Seeing a lot of chatter on here about ownership, used games, and Microsoft. Since I missed the Xbox conference - and my time is limited - can someone give me a quick synopsis? I buy a lot of used games, so all the talk has me concerned... Thanks!

Here's the deal:

You can buy and sell used games from specific participating retailers, and that is only if the publisher does not prohibit used sales. A publisher can decide to disallow used games, in which case you can't do it anywhere.

If you want to sell to or give a game to a friend, they have to be on your friends list for 30 days, and the transfer is final. They can't then sell or give it to someone else.

You cannot rent games anymore either.

But let's be honest, who here buys games from their friends? It's rare. The vast majority of used game sales are either at retail stores or ebay. Well, ebay is out of the question now, since you'd have to friend the person then undergo the 30 day waiting period. We're buying a game, not a goddamn gun.

So the only realistic scenario is buying from a participating retailer. I have no idea what the terms of participation are, but they have to be something.

Then at Sony's presentation, they said in completely clear terms that you can do whatever you want with your game disc. Lend it, sell it, rent it, etc, and that the PS4 does not need to be connected or check in every 24 hrs to function.

Cue standing ovation and the nail in the coffin. It's clear people care about this stuff.

- As it stands now the Xbone treats games you buy as disks and games you buy straight as digital downloads exactly the same. Both need to be installed on your Xbone, buying a disc at a store will just let you install faster.

- Microsoft is giving you a lot of new and decent things you can do with your game, no matter how you bought them. The big two are you can play any game you own on any Xbone as long as you sign in on it. You'd have to redownlaod the game if you didn't bring your disk (or never had one because you bought it straight digital) but thats an improvement from forgetting to bring a disk and not being able to play. You can also let 10 of your friends play any game you own as long as you aren't playing it at the same time. Despite everything else, these are cool things.

- Unfortunately, Microsoft is also putting on new restrictions. If I understand it right you can sell a game only once. This will cut into the used game market. Worse to sell a game you can't just take a $20 from your friend and give him the disk, you have to sell games through a reseller that has access to Microsoft's used game database. Worse still, Microsoft has allowed developers to charge users an additional activation fee on top of whatever the reseller prices a game as. This lets the reseller get a cut of the action where before they got nothing out of the used games market. Developers don't have to charge this fee however.

- To make all this work, tracking which games you own, tracking which games which Xbone can currently play, tracking which games your friends have access to, and tracking which games are being resold, Microsoft requires your Xbone to check in once a day or else it will not play any games, disk or no disk, period. And if you or your friend are playing a game on an Xbone you don't own the Xbone must check in once an hour or else it disallows the playing of games a friend owns.

All in all if you have a good connection these pluses and minuses are, in my opinion, mostly a wash. You get new privileges in exchange for new restrictions. However the Xbone doesn't exist in a vacuum. Things like LAN parties, or visiting a friend for a weekend might be made more difficult if you can't connect each Xbone to the internet once a hour / day. Microsoft is trying to vastly limit and crush the game reselling market. And to make matters worse, their main rival Sony has now pubically stated that they will have none of these restrictions. A PS4 does not stop working if it doesn't check in. PS4 disk based games (presumably not games you get straight online) can be bought and sold the same as always with no one taking a cut or limiting the number or times a game can be sold. And to top it off the PS4 will start out $100 cheaper than the Xbone…

* All information is to the best of my knowledge. Errors may have been made… though I don't think so. :)

Thank you both for taking the time to respond so thoroughly. With all that tracking, it sounds like Microsoft designed the new Xbone with the help of the NSA...

I actually question whether Ownership is the best model for video games, but that's a lengthy discussion where I haven't gotten all my thoughts straight yet. Either way, the xbone is mostly just a mockery of the current system, with all the downsides of ownership (high cost of entrance, reliance on first 2 months of sales, reliance on retail), with none of the upsides (owner control of media, lending, sharing, etc) as far as I can see.

Now I am pretty upset about the XBone also, so this is not a defense, merely a call for some reason in the gaming community. Everyone seems to have missed (or ignored) the fact that all games are digital on the XBone. Buying a game disk is like buying a PC game from Amazon nowadays. You at most get a disk in the mail, install it, and activated it in Steam for a large percentage of games, or in Origin for a smaller percentage. Whether this is preferable or not should apparently be the issue we get upset about if we're upset. If this was not the case there would be no reason we can't sell our games. I personally very much like the idea of being able to have a digital copy of the game, but I'd also like to be able to make the choice. For example, with a game like Destiny I would love to be able to download it and have it forever. But for a more single player oriented game I don't think I'd replay I would prefer to buy a physical copy and then give it to a friend or sell it to Gamestop or Amazon. I think that's the distinction they SHOULD have made. With digital copies available day one like they will be plenty of people would have bought the digital copies anyway since it's more convenient then going to a store, but they wouldn't have all this trouble with used games.