SF Signal: Tray and play???

Tray and play???

So with the next generation of MS Windows (codenamed Longhorn - John list?) and the new XNA development tools, Microsoft is looking to elevate the gaming experience on PCs. To that end they are looking at doing the concept of Tray and Play, where placing a disc in the CD drive will just play much like it does on a console. They even did a demo at he Game Developer Conference.

Another technology they have in mind (it starts on the xbox, but I suspect it's just part of DX10 or some other library that works on Windows systems) is to allow smaller low-dollar purchases. So if you'd like to add 2 more levels you can agree in-game to pay an additional $3 for them. I suspect this works best with xbox-live because they already have your billing info but it is a good idea for overall Windows PCs too.

Of course, this trend could be bad - if you start getting only half a game at $50 and have to pay two or three add-ons to get the full game it would be teh suq. On the other hand, if you only paid say $25 for the game and then could add on if you wanted (in other words, liked the game well enough to pay for more content) then that might be a fantastic approach. I'm happy for the game companies to make a profit, they just need to continue to provide value.

Posted by Scott on Saturday March 12, 2005 at 1:56 PM