@praetus and @ambershee The thing is, the games industry really is a service industry, just not in the way the hardware vendors and publishers are spinning it. The service lies in the creation of games, that's the real service. It's a lot like contractors building a skyscraper, you pay them for their time, effort, and…
You know what was great? When people could go home and just play a game on their tv without having to worry about any other paid service being involved. Getting real tired of this "games are a service not a product" schtick.
Not at all. A service industry doesn't necessarily provide a physical good, but it can. However, a product industry always produces a product. What matters is what is actually being paid for. In games, what is being paid for is the creation of a game. The disc isn't a product, it's packaging for the game, a delivery…
I think we're talking at cross-purposes. Yes the service of producing an intellectual property is paid for, as is the service (or trade) of building a product for sale. The publisher of course pays the developer for the service of making a game, as does the manufacturer pay their workers for the service of designing and…
Yeah. It's not up to the owners of the apartments in that skyscraper to pay the contractor for their service to build it; they just pay the real estate agent for the sale.
The end-user is paying for the content of the digital goods: the very arrangements of the 1s and 0s that in turn make the content have value. Once this data is in a format they can digest, they do so. Yes a service was rendered somewhere out there for the 1s and 0s to be arranged that way, but if I didn't buy this product…
It's not the ISP services that are the problem, it's the publisher servers that always cause issues. It wasn't Telstra (notoriously bad Aus ISP) that screwed up Sim City, it was EA. It wasn't (*USA ISP*) that screwed up the launch of Diablo 3, it was Blizzard. And Microsoft think they can handle online services better than…
You're going to love the nextbox then. I have a suspicion they'll be towing the 'games as a service line' pretty hard. Sony will likely do the same, but hopefully to a lesser extent. I also miss the days of being able to buy a game, stick it in a drive and play. That's what made consoles attractive in the first place.
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…