As I've already said a couple of times, the dependency on the cloud is troublesome for lots of reasons. I don’t want to “wait for authentication” every time I go play offline single player games, I just want to play the game! Why should I care if it authenticated.

And Microsoft could have made the whole program opt-in. Then some would have their digital future, and I wouldn't. In that case everyone wins.

DRM always presents a problem for a paying user. When you pirate games, you have 0 problems and excellent, if not better, experience than regular, paying users.