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Xbox One: No Always-Online Requirement, But Needs To Phone Home
An anonymous reader writes "The Xbox One was revealed earlier, and Kotaku was able to get some answers about the always-online rumors that plagued the console before its announcement. Microsoft VP Phil Harrison said Xbox One doesn't need a constant connection in order to play games, and you won't be dropped from single-player games if your connection cuts out. However, it does require check-ins with Microsoft servers. This echoes the Xbox One FAQ, which cryptically says, "No, it does not have to be always connected, but Xbox One does require a connection to the Internet." The number Harrison gave was once every 24 hours, but Microsoft's PR department was quick to say that was just one potential scenario, not a certainty. Microsoft also provided half-answers about how used games and game sharing would work. Players will be able to take a game to a friend's house and play it (using their profile, at least). Players will also have some mechanism to trade and sell used games, but it's not yet clear exactly how it would work. If one player uses a disc to install a game on their Xbox One, then gives the disc to a friend, the friend will be able to install it, but needs to pay full price to play it. That scenario, however, assumes both players want to own the game — the second one would essentially be a unique copy. Microsoft said they have a plan for trading used games, which would involve deactivating the game on the original owner's console, but they aren't willing to elaborate yet."
Several publications have hands-on reports with the new hardware: Engadget, Ars Technica, Gizmodo.
Xbox One includes and requires Kinect. This means that each Xbox One has an internet connected camera. In every living room, dorm room and bed room where someone places an Xbox One http://windowsitpro.com/blog/csi-effect-not-everyone-wants-kinect-camera-their-living-room
The games do not require an always-on internet connection, provided that the user first supplies a blood sample and a retinal scan and wears a special microchip implanted in his/her skin. The special microchip must always be within contact of a wifi connection, and not doing so voids the warranty on your XBox. You are free to sell used games to your friends, but after doing so, you are required to provide their name and address to Microsoft so that they can hunt them down and kill them and destroy the existing copy of the game.
http://i.imgur.com/inXnRfO.png
Sony's stock jumps 9% during Xbox One announcement.
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Steam has been reported to work offline for weeks at a time. If the Xbox One really can't stay in offline mode for more than 24 hours, it just makes the Steam Box that much more likely to succeed.
So if you have to install games to your Xbox ZERO or "deactivate" them to sell them, why bother with a console at all, just get a PC...
If Microsoft want to make a home media device for use in people's main living rooms, that's fine. It's actually quite a good idea. But such a device cannot be principally viewed as a games console.
I don't know about the rest of you, but aside from the occasional multiplayer split screen session, I play console games on a dedicated screen, either in a bedroom or computer room. I cannot play a game in a main living room, on a screen which in in demand by others for watching TV, films, or even browsing the internet. It's nice that this device can do so much, but flipping "channels" to whatever everyone else wants to watch is not conducive to the 4-6 hour gaming sessions I would like to have.
Maybe they're going for the complete casual gaming market here, people who will flick over to Angry Birds or whatever. But even the most passé of run-of-the-mill gamers is going to spend an hour or so playing shooters online, and are not going to be inclined to flip over to daytime TV, or browse the web in the middle of their frag session. I just cannot see this working en masse.
Some may call it anti-social, but to me playing video games is closer to reading a book than watching TV; it's principally an individual experience, and the living room is not the place to have it unless you are specifically playing co-op. I don't think Microsoft are serious about the Xbox One as a gaming console. It appears to be principally oriented around completely orthogonal capabilities.
May the Maths Be with you!
What's the real price going to be? You know, the one after you factor in whatever they're charging for Xbox Live this time around, in order to do what every other system on the planet lets you do for free. If they expect me to pay them for multiplayer gaming this time around, they're living in a fantasy land.
This unveiling was so vague and missing information that it's truly impressive. It's like Microsoft knows their answers are going to piss people off, so they're just avoiding giving details at all.
