The Official Xbox One Thread

[KaOTiK]

Xbox VP denies that they had planned to time-limit the family sharing:
https://twitter.com/notwen/status/348092374842474497

As does cheif of staff interactive entertainment at MS:
https://twitter.com/aarongreenberg/statuses/347911202057379840

Of course they would say that. Granted, even if they are telling the truth they wont believed at this point due to how horrible they handled their PR and such. It is easy to say no we were totally doing it the way you all thought too bad the feature is gone now lol.

 

[smackababy]

can you explain why it is such a huge deal still because your first attempt really doesn't compare. pc apps aren't anywhere near the same as games are, as far as ecosystem and how they are used.

and btw you can STILL buy digital copies and keep them on your hdd, without a disc...

It isn't a huge deal, but it was something I prefer. PC gaming had this problem before disc activation and DD became the norm. It was painful and cumbersome. On a console it is even more so, because I do have to get up and put the disc in. At least, on a PC, I am generally close. It is a huge convenience for me, and I imagine, a lot of other people that haven't experienced it. On Xbox now, I will get invites from friends playing a different game. If I want to play with them, I have to accept, then go change the disc. With the new system, I would simply have to pick "Join" or even say "Accept invite" to my Kinect.

The all digital copies is still available, yes. However, it isn't perfect. I cannot buy a disc and install it. I have to wait for the game to download. If MS allows preloading like Steam, that won't be a huge deal, because you can just activate it online at midnight or whatever and skip the waiting with slow speed because a million other people are trying to download this. People with slow internet and / or data caps are effected by this even more so than me, although I fear in the future I will be getting a data cap back.

 

[smackababy]

Of course they would say that. Granted, even if they are telling the truth they wont believed at this point due to how horrible they handled their PR and such. It is easy to say no we were totally doing it the way you all thought too bad the feature is gone now lol.

I like the response though. They should have said "We thought about a time limit, but scratched that so you could actually play the entire game if you wanted. Too bad you all didn't want it. Enjoy your discs!"

 

[KaOTiK]

I

The all digital copies is still available, yes. However, it isn't perfect. I cannot buy a disc and install it. I have to wait for the game to download. If MS allows preloading like Steam, that won't be a huge deal, because you can just activate it online at midnight or whatever and skip the waiting with slow speed because a million other people are trying to download this. People with slow internet and / or data caps are effected by this even more so than me, although I fear in the future I will be getting a data cap back.

I don't know if MS will do it like Sony said they were, but I would imagine they would. The game should be playable after you download xx% and continues to download as you play it. Which would mean you don't have to DL the entire game before playing it. I see no reason MS can't do it either, it is a software feature, not hardware.

 

[ImpulsE69]

Oh I get that some people have a issue with it on principle, but to call it a large majority is laughable. Mountains of molehills comes to mind.

I forgot, large cities in the US are the only places people buy and play consoles and those consoles never leave the general vicinity of their router. My bad. How narrow minded of me.

 

[purbeast0]

It isn't a huge deal, but it was something I prefer. PC gaming had this problem before disc activation and DD became the norm. It was painful and cumbersome. On a console it is even more so, because I do have to get up and put the disc in. At least, on a PC, I am generally close. It is a huge convenience for me, and I imagine, a lot of other people that haven't experienced it. On Xbox now, I will get invites from friends playing a different game. If I want to play with them, I have to accept, then go change the disc. With the new system, I would simply have to pick "Join" or even say "Accept invite" to my Kinect.

The all digital copies is still available, yes. However, it isn't perfect. I cannot buy a disc and install it. I have to wait for the game to download. If MS allows preloading like Steam, that won't be a huge deal, because you can just activate it online at midnight or whatever and skip the waiting with slow speed because a million other people are trying to download this. People with slow internet and / or data caps are effected by this even more so than me, although I fear in the future I will be getting a data cap back.

yeah so basically it's just a convenience. it just seems like people are making a huge deal about it when you can still get the digital version, but in that case now there is ANOTHER issue with that because you can't turn your disc version into a DD version.

glad i'm not bothered by having to get out of my chair for 10 seconds to swap discs lol.

 

[QuikWgn]

yes i know how math works

but it is doing stuff remotely. you can view other peoples reefs as well so it's not just you who is viewing it and seeing what is going on on it.

I have a similar game called "Fish Live" that I keep on my G3 to occupy the kiddies. You raise fish in your aquarium that can be sold after they mature. Some take up to a week, and you can go to other people aqariums and feed their fish finda like farmville...

 

[smackababy]

I don't know if MS will do it like Sony said they were, but I would imagine they would. The game should be playable after you download xx% and continues to download as you play it. Which would mean you don't have to DL the entire game before playing it. I see no reason MS can't do it either, it is a software feature, not hardware.

