Category Archives: Xbox

Microsoft kills game ownership

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Xbox-One

So Microsoft dropped some key details about it’s plan for how game ownership works  (Spoiler: Its shitty!) on it’s new console, the Xbox One—or the Xbone as I like to call it. Eurogamer has a nice breakdown of the juicy bits:

1. You do not own the games you buy. You license them.
2. Discs are only used to install and then license games and do not imply ownership.
3. People can play games installed on your console whether you’re logged in or not.
4. Publishers decide whether you can trade in your games and may charge for this.
5. Publishers decide whether you can give a game you own to someone for free, and this only works if they have been on your friends list for 30 days.
6. Your Xbox One must connect to the internet every 24 hours to keep playing games.
7. When playing on another Xbox One with your account, this is reduced to one hour.
8. Loaning and renting games will not be possible at launch, but Microsoft is “exploring the possibilities”.

Read the rest of Eurogamer’s article here. Kotaku also chimes in here with the news, as well as providing an opinion piece wondering if gamers have had enough. Polygon sums it up perfectly:

“[The] Xbox One’s game licensing policy was written from the ground up for companies. It’s aggressively anti-consumer and anti-middle class, and it outright ignores underprivileged gamers. It’s gross, despicable, greedy, pathetic, cowardly and out of touch with a growing global resentment for corporations.”

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The main issue here for me is how pricing is going to work, which they’re not even addressing at this point. On Steam I’m happy to give up my right to trade in a game or loan it to a friend because Valve passes the savings of an all digital product on to the consumer. Instead of paying $60 for a new disc I pay $50 (or even less if its on sale—I recently grabbed the entire GTA IV trilogy for $19.99) and I’m cool with that. But what Micorsoft seems to be proposing is the disc isn’t the game—you’re merely buying a liscense to play it. So why even bother with the disc then? Obviously because not everyone has an internet connection capable of of downloading 10GB games, but this seems at odds with Microsoft’s vision of an always online console. Games will be either the same price if not more expensive and my ability to use that disc however I want is removed. In any event my anticipation for the Xbox One has been severely dimished, and if Sony follows suit with the PS4 (and I suspect they will) then I see the PC as my next-gen gaming platform of choice.