Quote Originally Posted by TVTyrant View Post
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.
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.

Quote Originally Posted by Llama Juice View Post
Microsoft needed to just push how their excellent sharing features (that Steam is now taking from them) worked, and everyone would have pulled that steaming hot lead pipe out of their ass.

This news is extremely disappointing.
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.