The gaming industry is rife with Micro-transactions and in my eyes there is nothing wrong with the concept of them. However their implementation in certain games has to be called into question. Lets take a look at the popular Xbox One Exclusive title Forza 5. In which some shocking things are being revealed.

To quickly educate the masses, a Micro Transaction is an add on that is purchasable for a game with real world currency, be it cosmetic, upgrades to make you stronger, faster, have more inventory slots etc. These again, fall under two categories, Cosmetic and the highly frowned upon pay to win.

Typically these 'pay to win' games are single player as Multi-player communities very rarely take to a game that is pay to win, why? Well it's simple, nobody minds that someone has bought a cool looking outfit for their character for £5 or unlocked a new single player mission for yourself, its a good way to make money for those games that are free and is a fun way to show your appreciation to the company and the character. 

However certain games are Pay to win, mobile games for example will enable you to buy the level that you are stuck on in order to move on, or buy a stronger gun. Clearly these are a big no no for any game attempting to be skilled based Multi-player as they are "paying to win."

So what is the big deal with Forza 5? Well I'll keep it short so you can form your own opinion but it goes like this.
The game is not free, so before you even install the game and play you have paid £55+ at this moment in time. Now for me I don't ever want to see Micro-Transactions in paid games. In my eyes fun additions like skins, costumes, camos are all fine to be paid for in a free game. However in a paid AAA Title I expect everything to be unlockable through pure playtime.  

Well Forza 5 does that I hear you say, yes you are correct almost every single car bar one or two that are DLC are unlockable though playing the game and earning credits. So whats the deal? Some users don't find these intrusive but for me and many other customers we really dislike seeing 2 options in a paid retail game game to unlock content. When I go to buy a car in Forza it prompts me to buy with credits or cash. I feel pressured buying even with credits, I always have this feeling in the back of my mind that the developer or publisher has an active goal to get people to buy with money.

This theory goes hand in hand with what users of the Xbox One Game are saying. Many reports be it from friends or forum users claim the game has a lot of content missing from the get go and an emphasis is put on those real money transactions. Many are saying that there  is what we call a "grind" to unlock cars. This has and always will be the case though, since the begging of games they have made a way to extend your experience and keep you playing over and over again to earn enough points, credits or stars to move onto the next level. However the experience in Forza is that the extended the grind to much, you would have to put hundreds and hundreds of hours to unlock all the cars.

I honestly believe that companies like this think we are stupid, it is obvious that the pure man hours to unlock the same content as in Forza 4 (its predecessor) has risen. They clearly have a mission to sell those cars and sell lots. Again, I have zero problem with a games company being a business they HAVE to make money, just don't do it in a game that isn't free and where I have already spent $60 on your game, with day 1 DLC being announced and Season passes to rake in more money with content that should have been included on the disc. 

Here I have taken some posts from forums and summed them up to show you customers distaste for the new sequel. 

"Turn 10 says their vision for the new Forza is quality over quantity." 


They have left out many tracks  most surprisingly not included, the Nurburgring . There are just 14 tracks available when its released, with the possibility that more will be added later through paid downloads. They've also pared down the 500 car selection to just 200 cars. 


 NeoGAF users Izayoi states 

" - Half the on-disc cars as compared to Forza 4.
  - Half the on-disc tracks of Forza 4 (The Ring is paid DLC!)
  - New season pass gives you 60 cars at 83 cents each, old season pass gave you 60 cars at 50 cents each.
  - Shamelessly takes the car token system to a new level."

Finally in some shocking revelations their payment is actually flawed and designed to trick users to paying more money. I will admit these have now been corrected as being a "mistake after a patch" but its begs the question would these have been changed by the developer if keen eyed forum users hadn't raised the issue, how many more consumers would be spending more on less.   

You could buy 100 Credits for basically €1 or 575 Credits for €10 ( Their recommended package)  This means you could buy 10 lots of the €1 Package and get 1,000 credits for the price of 575 Credits. Again, this has been corrected but it makes consumers very worried about the fact certain publishers and companies are simply becoming more greedy then ever before. 

To put it bluntly it begs the question why the hell are we paying more then ever for Retail games at launch, with less content, less ambition, less love put into the game. Its turning into a money game rather than a passion project.



- Samuel Fletcher.

http://www.youtube.com/user/VideoFletcher

I felt compelled to start posting on my blog again after I have seen some quite outrages posts, tweets and videos about the new craze to be sweeping the Internet, Live Streaming. Usually I wouldn't post about this but when these channels reach huge audiences with very easily persuaded minds watching them I felt like someone should at least be honest about the new system.

Now before I explain why these posts are moronic let me bore you with a few stats. The live streaming site Twitch is getting more than 44+ million unique viewers per month, with each unique averaging 100 minutes of video per day and with 600,000 unique broadcasts aired each month you can definitely see why people want to stream and want to get a piece of that viewership pie.

However, people seem to be getting so unbelievably confused with what streaming exactly is and why the

"PlayStation 4 stream quality sucks."  

