store. Luckily for Valve most of the major game engines have done this without anything but ur-SteamMachines materialising.
That's not to say we won't get SteamMachines Soon™, it's just that their arrival is now less urgent. I think the original plan from Valve was to compete directly with the PS4 and XBone but I assume they've realised the inherent problems with that; console uers don't know Valve and don't want to the spend $currency with an unknown, whilst PC users do know Valve but don't want to play PC games on a console. The best way for GabeN to capure market share now is to sit perfecting his product till the mid point of the console cycle at which point he can release something vastly superior (in terms of hardware performance,) to the current console offerings with no real competition from the encumbents expected for some time.
re: SteamMachines
Probably the most effective thing to do would be to revisit some of the older games and get them working properly under WINE and push WINE out via Steam. I'm thinking things like the older Tomb Raider games which would be fine with a controller on the big screen. Perhaps they could bring out a robust system for people to use their Wii controllers with Steam.
Maybe they could cherry pick some of the newer games too, like PoE which used to run under WINE but now doesn't.
The increased sales from this will easily offset any "losses" due to the discount. Remember, you still have to give lots of money to Sony in order to get this discount.
I would have expected a deeper discount of maybe 50% for one game, bearing in mind that this is still money you are paying Sony, and the original price for some games is still quite high. But even this would be indistinguishable from promotions the Sony would run from time to time anyway. It would depend a little on which games are included in the offer.
Basically this is just weaselling, the minimum Sony thinks it can get away with.
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