Blah blah blah

Also Grim, if that were ever the message MS clearly communicated, it'd be a different story

I have to say, I prefer the way it was as family share was a killer feature and I don't really care about DRM as it wouldn't affect me in any way. Oh well... at least the infrastructure is there to be added later.

Get the message: The whole world doesn't live in the future. You can have online platforms that support offline media.

And I don't really care for direct download on platforms that have single digit life-cycles anyway.

We will never know the *reality* of those features anyway. Unless they return. And there's no real reason they can't for digital purchases.

True, but you can already see Microsoft's unwillingness to support both. I don't mean to sound so negative but I'm really really disappointed.

"There’s a few things we won’t be able to deliver as a result of this change," Marc Whitten, v.p. of Xbox Live told Kotaku, "One of the things we were very exicted about was 'wherever we go my games are always with me.' Now, of course, your physical games won’t show up that way. The content you bought digitally will. But you’ll have to bring your discs with you to have your games with you. Similarly, the sharing library [is something] we won’t be able to deliver at launch."


That means that two features are being cut, at least for now, from Microsoft's Xbox One plans. Microsoft's concept of having your full game library travel with you is gone.

Microsoft's offer to let you share Xbox One games with up to nine other "family" members is gone, too.

The play-your-games-from-anywhere feature had been tied to the idea that all Xbox One games must be installed to the system's 500GB harddrive in order to run. In theory, if you had registered the game online—a requirement that's also been dropped for disc games for the Xbox One—you'd then be able to play those games from any other console you were logged into. Now, with disc games not needing to be registered, you'd have to bring the disc with you to prove you had the rights to play the game on it.

Those sacrifices are the cost of the new DRM policy that, Whitten says, will give people an Xbox One experience with disc-based games that matches what they had on the Xbox 360. Games won't have to be registered online, and players won't have to connect to the Internet in a 24-hour period to play offline disc-based games. "The way to think about it is that it works the way it does with the Xbox 360," Whitten said. "You can give them, loan them, trade them, play them. They will work exactly as they do today."

It's clear that Microsoft was not planning to make these changes. Even though it's June and the console doesn't launch until November, Whitten said that Xbox One consumers will have to download a day-one patch to enable the Xbox One's offline mode. Presumably, without it, the console will still think it's living in the Xbox One era of E3 2013.

UPDATE: Microsoft clarifies that the planned day-one Xbox One update, which Whitten told me, will "complete some of the software that won’t be there," is actually not a result of today's DRM policy change. Rather, it was always planned and will simply be required for playing off-line, among other things. Not a patch, they say. But, yes, your new Xbox console would have to connect online once in order to do the things Microsoft described today. And then you can keep it offline and play games without re-connecting to the Internet forever.

Call of Duty: Ghosts AI development slowed by lack of final PS4, Xbox One hardware

Rubin added Infinity Ward is making "big strides" in development but can't push things further with Ghosts' AI until they know exactly what they are working with for the PS4 and Xbox One.

"We need some hardware, some finished hardware, before we can really expand"

http://www.polygon.com/2013/6/18/4441316/call-of-d...

The Vision

Here was the simple vision of the Xbox One, selling and reselling games:

Every game you bought, physical or digital, would be tied to your account. This would eliminate current-gen problems like buying a disc, and then being unable to store it or download it from the cloud.
Because every single game, physical or digital, would be tied to an account, publishers could create a hub to sell and resell the games digitally. Let's refer to these as "licenses" from here, even though it's a loaded term.
Because reselling games would now work through a hub, publishers could make money on resold games.
Here is how this makes sense for YOU: New games could then be cheaper. Why? Publishers KNOW that they will not make money on resold games, so they charge more to you, the first buyer. You are paying for others' rights to use your game in the future. If the old system had gone into place, you would likely have seen game prices drop. Or, at the very least, it could have staved off price increases.
You also would have started getting a better return on your "used" games—because a license does not have to be resold at a diminished rate.
How do you know that this would have been the case? Because that's exactly what happens on Steam. But wait!, you shout. Steam is CHEAP cheap, and it has crazy sales. We love Steam! Micro$oft is nothing like that. Well, no, it isn't now, but Steam was once $team, too. It was not always popular, and its licensing model was once heavily maligned. Given time, though, it's now the only way almost every PC gamer wants to play games.
Sharing games would have worked either by activating your Live account on someone else's Xbox One, or by including them in your 10-person share plan, which would not have been limited to "family.". Details on that had been scarse, but even the strictest limitations (one other person playing any of the shared games from your account) would have been a HUGE improvement over the none that we have now. We don't get that now.
The 24-hour check-in would have been necessary for the X1's store, which it is not for Steam, because the physical product (game discs) would still be available. This check-in, literally bytes of data exchanged, would confirm that the games installed were not gaming the system in a convoluted install-here-and-then-go-offline-and-I'll-go-home-and-check-in-and-go-offline-too-and-we'll-both-use-the-game methods.

This is the loss of some of the most future-facing features of the system

Also, please now stop the kinect whining. really.

Stop whining at us who whine about not having Kinect forced down our throat.

there’s a quote from Henry Ford where he said, “If I had asked what my customers wanted, they would have said they wanted a faster horse.” Even if the quote isn’t real, its spirit is. The idea is that people who make products that actually advance industries and push everyone forward should not and cannot wait for consumers to tell them what they want.