Xbox rumors proven correct...and much more is revealed
Ahh, those nostalgic days of...uh...early April.
I see there's about five billion Xbox threads here, but none of them seemed to have info right up front, so here it is:
Always-online is really true, so finally we can talk about the "rumor" we always knew to be true as if it's true. You need to be connected once every 24 hours, or...well, they don't say, but I assume you'll be locked out of using the system at all until you manage to get it connected again. Source: Kotaku
You won't be able to pop your games into other consoles to play them wherever you go.
You will have to validate your game code online in order to play.
Anybody can play a game from a disc you give them. However, either you pay to transfer the game, or they will pay full retail to play the game. Again, you have to go online to do this.
All games will be installed to the hard drive, but the hard drive is 500GB.
Kinect's mandatory, and microphone is always listening for verbal commands, even when the camera is "off" (not sure if this means if the console is off, to turn the console on, but that seems likely).
""Xbox LIVE — which still looks pretty much like the version of Xbox LIVE you’re using today — now remembers what you were last doing, what game you were playing, what song you were listening to and so forth, surfacing that information automatically."
(Confirmations of all the previous assertions from this NeoGAF post, aside from maybe the 500GB thing which is deeper in the thread, if it's there, and the Kinect microphone thing which I just discovered in this Kotaku article. EDIT: The last bit is from a Times Tech article that I keep losing the URL for.)
Some gamers thought that EA dropping online passes had to do with whatever it was the EA rep mumbled out the side of his mouth, but with EA dropping support for the Wii U and apparently not showing up for Sony events, it looks like they've just found a willing partner to build online pass blocks into the console itself, applying to the whole game. In other words, they're happy to let Microsoft infrastructure take care of this.
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It's funny, but recently I started to realize that this was probably coming. Computer users have been hearing rumors for over a decade about new DRM-like technologies being used (back in the Pentium 4 days, even), and there have also been rumblings within the last decade about systems restricting used game sales (I seem to recall the rumor being bandied about that the PS3 would do it). Each time it didn't happen gamers breathed easily for the few moments until the next rumor surfaced. Despite the (very reasonable) arguments that no company would ever make such an obviously anti-consumer move, I realized that it was quite likely an attractive proposition for companies that have looked at the infrastructure for complete server-side management of your gaming library (i.e. what Steam has already been doing for years) and that it would be a matter of how much time would pass before it happens.
In some sense Microsoft isn't breaking new ground here. On the other hand, buying games digitally off the Steam storefront has never promised to give you games that you could freely trade and sell, but so long as you have your account available and the software installed at any computer you have access to, you can access your stuff. (And selling games on Steam has been a reality for a long while now.) Steam serves as a sort of "virtual console," giving flexibility about where you play. With cheap PCs capable of playing games that will rival or better the Xbox experience in many arenas, limiting that flexibility is surely a blow to each gamer's freedom to play where and when they choose. Another thing that distinguishes Steam from the Xbox One proposal is that many Steam titles are very, very cheap, and often bundled along with other games. Many of these are older games, but you can expect to pay full retail for Xbox One games for a long period after a game might have received a discount on Steam. Of course, there's nothing that says that Xbox One games couldn't be subject to discounts or specials like Steam. We'll have to see how that works out.
My honest question is, how can anybody support this garbage? XBLA's consignment of games to a dead platform once a new system is released was clear enough, but instead of making any effort to fix this, they've made the XBLA problem apply to the entire platform. The only thing I could see happening for longevity is that, with the move to X86, there might be a chance that backwards compatibility could happen on an Xbox One successor. However, the X86 ISA won't necessarily be with us forever.
Sony fans are rejoicing at the glut of anti-consumer provisions, but at the very least the PS4 will have (I think they do already with the PS3) an XBLA-like system (i.e. tying games to each generation), and it's not yet entirely clear if they could have any ideas in store like Microsoft. Although the "always online" rumors were with us for a long while, some of the extra provisions seem to have been kept pretty closely under wraps for now.
Cripes, somebody's gonna have to make a Console Freedom Index now.
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Originally Posted by Bojay1997
