Microsoft reverses controversial game licensing policies
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
However the whole, connect 24 hours to verify the ownership of the game is a big turn off. I understand that, theoretically you could sell your game and then keep playing it on a switched off console. So if it were you, how would you go by achieving all the pros and none of the cons without enforcing DRM? Not supporting DRM but genuinely curious.
Edit: I see, if the DVDs are identical then that's not possible. But plenty of software comes with a serial anyways. Just make the serial transferable, problem solved.
So, log in to xbox.com, see list of your active licenses, click 'deactive' link on the games you want to forfeit your current digital license for. No console required.
You can't have disc-less disc games that allow trading and don't require some form of "always on". You have to give up one of those; this time around it seems they are giving up "disc-less disc".
Any holes in this approach?
There are of course further workarounds/mitigations for this problem, such as putting a (100 days?) time limit on offline mode, but they make the system even more complicated.
This isn't really too big of a problem. Just require users to phone in and request a license transfer if they lose a console. Limit the number of times that a customer can "lose" their console without an investigation.
Then they probably went through every worst case scenario possible, like a group of friends sharing a single licence of skyrim and just leaving their consoles offline, and made rules around them.
It probably didn't really click with them and they thought this was a great idea up until the point they got absolutely grilled at E3.
The thing is with steam, they don't really care about people sharing steam accounts and being offline, it's only a violation of the TOS but they have no checks for it since it's not a rampant problem. I think if they sold games for a decent price and trusted their customers they wouldn't need any invasive DRM schemes.
It's such a bad idea to develop a product like this. Developers who focus on anti-piracy measures miss the point: focusing on a frictionless way for consumers to acquire your product (and keep it up-to-date), while ignoring all those who pirate it will lead to more money in the long run.
Most anti-piracy measures introduce friction for genuine consumers who want to give you money. It's a poor trade-off.
Valve are a private company but certainly worth billions and $500-800m annual revenue. Gabe claims, per employee, they are more profitable than Google and Apple. See the forbes article for more analysis [1]. Note its from 2011 and Gabe has said elsewhere that Valve had a huge 2012, approx 50% revenue growth.
Here's another short article with Gabe commenting on their entry into the Russian market. [2]
GoG is also a private company, but well established and popular with netizens. I'd be very interested to see their financial figures.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/oliverchiang/2011/02/15/valve-an...
[2] http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111023/22062816484/just-a...
And in doing that, they created something truly quite terrible and very difficult to explain to the average person. I followed a lot of the Xbone coverage and have to admit I'm still confused as to how exactly their systems/checks, etc. would work. Based on what I did understand though, it sounded horrible.
They don't seem to understand that the inconvenience of doing this will prevent the vast majority of people from doing it. If the option to disconnect from WiFi is behind even one layer of menus, most people will find it too annoying to switch on/off in order cheat the system.
If they simply ignored all those people who want to cheat them — let it happen — and make it super easy for people to play and share within their system, I think they would find that they earn more money.
(Though personally I am not bothered by a 24 hour check-in. Since all my devices are always connected, I doubt I would notice this in practice.)
Its like saying "you know that potential infinite thing, we are now definitely saying you can only have one." It reminds me of the difference between free refills and no free refills, the actual amount of extra drinks you get probably is not high, but some soda heads will be pissed if they dont get free refills.
* Disk must be in the drive to play
* Share games by lending the disk.
The previous scheme, while it would not be befinical to some due to the 24 hour requirement, did allow for some exciting new ideas (which we've got used to with Steam);
* Access my games anywhere without needing a disk
* Share the game with my family who live away from me
My experience with Xbox live is that digital releases are launched at a price and stay there, apart from limited time promotions, for a long.
I can go on to Amazon or into HMV and get major releases from a couple of months ago for half the RRP, normally significantly cheaper than download. Plus i can give the disc to one of my friends when i'm done.
This makes me sad.
It also locks you out of playing your game in a bunch of scenarios (lost, stolen, damaged, or just don't happen to have it with you) that I think for many people are more common than a 24-hour internet outage would be, and again, it's entirely the artificial DRM restrictions that are locking you out as there's no real technical reason not to let you install the game and never need the disc again.
This is just an opportunity to say "HA, we won! They changed their course of action because of US!!! SUCK IT MICROSOFT"
We all know PC gamers are the master race though anyways, so any subsequent arguing is moot /s
The effectiveness of DRM is a totally different subject, but in this situation they chose their bottom line (DRM) over the desires of their customers, taking a gamble that the losses in sales from pissed off people would be less than the gains from decreased piracy.
People like myself preferred the system they designed because you didn't need to use the disk and could play a game you owned on any system that you logged in to, just like steam.
Microsoft messed up so badly that many people themselves as being on the xBox side of the "holy wars" that swirl around consoles "converted" to Sony.
A brand is a powerful tool. It might not be logical, but people do build emotional connections with brands. As with any power tool, you want to be careful and avoid cutting off your arm.
I see this as a step-backward than a step ahead. Sure there will always be a vocal minority, but rather than provide them an alternative, they've just gimped an online console.
What I think people objected to was a requirement across the entire console.
Not being able to play games without the disc in the tray is a major downside of the new policy though. Of course at least for me that means I will buy all Xbox One games digital going forward.
It also makes sense for "complex" calculations. It's how stuff like Google search and Google maps works - you send the query, big machines chomp on the query and spit out a result, and your netbook doesn't have to go into overdrive trying to figure anything out. Basically anything that can take 100ms or so to complete could be moved off of the appliance and onto Microsoft servers. Why? Well, why not? Make some more room for rendering, I guess.
