Four Years Later, Xbox Exec Admits How Microsoft Screwed Up Disc Resale Plan (arstechnica.com) 115
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: We're now approaching the four-year anniversary of Microsoft's rollout (and subsequent reversal) of a controversial plan to let game publishers limit resale of used, disc-based games. Looking back on that time recently, Microsoft Corporate Vice President for Windows and Devices Yusuf Mehdi acknowledged how that rollout fell flat and discussed how hard it was for the firm to change course even in light of fan complaints at the time. In a blog post on LinkedIn posted last weekend, Mehdi writes: "With our initial announcement of Xbox One and our desire to deliver breakthroughs in gaming and entertainment, the team made a few key decisions regarding connectivity requirements and how games would be purchased that didn't land well with fans. While the intent was good -- we imagined a new set of benefits such as easier roaming, family sharing and new ways to try and buy games, we didn't deliver what our fans wanted. We heard their feedback, and while it required great technical work, we changed Xbox One to work the same way as Xbox 360 for how our customers could play, share, lend, and resell games. This experience was such a powerful reminder that we must always do the right thing for our customers, and since we've made that commitment to our Xbox fans, we've never looked back." It's an interesting reflection in light of an interview Mehdi gave to Ars Technica at E3 2013, when the executive defended Microsoft's announced plans for Xbox One game licensing. Mehdi, then serving as Xbox chief marketing and strategy officer, stressed at the time that "this is a big change, consumers don't always love change, and there's a lot of education we have to provide to make sure that people understand... We're trying to do something pretty big in terms of moving the industry forward for console gaming into the digital world. We believe the digital world is the future, and we believe digital is better."
While the intent was good... (Score:5, Insightful)
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At least it wasn't Apple claiming it was "courage"...
Re:While the intent was good... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:While the intent was good... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Except 4 years later, we've lost the first sale doctrine.
People love digital downloads. They love not having to look for a disc with the game on it - they prefer picking it off a menu and playing it. Hell, ask any millennial and they hate physical media with a passion. The whole d
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it's not going to be easy to retrofit the proposed resale mechanism in because of all the existing contracts of sale.
The government can (and should, though its not likely to happen) change the law to require it.
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It will happen eventually, it will either take a new generation of computer literate representatives to get elected, or such an egregious abuse of DRM by businesses that it becomes a national topic. People having to hack their cars and such just to change the oil may get the job done.
Overage fees (Score:3)
People love digital downloads. They love not having to look for a disc with the game on it
Perhaps in the land of FTTH, cable, or VDSL. But if the only Internet access where they live is satellite or fixed cellular, they don't love the overage fees associated with downloads in the double digit GB.
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That's getting to be a problem even with discs. Buy the disc, install the game, oh and also download this other 10 GB that doesn't fit on the disc.
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People love digital downloads. They love not having to look for a disc with the game on it
I love digital downloads. I also like the first sale doctrine and hate system-intrusive DRM.
Hence, I play PC games and buy them from GOG instead of Steam.
Vote for the world you want.
Don't forget sharing with friends and family (Score:1)
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Valve has done more damage to first-sale doctrine than everyone else combined (with regards to games). The EU has taken notice of that and has been taking action. What Valve has done with Steam will probably bring down legislation upon everyone, including Microsoft to make the point moot.
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Valve has done more damage to first-sale doctrine than everyone else combined (with regards to games). The EU has taken notice of that and has been taking action. What Valve has done with Steam will probably bring down legislation upon everyone, including Microsoft to make the point moot.
Thing is about steam/valve. The prices are considerably lower to compensate for the lack of first sale. With xbox and consoles in general digital gets priced the same as physical to keep the brick and mortar stores on side. Physical sales would drop like a rock if digi was cheaper. Sure physical would still be a thing but it would probably arrive at cd then vinyl levels within a fairly short order and the cost of physical would go up again because they're not producing nearly as many. IMHO they should go em
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The prices are considerably lower to compensate for the lack of first sale.
Not anymore, go check prices, they're the same as the console prices.
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The prices are considerably lower to compensate for the lack of first sale.
Not anymore, go check prices, they're the same as the console prices.
Yeah that's what I said. On console digi prices are inflated to match the physical prices. Or do you mean PC prices have risen to match console?
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Or do you mean PC prices have risen to match console?