I'll keep it brief and simple. Streaming is taking a source be it gaming etc, encoding it on the fly and sending it to a website that allows you to broadcast it to viewers. This is INCREDIBLY resource intensive, it is one of, if not the most intensive thing you can make your system do and this comes from a gamer, video editor, and casual music maker.  I'll briefly explain how it works so you understand why the Next Generation console complaints seem daft.

You play a game with your CPU/GPU running at maxed, you then as well as a playing a AAA title fully maxed or whatever settings your system can achieve go and ask it to, encode a copy of exactly what your are doing and not encode it into a video format and have it be on your hard drive, but have it encode and be streamed to the internet.  It is like playing a game twice! and in addition to that you can be doing other things such as webcams running, music playing, overlays to make the stream look nicer AND be encoding at more than 30 frames per second to get that smooth look. This again amazingly intensive.  It is so daft that people moan about their quality not being HD when they are quite literally asking their PlayStation 4 to play the game in 1080p and stream in 1080p, if it could do anything near that level of intensity the games would be twice as good looking and we would never hear of articles coming out that say that

"The Next Generation of consoles have issues maintaining 1080p 60 fps"

To put into perspective I run an i5 3570K at 4.3 ghz (Overclocked) and a 3GB 7970 DDR5. This is a pretty high end machine and yet if I try to stream at 720p 60 I can "feel" that I am streaming, my game doesn't feel smooth, it  is less responsive and ultimately I can't perform at the same level when I am not streaming as it hinders how I play. Now If I crank it up the stream to 1080p 30-60 fps the game is basically unplayable, sure I still hit high in game FPS with 50-100, but it feels awful. This is why you see sponsored professional gamers with top, top end systems dropping their graphics quality to push a better quality of stream. You need a CPU that has hyper threading ( i7 Range) or CPU more than 4 cores to be blunt, 4 cores to run the game and the others can do the encoding and even then its a struggle! 

An example would be Starcraft 2, there aren't many people that when streaming use full graphic settings and this game is only optimized for 2 cores, meaning 2 are left to stream which makes it better on lower end systems in my experience.

So how does this relate to the Playstation 4 or Xbox One?

You are asking a console to perform a task that a PC cannot do. It is a ridiculous statement to make. The next generation console don't have the power of my current PC and that struggles, what you are asking to do is for the console to play your games in 1080p 60FPS AND stream. It isn't going to happen without some drawbacks.

You cannot lower graphic settings currently of current generation games on console, so what you see is what you get. It would be nice if the console said, "I am going to lower the graphic settings of Killzone so you can stream in 720p", but the reality is, they just wont. So they have to lower the resolution to 540p so the system can maintain a playable user end experience.

The console also streams at 60fps, which is far more intensive than 30 fps, whether the system can provide an update that allows users to chose their frame rate which will unlock new quality options is yet to be seen, personally I wouldn't wait on it though. For all I know their architecture may only allow people to stream at the frame rate they play, to be honest its a miracle the systems can even stream without any noticeable "it feels jittery and laggy" side effects.

It really annoys me when people post daft YouTube comments like .....
"Man Sony should just update their twitch app"

What does that even mean? Update it so it can? What? Somehow have a better encoder then a dedicated chip like the ELgatoHD. Yes somebody actually moaned that their dedicated streaming device looked better than the PS4. 

Streaming on consoles is a fun aside, a nice way to show your friends your gameplay, but it isn't to be taken seriously. If you want to stream and want HD you need a separate capture card device and a PC to stream that video that the capture card is taking.

To my knowledge the way the console streaming works is it limits the video resolution to 540P which is less than HD and does look bad, but if you a good upload speed (3-5MB+) you can at least get a sharp clear image. If you have good upload be sure to chose the "best" quality, if your upload speed is lower than 2mb, you won't get a good image quality as their isn't enough bandwidth to create create an unpixelated stream.

The fact is consoles are limited by nature, you cant overclock them as you have a standard cooler, games don't have changeable graphic settings to make encoding easier so you have to compromise somewhere to get the streaming feature to work, PlayStation chose resolution while maintaining a high smooth FPS, Xbox one on the other hand might opt for a better resolution but lower frame rate.  But you must see the similarities, both companies have to make compromises as the systems simply aren't powerful enough to stream and play at native 1080p 60FPS. 

Whether the team over at PlayStation learn to program on their system to better utilize thier power and enable you to push HD is for another day but I think its quite ridiculous that uniformed people expect a £350 console to do a job of a £1000 computer.


TLDR 

- Systems have to make comprises to play and stream simultaneously.
- Sony Lowered their max resolution output to 540p to achieve this otherwise games would lag when being played. 
- A lower upload speed results in a lower quality stream.
- Console games have no changeable graphic options so they can't play at lower settings in order to stream at higher resolutions . 
- In the future they may get more out of their system.
- A dedicated media encoder such as the HDPVR or ELGato WILL be better then on-board encoding. FACT.


If you enjoy this or wanted to share the knowledge then be sure to tweet the post around or post to your nearest and dearest. 

MY CHANNEL - http://www.youtube.com/VideoFletcher
MY TWITTER - https://twitter.com/VideoFletcher
MY STREAM - http://www.twitch.tv/ggzii