Astronauts co-founder Adrian Chmielarz has written a rather forceful editorial for Edge, in which the former People Can Fly developer defends Microsoft's now-retracted Xbox One game licensing policies, if not the manufacturer's presentation of those policies. "If you care about video games, you must want this model to die," Chmielarz observed bluntly of $60 price points and game trade-ins, arguing that used game sales damage first-hand purchases, and have thus contributed to the popularity of such (controversial) schemes as micro-transactions and "filler" content.



He rebuffed the "myth" that all that's required to spur sales is for developers to make better games, pointing out that acclaimed titles don't always sell what they should, and insisted that "experiments" as to how games are structured, paid for and distributed "can only happen in the digital space. They will not happen at GameStop. GameStop - never was a company named so fittingly - cares only about big expensive games, and used game sales."

"Some may say at this point: but what stops anyone from experimenting with various digital forms right here, right now? " Chmielarz continued. "My answer to that is simple: as long as the retail box is alive, no big publisher can ignore it."

Microsoft's "great idea" with Xbox One's licensing policies was to "accelerate the death of the box", by encouraging players to buy digital - but alas, the manufacturer "went about it like an elephant in a china shop". "There was a great vision hidden somewhere behind it all, but all that people remembered was that waving your hands or speaking loud would change a TV channel," Chmielarz insisted.

"We've all decided it's better to watch the dying animal's painful, slow agony than to fire the bullet," he concluded. "The animal will still die, there is no doubt about it. The current ecosystem is rotten to the core, and unsustainable in the long term. DLC, microtransactions and artificial length extenders will not work forever.

"It's just that there's going to be way more suffering along the way than there needed to be. As long as there is no one playground to focus on and experiment with, the digital revolution will keep being the digital evolution. We're wasting time, and nobody won anything."

Read other reactions to Xbox One's policy reversal here. Suffice to say, not everybody's as miffed as Chmielarz.

Source: Rheena.com