Yes, there is no PC/Console price differential. Well not in North America. Retailers still might have one in PC Master Piracy Race land in Europe.
https://games.slashdot.org/com... [slashdot.org]
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I think you are all right (if that makes sense :-).. The key with digital (pc and console) is when they are on sale (which tends to be pretty frequently and pretty substantial when they are). When they are not on sale, yeah, parity and expensive. Steam has its uber sales and Microsoft throws shit on sale all the time with its Deals with Gold (admittedly you have to subscribe to Gold, though).
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All of those benefits came at the cost of the loss of the First-sale doctrine
While this is important for some, the vast majority of the user base never buys and sells on the second hand market, so it's not really that much of an impact on the Microsoft decision.
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They download the disks, once, as needed. I've downloaded cracked versions of games I purchased, in order to play them with an ISO image rather than a hardware locked CD or DVD on a system that didn't _have_ a DVD drive. I've similarly downloaded DVD images of movies I bought, in order to play them in the country I happened to be in at the moment.
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Speak for yourself mate, always online was secondary concern for myself and I think most other games. It was all about disk ownership.
Let us not forget the standing ovation sony got in 2013 for simply announcing they weren't changing anything https://youtu.be/NOoJ6ucEY8g?t... [youtu.be]
I thought I was in the same boat but digital is better, easier and more convenient. As it stands I can only think of two real reasons to stick to physical. 1) You like having the product, something to display and look at, continue a collection. That's fine and there's nothing wrong with that (apart from physical games needing digi to match their price making digi more expensive than the should be) or 2) You like getting fucked in ass and taken for a mug when you trade them in to save a couple bucks off your
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And fourth, buying used discs for 80% off.
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From TFS:
the team made a few key decisions regarding connectivity requirements
Not having bought an XBone (or any system since the original Wii), I was stunned one day a year or two ago when someone was trying to set up an apparently brand new out of the box XBone for the video gaming room at a convention. It actually required an internet connection and a large download before it would do anything at all! Unfortunately, the wiffy was very crappy in that room and it never did get set up.
This is the same disconnect from reality behind the "helpful" unsolicited download of six and a half gigabytes of the Windows 10 "upgrade", with no regard to bandwidth cost or even free disk space, and the later forced updates to it. (My two Windows machines still run 7, with updates turned off since I can no longer trust Microsoft at all.)
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From TFS:
the team made a few key decisions regarding connectivity requirements
Not having bought an XBone (or any system since the original Wii), I was stunned one day a year or two ago when someone was trying to set up an apparently brand new out of the box XBone for the video gaming room at a convention. It actually required an internet connection and a large download before it would do anything at all! Unfortunately, the wiffy was very crappy in that room and it never did get set up.
Bullshit, they work offline out of the box. How is it supposed to know there's an update if it cant get online to check version numbers? Even today when a game or system gets updated you have the choice to update of stay offline.
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Exactly.
"we imagined a new set of benefits such as easier roaming, family sharing and new ways to try and buy games"
hahahahahahahahaha BULLSHIT
We all know exactly what set of benefits you were imagining.
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Exactly this. If they actually cared about gamers, then all these features would have been optional for the user. Without an internet connection, everything should have worked just as it did before.
Take a look at GoG Galaxy for a product with a much better claim to "good intentions".
Re:I reserve the right to resell (Score:5, Insightful)
An unfortunate aspect of games this generation - virtually every game needs a large update to make the game playable. The size of the patches and installs means you probably don't have sufficient hardware space so once Sony & Microsoft stop providing online services for the console those disks will effectively be unusable.
As complexity increases it becomes less likely we'll see emulators thus many of these games will be lost forever in ~10-15 years.
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Don't have sufficient space? I think the smallest XBox One is 500 GB. I have a 1TB model and have used less than half the space after installing five AAA games and a few other things.
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I also hate "ALWAYS ON" connections for anything but mobile games
I hate them even for mobile games. A tablet might not be in range of Wi-Fi, nor might a smartphone on a prepaid plan that includes voice and not data.
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I also hate "ALWAYS ON" connections for anything but mobile games (and those are "free" anyway for the most part).
Why does mobile get a free pass? They're mostly free? Well, unless you actually wanna play them they mostly are. You do know mobile games are the absolute worst for hosing consumers and ripping them off? You don't seem to be standing against them even though there is absolutely no sharing, resell, refund or anything on them and they are orders of magnitude worse than console games.
I'll never forget it... (Score:5, Informative)
MS had this long drawn out "you can do this but not that" speech that took minutes to explain.
Sony says "here's how you lend your friend a game with Playstation" and hands a box to his friend.
