Xbox 720 Could Require Always-On Connection, Lock Out Used Games 592
MojoKid writes "Sony's next-generation PS4 unveil is just two weeks away, which means leaks concerning both it and Microsoft's next-generation Xbox Durango (sometimes referred to as the Xbox 720), are at an all-time high as well. Rumors continue to swirl that the next iteration of Xbox will lock out used games entirely and require a constant Internet connection. New games would come with a one-time activation code to play. Use the code, and the game is locked to the particular console or Xbox Live account it's loaded on. Physical games will still be sold (the Durango reportedly supports 50GB Blu-ray Discs), but the used game market? Kiboshed. If this is true, it's an ugly move on Microsoft's part. Not only does it annihilate the right of first sale, it'll eviscerate any game store or business that depends on video game rentals for revenue."
And for those with a normal... (Score:5, Interesting)
... unreliable internet connection (most of the world) this will make it unusable.
This will get them sued in the EU (Score:5, Interesting)
Currently, STEAM is sued in Germany for not allowing re-selling of things bought on STEAM. This will likely be escalated. If MS thinks angering consumer protecion agencies in the EU is a good idea, they may find out that they are wrong.
Dear Microsoft (Score:2, Interesting)
Please read this carefully:
Always-on internet and/or unable to resell or buy second hand games = no deal
I hope I'm clear.
A long-time XBox 360 player
Re:Thanks, Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
Halo 5? Wow, I wonder what you have to do in *that* game!? (hint: shoot aliens...)
And what are they supposed to do? Race Penguins in go-carts? Grow things on their Farm and sell them at the Market? Save a Princess from an Ape?
Don't bag on a franchise for sticking to formula, it's what the audience wants.
I just bought DeadSpace 3 for my PS3 yesterday and love that it's essentially the same as 1 and 2 and hope to see a DeadSpace 5 and would expect it to be the same thing all over again as well. Because. It's. What. I. Want. To. Play.
Re:And for those with a normal... (Score:5, Interesting)
I live in a nation that, despite giving billions to the telecom industry, doesn't even have reliable dialup in every town.
I'm in a town about five miles outside a city of 200,000 people, and the best I can get is 3G cellular. The speed on it is actually okay, but it's certainly not reliable, and it drops out fairly regularly.
I'm half a mile from a school, so it's not like I'm way out in the boonies.
(Technically yes, I could get service with another company. There's satellite, with its dropouts and terrible ping times, there's dialup at 28.8 at best due to the quality of the copper, there's ISDN at $700 per b-channel, or a T1 at $2619.20 per month.)
But then, that's how things are in these United States of America.
So, Microsoft, you're saying just like Steam? (Score:5, Interesting)
You want to make a console like steam, no lending to friends and no used sales?
Well Microsoft, I can deal with that - I buy heaps of things on steam and I buy a heap of things on my consoles, so maybe we can come to an arrangement here,...
Only one problem is, the average price of games I buy on steam would be between 15 and 30$ and the average price of games I pay for on consoles is probably 40 to 50$, Steam games are _very_ regularly discounted to sensible prices.
So if you're willing to drop the prices of console games down to a similar, sensible level, then you might see me participate in this. but don't for a second think I'm signing up for this bullshit at 60$ US a shot for a game (and I KNOW you assholes will region lock it, so as an Australian, I'll be paying - 110$ US per game with no way for American friends to "gift" me the game at US prices and I paypal them)
You wanna have your cake and eat it too? Sure but I'm not participating if so.
Re:Thanks, Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
People keep forgetting that the reason people like Steam is because they provide a service in exchange for you giving something up. If you buy your games with a Steam account, you get them integrated with social features, achievements, cloud saves and settings, automatic updates, and most importantly, brain-dead simple moving to new computers.
That's without all the "good faith" things people have come to expect from Valve like frequent deep sales, new platform support, etc.
Meanwhile, you can be damn sure your new Xbox game will be strictly less functional than before, not a trade off. The problem is the one-sidedness.
It's all Nag-ware anyway (Score:2, Interesting)
I am fed up anyway with the way things are going gaming. I may abandon consoles altogether until all this blows over.
I don't think the manufacturers realise that not everyone can afford t pay £50 per game, without the opportunity to trade in old games against it.
And let's face it; most games these days are in fact just 'nag-ware' which constantly rub your face in the fact you are missing out on all the DLC you haven't forked over for.
