This thread is inspired by another: view original post
"Shoe's Breakdown of what Microsoft was trying to do."
With the DRM situation at hand, it's about time we take a look at what exactly it was they were trying to do with this anti-sharing stance surrounding the release of the Xbox One.
With any form of electronic entertainment, the greatest concern is Piracy. There is no money made by those who work hard to produce the medium, which is to many, a form of theft. The music industry has fallen victim, the movie industry is soon to follow. One of the last mediums to survive thus far is the Gaming industry. Console gamers have been unable to manufacture pirated copies of games, but the PC gamers have no problem at all. With that in mind, Steam made the reasonable decision to mandate DRM, and constant online connection. This was to prevent piracy of games that need internet connection, though it was never going to be enough to completely stop gaming piracy. But this made sense, because if you use a PC to game, you are almost always going to have an internet connection.
This was Microsoft's mistake, because console gamers don't need internet connection. In fact, console gamers went years and years without ever connecting to the internet. This created a form of commerce founded upon the sharing of what a gamer physically owns. Memory cards, controllers, cables and games all were exchanged from hand to hand, and console gamers learned quickly the joy of sharing.
When a PC gamer spends the money to play a game, they spend the money to use Steam's connection to other gamers. They spend $60 to be allowed to play with other PC gamers. But when a Console gamer spends $60 for a game, they are owning the entire game, including what they choose to do with the physical disc. Console gamers already spend $60 a year on Xbox Live to play with other gamers, there is no reason why Microsoft should feel it appropriate to dictate that a console gamer must pay $120 to play a game with their friends, especially if the given game is not something that will use the Xbox Live service.
To summarize, Microsoft was planning ahead to prevent console piracy, but because it will never truly take hold as it has with PC gaming, the measures taken with the creation of the DRM at this point only prove to increase the profits that Microsoft is capable of making. Perhaps that is a little biased, but it is the only outcome that can be seen currently, especially with this large of an increase in console power, it will be years before there is an easy method of pirating games in this format.
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Here read this[quote]Since its announcement, there has been some confusion over the details of sharing your Xbox One game library with up to ten "family members." Mehdi couldn't give comprehensive details but he did clarify some things. For one, a family member doesn't have to be a "blood relative," he said, eliminating the extremely unlikely possibility that the Xbox One would include a built-in blood testing kit. For another, they don't have to live in the primary owner's house—I could name a friend that lives 3,000 miles away as one of my "family members" Mehdi said. You'll be able to link other Xbox Live accounts as having shared access to your library when you first set up a system, and will also be able to add them later on (though specific details of how you manage these relationships is still not being discussed). The only limitation, it seems, is that only one person can be playing the shared copy of a single game at any given time. All in all, this does sound like a pretty convenient feature that's more workable than simply passing discs around amongst friends who are actually in your area.[/quote]
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Again, I understand what they are trying to do. And perhaps this compromise will help many feel more comfortable with the DRM, but it took an uprising of customers in order for Microsoft to make a change to this system.
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