It didn't even take 10 seconds for Sony to eat MS's lunch there.
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And the reaction from that crowd spread to the Internet like wildfire.
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I found a PS3 in a dumpster, put an SSD in it, bought a PS3 controller, got the firmware installed, and bam! a console everyone enjoys because you can get some of the best PS1 games from the PS shopping online thing and install them.
So why not just buy a ps1? or even 2? Isn't back compat on a subscription model from sony these days?
At the end of the day do you really think the ps3 is a "better" machine that an xbox one or do you just like that you can play older games on it? Are you actually expecting an xbox one to be able to play psx games though?
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So why not just buy a ps1? or even 2?
Try finding a working PSone that isn't overpriced. Early model PS2's also tend to have dvd drive issues. 50001's and later tend to be okay though.
The PS3 is more convenient, especially if you can find a CECHA/CECHB/CECHE PS3 which can run PS2 games. (ALL PS3's can run PSone games) The virtual memory card thing alone is nice. The only issue that bugs me is that if you use the PS3 you lose non-USB PS2 and PSone peripheral support, so no using the PSone mouse or the giant dual analog stick with the PSone p
And then there was Kinect (Score:5, Insightful)
If that was their only problem, they could have recovered more easily. But they also had:
- $100 higher price to cover the cost of Kinect -- a device few wanted
- the TV stuff and the Snap interface so you could split-screen TV and gaming -- providing a poor TV-watching experience and a poor gaming experience simultaneously
- a giant box that looked like a VCR with a big external power brick
- somewhat worse performance than the PS4 because of the speed of the RAM interface
It's difficult to dig yourself out of a hole that deep.
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Some people watch TV -- for example a baseball game -- and play games at the same time. Split-screen is the worst way to do that though. Microsoft must have had big internal cultural problems for something like that to make it all the way to a final shipping product.
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i use split screen for kids tv and my gaming. then again i have a projector with a large enough screen to make both work.
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Or is the answer "don't, let the customer have 2 TVs"?
Correct.
Case in point: Look at how many games nowadays support only online multiplayer, not same-screen multiplayer. Publishers rationalize the decision not to spend time=money on same-screen multiplayer by claiming limited GPU and RAM resources, as well as the fact that the average age of a gamer has trended upward since the NES and Super NES era.
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iPad or remote play
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(BTW, I have never owned any of the Xboxes)
I thought some of the TV stuff at least had potential.. Even if only to remove the need to switch/have inputs on the TV. In other words, have the other video source daisy-chain through the Xbox.
(I switch inputs on my TV all the time, so obviously know how to do it.. It does suck that nowadays it's much slower than switching inputs on analog TVs.. but really, I wish I could have all devices plugged in and essentially instantly switch between which one I am seeing
Designed from the Ground Up for Ads, Not Games (Score:5, Informative)
- $100 higher price to cover the cost of Kinect -- a device few wanted
What do you mean nobody wanted a microphone and HD camera focused 24/7 on their living room or bedroom (or kid's bedroom)?
It was also intended as a platform to force-feed ads, first and foremost:
http://www.sticktwiddlers.com/... [sticktwiddlers.com]
So what about the future of advertising on the Xbox One? “It’s going to be an exciting transition though because the 360 console wasn’t built with advertising in mind, it was more of an afterthought, so we’ve had to adapt to the technology and how we work to fit them in to the console,” said Technical Account Manager for Xbox LIVE Advertising, “whereas this new one is going to have advertising in mind. So a lot of the limitations that we have now, hopefully the release of the boundaries will widened so the opportunities will be a lot greater.”
http://hothardware.com/news/mi... [hothardware.com]
The Xbox is developing native advertising, where ad content is displayed alongside relevant material, either embedded in search results, promoted on a network like Facebook, or a "Liked X? You'll Love Y!" style of marketing. Not to worry, though -- the company plans to use Kinect to make these advertisements even more engaging than their current counterparts. In the future, Kinect may offer you a "Choose Your Own Adventure" style narrative in which you speak commands or give orders to an ad as its playing to change the final outcome.
The other way the company wants to use Kinect is to monitor what's going on in the living room to serve you group-appropriate content, rather than resorting to the plain old method of bombarding you with non-interactive advertising for things you don't care about. Microsoft claims that the demographic data the ad team can access is very limited, but it's hard not to see shadows of the same patent for movie licensing that the company applied for last year.
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What do you mean nobody wanted a microphone and HD camera focused 24/7 on their living room or bedroom (or kid's bedroom)?
