Dear Microsoft, Make Games on Demand Better

Dear Microsoft,

Games on Demand… it needs to be better. Stop wasting everybody’s time but releasing games that are more than a year old. Valve changed PC gaming with Steam and it is time you changed the entire gaming world with Games on Demand. Let me tell you how you can do it.

The first thing you need to do is get publishers on board to start releasing games on GoD sooner rather than later. Give 2K Games a call and get Borderlands ready to go. And don’t be stupid and charge $60, give a discount and sell it for $50 tops. Advertise the shit out of it and as a bonus anybody who buys the game the first week will get the Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot DLC for free.

Do the same thing with Assassin’s Creed II. Start talking with Ubisoft right now and get the game on GoD as soon as possible. There is no reason to sit on your ass with this shit. Again, charge $50 and include both of the DLC packs for free for the first week.

You really need to be doing this for every major release on the Xbox 360. Once the games are available, you can start offering limited time offer sales on games. You just had a 75% off sale for Batman: Arkham Asylum on Games on Demand on PC. You also released Bioshock 2 on GoD on Windows the same day as retail release. In the PC world, you are just playing catch-up with Steam and you have a long way to go so you need to focus on the Xbox 360 to make people notice.

Halo: Reach is right around the corner. Obviously the game is going to sell like crazy but it is going up against some pretty heavy hitters this holiday season. You need to offer people as many ways to buy this game as possible and a simultaneous release on Games on Demand needs to be one of them.

If you can do everything that I have listed here then we can talk again in November. Games on Demand has the potential to be the number one channel for people to access video games. But you need to take it one step at a time.

Sincerely yours,

NamelessTed

Tags: Dear Microsoft, Games on Demand

Posted By: NamelessTed

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xino

so basically you don’t want old games on demands but want newier titles:/

Don’t you think that stupid and another stupid @ss generous way to give Microsoft money?
Oh yea I forgot there are lots of idiotic xbots who are so royal to Microsoft and will always give their money to them by buying their bullsh* products!

We want rare titles on demand!
Rare titles cost £100-£400, we can get it on Demand just for £30.

Another way developers make money is by releasing their old games to next gen consoles.
Sonic Adventure on Xbox Live, seriously, who da hell would wanna play for that sh* again?
Sonic Adventure on
*Dreamcast
*PC
*Gamecube

Now they want to release it on Xbox Live, same bullcrap with no improvement? just Achievements and some leaderboard crap.
Don’t forget people who still have their original copies and SEGA did ship TONS of the Dreamcast version.

I want old games that are worth having again, and new games that publishers are not even sending anymore products to game shops.
Reigen

no ofence but releasing games sooner and in beta form rather than later and in gold is quite retarded
and releasing dlc cut out of the game the first week ewen more so

microsoft should just learn to make good 1st party games for a price of 40
and thats it
Dom

I think one of the biggest problems is that the games come out at completely uncompetitive prices. They’re about half the RRP when they’re first released, but in the shops you can often get them much less, meaning GoD seems completely redundant.
Dom

I think one of the biggest problems is that the games come out at completely uncompetitive prices. They’re about half the RRP when they’re first released, but in the shops you can often get them much less, meaning GoD seems completely redundant
Will

So you want new games sold cheaper than retail prices with dlc included? Hell why dont you ask them to wipe your arse while your at it? Try and grasp some understanding of feasibilty before writing article like this.
yojim

Who the hell actually buys game from this Games on Demand bs.
COD2 is on there for like $30. At my local gamestop you can get that for $10 maybe cheaper.
Jorge!

I would really like to see games on demand flourish, as it would benefit developers quite a bit while increasing selection in the games markeplace. That being said, it has to be done in a way that doesn’t undermine the work developers put into extra content. I don’t need the content for free. A discount at purchase is fine, but keep in mind, the revenue from this kind of stuff pays salaries. I think the suitable solution is to offer the games shortly after their release based on how the games are selling in the wild. Games like AC2 and BL are doing well, but are for the most part, passed their initial selling push. I could agree with them being on the GOD serive but they need to be at a discounted rate and come with digital versions of the included content, IE I want a viewer that lets me see a digital version of the instruction booklet and the sleeve. I also think that extra content in the form of art, articles, commentary would be helpful. Ultimately, there needs to be a reason to buy it in digital format as people are still quite fond of having the actual product in hand as it is mush more usable for lending/taking to a friends house etc. (SF4, Tekken 6 are more suitable as physical product because of the nature of head to head competitive gaming)As long as I don’t feel the negative aspects of digital ownership I am all for this, but I want more for less because I KNOW it will be costing the developers less to move the product to me. If we agree to cut out the middleman, there needs to be some sort of incentive.
http://golgotron.com Mr. Hawkins

Wow. Allow me to step around the garbage comments laying around here.

So Games on Demand does little for me as someone who enjoys the physical material involved in purchasing goods, however I see a few ways that would make it relevant to me.

1) Explore creating a game rental service. The demo system is hugely popular on Xbox, so expand on it. Allow games to be rented for MS Points at a reasonable rate, then give me the option to keep it if I like it by paying the difference.

2) Make them competitively priced. Make me think about whether the case, disc, or manual, are worth whatever the difference is between retail an GoD pricing. After a few weeks or a month or so, start keeping a close eye on GameStop’s used game price. Since (somehow) GameStop is selling millions upon millions (upon millions) of used games a year, it’s apparent that people are buying them. Make those people question if it’s worth it to go get upsold and talked down to in order to save a buck or two against GoD on a used disc in a sticker infested case.

3) Compete with your biggest competitors. I’d consider them, in this market specifically, to be GameStop and Amazon. Yeah they don’t have a store built into the Xbox, but they’ll mop the floor with GoD in terms of sales. Amazon gives me free release date delivery (via Prime) and about 10-15% off retail on day one. They also provide pre-order bonuses. GameStop can undersell you after a week or two due to the high influx of trade-ins. Take those factors and position GoD to at least match what they’re doing. Sell new games at launch and get some old classics on there for a no-brainer cost. Sony’s top 10 most sold games on PSN include several hard-to-find PS2 titles.

4) Consider storage constraints. These games take a good while to download and they take up a considerable amount of storage. Instead of charging an ungodly amount for proprietary hard drives enclosures, start selling a DIY kit that comes with a voucher for a GoD game. As well as the Xbox is doing, there’s still no reason not to match what Sony is doing right in having access to PSN games on Amazon and Target and allowing users to swap out their HDDs to allow for better storage.

If all these things happened, I’d have no choice but to look at GoD as something other than a NXE blade I look at for novelty’s sake.
http://golgotron.com Mr. Hawkins

In regards to what Jorge posted, I think the rental system would serve well enough as a system for “lending” a digital copy of a game but one thing I would like to see is something similar to the library feature demoed on the iPad that shows your bookcase of digital titles. This should include your XBLA and GoD purchases, and maybe someday your installed titles from your physical collection.
not a fool

Games on Demand is an excuse for M$ to rape you for every penny. They won’t be happy until they have all the fucking money so they can spend it on whores, drugs, guns and killing little black kids.
CUNTS !!!
http://golgotron.com Mr. Hawkins

Hey it’s that thing I said. Sorta. http://www.joystiq.com/2010/03/18/xbox-360-gaining-usb-storage-support-in-2010-update/
http://golgotron.com NamelessTed

Yeah, I have been reading about the new ability of using the flash drive as storage. They limit it at 16GB though. That is actually more usable storage than the 20GB hard drive which only give you 12GB to work with.

Baby steps I guess. This is very much a step in the right direction.

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