TBH the entire presentation was highly unimpressive. The people listening were core gamers, and Microsoft totally ignored them in favor of "hey look at Kinect moving the TV window around and bringing up a browser!"
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
you can make more money by being evil and doing stuff like this?
There was news that the new console will be able to sell your used games on the Xbox One.
I think the reason is Microsoft just wants to kill the secondhand market and gamestop and take money for themselves. I bet it's gonna be revealed and clarified that you can sell your license to the game on their marketplace and you earn a certain percentage (if they were nice it would be high like at least 70% but who knows) and you can only put that money back into the Xbox marketplace for a new game or whatever.
To stay on topic, I bet this is why it requires always online, license checking. If you sell your game but never go back online then you can have your cake and eat it too.
Maybe before we rush to adopt a camera in every living room we should stop to consider the consequences of blithely giving this technology such a central position in our lives.
Anyone remember that EA bullshit about SimCity needed to "offload" some of it's processing (which was proven false by a hacker later)? Well, one of the things they mentioned specifically at the announcement yesterday was that the Xbox One would feature this capability (they bragged as if it was a good thing). And with them highlighting EA as a partner, you can bet you'll see plenty of One games that require always-online connections, to connect to EA servers for "processing."
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
The NES and SNES aren't so innocent since they still had the form of DRM known as region locking. The PAL/NTSC limitation is complete bullshit when the digital game ROM has no analog video signalling components.
At least my old games still work on those old consoles. The future is pretty bleak as to the longevity of current games with activation servers going offline after they become an expense. Cracking teams are our only hope of preserving our gaming history.
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Well, looks like developers finally found a way to drive GameStop and its ilk out of business. First they made it impossible to sell used PC games, now they've finally come for the used console games too.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
I tell you what I don't want: an Xbox One.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Yes, it will. People will still buy millions of these. The minor segment of population who actually cares about DRM/privacy will buy one too because everyone else has one.
Why can't you just buy it, and own it, and use it how you like? Or... not buy the damn thing. It's supposed to be entertainment, not work, not some sort of interactive customer experience with Microsoft.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Sony's stock jumps 9% during Xbox One announcement.
From
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-21/sony-jumps-on-report-company-weighs-entertainment-spinoff.html
Sony Corp. (6758) rose as much as 9.2 percent in the U.S after Japan’s Nikkei newspaper reported the company is “leaning toward” spinning off its entertainment division.
What, you mean you don't want your console to put an annoying kludgy overlay on top of your cable box?!?!?!? Don't you want your living room filled with the magic of MS ads?!?!?!?
You people are so ungrateful. Here MS is kind enough to allow you to pay $50 a year for the privilege of paying Netflix $8 a month to watch movies, and THIS is how you repay them?! Ingrates!
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
I think Microsoft is starting a trend that Sony and Nintendo will continue as the market is ready for this. As consumers we've been programmed to accept that you can't trade anything digital. Buying anything on itunes, google play, or steam is a one time purchase, can't trade or even give away. Kindle lets you loan books - if the publisher allows - for a single short period. Get a book loaned to you but something comes up and can't read it in that window? Oh well out of luck!
Unfortunately, million and millions of brainwashed masses will buy one; maybe even two. Nobody cares about privacy and the like anymore. I collected about a dozen or so links to real facts about Skype and the backdoors for Law Enforcement etc, and posted on many topics, nobody cares man. In fact they will attack you textually. They could announce right now that in order to use the Xbox One, you need an Always-on camera and a full time connection to a monitoring dept.; it would sell like hotcakes.
I've come to the conclusion that there is no hope for Humans and they completely ruin it for people who DO care about their privacy and other matters. So just let them have their fun and in the end it will bite them in the ass.
