I’m in the same boat. Each year, we have three or four internet outages. Usually, they’re only for a few hours or a day, but at least once a year (usually when it snows) my home internet and cable TV will go down for a week.
You know what I did during the last week long outage? I played games on my 360. I fired up Steam in offline mode and played some singleplayer games.
Teiman
1707
If publishers are ok with the Steam Offline mode to last many months (I can find if it last forever). Why Microsoft is making a deal so it only last One Day? Have Microsoft worse bargaining power than Steam? Do Microsoft negotiated on purpose a worse deal? Its this Microsoft acting randomly, not a publisher limitation??
I’m not much of a console gamer, and I have no intention of getting an XBoner, but all this discussion is still interesting. The 24-hour-connection thing is pretty awful for legitimate users wanting to do things like take the console to a beach house, or simply without connection for reasons beyond their control for more than a day. Other than that, most of what’s been published (I read the PAR articles) seems reasonable. Unless you’re Redbox or Gamefly, in which case, screw you and your business model.
So:
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Publishers decide whether you can trade-in or resell disc-based games. Most of them will either disallow this or add hefty fees so it’s not a good deal for consumers.
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You can only trade-in/resell at authorized retailers. But due to #1 that doesn’t matter.
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Publishers decide whether you can give your games away. All of them will obviously disallow this.
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You can only give games away to people on your friends list for 30 days, so it will not be possible to have 3rd party trading sites, etc. This totally doesn’t matter due to #3.
Before everybody goes all crazy, I fully expect Sony to do something similar, and while this is obviously infinitely more restrictive than previous console generations, it’s more permissive than Steam or iTunes and you all use that, right?
As for Kinect privacy, they didn’t answer one very important question.
“If the authorities deliver Microsoft a legitimate court order, do they have the ability to turn on my Kinect and surreptitiously record?”
If Sony does the same with the PS4 I’m out there too. It is very simple for me.
Edit: I will accept both MS’ (and Sony’s, if they go this way) plan if I can get games for iOS prices. Else, hahahaha.
They totally will.
There are some interesting exploitative opportunities here, if you think about it. If you login to your xbone with your friend’s xbox account, download his games, and then unplug the box from the internet, you can then play all his games for 24 hours. And vice-versa. The more xbone owning friends you’ve got, the more account sharing makes sense.
Imagine this-- you and your 6 xbone owning friends setup an xbox live silver account and share the login. You pool your cash and buy a single-player game, registering them to that shared xbox live account.
You all login to that account, download the game, then unplug from the internet. You all got that game for 1/7th price.
Heck, most single-player games have well under 10 hours of gameplay anyway. Most people won’t even bother being so organized. They’ll just share their main accounts, download their friends’ games, and go to town.
This would actually work with steam too, except there’s no time limit. Nobody bothered to do it due to Steam being a generally good service, and of course their sales making prices reasonable later on. But microsoft? Fuck microsoft.
stusser, they anticipated that – it is a one hour offline window unless it is the primary console (I’m assuming the first one you installed it to). This console needs to fail, and fail hard. I will be doing everything in my power to educate all of my friends about this.
ShivaX
1713
Or for Steam prices for that matter.
Oh, so they did. It was a beautiful dream.
You could still make individual xbox accounts for each game; some people already do this for Steam. Then you just sell the account login/password. Only problem is inputting that login on a console every time you want to play a different game would be arduous.
Sony has stated multiple times the PS4 can be played without ever being connected to the Internet. It is not clear what other used game blocking measures they might emply, if any.
What do you do for the first 3 hours while it is downloading?
The internet timeout limit is only 1 hour on systems that aren’t the originating hardware for a game.
They did say Xbox Live accounts will now work for up to 10 people and all those people will be able to play the entire game library wherever they log in from (as long as they remain connected), but I have to believe there will be some significant restrictions such that it won’t be desirable to set up 10 person game sharing circles. Publishers forced Sony to reduce the number of PSN activations from 5 systems to 2 because of abuse. I know family accounts now have some weird limitations for “child” accounts, like you can’t add MS points unless you’re the master account. All the other accounts only get MS point allowances. Games may need to be registered to the originating hardware so you can’t have 10 people on 10 systems creating a huge web of games that can all be played by everyone.
Also, I don’t think there will be such thing as a Silver account on the Xbox One. I predict every system will have to be associated with a unique, paid gold account.
Quaro
1716
If they got rid of Silver they’d have to subsidize the hell out of the console.
Feeling like MS is starting from the assumption that they will be the market leader, and working out how to capitalize on it, rather than worrying about getting to that spot in the first place.
I dunno. Maybe they DO know what they are doing? What if the E3 shocker is the console is FREE with a 4 year Live contract or something. I think people would willing to accept strong DRM, lower performance, always online, ads all over the dashboard, kinect checking whether they smile during ads and reporting the data, kinect analyzing the data in their living room to figure out income levels and reporting that, pretty much EVERYTHING bad you could imagine if the console was free or 99 dollars.
I can almost see that the ability to track consumers in real time as they watch ads on the Xbox, or on regular TV with the HDMI in, would be so damn valuable they would just give away the things if you opt in to that.
Even if they ended up paying $600 over 4 years.
Something like, but not exactly a subsidy has been my prediction. They’ve been talking around the issue, but I think the implication is Silver is gone. My guess is the price of Live also goes up. I think they’ll say Gold is now $15 a month (limited amnesty for people with existing balances), it covers up to 10 linked family members (but not other systems) and the Xbox One is $299, no contract.
If Sony does the same thing I won’t be buying any console. Is that what they want? “They” don’t want my money any more!
I’m betting that sharing with others is gated behind Gold.
I wasn’t talking about sharing games, I was talking about trading/selling xbox live logins, each with only one game associated.
I really am concerned about Kinect privacy. It sounds silly, right? None of us are terrorists. But then you read stories like this and realize that doesn’t matter. If the government has the ability to surreptitiously record everything we do, there is a reasonable expectation that they will do exactly that. They just say “terrorism” and wave their hands and we allow it to happen.
That’s why I need MS to come out and say “Even if we get a legitimate court order we do not have the ability to record anything.”
Not “we respect our customers’ privacy and won’t do it”. That is not good enough. Verizon respects our privacy too, right? You get a court order from the government, you have no choice.
You can totally trust the govt. and all agencies. Yup. Totally. Uh huh.
Yeah, MS can say they won’t spy on us all they want, we know that is only so long as the NSA doesn’t ask them nicely.
Oh, ah, I got you now – yeah, that could be a loophole.
Yeah, agreed on the Kinect privacy. Anything short of “you can disconnect it and toss it in the closet” is unacceptable to me.
This sharing with Live friends and trading in retail with individual publisher rules/fees sounds like one giant PR disaster waiting to happen.
