This week, Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo published a report claiming that the next Xbox may use a system to prevent used games from being played. It’s a tricky situation in itself: the used games market is huge, and doesn’t directly provide games publishers with any revenue, although the situation is far more complex than the likes of THQ would have you believe.
But it also points to something else further down the line: it’s no longer just Sony who wants to sell and send you console games directly over the internet. Microsoft wants in too. It’s a shame our shoddy broadband network won’t be up to the job.
I’m going to sidestep the issue of whether it’s ethical for Microsoft to block used games on its next Xbox: let’s look at the elephant hiding in the corner instead. If Redmond wants to get away with that, it also needs to provide games in such a way that it wouldn’t occur to customers to try and resell them: through an Ethernet cable.
Microsoft and Sony already sell full games over their respective networks of course, but neither are trying particularly hard. Xbox 360 generally appear on Xbox Live a year after launch, at a price nobody with any sense, or a GAME shop nearby, would consider; some PS3 games appear on the PSN soon after launch, but at eye watering prices (Rayman Origins for £47.99? Bargain.)
And why would they? High street retailers still matter – their reluctance to sell the download only PSPgo was the nail in its coffin.
That will change though: it has to. The success of iPhone gaming and app stores means customers are already trained to purchase software this way. In theory, publishers can reduce their costs since the cost of packaging and delivery is minimal, while Microsoft would get a cut from every game’s revenue, not just the licensing money from its developers. Sooner or later, the smartphone stabilizers will come off.
So long as the games are priced correctly (read well below regular disc prices), people should come round to the principle of this. Steam, with its excellent deals and customer service, has already proved the model works on PC. But the state of British broadband is going to have to change drastically for this to take off.
At the moment, it wouldn’t be so bad for Xbox 360 games. Stored on a DVD, they max out at about 8GB (Unless of course, the game uses a billion discs, like Final Fantasy XIII). But if, as Kotaku’s report also claims, the Xbox 720 will adopt Blu-ray for its new format, you could be looking at games up to 50GB in size a few years down the line.
Many home in the UK simply aren’t ready for that. Achingly slow infrastructure is one factor: the government has set a target of 2015 for the whole country to be in reach of 2Mbps speed that those in urban areas have been enjoying for the best part of a decade. BT has said that the EU target of 30Mbps speeds for all by 2020 isn’t possible: meanwhile, South Korea aims to achieve 100 percent 1Gbps penetration by the end of this year. Splendiferous.
But more pressingly, too many broadband tariffs pack data caps that would prohibit downloading too many games this way. Commendably, Virgin Media offers unlimited data on all of its tariffs, but BT does not: its cheapest tariffs come with a cap of just 10GB. It’s commonplace in America too, where more Xbox 720s will inevitably be sold. Almost every major provider has a bandwidth cap that varies between 150 and 250GB.
So how do you reconcile those measly caps with a spate of high profile games? Let’s take the few weeks in the run up to Christmas last year: hardcore gamers would have had to download Modern Warfare 3, Arkham City, Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, Gears Of War 3, Dark Souls, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, FIFA 12 and Rayman Origins, to name but a few. Imagine downloading that sort of spate of AAA games, each spilling over every 0 and 1 of a 50GB disc in the shops. And then streaming all the HD shows and movies you can now watch via Xbox Live, in place of broadcast TV. You couldn’t.
Game streaming isn’t any better. I’ve been testing out OnLive’s micro console this week: when plugged into your router it delivers PC games to your TV from the cloud. With the bundled gamepad, it’s a console like experience from a tiny box, that can be had on some exceptionally good deals: OnLive regularly gives the £70 box away with pre-orders of new games, while BT is offering both the box and a three month subscription for new broadband subscribers.
But its limitations are already abundantly clear: connections sometimes drop, and the lag on games where speed counts, such as Street Fighter 4, is a bit too much. And it may be using up as much as 2GB per hour.
For hardcore gamers too, it’s hard to imagine switching to this model full-time. The odd Lego Batman spree won’t run up too much data, but a 70 hour Skyrim slog? It’s a good thing OnLive doesn’t offer the time-sucking game: too many people’s routers couldn’t hack it.
What’s the solution here? We can’t just expect every Xbox gamer to pay for unlimited data: most people still expect a console to be an out of the box experience. And they may have already tied themselves into a broadband contract.
There’s no point trying to turn and face the march of progress, but unless we get better broadband soon, the gaming experience we’re used to will suffer.
What do you think? Is the push to download-only games a bad thing? Let’s hear your thoughts in the comments.
