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Comment by zinkem | Hacker News Reader

This comparison to steam is a bit of a false equivocation. I can run Steam on a variety of hardware configurations, which I can buy from a variety of vendors. Steam is better not because the DRM system is different, but because it's hardware agnostic.

Once the XB1 lifecycle is over, I have no guarantee I will be able to play the games I bought. As far as I'm aware XB1 is not backwards compatible at all. Once my 360 dies, if I can't find another one in working condition, or XBL stops offering services for the 360, my 360 XBLA games are gone forever.

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> Once the XB1 lifecycle is over, I have no guarantee I will be able to play the games I bought.

Sooner than that though, right? Weren't they shutting off Halo servers when new Halo games came out during the same console lifecycle?

Of course that is a problem you'll have with multiplayer on all the consoles I guess. Maybe gamers are okay with that. I would be bummed as hell if I couldn't play the occasional quake match anymore though.

I think he means if they turn off all the servers , so there is nowhere for the console to "call home" to. So you will be unable to play at all.

Hopefully they will just patch the console to enable offline play before this happens, but I guess you don't know for sure.

Why bother spending money to pay a developer to patch it for offline play? They already have your money.

Long term goodwill I suppose.

Halo: CE (i.e, Halo 1) didn't support online play, as it was released before Xbox Live was available.

Halo 2 was released in 2004 (on the Xbox!), and the online play servers were just shut down earlier this year. Given that the platform it was released on has nearly been superseded twice by now (first by the Xbox 360, and soon by the Xbox One), I think they've given it a fair run.

As far as I'm aware, all of the other Halo games are still playable online.

Wikipedia has Halo 2 multiplayer on the xbox being shut down in April of 2010 (while on the PC it lived until this year). That is not the sort of lifecycle I expect from a game that I enjoy (I still play Doom on occasion, and that was released two whole decades ago. Half-Life, from 1998, is still played online as well. Halo 2 was only from 2004, was massively successful, and is dead.)

Difference: if XBoxOne servers are ever shut down, single-player XBoxOne experience will be destroyed due to stupid DRM.

Yup, and it is not like Microsoft has never threatened to shut down DRM servers before.

It's not like they've done it before: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080422/234401923.shtml

My apologies if you're not particularly bothered by diction, but I believe you mean "false equivalence" rather than "false equivocation". Equivocation means "beating around the bush" or "refusing to give a straight answer".

http://mw4.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/equivocation

All non-mathematical/non-logical/etc. equivocations are false if you're enough of a dick about it. The dude is trying to make a legitimate point about disc-based vs. cloud-based storage, and there's exactly one player in that area. Give him a freakin' break.

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