I haven't read up on it but I would guess it is for the same reasoning. For Directv it was because if you weren't hooked up you couldn't use the PPV and some other pay as you go options. Being specific about why just ads confusion when dealing with millions of people, so they blanket it and say you need to be connected either by phone in the old days, or internet at all times whether you care about these things or not. Not ever doing PPV I've not cared and have technically broken their rules by not being connected to them for 15 years and it still does everything I want. My guess for the XBox is they want to be able to keep current on what their offerings from a TV aspect are. You may get annoying messages, but I doubt it'll be come unusuable as a whole if you don't connect. That would be a nightmare for them.
In a time of global recession M$ decided to release their new platform burdened to the hilt with DRM? Wow - that's not so much shooting yourself in the foot as sticking a live grenade into your boot. Sales of this are gonna tank and they're going to be forced into a Win8 style climbdown.
Also, what happens if the authentication servers go down? My old house the internet connection would drop to virtually useless for days at a time due to Virgin's shoddy infrastructure and the 360 was the only thing left to use. If it has to dial home every day then that's pretty damn useless.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
More accurately, it is easy to see how to make money being evil and doing stuff like this. When was the last time you saw customers actually reject an evil product? We, the consumers, make evil the low-risk option.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(just like with the PS4 and pretty much any other major console).
FTFY, I'm pretty sure you didn't intend to lump the indi consoles like Ouya and game stick in with the big guys. I hate to make a "This is the year of" prediction, but I think some of the casual consoles will pick up a bit of steam with the crap Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo are putting out.
Of course PC still reigns supreme in any case, especially with gaming becoming more common on Linux boxes.
I think I may go back to PC gaming this generation. Those games are loaded with DRM too, but at least the games are cheap and developers are upfront about restrictions. I just really hate to go back to chasing that upgrade dragon.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
No, not happening. The last update I took on my current Xbox changed the screen the awful thing it is now, and introduced ads -- both in games and in the home screen. That's why my current Xbox isn't connected to the network and never will be again.
I will connect it to the network when and if I choose, but if it requires the ability to call home once/day, it's simply not happening.
Microsoft may have visions of this being my entertainment center of the future, but it won't be. And if it is going to require this ability to connect to the internet at will (and from the sounds of it when I even have it turned off due to this low power napping), then this is a non-starter for me.
Microsoft needs to clarify some of this, because the chances of me replacing my current Xbox 360 with something which demands it be able to access the internet when it chooses is pretty much zero.
I don't care about the TV integration, I don't care about the skype integration, I don't care about the web integration, I don't care about enhanced sports watching ... I care about one thing, single player games with no internet requirement. This isn't it.
Now I'm more likely to buy another XBox360 as a spare so I can keep playing the games I have now, but I won't be buying this.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The PAL/NTSC limitation is complete bullshit when the digital game ROM has no analog video signalling components.
I'm not sure about NES, but PAL and NTSC Commodore 64 have different clock speeds and the vertcal blank is at different frequencies, so on some games the timing is wrong or some video tricks aren't working.
"Where should I screw our customers today?"
How about making a straight forward good old console. Why do we need to have all consoles internet active and DRM locked, what ever happened to the rocking systems like the NES ans SNSES?
If you ever saw that stupid blinking red light when trying to boot a game, you encountered a DRM-related problem on your NES.
Whenever the NES boots, its internal CIC (authentication) chip tries to do a handshake with the matching CIC chip in the cartridge. If it fails, then it goes into an endless reboot cycle (that blinking red light. This process is very sensitive to dirt or other contaminants on the connectors. Making matters worse, instead of using a standard card edge connector, they used a weird ZIF-like connector which was very unreliable. This was for marketing reasons, because they didn't want it to look like a game console (these had a bad reputation after the 1983 video game crash).
This DRM was aimed at unlicensed publishers, but it often affected end users as collateral damage. Nintendo wanted a cut of third-party game sales, and was also concerned that a flood of crappy third-party titles had helped precipitate the 1983 crash.
The game data itself was, fortunately, not encrypted in any way – they figured that the cartridge form factor would be enough to deter casual copying, and for the most part they were right.
The original Japanese Famicom didn't have any of this crap, and neither did the top-loading NES that was released in the early 1990s.
