Bleszinski says disc-based market 'crumbling'

Former Epic Games design director Cliff Bleszinski believes the disc-based console market is falling apart in favor of free-to-play games and microtransaction-enabled titles.

"Newsflash. This is why you're seeing free-to-play and microtransactions everywhere," Bleszinski said on Twitter. "The disc-based day-one $60 model is crumbling."

Xbox executive Phil Spencer offered a different sentiment recently, saying that the disc-based market is "really important" for the Xbox One and that the retail market will remain a major component of Microsoft's business strategy moving forward.

Bleszinski's comments came as a punctuation of a message about another industry hot topic: used games. He said AAA games and the secondhand/rental market cannot coexist due to ballooning development budgets.

"You cannot have game and marketing budgets this high while also having used and rental games existing," Bleszinski said. "The numbers do NOT work people."

"The visual fidelity and feature sets we expect from games now come with sky high costs. Assassin's Creed games are made by thousands of devs," he added.

Ubisoft has eight studios working on Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag.

The Xbox One supports used games as a platform, though decisions about allowing secondhand titles will be left up to publishers. Sony's PlayStation 4, on the other hand, will not feature any "gating restrictions" at all for software.