The way it should have worked

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Thursday, June 20, 2013, 22:46 (4177 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Yeah it's a real shame about losing the F&F thing

I don't understand. Why not just let someone opt in to the 24 check in DRM in order for all this cool stuff?

Like, you get it and it functions like an xbox 360, but if you want to play without the disc in the tray or share with your 10 family members, you can turn on the DRM and do it if you want.

Isn't that the best of both worlds?!

That's largely what I was thinking. Make the default mode like the 360, like they've set it up now. Since I haven't authorized any digital sharing, my console shouldn't need to check in for game authorization status, so there's no chance I'll ever be locked out of a title because my console can't verify that I still own it.

Better still, why not do that on a per-title basis? The checkin requirement seems to exist because after 24 hours, XBL assumes you may have loaned, sold, or traded in some or all of your installed games, instead of assuming you haven't. Why not let someone login to XBL and tell the system "hey, I'm loaning or trading in this game today" before allowing the transaction? Then require either your friend to login to XBL to play the borrowed game (which is reasonable) or require GameStop to checkin with XBL to check that a title being traded in is authorized for tradein. (Also means nobody can steal games from you and then sell them without your permission.)

If the system worked that way, users would only need to checkin when they want to use one of these features, and nobody not using the features would ever be locked out of something they own because of a requirement to make every console checkin every 24 hours.

Better still, allow tradeins of digital purchases. Since there's no other market for doing this except within the system, there's no need for additional checkins-- you're online when you trade your title, the buyer is online when they purchase it, MS and the publisher get their cuts, and GameStop gets nothing.

As it stands, though, I'm sure all of this is in the TOS subject to change without notice. Knowing the way MS wants things to work, and their unwillingness to extend the same rights to digital copies that apply to physical copies (or, indeed, to any copies, given the Xbone's original system) I wouldn't trust them not to partially implement this system later.

The system also needs to work without Kinect plugged in. That's a deal breaker for me as well. No mention of that changing.