The problem is that when I pull out my old PSOne I can put the disk in and sit down and play a game without any issues where as with the newer consoles if you have online activation the life cycle of that game is tired to the activation servers which might be turned off a year after the game came out. Since a lot of people that grew up with the NES, SNES, and similar systems are now having children of their own, they can sit down with their kids and introduce them to a game that they enjoyed as a child. Will the children that grew up with the Xbox One be able to do the same thing? For that matter, a year or two after you played a game would you even still be able to play it if you wanted to?
My guess is that Microsoft is Angry that other companies are making money off the Internet and that they plan on putting a stop to that. This box will probably do its damnedest to charge people to access Netflix, Hulu, and the like. I am also willing to bet that MS is looking at the catastrophic failure of the Wii U with relief as it won't be a competitor instead of the correct way which is in sheer terror that it foretells their own fate if they don't get this perfectly right.
I am not looking forward to the new XBOX that much. My timeline for buying one will be around 2015 and getting a used one. There is a long list of games for my existing XBOX to keep me amused for quite some time. I am looking forward to whatever Valve comes up with and every now and then amuse myself with something on one of my mobile devices.
And there lies the rub. MS probably thinks they are going to do battle with the PS4. I bet their charts don't really show how shattered the whole market is. Does MS realize that one of their competitors is Netflix? The gaming market is part of a larger market called entertainment. People have an entertainment budget and will spend it on different things of which console gaming is just one possible thing. This is something the movie and TV industries have learned the hard way when console gaming vastly reduced people's appetite/budget for network television and movies.
So as MS realizes that people want to do other things with their money and Televisions I suspect that MS will pathetically try to position their console in between people and what they want in order to collect some rent. I love when companies pull this sort of stunt because I always enjoy the show when fantasy crashes into and is steamrolled by reality.
Get a Wii U, then you can play on the main TV and allow others to watch TV without interrupting your session.
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
If you buy the game on day one for 60 Euros, do you really think you'll get 70% off it three months later when you can pick it up 10?
It's not about making money by killing gamestop, it's about vendor lock-in.
That's the whole Microsoft business model. That's how they keep corporate clients, that's how they've built Windows 8 and the the whole Office suite. Etc etc etc.
The reason they're not releasing any details, is because they're testing the water, looking to see how people react.
Microsoft is completely stupid by doing that. If I cant loan a friend the game, then I'll support all hackers from cracking their system and pirating the hell out of the games.
Microsoft deserves to lose big time for this, as well as all game devs that support such a platform.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
So we get a $500 voice activated remote for the tv. Cool.
Don't really want one.
On the other hand, for those gamers that detest the controller and only game on the PC... why on earth not install a keyboard option? Or are a few million more customers not worth it? I would think that even if the keyboard was proprietary they'd increase sales by a huge margin.
The most annoying thing on the planet is typing on a console/smart phone/tablet keyboard.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
First, one of the prized features of the Xbox platform is the Xbox Live services. You know, those services that match you up in games with friends and offers social and multimedia feature. YOU KNOW, the service that requires an internet connection.
This might be a fair point if we had a better idea of how many Xbox 360 owners never connect to the internet or are connected but only have the Silver accounts. There are a lot of people out there that only play single player games which means that most of the features that a Gold subscription account offers are completely useless.
Second, pick up ANY smartphone or tablet and realize these devices are constantly online. You may not need to be online to play, but the online services are there in the background making sure your Tweets and Facebook followers are aware of what you are up to and you are kept informed of the world.
True in the case of the smart phone but not so much in the case of the tablet even though the use case might be much smaller for those tablets that aren't online. However, not everyone has Twitter or Facebook running in the background all of the time or even wants people to know what they are doing. A lot of people don't care what their friends "Angry Birds" score is nor do they want to go out there and tell people about theirs. Also, there is a big jump from a smart phone or tablet that is online to a camera and microphone in your living room that is always online. There are major security implications that bear consideration. You can't put an attractive target like that in someones living room without hackers and other such folks wanting to crack it.
