Llama that feature IS cool. Nobody is arguing that. It's the list of other things that come with that feature that have people annoyed.
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Llama that feature IS cool. Nobody is arguing that. It's the list of other things that come with that feature that have people annoyed.
I haven't seen anything saying they are removing the Kinect requirement. Until that happens there is no way they will be getting my business.
Introducing the Xbox 540!
E: Microsoft next year:
http://i.qkme.me/3pwtqn.jpg
The problem is, that feature shouldn't really exist in the first place. They added in DRM and restricted what you can do. They, then, change the parameters of the DRM to give you more permissions in one way, and less in another.
"Yay! That's so cool!" except for the exceptions, like nuclear submariners, "Crap this won't work for me!"
"But this DRM change makes me so happy!" ... "But this DRM is unplayable for me!"
o.o It doesn't benefit either of you! ... It just gets in the way less than it did for some, and more than it did for others.
You then see companies like CD Projekt, makers of The Witcher and GoG, selling games DRM-free... or I should say... never adding DRM to games... because they built their marketing strategy around "being the source of good, untainted games".
You can take a copy of the upcoming big-budget "The Witcher 3", install it on your machines, let a friend borrow it (probably not allowed in the license... but who knows, they might end up buying a copy for themselves), back it up, keep it in a museum for generations because there's no DRM servers to get shut down, and so forth.
Im talking solely about this E-library concept, not the DRM behind it. As in, I have a copy of Bioshock, and instead of driving to my friend's house and giving him the disk, he can just download and play it as if I had loaned it to him because he's on my "family" list and the system sees I have the game. Although, I can see how that would cause problems if some authentification server went down.
You could already kind of work the system with the 360. If somebody installs, say, MW2 onto their hard drive, boots the game (which requires the disk in the drive, but then it stops using the disk), you can then lift the disk out of the drive and put it in another xbox. I never tried to see if both xboxes could play with each other, but it did work for offline play. I guess it's also worth noting that the cover was off of my DVD drive, since pressing the eject button would immediately kill the game and go to dashboard (so youd literally lift the cd out of the exposed tray).
Suddenly that "connection every 24 hours" thing makes sense. Without that, somebody could "borrow" a single player game while their friend keeps the physical disk, and just stay offline to play indefinitely without the disk. I guess at that point the question becomes what's the (financial) difference between that and just loaning him a physical copy?
E: then again, it still doesn't really make sense because it's a pain in the ass for anybody not using the sharing function.
What the fuck, trying to comprehend this is making my head hurt. I think I'll just stick to PC gaming where everyone buys their own copy at 75% off.
They can't really pull it out; it's part of the firmware. The thing won't pass a POST without successfully getting data from the Kinect.
Not really. Even now, they're doing the opposite of what needs to be done.
When introducing drastically different changes that completely alienates a percentage of customers, you need to maintain the current method then include the change as an opt-in system with rewards.
Allowing offline-use is great, but if they're completely axing away the Live features they've listed, they're going about it completely wrong. I mean, we're talking about if-statements on auth here.
Yeah, you can add a title to your Live Library then send the disk to an offline only console, but is that really such a worry for Microsoft? Is offline-piracy really something to be afraid of? The "pirate" in this case of not-so-good-license-management (you know they'd label these offliners as pirates) is taking no resources from the Live server farm and in no way impacting other users of the service. It wouldn't even be that hard to check disk hashes (they made a patent on this I believe) to ensure a game isn't being doubled up in a LAN environment.
The only reason I can possibly think of for Microsoft to be so outraged over the idea that the DRM can be pushed off with a software update is that it is not software controlled but through firmware locked to the motherboard.
Chances of me getting the XOne have gone up, though I'm still going to be weary until reviews start to come out and no major problems are there. Plus, still waiting for some good games to get for it. Only thing I'd get right now would be Ghosts (fuck off, it looks like a neat game and I'm eager to see this change in direction) and maybe AC4. Everything else is coming out next year.
Still, fucking congrats to Microsoft for taking the feedback and knocking the DRM away.