If the last 5 years have shown anything it's that no one but a rounding error of users cares about this, and some people will actually pay extra for the feature.
No the ONLY complaint was that people were forced to spend money on a part of the device they had no intention of using. Privacy didn't even register in the list of complaints.
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If that was their only problem, they could have recovered more easily. But they also had:
- $100 higher price to cover the cost of Kinect -- a device few wanted
Devil's Advocate: Microsoft thought (well, logically) that they could try and gain share by stealing some thunder from Nintendo (the Kinect was aimed at the Wii, not the PlayStation.) It made sense because the Wii ate Sony *and* Microsoft's lunch in raw sales (in spite of not doing HD, having a DVD-R that couldn't play a movie DVD, shit resolution, shit sound, etc...)
No arguments against the rest, though.
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having a DVD-R that couldn't play a movie DVD
The drive could, at least with the early drive chips. Nintendo just didn't want to have to pay DVD FLLC for every Wii console it shipped. Microsoft did the same thing with the original Xbox (2001), putting licensed DVD player software on a separate memory card in the remote receiver. It's unclear whether Nintendo could have likewise offered something like "PowerDVD now available in Wii Shop Channel for 2000 Nintendo Points".
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- $100 higher price to cover the cost of Kinect -- a device few wanted
I've never bought a Kinect bundle. I don't recall that ever being the only option. If that was a release thing they must've backed down quick.
- the TV stuff and the Snap interface so you could split-screen TV and gaming -- providing a poor TV-watching experience and a poor gaming experience
All screen-in-screen stuff is terrible for doing either. It's really spiffy for Twitch streaming though, and you can now run things like Pandora in
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I know you're talking about release issues, but I don't personally know anyone that has a current Playstation and does not have a current XBox. Playstation's online stuff was so awful to use that I gave up. I had a PS3 for over a year, only played it a few days during that time.
People may have pissed and moaned about things, but they still bought the product.
Many Xbox One games run at reduced resolution (Score:1)
if there is a difference it's that insignificant during game play.
The typical pattern is that the Xbox One version of a game would run at 1280x720 before upscaling for output, while the PlayStation 4 version of the same game could run at 1600x900 with the same frame rate due to faster memory. (Meanwhile, PC masters got to enjoy their 1920x1080, 2560x1440, or whatever else the aftermarket GPU was capable of.)
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Kinect was originally intended to be required, but they dropped it pre-release because of the backlash.
Split screen was a bad joke
The big external power brick is annoying, yes they are learning, but the PS4 didn't have an external power supply at launch, so it may be more accurate to say they are learning to copy Sony.
Slower RAM interface and less processors tasked with gaming (at least at launch) ended up cutting their performance by ~25% compared to the launch PS4.
I am not a fanboy and I have both systems
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If that was their only problem, they could have recovered more easily. But they also had: - $100 higher price to cover the cost of Kinect -- a device few wanted - the TV stuff and the Snap interface so you could split-screen TV and gaming -- providing a poor TV-watching experience and a poor gaming experience simultaneously - a giant box that looked like a VCR with a big external power brick - somewhat worse performance than the PS4 because of the speed of the RAM interface
It's difficult to dig yourself out of a hole that deep.
-Kinect was a piece of fluff that wasn't dropped quickly enough. -Even less people used that than kinect so is kinda moot. You can only pay proper attention to one thing at a time anyway. -As opposed to a giant box with a slant so it looks 'funky' -Performance worse in some aspects and better in others, guess that depends who's PR is louder. The hole wasn't that deep, they seem to be doing ok these days.
Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
"...we imagined a new set of benefits such as easier roaming, family sharing and new ways to try and buy games, ..."
If he can't even be honest about the basic intent of drm as a method of protecting revenue, why should I take ANYTHING else he says as credible?
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it's hard to say something like "we're going to rip you off, but not as badly as Gamestop has been," even if it is true for the average consumer.
Steam Library Sharing (Score:4, Insightful)
For anyone that uses the Library Sharing feature of Steam, this is essentially what Microsoft was attempting to do. But because Microsoft was building a traditional console, not a download-only service, is why it was met with such negativity. I'll dis on Microsoft as much as the next guy, but they due try to do new innovative shit all the time, they're just notorious at always fucking it up or never actually releasing it in the first place. Other examples include UAC (sucked in Vista, fixed in 7), WinFS (never released), Photosynth (released, then dead shortly thereafter)
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I usually get my Steam games (Score:3)
So yeah, I'm giving up the ability to sell/share it but I'm paying a fraction of the cost.