Edit: and also, as mentioned, reliable cloud processing was never in the cards since they were only ever going to require check-in once per 24 hour period.
I don't think there was anything in the early schema that would have impacted the way I use the system (apart for multi day internet or server outages) but plenty of benefits
Game sharing was a huge positive step, even though I felt that most publishers would ignore or disable (like game sharing on the DS).
Not having to swap physical disks would have made life much easier and increased my playing time. I'm fairly lazy when I've settled down for an evening in front of the TV. A usual XBox session involves playing what ever game is in the drive till i get bored (anything from 15 minutes up) switching to something downloaded so i don;t need to get up (normally trials). Getting bored again and flipping to TV or a movie.
The ability to choose from my whole library with leaving my seat would have been a revelation.
Also, my two year old has lost my Forza disk, which really sold this idea.
It isn't fair to the publisher/developer. I'd rather have seen a price change to facilitate more ownership rather than used games sales. EA's implementation sounded a bit practical to solve the used games market.
Why is it fine for me to sell a book second hand, but not to sell a game second hand?
Enabling resale of digital goods has very high risk of crashing the market, as they almost by definition do not degrade in use. Historically the second hand markets have been limited by local availability, but internet removes such barriers for digital goods and that makes the situation very different for games compared to conventional items such as books.
There is no intrinsic social contract that stipulate media creators should/must be paid per-consumption.
No one's making you agree to that.
The current standard terms of consumption for console games includes the ability to give your copy to someone else. There is neither a legal nor social contract that these games be paid for per-consumption.
What we saw is Microsoft trying to change that. The market has responded clearly and unambiguously.
So no one (short of the pirates) has violated any terms, legal or social.
What we have is a vocal minority responding clearly and unambiguously. The size of such a group, minority or otherwise, will not ever be known, since Microsoft has not sold anything to anyone yet.
How cool would it have been if all my friends made a family group and with that we can all play each others games. But no people love gamestop.
Announcing a crazy DRM plan was a fantastic PR move. If people liked it, they can just go ahead with it. If they didn't, they end up burning lots of press time talking about something on their terms, instead of focusing on what Sony wants you to think about the actual hardware
No PS4 or XB1 units have been shipped. Except now, Sony has less time to make the real arguments against the XB, and already people can just accuse others of "complaining about everything on the Internet". MS wins points by "making a major change in response to consumers". More than if they had taken this position from the beginning.
A bit risky, but it'll pay off fantastically for MS.
"you can also download games from Xbox Live on day of release"
If you have a decent Internet connection and don't want to use discs, you have that choice.
Both of the new machines (Xbox One, PS4) still allow third party publisher DRM (such as EA's 'Project Five Dollar') though, and if the console market moves towards digital distribution the way the PC market has, the used games point might be moot.
I'm sure there were people posting on cix in 1984 right after the superbowl, "I want a mac cheaper therefore without a toy I will never use. If you want to 'hack' a mouse,then buy one separately. Or at least Apple should give the choice to buy a computer without one ,at a lesser price."
On a more serious note, I don't like this rollback. It only goes to show how the witchhunt and echo chamber on Reddit worked. Even before the reveal, Microsoft was falsely accused of trying to game Reddit and everyone flew off the handle over someone pretty much lying to be a troll. Say the word "DRM" and you get bucketloads of Reddit karma and posts pointing out the facts(forget about posts taking the opposing view or opinion) were downvoted into oblivion by the angry mob.
And then there was the bad timing on the NSA leaks, which didn't help at all. Everyone has smartphones, laptops and tablets with cameras and mics which could be watching and listening and Apple/Google were part of the leak, but it was Microsoft that was singled out for proposing a device that could turn on itself, and had numerous safeguards to configure privacy if you wanted to.
All this doesn't excuse the fact that Microsoft utterly and totally failed in communicating their message in a proper manner in E3 and handed Sony an easy victory on a silver platter.
I guess it was easy to roll this back because it was not Microsoft but publishers and game developers that were going to reap the benefits of diskless gaming because Gamestop etc. skim off the value of older games and leave publishers with not much value. Once the public failed to see the advantages and blamed Microsoft for a power grab that was not going to really benefit them all that much, it was game over.
First, they throw up the idea of some draconian DRM, which they then later retract. The first move gets them tons of publicity and tongue-wagging, the second move starts to make that positive publicity. They're banking on gamers being so addicted, they won't really care that they've been played for idiot chumps.
If the market for the new XBox was 12-year old children, they wouldn't even have bothered. But, since they're really marketing to adults 20-35 or so, they have to look like good guys to the people they're talking out of their money.
This was calculated. Reddit and everyone else got played. Hard and dry.
As it stands, I will be surprised if XBox One captures 25% of the latest gen console market when it is all said and done.
I think I cleaner interpretation is that they were aware that the push might fail but figured going back on the setup as they've done wouldn't set them back too far. And the move, even if it failed, would set them up for basically the same change in the future of the consoles life. Remember they changed the Xbox dashboard a lot. They can still add the planned sharing features to download only games. At first only to developer opt-in games then just the MS published games will have the additional features. After that other publishers will need to have their games use the extra features for licensed download games.
So everyone saying they ought to have done both may be right but maybe it wasn't ideal and they reached a bit too far. So they've fallen back and are retooling. I just wish they'd let me take off adverts on the damned main dashboard! I never buy anything and they know it.
Nooooooooooooooooo. Please still allow me to opt in for digital downloads so I can finally stick the console somewhere where I don't have to see it, hear it or suffer it's heat wrath.