No, they looked at a problem and found an utterly despicable way of "solving" it. There is absolutely no technical reason why the terms had to be so anti-consumer. As long as the system has to phone home every time a game is bought or traded, that it enough to keep piracy at the same level it is now. It wasn't design by committee, it was design by greed.
EDIT: Parent has deleted. Originally read:
"This is too bad. These engineers/marketers imagined a world where you don't have to deal with the crappy experience that lost, scratched discs provide, but bent over backwards because a few loudmouths can't imagine a digital future. Sometimes even the customers don't know what they want. These engineers identified a true problem and took a pretty good stab at solving it while juggling a huge number of stakeholders, but marketing's awful communication about this vision for the future puts so much of that work to waste. This is design by the biggest committee."
Anti-consumer? The fact that you could share a game (either on a disc or a digital download) with your family members or the fact that you didn't need to deal with optical media?
This could've been a brilliant console had MS addressed the media a bit more cautiously. Pity that major players still aren't ready for an Online console, while upstarts like Ouya and others will be defining newer experiences that are more suited to the new digital paradigm.
As far as I understand it, other people can log into your console to play the game, or you can log into someone elses console. You cannot lend games to anyone to use on another console without giving them access to your account.
They also places very clear restrictions on selling used games.
There is no reason why these require additional payments or phone home every day. Phone home on activation or trade would have sufficed, and I would have cheered it all the way.
The original plan let you designate 10 accounts that could play any of your games (although only one account plus the main could play a game at once- no buying one copy of Halo and then having all 11 of you get online at once).
The check-in is required in order to remove old games from your account, not to add new games. It's to make sure you still have the license to the game that you're playing. That's far more generous than Valve's "no you can't sell used games ever"
If your friends can play your games at any time, it means that the game is not tied to a disc, it is tied to your account. That makes it more like Steam. How does one sell a used Steam game? The answer (for all current digital services) is that you don't- there is no used market for any game that requires Steam or Origin or any other digital service.
Microsoft wanted to change that. But in order to implement something resembling used games, you have to remove access to the game when someone sells their copy. And the only way to do that is to have the console verify licenses. The easy way to implement that is with a license check every time you start the game. Microsoft tried to be nicer than that by only checking once every 24-hours so you didn't always have to be online.
The once per day is to ensure you still have legitimate access to the game.
The point of restricting used games is that all games are treated as digital downloads, whether they are delivered over the internet or through a disc install.
>There is absolutely no technical reason why the terms had to be so anti-consumer
Yeah, actually, there are plenty.
Step 1: Buy XBONE game.
Step 2: Load it on your console.
Step 3: Loan it to hundreds of friends and they load it on their console.
And now hundreds of people are playing one copy of the game with no way of preventing them from doing so. It would make the "piracy" scene on day one, the worst of any console experience ever, ever.
So how are you going to prevent that without requiring online connections?
You can still play the game without uploading so each game represents 2 copy's. Require an activation code to "load" the game which you can get automatically online or with a phone call. Require someone to unload the game which spits about a 6 digit code before you can upload it again. Make a fast online check to see if anyone registered the game via a partial code on the outside of the box for the used game market.
Don't let the disk play online content while "loaded" on a separate XBOX. Allow someone to declare an Xbox as broken, lost, or stolen.
Or register the game to your account and then be able to share it immediately, wirelessly across the country with 10 "family" members and being able to resell the digital copy.
But noooooo, codes and short codes and registration verification sounds way better. >_<
I guess this is so frustrating for me because I worked on a licensing system and had to deal with the hundreds of little places it could be attacked in ways that aren't obvious if you haven't worked in the problem space before.
That's probably because you were trying to come up with a system this is more restrictive than the traditional physical media system (where you could share or sell a single physical item), but with concessions.
There is a very simple and obvious solution - internet connection required on activation or deactivation (for trade). I have not read a single good argument against this system anywhere.
I dont think you understood what i said. The codes are transparent if someone is connected to the Internet. The reason I added them is to add functionality. Also, I would suggest a pure digital copy shuld probably have more permissive digital lending features as a selling point, but there is no reason not to add them for a "loaded" game.