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I for one was saddened by the fact that Microsoft caved on the issue. There was a lot of FUD floating around that time about what you could and couldn't do, most of it just lies.
It was never "always on". It had to be online once every 24 hours (or 1 hour if you were accessing your library from a remote console) both of those were part of the very first announcement.
There was never a ban on reselling used games, even from the day 1 announcement. The idea was that you could sell the used game, turn it back
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This is kind of in support of what you're saying (innovative stuff) so don't take it as a counter post, but a supportive post clarifying part of what they were trying to do for anyone reading it.
Steam Library Sharing, while progressive, is not nearly as good as what Microsoft was trying to do (and to a limited point actually did) with the family sharing.
Owning two XBOX One machines, I do not have to buy every game twice for me and my wife. She can play on my Home Xbox and I can use my Roaming License on th
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Also it does kind of suck that the option to convert from disc-to-digital was removed as part of the backtrack. All games are installed to the hard drive prior to being playable whether from disc or digital. I don't sell my games back to places like GameStop so obviously I have a different take than those that do.
Are you fucking kidding me? (Score:1)
While the intent was good...
The intent was the undermine the ownership of game by the customer. Only a sociopath would think the "intent was good" because that shit is straight up evil.
Second rule of business (Score:3)
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Your business has absolutely nothing to do with what you want to sell... it has absolutely everything to do with what your customers want to buy.
"But we can shift that paradigm! This time, we'll plan better, we just need to educate our consumers."
Well, at least they taught their consumers a valuable lesson: Sony, famously guilty for shitting on the rights of virtually everyone through their crappy DRM-enabled hardware, still sold way more consoles than Microsoft.
Microsoft just has never excelled at building what customers want.
Nokia and everyone else had phones with Java, so Microsoft shipped WinCE phones - that didn't sell.
Apple came out with the
Digital console (Score:2)
"this is a big change, consumers don't always love change, and there's a lot of education we have to provide to make sure that people understand... We're trying to do something pretty big in terms of moving the industry forward for console gaming into the digital world.
Imagine a future where people play games on a digital console, instead of today's crappy analog consoles.
Sheesh! I think we know who needs some education.
The education that they seem to think we need is their plan for us to never own anything, to pay over and over, and to have no say or control over anything.
What a load of crap (Score:2)
Once you are able to admit this, you might be able to recover from your mistake. But based upon your statements, Microsoft will continue to shoot themselves in the face.
That was never the issue with DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
"...we imagined a new set of benefits such as easier roaming, family sharing and new ways to try and buy games..."
OK, fine, but thats not what people were pissed about, and you know it. There is no rational explanation for DRM (aka digital non-rights) to prevent resale. You want to digitally revolutionize and save money on distribution and make things more convenient for your customers? Fine, but give me a button in my Xbone UI that says "release rights" or some such or better yet, an online marketplace to resell digital content I no longer want. Why should I give up the fundamental right of resale on my $2000 plus library of games just because the original seller saved $7 on not having to sell me a physical disc, case and manual? Hell, digital should give me more rights or a discount, like the right to rent my copy out to others when I'm not using it.
This was a straight up money grab by MS and the developers, and the consumer bitch slapped you down because there was real meaningful competition. Own it and move on.
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Thanks for spreading more FUD. Resell was always an option, almost exactly how you describe how it "should be" as it was announced on day 1.
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"Thanks for spreading more FUD. Resell was always an option, almost exactly how you describe how it "should be" as it was announced on day 1."
Thanks for showing your ignorance. In their original plan it states this:
"Trade-in and resell your disc-based games: Today, some gamers choose to sell their old disc-based games back for cash and credit. We designed Xbox One so game publishers can enable you to trade in your games
. Microsoft does not charge a platform fee to retailers, pu
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AC below pretty effectively spelled it out. You might want to pay closer attention to WTF is going on when giant corporations are trying to rob you of your basic property rights instead of licking their boots...
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How Many illegals read Slashdot?
Uno.
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Uno.
Wild card -- draw four, one card for each year since #dealwithit.
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No I don't, that's why I'm asking!
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If you're in the US illegally, Trump isn't playing around. You will be deported. Living in Chicago or San Francisco is no protection. ICE is coming for you and you will be deported.
You're really doing well turning America into such a shit hole that no one would ever want to go there for a visit let alone to try and make a living. It's one way to deal with immigration that's for sure.