Xbone and ownership

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Monday, June 10, 2013, 21:52 (3975 days ago) @ Oholiab
edited by Ragashingo, Monday, June 10, 2013, 21:57

- 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. :)