Yeah, Blizzard did that with D3, and still does for patches. It wouldn't be a huge problem, and welcomed considering the games are going to be 20+gb. =(

 

[KaOTiK]

Yeah, Blizzard did that with D3, and still does for patches. It wouldn't be a huge problem, and welcomed considering the games are going to be 20+gb. =(

Starcarft 2 and a lot of MMO's do it, The Last of Us on the PS3 does it as well.

 

[jrphoenix]

I like the response though. They should have said "We thought about a time limit, but scratched that so you could actually play the entire game if you wanted. Too bad you all didn't want it. Enjoy your discs!"

yeah, and the first person that complains about a scratched disc is perm banned from Live, LOL

 

[ImpulsE69]

Good thing I'm smart enough to know how to fix discs. And the additional getting up to change disks every week or so will keep me in shape after playing all those fixed discs.

 

[AstroManLuca]

EDIT: if you are implying your friend stays offline after the first validation check, then kudos you got two licenses off one disc. You've beat the system.

You can also "beat the system" with the Xbox 360 by buying a game from YOUR console while logged into your FRIEND's account. When your friend goes home and logs in on his own console, he gets to play the game... and you can still play the game too because you're on the hardware that was originally used to purchase it. With the limitation that your friend would have to be logged into XBL to play it, and you would have to be on your original console.

It was known for years and I even took advantage of it one time, but it was clunky enough that I doubt it really hurt their sales much. You have to consider that these companies do a cost-benefit analysis of all these decisions. Make the DRM too lax and people can exploit it and avoid paying. But make it too restrictive and you'll increase support costs and possibly turn people off of buying anything, just for the sake of closing loopholes. Imagine if you were required to be on the original purchasing console AND logged into Xbox Live on the purchasing account to use any downloaded games or content. That would be a headache for gamers and by extension, MS.

Oh I get that some people have a issue with it on principle, but to call it a large majority is laughable. Mountains of molehills comes to mind.

Large minority. Meaning that most people aren't affected by it, but a significant number of people are.

That also covers those who live outside of the 21 launch countries of the Xbox One who would be unable to play any games on them. Poland and Ukraine are home to major game developers (CD Projekt Red and 4A Games), and no one in those countries would be able to play. Along with Greece, Portugal, Japan, South Korea, and many others.

It's mostly the principle, I guess. When MS says that you have to be online every day and you must be from one of these 21 countries, they're basically saying they don't give a shit about anyone else. That's millions of people. It is possible to have an opinion on an issue that doesn't directly affect you.

yeah so basically it's just a convenience. it just seems like people are making a huge deal about it when you can still get the digital version, but in that case now there is ANOTHER issue with that because you can't turn your disc version into a DD version.

glad i'm not bothered by having to get out of my chair for 10 seconds to swap discs lol.

Well some people might be in the situation of their wife having their balls in a jar and refusing to let them store video games next to the video game console where they are publicly visible and instead requiring them to hide them away in a corner, requiring extra effort to swap games. But what do I know? D:

 

[railven]

Good thing I'm smart enough to know how to fix discs. And the additional getting up to change disks every week or so will keep me in shape after playing all those fixed discs.

Exactly, when life gives you lemons...

 

[Dominato3r]

Of course they would say that. Granted, even if they are telling the truth they wont believed at this point due to how horrible they handled their PR and such. It is easy to say no we were totally doing it the way you all thought too bad the feature is gone now lol.

Let me take a guess as to what the responses would have been had he said " yes there was a limit"... :hmm:

 

[BoberFett]

yes i know how math works

but it is doing stuff remotely. you can view other peoples reefs as well so it's not just you who is viewing it and seeing what is going on on it.

Ah, I understand. That makes a little more sense. I understand the benefit of persistence for multiplayer, but some of this discussion of calculating real time data like calculating nearby trees in the cloud seems ridiculous, since that data gets fed right to the GPU. If they can prove me wrong, more power to 'em.

 

[AstroManLuca]

Good thing I'm smart enough to know how to fix discs. And the additional getting up to change disks every week or so will keep me in shape after playing all those fixed discs.

Unless they design the One to destroy discs at random like the 360 did.

 

[railven]

You can also "beat the system" with the Xbox 360 by buying a game from YOUR console while logged into your FRIEND's account. When your friend goes home and logs in on his own console, he gets to play the game... and you can still play the game too because you're on the hardware that was originally used to purchase it. With the limitation that your friend would have to be logged into XBL to play it, and you would have to be on your original console.

It was known for years and I even took advantage of it one time, but it was clunky enough that I doubt it really hurt their sales much. You have to consider that these companies do a cost-benefit analysis of all these decisions. Make the DRM too lax and people can exploit it and avoid paying. But make it too restrictive and you'll increase support costs and possibly turn people off of buying anything, just for the sake of closing loopholes. Imagine if you were required to be on the original purchasing console AND logged into Xbox Live on the purchasing account to use any downloaded games or content. That would be a headache for gamers and by extension, MS.