I know that in that RARE circumstance where there might be an internet outage or you take your Xbox One to the cottage and want to play some games on a rainy day might be a bummer if the game won't let you on because it can't phone home, but I doubt that will be an issue for most people out there.
Rare for some people, not so rare for others. But what's the point in buying an entertainment device if it can't entertain you when you actually want to be entertained. This is the whole reason that DVRs and time shifting shows became popular - the consumer of the entertainment wants to dictate when, where, and how they are entertained. The device itself should not be the one driving that decision.
To many people, to many it isn't something we use.
Neither my tablet nor my smart phone have data plans. They get wifi turned on and used as needed. So your assertion that ANY of these devices is always connected is bullshit and anecdotal. I don't use Twitter, and I sure as hell wouldn't let Facebook onto my phone.
My current Xbox 360 doesn't connect to the network now, and a replacement one definitely won't be connecting to the internet.
There's not a single on-line feature about the Xbox I have any interest in. I don't play on-line games, and I never have. My XBox doesn't even know any information about my wifi and has no network cable running to it.
You may use these features, and you may actually believe that 99% of all people use them as well, but of the people I know who own Xboxes, about 80% of them don't use the networking feature, and aren't connected to XBox Live. So, for me and my friends, this is a major enough change that most of us probably aren't interested.
I'm more likely to buy a spare XBox 360 than this. What you consider rare and improbable is what I consider the normal use case for it. I'm sure Microsoft won't have their feelings hurt if I don't buy this, because I'm just one guy.
But that doesn't change the fact that I won't be buying this. Because contrary to what you believe, not everyone currently does connect to XBox Live or use the network features.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
There is a demand for a connected experience.
There is also a demand for an isolated experience. Any console that doesn't provide it will not get my money.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
First, one of the prized features of the Xbox platform is the Xbox Live services.
One of the prized features of the Xbox platform is playing games. Anything that gets in the way of this feature is a bad thing.
a feature that, guess what, you have been supporting for the lat 8 years anyways everytime you turn on the Xbox360 and its signs you into the Live cloud.
Has never happened, will never happen.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I just really hate to go back to chasing that upgrade dragon.
As someone who just got back into PC gaming about five years ago, I can say that that doesn't seem to be as much of an issue any more. My rig was pretty awesome when I first put it together (though not that expensive), and I can still play any new games with all of the settings maxed out. If that trend continues for another couple of years, it's easily in the realm of console lifetimes.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Agreed, I read the article about required internet connection and people post things at the bottom saying that's if you can read the article then you can surely connect your XBOX every 24 hours, and let the nerd tears flow! These people have obviously never lost a internet connection before, I have had my cable connection down for over a week once, and the cable company could not figure it out for that long, I also go on vacation to a beach house that has no Internet and also other remote places, and I bring my console to keep me sane. These people either do not think of these issue because they are to young and spoiled, or are just trolling. I also worry about the constantly connected camera, and even thou you can throw something over the lens, the mic would always be on, even if Microsoft did not abuse this, it does not mean some hacker wont. I will not let a camera sit in my living room constantly on, connected to the internet, period!
This mentality is not just about the Xbox, I was just arguing the other day that I was upset that allot of the new Android tablets had no SD card slot, and also everyone responded that you can use the cloud to stream all your audio and video! so why would you need more local storage, WTF? I even have a unlimited 4G wifi puck that I carry around and I can not stream video in all places I might want to watch it, and imagine if everyone wanted to stream HD video via the cell phone network all the time. I was also just arguing with Amazon.com the other day because I accidently 1-clicked a digital video and bought it, even thou I have 1-click turned off in my settings, the guy at Amazon told me that 1-click was always on for digital purchases, because its digital, and is bought right away (like that makes any sense) and then when I explained that I was just trying to get to a screen that explained if I could download a copy of the video, he asked my why I would ever need a local copy, when you can just stream it!