Just put a code into the game case that allows for discless play, and require an online connection to install the game to the hd and unlock it for discless play. Not rocket science.
>Just put a code into the game case that allows for discless play, and require an online connection to install the game to the hd and unlock it for discless play. Not rocket science
It is rocket science apparently
Person A does what you said and goes on a cruise ship playing the game before giving the disc to Person B.
Person B takes his disc, installs the game with an online connection. The server has no way of telling that Person A is still playing the game on his cruise.
Person B finishes installing, goes to a camping trip before giving the disc to Person C....
Person C installs the game, unplugs the network from the Xbox and gives the disc to Person D...
Person A installs the game. Then goes on a cruise ship, playing the installed game, giving the disc to Person B.
Person B takes the disc and can't install it because the code that came with the game has already been used. If he or she wants to play it without the disc then they need to buy a new code.
Person B plays the game as much as they want then lends the game to Person C. Person B can no longer play the game because they don't have the disc, but Person C can play the game as much as they want.
Except that publishers won't agree to such a deal, meaning that any console implementing such a policy would lose third-party support resulting in significantly decreased sales units, and ultimately billion dollar loses for the console manufacturer.
>If he or she wants to play it without the disc then they need to buy a new code.
From who? A used game code? Or a new one? How is that any different from the rules announced at E3 with no used games?
>Person B plays the game as much as they want then lends the game to Person C. Person B can no longer play the game because they don't have the disc, but Person C can play the game as much as they want.
So the disc is required to play? Like in the new rules?
Disc is required for disc-required play. Code is required for discless play.
They'd buy the code from the people that made the game, of course. If you want to install the game to the console and play it without a disc present then it's trivial to process that through a workflow that requires some sort of purchase.
You can have the best of both worlds if you like.
If it makes it any simpler just think of it as downloaded vs. disc-based games. You can pay to download the game to your console or you can play the game off of a disc. For convenience you could include a free download code in each new game, or even just provide a discount.
And? Some people will take advantage of it, most won't because it's too much of a hassle.
Look at netflix back when it was just a disc-based service. Just get as many DVDs delivered as possible, rip them to your HD and then pop them back in the mail. Some people did that.
Most didn't.
Also, the Xbox One HD is only 500 GB, you can't install quite so many games (delivered on blu-ray) before it gets full.
The difference is that ripping a DVD continues to be a pain in the ass for most people, while "ripping" the game disk will presumably be something the XBox makes seamless.
But the games for the Xbox One MUST be serializable, how else would it know the difference between a install of a disc on one console and another?
Put in disc. Installs to hdd, checks in with MS. Take out disc.
Something stops you just putting that disc in to a mates Xbox One. So obviously they do have something similar to Sony's patent. Or every disc has a unique serial written to the small inner sector of the disc?
Oh, cool. That's very interesting. I curse it because it seems even more insidious and because I can't believe the next gen of consoles is even shipping with an internal optical drive... but I digress. Thanks for the link!
No. That's not true. That's true as of today with the new change. Before, that's absolutely not.
This just goes to prove that most of the ignorant internet rage was from people that didn't bother understanding just how much MS was really giving us with the previous setup.
You can't "phone home" with optical media, it's not serializable.
I'm saying that's the way it should work. Give the user a disc and an activation code. Activation code becomes tied to the account until traded. Problem solved.
> Activation code becomes tied to the account until traded.
So, like: I should be able to just directly say "Give my Halo 5 license to bornhuetter" and then my disc stops working because my console doesn't have a license and yours can then download the digital copy or put the disc in and have it "unlocked" with the license.
I think that could work, still would require an online connection for any NEW games though, which I think MS is trying to avoid rather specifically (the blowback from overseas guys playing consoles, etc)
Let's say you install the game on two consoles. You put console 1 offline, then go online with console 2 and de-activate the license (by reselling, giving, etc. the game). How does console 1 know that the license has been de-activated?
You hit the nail on the head. This is nothing more than innovation being held back by the masses. Allowing customers to share their ENTIRE game library with up to 10 people is extremely generous but all people could see was the 24 hour online check.
It's sad how even ignorance can spread so easily through a mob mentality.
You must admit, 24 hour online check was pretty bad. Also they said that they're removing region restriction on games, which is another thing that people (including myself) were complaining about.