Understandable, and I've been doing this for years with Steam. Friends and I share accounts, and we get to play tons of games. However, I don't think Steam is collapsing because of this.

Hell, some of those games I played on a friend's account I bought during a sale.

However, it is still an option that can satisfy everyone and once we start seeing forums with "yo, who wants to be my offline buddy" then MSFT (or Valve/Sony) probably won't care enough to start hunting us down like the dogs some of us are.

 

[BoberFett]

There's no way the One will allow you to install games and play without the disc. This is what irks me about people screaming the Xbox One had DRM and now has none and that the PS3/4/360 also have none. If I install a game to my 360's hard drive in its entirety it will still require me to put the disc in to ensure I still own it. This is DRM. Checking via an online check is no more DRM than checking the disc. Both are DRM. One is checking the disc for a license, the other is checking my account online. I have no problem with people taking the stance that ALL DRM is bad, fine. I'm a Linux using hippy, I can see where you're coming from. But it's absolute bullshit telling me that checking an online keystore is evil phoning home/treating gamers like criminals DRM and yet doing the exact same check locally is somehow perfectly ok. By asking for the disc when all the files are present on the drive is effectively say, 'I don't trust you still own this game, show me the disc you dirty little criminal.'

There's an important difference. When DRM is in the form of checking a disc, you have control over what happens to an item you bought. When DRM is an online check, someone else has that control.

These companies are notorious for getting people to buy into their DRMed systems and then pull the rug out from under everyone, shut down the service, and everybody loses everything they had invested in that system. That's practically criminal in my mind.

 

[Midwayman]

I forgot, large cities in the US are the only places people buy and play consoles and those consoles never leave the general vicinity of their router. My bad. How narrow minded of me.

http://gigaom.com/2012/09/04/90-of-us-households-with-computers-have-broadband/

So where's the large majority? Let's just say the people with enough money to buy a system and games probably also have internet. It's not 2005 anymore.

 

[jrphoenix]

Good thing I'm smart enough to know how to fix discs. And the additional getting up to change disks every week or so will keep me in shape after playing all those fixed discs.

Just search the forums for posts by people with scratched discs. It's not about your abilities, mostly people with kids / renting games.

 

[BoberFett]

Make that option online only. Done.

"To continue using the diskless feature, you will be required to validate ownership by checking online once every 24 hours."

When you set up diskless usage:

"To use this feature we require a persistant online connection to validate onwership. If you are okay with this, press start to continue."

During down time:
"We've noticed you don't have an online connection, please insert your original disc to validate ownership and continue playing, if you can not do this your game will save and stop functioning until you can either provide the original disc for validation or connect back to the MSFT network for validation."


This isn't brain surgery. For whatever reason the brilliant minds at MSFT can't figure this out..."oh piracy, you can hack it." Well if you're going to be hacking it any ways nothing they can do will stop you. But this is a working system for people who aren't pirates and what the options."

That would be a fantastic solution that I would happily endorse. Either it checks online, or you put in the disc to play after XX hours have passed without an online check. If they had announced that from the beginning, that would have been a step forward.

But the infants at MS are going to throw a tantrum and insist on doing it one way or the other.

 

[BoberFett]

So what happens when I install a disc in online mode and give it to my friend who is permanently offline?

Them's the breaks.

If they don't like it, they can get out of the software business and go build a widget factory in China.

There's no perfect solution, but the answer is not to decimate the rights of the consumer and eliminate any concept of ownership. That's too far the other direction.

 

[ImpulsE69]

http://gigaom.com/2012/09/04/90-of-us-households-with-computers-have-broadband/

So where's the large majority? Let's just say the people with enough money to buy a system and games probably also have internet. It's not 2005 anymore.

Very bad report to use, since you have no clue how many people w/o a PC have a console (or instead of). Not uncommon at all. I know plenty w/o internet or computers but have consoles. I know that is sometimes hard to get your head around from us obsessive AT forum people

There are still plenty of people who simply have a phone and no internet, and many combinations thereof.

 

[Midwayman]

But the infants at MS are going to throw a tantrum and insist on doing it one way or the other.

I think it might be more of a implementation on short notice issue. That blog post linked awhile back mentioned some of the sharing stuff wasn't necessarily off the table for DD games for instance. They're only a few months away from launch, so going with what is easy makes sense. Of course I totally agree the either/or method should have been used in the first place.

 

[ImpulsE69]

That would be a fantastic solution that I would happily endorse. Either it checks online, or you put in the disc to play after XX hours have passed without an online check. If they had announced that from the beginning, that would have been a step forward.

But the infants at MS are going to throw a tantrum and insist on doing it one way or the other.

I missed this, but yes, I agree that this would have been fine. It adds options that don't brick your system just because you want to do something that is considered not normal (by the narrow minded people who don't see beyond their own small circle).