After receiving tons upon tons of criticism for many of its decisions in regard to game authentication, used game limitations and anti-piracy measures for the Xbox One, Microsoft has said ?we listened.? Today, they announced that they are reversing most of the decisions people were complaining about. Giant Bomb broke the story before it was official.
Chief among the policy update are the following, to quote Xbox PR:
- An internet connection will not be required to play offline Xbox One games
- You can trade-in, lend, resell, gift, and rent disc based games just like you do today
These were two of the biggest bullet points, by far, that won Sony tons of trust and praise at E3 just last week. One has to assume that Microsoft was watching just how quickly they had been turned into the big bad wolf of video game manufacturers.
But there are some downsides to this role reversal, unfortunately. Don?t get me wrong ? as this is what the Internet at large was demanding, in force, this is almost certainly the right move for Microsoft to make, especially in terms of public perception. On the other hand, we?re losing some upsides that we were about to gain with the always-online Xbox One.
For starters, we now have to get off our lazy butts to switch out game discs again. Yes, this is the way things are now, and yes, we can still avoid this if we just download all games digitally anyway ? but I was actually kind of looking forward to this disc-less future Microsoft was telling me about. I like owning physical discs, but it would have been nice to not have to get up to put Halo 5 in the disc drive after finishing a race in Forza.
Also being threatened are the Family Gold features that Microsoft announced, which allowed family members (you could have up to 10 members in your family) to share games, even across systems. This was going to be really nice for, say, my dad, who is always borrowing my games but may not want to wait for me to drive to his house in order to hand them to him. As games are no longer tied to accounts, this is going away. It also means downloaded games cannot be resold or shared, which was something that Microsoft was (vaguely) talking about.
It is unknown whether or not this also affects the much more simplistic ability to share a Gold account for online multiplayer gaming ? at least across a single system. Hopefully this is still something that Microsoft is doing.
There is also the possibility, however slight or however ?deserved,? that we will see a lot more big studios and publishers close down over the next few years. We have to face the fact that used game sales do?have a negative affect on a developer?s income, and it was, after all, the publishers who were pushing for all of these restrictions in the first place. Still, one could certainly argue that the death of more multi-million dollar ?blockbuster? types of games, which always need to sell millions just to break even, could lead way to more smaller, creative types of games. One can hope, anyway.
Even considering the downsides, this is probably a huge win for gamers/consumers. Are you more excited about the Xbox One now that this stuff has changed? Do you already have a system pre-ordered? (I do.)
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