what about the ability to sell digital games, i'd definitely say that was the best feature by far... if you were into that sorta thing of course

Selling, trading and gifting your digital games is very pro-consumer. I hope those features and game sharing comes back!

I hope there is an option to retro-actively apply this to existing digital games as an option in the future. I don't care about the 24-hour check in thing. It happens so rarely compared to me being able to access my games anywhere, lend games from friends instantly and so on.

If you mind the 24-hour, then buy disc based games.

Please make MS digital vision an option again!

nuketail you said it just right. I WANT THE OLD PLAN BACK. As long as I can buy, sell, or gift/trade the game the old plan with family sharing is huge incentive for going digital. I'll take the drm, along with 24hr online check so that my games will benefit from the cloud. Im always connected so why should I not be able to take advantage of it. They should use a game like Quantum Break where updates to the story and abilities change on the fly, AI react differently every playthrough dynamicly extending the life of the game like Phil talked about for those who "OPT IN" the digital plan. I bet you digital is going to convert alot of the community over after they see the benefits.

That's actually exactly how it was going to be. There were a few limitations though. Mainly: only one of your 10 friends can play the game from your library at once.

I did hear at one point that you could actually play a game together with someone on your friends list with just one copy of the game purchased if you were playing with he person that owns it.

I hope they bring back parts of this.

I think the rage from not being able to play offline for more than 24-hour overshadowed any benefits what so ever. There was nothing MS could have said or do.

It is a case of the loud minority.

Truth is, no one really knows what made it so great. There was so little information released about the plan that all the stuff people say it was going to be is all based on conjecture and speculation.

If it was as good as some of the commentators made it out to be, MS should have pushed that above all else as the reason behind their digital future. It would have done a lot to stop the initial backlash, but nothing was said about it until a while after the reveal. That kind of thing is what you put front and center to show the benefits of the DRM/always-on that they wanted to have.

I still don't think it would have lasted though. Sony has a sharing plan now, and it is more restrictive than the speculated plan from MS, and even then the publishers weren't too happy about sharing a game with 5 people. Pressure made them drop it to 2 shares. There is no reason to assume the same thing wouldn't happen with MS.

Well, I have my doubts, if you check Angry Joe's interview with Major Nelson (link below) Major Nelson kept using the word "check out a game", at the 4 minute mark. He said only 1 person at the time can play, and he also said "it's not like you are buying 1 copy for all 10 members" (4:18 mark)
You can't really take what Aaron Greemberg said as the absolute truth, because he made that comment after the family sharing plan was cancelled.

I do think that bringing a real sharing program would give them a lot of sales

LINK http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Yes MS dismissed the claims after the family share plan was already canned. If MS has no intention of bringing the plan back then of course MS is going to make the feature sound better than it was.

As HeavY has also said, Major Nelson himself alluded to the idea that the family share plan would have just been demos.

"Check out" is a common phrase & you both know it. When you "check out" a book from the library or dvd from blockbuster, do you get a snippet? "Hey, let me check out that cd." Do you get 30 second samples of each song?

Only a member for 35 days and already one bubble? I wonder why... SMH, do some research before opening your mouth, instead going into (ironically) defense mode

Question. If Sony had pressure from publishers to take their sharing plan down from 5 shares to 2 this gen, what makes you think MS can offer 10 shares to everyone and anyone(on your friends list of course).

It has nothing to do with the SDF, it has to do with common sense.

Say you have 10 people. Each buys 10 different games. They all share those games. That's 100 different games played by 10 people. Instead of selling 10 copies of each game, they've sold 1 copy of each. That is not a hit publishers are going to take for the benefit of MS. They won't even take a hit of a quarter of that when multiplied by the number of consoles sold.

There were major restrictions on a plan like this that MS never made public, just no one on the Xbox side using it to validate DRM is willing to admit it.

Edit:
Let's assume that it was just a timed demo sharing thing. My question would be, why not just have a timed full-game trial like Sony has. Then anti-social a**holes like me that have no friends can still play.

The thing with saying there's no time limit though is that it could mean many different things. For example, if you download a 60-minute timed trial on PS3, but don't play it, it will last for one year before it's deactivated. So Greenberg could have meant that the trials will never be deactivated in that way.

Anyway, we'll never know for sure, though I really don't trust what MS says at all. They've made a business out of lying to their customers every chance they get. With MS I assume everything they say is a lie until it's actually proven to be true. It's saved me quite a few times from making bad purchases.

These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse

Contractual agreements are not the same as “gentlemen” agreements. If you think that they work with their distributors a month before production then their entire business model is trash. They work with companies like nvidia constantly for building the graphics cards they need. They work with companies that build motherboards years in advance. This is what proper business planning does.

They are not buying components on a whim like a consumer. So again, considering the ram isn’t a singular module and is integrated into the motherboard I highly doubt they wouldn’t have a final schematic that they are supposed to be building around.

If they are delaying production another 3 years then it’s obvious again this is an after though project and is just trying to be responsive to their bad execution they had the last 14 years.

It also isn’t far fetched to use their failure to produce first party titles the last 7 years including the highly anticipated games I mentioned all being cancelled. That they would continue to you know… lie

Yeah with FSR 5 they should be able to offer a much cheaper version of Helix.

Series S is what has killed Xbox Series so... Will they dare?

The factors are largely external. Covid and Russia-Ukraine war causing inflation led to the first price increase in 2022.

Then we get Trump's tariffs increasing hardware prices, AI boom causing a RAM crisis, war on Iran causing a worldwide fuel crisis which impacts the cost of everything.

Gaming doesn't exist in a vacuum. The last few years have been a shitshow and lot of it was definitely avoidable.

LucasRuinedChildhood,

For sure. No disagreement on the external factors doing a lot of this. Where I have to gently push back however is on two fronts:

1. The pandemic definitely caused some issues: asynchronous development was a big issue and really complicated timelines and affected game quality. At the same time, when it comes to price hikes, it's really difficult to know what was genuine necessity and what was taking consumers for a ride. The pandemic brought about "stag-flation" which was increasing prices and stagnant wages, which was a problem caused by supply chain constraints. There was also "Greed-flation", where companies that were slightly affected or had no issues took advantage of the situation and squeezed everyone citing supply chain issues when there were none.

2. It's definitely true that the tariffs, AI boom, and RAM crisis were all things enabled by tech broligarchs throwing money at this caricature of a world leader, one of them being Satya Nadella. I don't think Sony and Nintendo have contributed much to this problem if at all, but Microsoft's Nadella I feel was instrumental in causing every one of those issues. Microsoft as a company contributed to both candidates (though they gave Harris 4x as much if I recall), but Nadella was all in on letting AI run wild. He paid for unregulated AI, and got a war that's not a war (even though Trump called it that at least five times on television) that screwed up helium access. So for me, I feel that one of the players in the gaming industry is a key architect of these issues, and for that reason I struggle a bit to think of it as "external".