A massive, massive reduction in sales. To the point where, if they were a PC only company, they'd have gone out of business.
Their management is schizophrenic across the board. It's just that, as PC gamers, that's where we get to see it most.

Yyyeah, after HoMM6's online/offline humbug, I'm not going to trust a word they say, nor buy a game they're involved with.

Acording to David Braben one of the reasons for this shift is because "used games business has effectively killed off the single-player focused endeavor, and he believes that not only are used games pushing more games to focus on a multiplayer setting" (http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-03-19-used-games-business-is-killing-single-player-experience-says-frontier-developments)

Used games are also a reason for the high prices of games:

"People will say 'Oh well, I paid all this money and it's mine to do with as I will', but the problem is that's what's keeping the retail price up -- prices would have come down long ago if the industry was getting a share of the resells."

Surely this is just the law of supply and demand? If publishers can't stay competitive with their pricing then they will lose sales. It's not the fault of those taking the preferred deal.

How do you compete with your own product though? Every copy sold can be used infinite amount of times and doesn't degrade, and used markets have become so professional and available that getting a second hand copy is almost as easy as a new one. And the single player experience is usually limited, so after you're done, it can be sold. (for those so inclined)

In the meantime, game's just cost more and more to make. You can keep pushing down the price of your game, but if a lot of the return on investment is lost on used sales I can see why it keeps prices up.

he is arguing that this means they can only recoup cost from day-one sales, and therefore they have to price them enough to put production in black. If they could factor in further sales, initial price could be less also.

Well, CDPR manage it. You release (free) updates that improve the content. Otherwise, you drop the price in line with what people would pay for the resale (plus a bit because they get a new supported product, as opposed to a potentially damaged resale). I'm not saying that it's pleasant for the companies, I'm just saying that they are complaining that we are a capitalist economy (which I think they knew was the case when they started trading).

The games industry appears to me to be one of the worst for complaining that the market isn't fair. When actually they're complaining because it is fair.

I personally have no interest in games in general adopting a MMO mentality. How do they propose to pay for all that after market content creation? MMO's charge a monthly fee, is that something we can look forward to? DLC taken even further?

Does this encourage devs to put out small games because they have big plans down the road? If they put too much in the base game does that mean all the extras don't matter to people, and if they put too little, does that mean people won't want the game to start with?

What happens to games that don't sell well? Do they receive this same "i probably should have been in the game to start with." content or do they just rot in an incomplete state?

Do I have to wait 10 minutes for this blessing of new content every time I want to play? What does my ISP think about another bandwidth hog in my home? Is the game the same when the Internet goes down for a while?

I actually don't mind devs producing added content after the fact. It can be fun and a nice service to those that bought your game, but I have serious concerns over trying to make it a standard practice. A game should be completely enjoyable with or without said content, but in this situation it almost demands that a game NOT be. That is a problem and at conflict with my interest.

If they have "struggled" finding that balance with DRM I have to assume they are going to struggle big time with finding the right balance between forces here.

And its kinda of like an always online DRM requirement, but instead of loosing 100% accesss to a game when the line goes down, you loose 50% or 25% or whatever content has been clouded. Can we trust that content will always be packaged into something obtainable down the line, or once a server goes down do we start loosing giant chunks of content forever? If so that sounds highly undesirable.

I don't think Braben is saying this is fair or unfair, but that this is one of the reasons why games costs as they do and why there is interest in other forms of distribution / DRM.

They are actually competing against a superior product. One that in play is identical, but has been stripped of things that often cause system conflicts, play restrictions, and even performance issues

Yeah they have a big problem when they are asking people to pay money for something that that same person can get for free that is a better product. The more they fight it the more they are at risk for encouraging people to pay less for a better product.

Last time Ubisoft changed their mind about DRM and promised to get rid of DRM we end up with... UPlay always online DR... I mean feature.

Basically they will probably do the same BS they are already doing for some games like Heroes 6 or Anno and instead of the "you must always be online" switch to the "you can play offline but you will miss several single player features if you do" and hope peoples will be stupid enough to buy it.

Good news to Braben: PC games haven't been "resellable" for a long time, ever since online DRM. Hence, according to him PC game prices should have gone down from the retail-only times.

Have they? To me it seems new PC games still cost the same 50-60€ new from digital sites as they did earlier on retail (without DRM).

For older games, you seem to sometimes be able to obtain them quite cheaply from Steam etc., but then I don't know if that is much cheaper than retail clearance sales used to be, and whether it is simply because digital delivery multiplies the number of available games for sale, which in itself probably pushes the prices down.

Fail