I can see so many problems with that it's not even funny.

I think I've mentioned it before. Essentially if those gamers bought games secondhand, they're unlikely to cough up the cost for full price. Which means those gamers wouldn't have bought it anyway. Those who and plan to sell on are more likely to be selective. This is just going to drive sales towards more popular/mainstream titles and stifle innovation.

If they wanted me to pay to play a secondhand game, the cost either needs to be negligible eg £1 or the game will need to be free, which defeats the point of secondhand games. Either way, gamers will lose out in terms of novel games and the industry loses out in terms of money.

I think for me it will mean that the new game will need to be under a fifteen quid and a used game under a tenner. If the game is crippled then the second hand game will need to be close to a fiver for me and that will mean that price that the first buy will get will also be lower. If they are normal sellers of games then they will account for that in their willingness to buy at full price. As you said it will reduce the demand for games. People will need to be more selective and it could be beneficial for magazines that provide reviews.

All future EA games 'will include microtransactions'

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/39 ... ec-claims/

Oh yeah, cool. Whoo...

No more EA games for me then.

You have to wonder how much money it even brings in, never mind once the console makers have taken their cut

And the credit card companies. Though it does make sense. What it does do is allow occasional players with money buy their upgrades and weapons. Before people would buy offline the characters that had been levelled up by Chinese prisoners and these levelled up characters with their weapons and gold were sold for real money. This hits them and allows the game developers to profit.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/39 ... -detailed/

I am curious about what HDDs the new consoles will launch with; I'd like to think 500Gb would be the starting point for our bigger games and more digital future, but I can't see it somehow

I think that they might start at 320 Gb as a start though there will probably be a low capacity drive to keep the price down. Though there would probably be a 500 Gb as a premium version for the first couple of years. Later in the product cycle I would imagine a 640 Gb drive might appear. They pick small drives that can be cheap to produce and provide sufficient capacity for most users. If they have a really efficient saved game process then big drives are redundant anyway. Though it does depend on what else they plan to stick on the drives at some point. If they take the app route then there could be a number of apps and so those could require extra space.

I can see it being a real problem next gen. Christ, the new God of War demo was over 3Gb, and patches now run into hundreds of megs.

I can understand that but how many demos do you keep? I have never downloaded any console demo, but I will accept I am part of an exceptionally small number for whom that applies.

It's the way the PS3 (at least) works, if you're downloading say 3Gb, you actually need 6Gb of space. Don't get me wrong, it's not a major problem, but it's one I could imagine being repeated/getting worse with ever growing games.

It's not so bad with the PS3 given the drive is a standard part and anyone who knows which end of a screwdriver is which can swap it. Unfortunately, I have some doubts as to whether that pleasant arrangement will continue with the next one...

I agree that it may become harder to swap HDDs. What's more worrying is the plan to link games to consoles or accounts. The latter isn't as bad as the former but either way if your console goes down or your account gets hacked/deleted, you lose out on the cost of the games as well.

As for HDD space, I long ago swapped the 40GB for a 250GB one. More useful when DLC is in the order of 2GB. There are 4 DLC planned for BLOPS so that's 8GB on top of the game install. If digital downloads are the future, we need more space. MOAR!

Yeah, they already do this for digital stuff obviously but IMO doing it for 'retail' disks would be a step too far. However you can't get round the fact that this already happens to a great degree in the PC world - look at how many retail games 'lock' to Steam accounts with a code, even though you've got the DVD in your hands - and hardly anybody seems to complain; and PC gamers are the most bitchy bunch there is when it comes to DRM & the like...


IIRC there are two 'sorts' of PS3 at the mo - there's 'normal' PS3's which have either 160GB or 500GB HDD's in them, then there's a 'budget' PS3 that has 16GB (I think) of flash RAM and a slot for a HDD to be added. I don't think, at least in the first revision, we're going to see a HDDless PS4. The slide shown in the launch presentation pretty much implied all PS4's will have a HDD. I can't imagine the drive in the PS4 will be smaller than the ones fitted in the PS3...