Major Nelson snippet
1. You can buy and re-sell used games (I think we knew that)
2. There is NO FEE to bring a game to your friends house and play. The only requirement is that you be logged in to your profile to play.
This is technically true but misleading and deceptive. Yes, you can still buy a used game from GameStop (say). But you won't be able to play it on your X1 without paying a fee. And the "fee" is the retail price of the game. In other words if you want to play a used game on X1, you have to buy the rights from Microsoft. No more GameStop, Amazon, or eBay. And no more rentals.
I don't buy used games very often so this wouldn't affect me much directly, but I'm with Slax that this is a bad development for the industry as a whole.
so you are saying i could buy a used game for $14 and then have to pay full retail price to unlock it?
I think you could be mistaken. I think any info on how used game sales will work is speculation
I agree. It says "we have designed for", which implies an active market. I don't think their "fee" is going to be $50 or $60.
If it's as low as $10, and you can play it right from your hard drive once installed, then I foresee a lot of "game exchanges" going down on various websites/communities.
I just don't think we know yet which one it will be closer to.
And saying it's "bad development for the industry" is not true in my opinion. PC gaming went this way years ago, and something like Steam is very successful. You don't care that you can't resell your games when you can get such a variety of games for great prices, new and old. It will just take time to equalize to that point on consoles.
Game retailers and rental places alike will be affected by this. For example, I have a friend that owns a video rental store in my town and one of my best friends from high school also owns a small video game retail store. It's obvious where video game rentals will be hurt here. His rental store is the last one in our town outside of a Redbox kiosk and he does rather well. However, most of his profits come from video game rentals. That will be dead next gen especially if Sony goes a similar route.
The video game retail store makes very little profit on new game sales. In fact, once a game drops in price, he immediately takes a hit on each game sold until he's able to reorder stock, assuming he even sells those games he already has. So he relies on used game sales to make his money. He'll still be able to sell current gen and older games (and thankfully for him, he makes a lot on retro games). I assume this to be the same case with Gamestop and that's why they are the way they are with used game trade-ins. Hope you guys like buying games from Wal-Mart and Best Buy. And that's where digital downloads will likely be preferred.
Once the retailers decide it's not worth carrying the games anymore, it won't be worth carrying hardware, then nothing. I've seen a couple of retailers already stop carrying video games already.