Xbox One forces gamers to pay for games borrowed from friends

In order for someone play a disc that they have purchased on someone else's console, the owner will need to sign into their Xbox LIVE account in order to play the game. Even if the owner leaves the disk with his or her buddy, they will not be able to play it without either a) signing in with the owner's XBL account or b) paying full retail price for the title.

Without media, I generally agree: no one expects to be able to loan your electronic copy of a game to a friend, or to resell it.

However, the concern is that this will apply for physical media: it will require installation onto your box and be associated with your X-Box Live account. You can take it to a friend's house to play, if you sign into your account, but you can't leave it there unless you let him stay on your account.

If it accepts "disc is in the slot" as its "DRM," that would be totally fine. The concern is that it won't do that. Which sucks. If you are selling physical media for a console, the license needs to move with the media.

With online DRM (like, I suppose, Xbox has) it should be only one running instance at a time per bought copy. Which sounds perfectly reasonable. I suspect there are some "offline mode" workarounds, but this is essentially the same as just "pirating" the game.

All this boils down to a question on whenever lending, trading or gifting an "used" game is legal. If law considers so, then removal of an option to give the game away is a straight violation of consumer's rights.

It sounds like it's not simply a matter of forcing the borrower to play from the disc directly, and the disc is merely a delivery mechanism for a DRM download. (I'm taking the article's word on this; seems like Microsoft is being deliberately vague on the actual mechanics.)

When people talk about wanting to revolutionize distribution, they mean take advantage of all the efficiency and convenience technology enables. Some would just like to pirate everything, but not everyone. No one means they want to find ways to tweak traditional distribution models to make them even worse.

* Customer purchase a licence to download and play a game, linked to an account

* Licences can be given or traded with other account holders (subject to a reasonable time-limit)

* Machine has to phone home in order to complete trade.

That would be a completely fair system for all parties involved. But publishers don't want a system that is completely fair for all parties involved.

I prefer physical products because you "own" it. You can share it, you can watch it when/where/how you want and you can resale it. The day Microsoft will decide that theirs servers for the Xbox One are too expansive (like all the old Halo multiplayer server), you will lose all your right on theses games.

I only use digital distribution when they are cheap enough (Steam and Netflix).

I'd pay a relatively hefty monthly subscription fee to have unlimited access to an entire library of games.

They haven't been clear, but even if they were clear, the "facts" of how it works will remain uncertain, simply because it's remote controlled DRM and that's what DRM does.

That makes my gaming experiences very different from someone playing 2560xwhatever with all settings on Ultra. Maybe I don't know what I'm missing. But I tend to emphasize gameplay over shinies.

Along those lines, Monaco is fabulous.

If the service provider drops support, goes out of business, or decides to ban you, you lose an enormous investment.

I've known for at least three years that I would completely drop out of the console market after the PS3/360/Wii generation. Things are just getting too crappy. Maybe I'll go support Ouya instead.

But Consoles have historically been well removed from the DRM wars. It is extremely frightening to me to see DRM enter a mainstream console. If the PS4 follows suite, I'm probably gonna have to boycott both systems and stick with the WiiU.

There's a reason they trust you:

1. You are after older games, so you are probably older, and less likely to be a thief. (And even less likely to write screeds about how you aren't really stealing it.)

2. The games have already gone through the peak of their popularity cycle, so they have already captured the bulk of their revenue. Anything now is just a bonus.

3. The price is so low that they don't lose much to piracy even if someone steals it.

I haven't even made it all the way through the last bunch of things I got from GoG, but when I do I'm headed right back there to get some more stuff.

Because there are so few modded consoles, though, the console game market works much better. You can buy a game, lend it around, borrow it from Blockbuster or Gamefly, or sell it. If you don't have the disk, you generally can't play. (Yes, there are people who have defeated this. They are an incredible minority that aren't worth paying attention to.)

They are taking away that option. I fully understand why publishers of PC games try to lock stuff down, despite the very best peer-reviewed research being published on torrentfreak saying they shouldn't. [2] But for consoles I must object.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

[2] This was sarcasm.

Except for a few major titles, most stuff gets discounted eventually, sometimes even substantially. This leads to decisions of buying it now for a lot or half off later. Console games take forever to get discounted by comparison.

Combine with a locked up marketplace and it's bad aspects of both worlds: Full price downloads with no disk sharing.

You can't have a purely digital content item and not have it bind itself to some kind of purchaser. Why? Because then you'll have one person buying the item and distributing it for every family and friend out there. You might then try to argue that physical items like books and DVDs are subject to this exploitation. Obviously the physicality of the items make them unfit for mass sharing. It takes a lot of time to swap around a single book or DVD. It takes 5 seconds to whip up a dropbox link to my giant email list.

Aside from the above, Steam started off with a "all sales are final and permanently tied to the account purchaser" model. No one expects to be able to buy a game on Steam and then share it with a friend.

Valve is a small company (compared to the publishers/sony/MS) that has track record of amazing games and a company that groks gaming and gamers. While Steam is indeed some form of weak DRM the value the platform adds is substantial. Steam workshop and other mod tools are important.

Also while you are on a PC you control what steam can do and not the other way around.

MS lack good will with PC gamers (the communities overlap). They deliberately stagnate the platform, GFWL was terrible ...

If you buy the HalfLife2 orange box ulimate set and already own HalfLife2. Then you can give your old HL2 copy to a friend for free.

One of the concerns is that people like microsoft wouldn't bother doing the above.

Watch any simultaneously Steam and console release you like, for a decent game that doesn't immediately crash in value everywhere because it stinks. Watch the prices over the course of the first six months. Watch them both start out at $60, but watch the Steam price come down first, and more often. It's the usual pattern.

Watch Steam have their sales where something goes on sale for $5 or $10 while the consoles are still charging $25 on average.

I played Mass Effect 2 for $5 on the PC, when it was still ~20$ on the consoles. At that price, I don't care that I can't sell it. The abstract ethical arguments still theoretically apply, but in practice it's not worth worrying about. That's already approximately the delta between buying and selling used anyhow.

Based on history, Microsoft isn't going to work this way. For some reason, Steam is still the only digital retailer that has figured out the true supply/demand relationship and tweaked the price curves to maximize their returns, based an a rational model of the economy. Almost everyone else would seem to rather sell nothing at $20 than sell lots at $5.

(Nintendo's even worse than Microsoft at this, actually. EA's Origin seems to have at least partially absorbed this lesson. What's really weird to me is that rationally, the lower prices almost certainly maximize revenue; holding on to higher prices is probably based more in politics than economics.)

If I install a game on my console and then lend the disk to my friend and he installs it on his, how will the game know it has already been installed on another console?

If you go with an always online model then you will be able to implement a formal game lending system into the console itself.