As it stands right now, when a customer purchases a game for the Xbox One, the disc is really only acting as an alternative to downloading the game that the disc contains, much like SteamWorks enabled games on PC. This is because every game for the Xbox One must be installed on its hard drive, and every game is linked to the user's account. If this was the only DRM involved with the system, I wouldn't be too upset about it. I play most of my games on PC, and this is exactly how things have been since I got into PC gaming. The "one more thing" that really turns the whole system sour is that the Xbox One checks to see if the game belongs to the person playing it every 24 hours, or every hour when that person is signed in on another console.
Chris Plante, a features writer for Polygon recently posted his own opinion piece on the Xbox One. It's overall an extremely well-written feature that I encourage you to read for yourself, but one part in particular pertaining to the comparisons to PC gaming stood out to me. He said, "The Xbox One policy doesn't share the good aspects of PC gaming. PC games can be given away by developers. PC games can be sold without DRM. There are alternative retailers, allowing the consumer to choose where he or she buys from. And because there is choice, there is competition, and because there is competition, there is competitive pricing."
Every PC feature he lists is part of the overall reason of why I am okay with how things work in the PC realm. I still feel like I have freedom with PC games. Granted, when I buy games on Steam, I'm also only buying a license to play that game. There is one large difference, however between the Xbox One and Steam, I can play games that I purchase on Steam offline. When my internet goes out, I don't feel like my PC is essentially a massive paper-weight. I can play every single one of my games offline, and that's something I feel should never be taken away from me. If Microsoft even had an inkling of consumer benefit in the farthest reaches of their corporate minds, they'd provide a similar feature to this.
Game rentals won't be available at launch, a troublesome sign for subscription services like GameFly and rental services like Redbox. Lending games to friends is also a thing of the past as the only way to allow it is to transfer ownership of the game's license to them. This can only be done once, and the friend you're giving the game to must have been on your Xbox Live friends list for 30 days or more. Used games will be tradable at "participating retailers" and at least on Microsoft's part, there will be no fee to trade them in. What I mean by that is while Microsoft will not place a fee to transfer ownership on games that they publish, they've left it up to the publisher for third party games. Notice that Microsoft makes it seem like they're doing us a favor by not charging to trade their games.
To me, and as it seems many other people this is just completely confusing and in complete honesty just a huge hassle to go through just to play video games. Not only are these anti-piracy measures extremely anti-consumer, they're, in their most basic form, anti-fun. Right now it feels like Microsoft is saying "we had to go through a lot of trouble to make these game's playable for you, so just enjoy the fact that you're able to play them at all", and that's really troublesome to me.
I shouldn't have to feel like it's a privilege that I'm allowed to play video games on a game console. I shouldn't have to be scared that one day, since parts of the game are rendered on a server, I won't be able to play that game anymore. I shouldn't have to fear that one day this product that I spent a vast amount of money on will become no more than a paper-weight when Microsoft decides that keeping their server's running is too costly to justify it.
Microsoft should be aiming to please me, the consumer, as much as possible. I am after all, the one who's going to buy their hardware in the first place, so what does it matter if the publishers are a tad upset with them? The publishers won't make any money if nobody buys the console that their game is playable on. Microsoft and Sony should be the one's setting the rules, not the publishers, since as it stands the publishers need Microsoft and Sony to make their games playable.
Another big question I have about the Xbox One is what happens when a game goes out of print? Some publishers, like Atlus for example do extremely limited runs of their games, and after a few months the only way to purchase them at a decent price, is pre-owned. I know that Microsoft says that they'll allow us to trade our games, but there's no way things will be as open as they are now.
The most troubling thing about Microsoft's used game policy is that there seem to be so many better ways to handle it. What if a game was only available to purchase pre-owned after a set period of time? For example, when Call of Duty: Ghosts comes out in November, people who are accustomed to buying their games new could drive to the store and buy it new. The catch would be that once that copy of CoD: Ghosts is linked to their Xbox Live account, it would be untradeable for a set period of time. Once that time limit expires, the requirement for a game to be linked to one account would be lifted, and the original buyer would be free to sell/trade/lend their copy of the game as they pleased.
This system (assuming the fact that things need to change as Microsoft and Sony want us to think), would benefit both the consumer who prefers to rent or purchase pre-owned games because they would be free to do so after a set period of time, and the publisher would be guaranteed a profit from every copy of their game that is sold within that time period. Rental companies like Redbox and GameFly would also benefit from this too, they just wouldn't be able to make the game available for rental until the time period expires. This is just one example of, what I think at least, is a better way of doing things.
To me personally, it doesn't matter what games Microsoft announces today at their E3 press conference. I don't want to play Halo or Forza if the bridge connecting me to those games is as restrictive as it seems to be thus far. The same thing goes for Sony, if they announce Uncharted 4 tonight along with a DRM system as extreme as Microsoft's, it would be enough to make me reconsider buying the PlayStation 4 as well.
Speaking of Sony, regrettably they most likely has a similar system regarding used games in place. It's just common sense, why would a publisher port their game to Sony's console if the Xbox One allows them to block used games, which they make little-to-no profit on? I know that I'll be purchasing the PlayStation 4 first, I've known that since before either of the consoles were announced. The PlayStaiton 4 has been marketed as a game console, and the Xbox One as an entertainment hub. Because of this, the choice has been even further solidified for me. Before the Xbox One reveal however, I genuinely wanted to purchase both consoles.
As it stands right now, the only next-gen console I'll be playing my games on for the foreseeable future is the PlayStation 4. As I said earlier, that could change after both Sony and Microsoft's press conferences today. Microsoft has, as far as I'm concerned, one more chance to change my, and many other potential consumer's minds as far as buying their console goes, but right now I'm even further from purchasing the Xbox One than I was before Microsoft announced it.
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