Thanks, that's what I wanted from my new game; to be told that it isn't complete and I am missing out unless I pony up the green.
Grim days to be a gamer I say.
And gone are the days of buying a game and having the exact same experience with your friends who have the same game.
Re:Always on = !on (Score:2, Interesting)
It would be unrealistic and unnecessary to have a constant internet connection the entire time you are using the device.
Connecting back every day or week is not going to break the lolz
Also who are these people without reliable internet? I used to live in AUSTRALIA, the asshole of the world and even there we had 100mbit cable
Re:Well... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep.
I already dropped out of modern console gaming due to DLC bullshit. This just sounds like suicide on their part to me.
Give me PCs and emulators and go fuck yourself until you can provide a good product again, game companies.
Re:This is a move to stop online piracy. (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a locked XBox Live account with +half a year or so paid on it. Being a yearly subscription, I forgot to update it when I canceled my bank account (due to another bank that I dislike buying out my bank). Instead of cancelling my account, MS left it running for another 4 or 5 months, THEN closed and locked the account for nonpayment. I went out and bought a year prepaid card, entered it in my account. The next day I was locked out again. The response I got from MS? "We don't take time cards as payment for debt owed." I also couldn't get any prepaid credit cards to work with their system.
Their system was more than happy to eat the $50 subscription card and bring my account back into the positive, but still keep me from accessing my account. Customer service told me I was out of luck. My Live account has hundreds of dollars of DLC and games on it. I sold my XBox within a week and haven't looked back. I'm done with consoles.
Where does Microsoft's confidence come from? (Score:5, Interesting)
These kinds of decisions are obviously going to piss off customers. But Microsoft clearly feels they are untouchable.
This might be understandable if they weren't currently the not-so-proud parent of a dismally failing tablet, a disaster of an operating system and a serial failure in the online space.
One would think that just maybe they should approach customers on the basis of what the customers want, and not what some repeat-disaster of a CEO thinks is good strategy.
This will be the year of the "upset" IMHO. Ouya and Steam look set to overthrow the aging behemoths. I look forward to healthy competition.
Re:Burn them all at the stake! (Score:2, Interesting)
Who needs proof to prop-up the years-old narrative here that Microsoft are only & can only be evil? What makes me chuckle are the responses to generic "Microsoft to force [evil_action] for [product_name]?" are so often "Well I for one won't be buying this then", as if they were ever going to....
Re:Well... (Score:5, Interesting)
My wife was hounding me for a while because before we had gotten married I borrowed some money from her that she was planning to buy a PC with for Diablo 3 when it came out, so... I got us both gaming PCs..... my first in years
The consoles have all been collecting dust ever since. It killed a few game series, just because buying a controller isn't that high on my list and third person running around games suck on kb and mouse... but the experience is better too.
Its not so much about graphics, my PC blows them away, but its also a lot newer, so thats understandable.... and thats kind of my thing... I can upgrade it.
The tradeoffs are simple. Consoles are consistent. Games are written to their specs for years. If a game says "Xbox360" there is no question, it will work on my Xbox360.
The downside, no upgrades untill the next version comes out. Performance has always been far behind PCs (a friend was over and saw my wife playing skyrim and he was shocked at how short the loading screens were compared to his console).. and as great as controllers are for some games (3rd person and games with simple rough mechanics) they are decidedly inferior to keyboard and mouse for anything remotely FPS, and when you look at the recent FPS RPGS like skyrim and Fallout....one word.... autorun.
Of course when I put a PC together, I can't seem to do it for less than 3x the cost of a console, but, I know the lower end of the market is perfectly fine at this point and, based on the last gen of consoles, at about the same price.
Thats the real kicker. When a console is $100-200... thats one thing... when it converges on the price of a low end gaming PC.... which can be used to do so much more, its hard for me to justify the console.
For me the balance is just so far tipped towards PC; I just can't justify another console.
Re:Always on = !on (Score:5, Interesting)
Great. So in order to loan a game to a friend, I have to loan him my console as well, even though he has the same console in his house. Gosh, that's not retarded at all.
Says who? I've borrowed great games from friends without wanting to buy them myself, and in turn loaned great games of my own to friends who didn't want to buy them. That's not some edge case either, it's a common and perfectly reasonable thing to do. Furthermore, what if we simply want to give each other games? Or buy used games? Or rent games?
You really don't see how this is clearly worse than the way things are now?