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.
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