I think what it comes down to is how much are you willing to be at the mercy of a manufacturer over something you own? It is in some cases, an escalation of annoyance that many people won't want to deal with. Lets say I get off work and I want to play some "Shoot em Up 5000." If their servers are down for maintenance or my…
This is fairly ridiculous. I'm lucky enough to live in an area where I pay about $50 a month for great internet service. I'm near some larger cities and we have a few telecoms that compete so we make out a little better with price and service but I know damn well this doesn't apply to everyone. Hell, one of my coworkers…
Actually I looked around myself, and most devices which offer internet capabilities are always online - even though I could disconnect them if I wanted. My PC is hooked up to broadband, although I don't need it to work or play most games. My iPad is always online, even though I don't often use the internet. Same goes for…
What is being said that MS is going the direction of the Cloud with their Live services, so this means there is a good chance the HDD on your XBox is going to be used as cache/temp storage, nothing more, and it will require you to be online at 20 minute intervals a la Sim City for a synch. So starting the game will require…
I would imagine that this'd prohibit a great many users in what I guess can be termed 'emerging markets' (Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and the middle East) from joining in on the fun anytime soon. Not sure how stable connections are in Lagos for instance, and Nigeria is one of the better run countries on the african…
Do we always define technologies by their failures? I think good points have been brought up about Steam, but overlooked. "Always On" does not implicitly mean "Fails when it's off". These are not mutually exclusive. I think the media is doing a great job of drumming up criticism surrounding the failures with Simcity and…
Beyond the fact this guy mishandled it. Steam has done well even with needing net connection to play purchased games. Of course you could argue they could have done even better not. Though does it mean though there will be no easy way to turn the console off versus "sleeping" even if you aren't using it? What a waste of…
The thing is, this crap is already happening on the XBox Marketplace and such. I have a bunch of games that I paid for from the marketplace and when I don't log in to my Live account, most of those games revert to trial mode and I have no ability to play them. I paid for them, yet I can't play them because the system…
It seems pretty far-fetched to me that Microsoft would do anything to hurt their console dominance. They better than anyone know exactly how many xboxes they have sold, and how many of those are on xbox live, or probably even how many have ever connected to the internet. They know the numbers. Would they really do…
How is alienating over half of the US, EU, JP and AUS a good idea? Especially when you have services like Comcast in place? How many more copies of a game will you be able to sell with that attitude? Not everyone who ones a certain hardware will be buying your game mind you. What about Data-Caps? Canada still has them in…