The problem is the message and how to deliver it, says Patrice Desilets.
“I just think, ‘come on, guys, the future is going to be digital,'” says Patrice Desilets, creator of Assassin’s Creed. “And maybe right now we don’t fully understand it, so we don’t know how to communicate what digital is and how it will actually work.” Which, he says, is a big part of Microsoft’s Xbox One problem; it didn’t need to mention the check-in-every-24-hours deal. The world is going digital whatever the Xbox One ends up doing and, given that, to deliberately invoke a PR disaster by talking up the ways in which the console was apparently locking itself into almost-always online was pointless. “The problem is the message, and how to deliver the message,” says Desilets. “They focused on the wrong stuff.”
Besides, he says, most hardcore gamers will pick up both consoles anyway. Nor will the content be significantly affected by the brave new digital world. “The blockbuster part will not disappear, even if the way we sell it to the gamer will change,” he says. “People will always want that.” But physical retail copies will become – in fact, have become – much less important to the business model. “I can’t be the only one seeing all of these music and game stores closing,” he says. “What’s the reason? People aren’t going to them anymore.” Microsoft was trying something different, and suffered for it, but that doesn’t mean Microsoft was doing the wrong thing. It just means Microsoft was incredibly bad at expressing itself, and lost out as a result.
“In the end,” he concludes, “I think people will buy most games on PSN on PlayStation 4 and Xbox Live on Xbox One.” That’s the way the industry is headed, if it isn’t already there.
Source: Games Industry