I don't think that the 24 hour online check is/was necessarily a bad thing. In my opinion, it would push technology forward and bring the console industry up to par with the pc gaming industry.
On the other hand, I absolutely agree with you about the region restrictions!
There's no reason that you can't avoid discs. Xbox One will still have the on-demand downloads, just like today, although it seems it'll be for every game.
The rage was over adding "cloud DRM" to purchased discs.
MS most likely had this planned out from the beginning. It's a great way to do PR. Announce something silly, get people talking about your product and not the competition. And when they do, it's on the thing you've decided.
Then, flip it back, destroying the one thing people were praising the competition for. Get bonus points for "listening to the community" and being "flexible".
Now, MS has dominated the press for a while, and removed the "one" big problem with Xbox.
Where is the discussion of how terrible it is that your Xbox that you paid for, running software you buy, on a monthly subscription, is shoving ads all over the UI?
The fact that they change the location of ads so you don't get accustomed to ignoring one part of the screen.
If someone brings that up now, people can respond "it's always something! MS made a big change and went against publishers, but you just want to complain".
Just like when VS 2012 launched with the shitty 1-bit icons and arbitrary casing everywhere. People complaining about "THE MENU YELLS" focused the conversation on that one thing. Then for RTM? "OK we listened and all caps are optional, can we stop complaining now?"
It's a possibly risky, but great way to control the conversation.
Honestly, a PC with Steam, and XBox 360 controller, and an HDMI cable is all I really need. I've moved to doing that pretty exclusively and it works wonderfully. Bonus, I don't have to re-purchase games to play them on my laptop or in my office.
Where is the Steam Box? I would pay Valve $800 if it guarantees 1080p@60 games for several years. Both the XBox One and PS4 likely do not have enough power to do that for most games.
Most people didn't realize that MS was pushing the envelope with their purported "Cloud processing tech", which was supposed to be based on Remote processing of a few threads (A.I., Physics, etc) and even had a new programming paradigm for it (based on prioritized threads that could be processed either locally or remotely)
As someone who has done game development (no longer though), I can tell you absolutely nobody is going to do AI or Physics through Microsoft's cloud infrastructure. Absolutely nobody. Never was, and never will. It doesn't make sense.
BS. It's possible to deal with the issues you mentioned and not screw your customers over. Even if it's not, it's still perfectly valid to be vocal about it.
Digital futures are fine. But I don't think a company like MS fully understands what it takes to provide a digital future that is an adequate replacement for physical media based games.
Valve has most or all of it figured out. Digital delivery. Easy downloads. Lower prices. Embracing indie games. Discounts on bulk purchases. And so forth.
Steam games have a lot of the same limitations that the xbox one would have had but you don't see nearly as many people complaining about that. And that's because of all of the things listed above.
There are tons of console games that I and many of my friends have grown to love which started off as borrowed games. And that's, I think, how it should be, the same as books. I don't think Steam is the perfect answer for all of time but the fact that you can acquire games at effectively used prices or lower (sometimes $15 or even $5 for a AAA title or even as little as one or two dollars for an indie game) significantly blunt the problems of reduced lending opportunities.
P.S. For clarity I'm saying that being allowed to lend and borrow games is a huge benefit to game makers because it is a very potent way of increasing the fan base. How many people borrowed someone else's copy of Harry Potter and then went on to buy hardback copies of subsequent books as they came out and watched the movies and so forth? The same phenomenon works just as potently with games. There are several people I know who are fans of the Mass Effect series who might not have been if they couldn't have borrowed the game that first time.
With art the best salesman is the thing itself. That's how radio works. That's how museums work. And libraries. How do you convince someone they like Manet or Picasso or The Fiery Furnaces or Gershwin or Raymond Chandler or HP Lovecraft or Katamari Damacy or The Last of Us? There is no possible way to adequately describe such works in words alone. The only possible way to determine if one likes such things is to experience it first hand. And that is why "piracy", even in its most extreme forms, is never going to be as much of a threat to makers as some people believe. "Consuming" art makes fans, and fans with money will spend their money to acquire art by artists they enjoy, whether it's games, concerts, movies, albums, and so forth.