This cloud mentality is scary, if you ever lose your internet (cable) connection you will have nothing to do at all I guess, no games, no movies, nothing.
I just really hate to go back to chasing that upgrade dragon.
Well then you're in luck, because keeping a gaming PC capable of playing the latest games is less painful than it has ever been. Mid-grade CPUs and motherboards from 3-5 years ago are still perfectly capable of running any new game. Ram and HDDs are dirt cheap. The only thing you'll be sinking much money into is most likely a graphics card, and even that isn't too bad if you shop carefully. Usually the best value is a current-gen mid-grade card that you can pick up for $150-200, and you won't need to upgrade it more than about every 2-3 years. And this situation is only going to keep getting better.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Ground pin 5 on the 10-nes to 'jailbreak" your NES
GENERATION 24: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
Once you add the need to stay connected, you have to control copying (Otherwise people could just burn DVDs or Torrent the game and apply a patch to unlock DLC content). You have to enforce updates (so everyone is on the same page with patches and content updates). You have to protect the console, otherwise why would a company like EA spend bazillions creating the best games for a platform that doesn't stop hacking or copying?
For games that are inherently multilayer that's all well and good but they already solved for that problem years ago with the install keys. Each game gets a unique key and you keep a database of the ones that have been issued already. If an unknown key shows up you ban it and if the same key connects from two different IP addresses you ban it as well. Diablo II and Starcraft used that system for years without much problem.
Also, the number of people that are running around and pirating the AAA games likely isn't enough to for amount of hassle that your customers are going through to just play a game. If I spend $60 for a game I should be able to just sit down, install it, and start playing with a minimal of fuss. If it's a single player game I should be able to pull out a laptop on an airplane and play the game. If the game is muli-player I either know what I'm getting into ahead of time when I buy the game or I just don't buy it.
I would love to see a reference to this claim, because I think it is too good to be even close to true.
Basically this would not kill the secondhand market, instead it would streamline it. Yes this would probably kill (or at least maim) Gamestop, but that would be because this would eat their lunch.
Using the marketplace to sell used games, for a presumably lower price than new or then what is the point, would be great. Currently you have to either deal with a practically not worth it system via Gamestop (used games sold for $5 off the cost of a new game and the seller getting a pittance) or deal with a potentially shady character off of craigslist and deal with the hassle of setting up a meeting time and place (or wait for something in the mail from ebay, etc.) with no real recourse if the disc doesn't work.
This solution would have no downside. You can buy the game for less than the cost of new (or again whats the point) for a digitally identical product (no worrying about does it actually work) and do it instantly from your living room. For the seller, as long as they get a reasonable percentage of the sales price then they are already ahead of where they would be with Gamestop. It is possible that the seller would not get as much of a return as they would by selling via Craigslist or via eBay, but they would also have less overhead (no mailing, meeting, etc.). Plus I think more people would actually enter into the used game sales market (both buyers and sellers) if this system were in place because it reduces the transactional friction.
All of these things would be great for the consumers and for MSFT, but the one group that would see this as a travesty are the publishers. There is absolutely no way they would support a system that actually made second hand sales easier. For this reason alone I cannot believe there is any way that this rumor is true. Although I would never have been so happy to be proven wrong.
And what about the secondhand market ten years later, after the Xbox Too is released? Will they decide at some point to drop whatever authorization server is needed to play the game disc you have? Will it even become impossible at some point to register new-old-stock shrink-wrapped games? Will there come a time when you can't even take it down out of the attic, dust it off, and play the games you bought 20 years earlier? What, you think still having an Xbox account will help? Just try to see what you can do online with the original Xbox now, and imagine what it would be like if DRM activation was a requirement.
