If we've been down this road before I don't remember. What does people selling game boxes have to do with DRM acceptance?

People care about intrusive DRM. But most of them care on a basis "you bastards you thieves!" and then... buy Diablo 3, SimCity, and Xbox one.

After a year they adapt and forget how much they "hated it".

This is how every annoyance is introduced. Companies shut their mouths for as long as people get used to it, and then it's a common standard.

Steam was the same.

Exactly.

it'd be interesting to know how many gamers, exactly, are being / have been impacted by the move to digital distribution, due to slow connections. I'd also suspect the number is pretty low overall, but still it's an issue that'll persist for some people, whether they're downloading their game drm-free or through some form of drm-based client or console.


the xbox chief joked about people on nuclear submarines being the kinds of people who'd have to stick to the 360 instead of the xbone, but that's just crude. always online drm sucks the big donkey balls. at least with offline types of drm you can always download the game somewhere else, and then it play it in your cave in the woods or wherever.
http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/12/don-mattrick-xbox-360-offline/

Thinking as a parent would you rather buy your kid the machine that does it all or.. buy the cheaper console that doesn't AND the smart TV that does the rest?

TV roll over for many people is something that happens when the TV breaks not when a new feature you want comes in.

I was introduced to steam when I bought FEAR 2, as I remember. My first impression was quite horrible, becauase I had 512 kbps net connection and had to download 1.5 GB of patches before I played.

My first experience didn't matter when I got faster net connection. Then I bought Orange Box, Day of defeat and couple other games in few months, and I liked steam. I liked buying games without waiting for mailman and some other crap.

Then I discovered Gamersgate. GOG I discovered when they were offering Tex Murphy for free, if I remember correctly. Good times.

But you pretty much need HD television to play on any console. So in most homes they will have smart TVs. Anyway, if I was a parent, I would rather laugh when I heard an argument "but you can turn on your tv with voice!" from my kid.
(judging most of the features will be unavaible in Poland anyway, maybe they won't even bother to translate vocal commands, that would be funny)

Except no... Smart TV's are relatively new compared to HD tv's, We have 4 TV's in this house atm of which... 0 are smart TV's 2 of those were bought in the last year. Sure if you've replaced your main TV in the last year you /should/ have a smart TV but before that? Probably not.

All in all, I just can't envision a reasonable parent that buys Xbone "because you can change channels with voice!" ;-)

Gets me thinking back to the first time I used Steam. I'd pretty much avoided Steam every time until The Last Remnant, and I decided to buy it as it wasn't available for PS3. The experience was genuinely horrible - the key in the box was invalid, then when I got that sorted weeks later, the game refused to launch.

While I as a collector could never stand DRM, I was actually fairly ambivalent about Steam and SecuROM and did buy stuff with DRM for a while until a few instances caused me to realise that DRM does affect the experience a lot more than I thought.

The first one was that our old ISP kept having downtime lasting a day or two, which made installing Steam games impossible.

The second was when we moved house, and our new ISP botched the installation work, leaving us without internet for three weeks. We had to rely on our mobile phones and a nearby net café to check and send emails.

The third was when Steam locked my account for a week, supposedly because I had used a stolen credit card on my account. Funny stuff, as I had never used a credit card on the account.

The fourth was when Steam was completely unavailable for German users for two days last year thanks to a technical glitch at Valve's end.

The fifth was the stunt that GOG pulled with the site shutdown a few years ago. As little as Steam had to do with this PR stunt, it was more the realisation than anything that a company could actually disappear overnight - I've seen it happen on several occasions, and lost my job once as a result of a company suddenly and unexpectedly going bankrupt. (By the way: first thing I did when GOG went back online? Download every single one of my games and archive them locally).

As I say, it's the benefit of experience that makes people aware that DRM affects them more than they think.

I actually know someone who owns one of these new-fangled gesture controlled TV channels, and he regrets making the investment. At least he still has the excellent image quality (it is otherwise an awesome piece of equipment) but he eventually ended up switching off gesture and voice control because he couldn't move around or have people speak in the same room without some menu opening up or the channel changing.

Smart tv's are usually more than that. Youtube, some other VOD services integrated, movie recommendations and such.

I don't believe Xbone will have any of the advertised features in Poland. We had to wait YEARS for Xbox Live to be officially introduced in Poland ;-)

So yeah, in Poland, its multimedia functionality will probably be just voice control.

Yeah, we have a 55" Philips Smart TV that's about a year and a half old now, and that too has raised some interesting questions with regard to service availability.

Philips operates a hub service to access stuff like YouTube and various VOD services, but many of these content providers haven't updated the access to these services, meaning that much of it is no longer available from the TV. For example, Maxdome (a German version of Lovefilm/Netflix) no longer works on the TV, although it does still work on my PS3. Not that I use Maxdome much.

This TV is not even two years old (it was first brought onto the market in mid-2011) and already it has been rendered obsolete by content providers who only wish to support the latest and greatest.

Thankfully the Twonky Beam functionality still works fine with this TV, which means I can simply call up the video on YouTube I want to see and stream it directly to the TV from the phone, but most of the actual online stuff is useless nowadays.

The moral of this story though is to not trust in equipment that is inherently dependent on continued support from content providers.

I don't think so, but that stick looks like a great idea. Pretty much the same principle as the Ouya really, only a lot more compact and efficient.

Today's Penny Arcade comic seems relevant to this discussion: http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/12

I came to think of it that if game developers still add their own DRM to their PS4 games (even though Sony is not pushing it to them), but all the XBox games use the same default MS system, that could also backfire at Sony's behind.

I presume for PS4 gamers having to use UPlay with Ubisoft games and Origin with EA games would be worse than using MS account for both Ubisoft and EA games on XBone. The same reason why many prefer to keep their account-tied DRM games on Steam, instead of Steam/Origin/UPlay.