So the hell with the regular secondhand market, what about the retro secondhand market? After all, old consoles and their enormous library of games (even if you don't consider emulation) have to be a major competitor to newer game systems. Oh sure, they won't have this year's NFL roster for the people who do nothing but play the annual sports games, but those games are worth zilch two years later anyhow. It's the games people grew up on and want to play again and again that can hurt the market for new games, so let's nip that in the bud while we (MS, Sony, etc.) still can.
So just throw away that N64 already. If we think you deserve to get some Goldeneye nostalgia, we'll see about letting you rent it for a few years on our newest hardware.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Those games are loaded with DRM too, but at least the games are cheap and developers are upfront about restrictions.
You mean upfront about the hidden rootkits they put on your PC to protect their IP while creating stability issues for your system? I've had to actively search forums and customer reviews to find out about such hidden DRM, it wasn't like the publisher put a big label on the box announcing what they were doing. At best, it might be in the fine print.
In an interview with Kotaku, Phil Harrison, a MS VP, stated the following:
"The bits that are on that disc, you can give it to your friend and they can install it on an Xbox One," he said. "They would then have to purchase the right to play that game through Xbox Live."
"They would be paying the same price we paid, or less?" we asked.
"Letâ(TM)s assume itâ(TM)s a new game, so the answer is yes, it will be the same price," Harrison said."
Yes, that's right, you can't sell your used games because they'll end up costing the person you sell it to full price anyway. Want to lend a game to a friend? Sorry, full price. Want to bring it over to their house to play? Sorry, full price.
Disgusting.
Depends who you talk to, and when you talk to them. For instance, most times your boss might go "Recession? What recession?" if you ask them about it. But when it comes time for performance and compensation reviews, "We cannot offer you as much because we're in a recession".
I sell a game to them for $10 while they sell it back for $40. Makes sense they're in business but its not even a 50% cut for the customer. If MS gives the user at least 70% or higher, that'll be good.
RTFA
Another piece of clarification around playing games at a friend’s house – should you choose to play your game at your friend’s house, there is no fee to play that game while you are signed in to your profile.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
I think I may go back to PC gaming this generation. Those games are loaded with DRM too, but at least the games are cheap and developers are upfront about restrictions.
I mostly buy games DRM-free on GOG.com these days. A lot of new indie games go there, and there are plenty of older games still worth playing.
I just really hate to go back to chasing that upgrade dragon.
Fortunately most games are crippled for the console market, so a cheap old PC is capable of running them at medium to high settings. That may change for a year or two when the new consoles come out, but this one appears to be significantly less powerful than a high-end PC.
Philosophically i dont give a shit what most people are willing to accept. Full national wiretaps is absolutely 100% ILLEGAL.
Good-bye
http://www.xkcd.com/1215/ :)
When has the average consumer ever cared about DRM? People have gotten upset about an "always on" requirement, but DRM without that has proven marketable.
I suspect there will be a lot of variation between individual games in what the requirements are - just like Steam.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
GoG is by far the best and easiest way to get old PC games, because they work out the emulation and such for you. There are still people who sell boxed copies of old games for more than GoG prices, but that's mostly the collectors aspect, I suspect.
Given a good online service to buy old console games cheap - like GoG (and to a limited extent Steam) provides on the PC - why would a second-hand store be needed?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
... except that you can, have been able to for years, and tons of people *have* made Xbox 360 games and published them online. They're even distributed on Xbox Live, under the completely sneaky and unexpected name of Xbox Live Indie Games. http://xbox.create.msdn.com/en-US
There are catches, of course: the online publication requires a $100/year account, and the games can only be developed using XNA (which is a quite nice framework but produces CIL assemblies, not native code). The tradeoffs are at least a modicum of curation of the store content and an architecture independence that should (don't know if this has been announced) allow running XBLIG, unmodified, on the Xbox One even though it runs on a different architecture than the 360.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Exactly. I built a not-all-that-expensive system back in 2009 that I'm still easily playing games with on high graphics settings. I'm just now getting that upgrade itch, but it's not entirely necessary even at this point. Though, I'm that type that I don't absolutely need the highest possible settings to enjoy the game.