July tenth Microsoft announced the latest X-Box, the X-Box one and from the get go, had mixed reviews. When the X-Box One (XB1) was announced there was a heavy focus on the features and new functions of the system with it's new voice commands, gestures, and Kinect 2.0 but what had everyone talking was how it would play games.
The XB1 was originally announced that all games would no longer be disk based and would be saved to the HDD or the Cloud and would require you to have a constant connection to the internet to verify your disk copy. Your copy would be verified once every 24 hours on your own home console or once every hour on a friends console if you were playing games elsewhere.
This enables a really neat feature like up to 10 "family" members having access to play your games, even one with you at the same time. The downfall was an extremely restricted "giving" policy and made borrowing games and renting impossible. (Microsoft did say that they would work on a way for renting and borrowing games but it would not be available at launch.
Microsoft took so much heat over it's DRM policy even Sony was throwing the low blows.
By the time E3 came around nothing new had changed and it seemed like Microsoft was standing firm and publicly announced that the newly designed X-Box 360 would be the consumer's choice for a non connected customer.
Fast forward to today, Microsoft has officially announced that due to consumer feedback, DRM would no longer be a staple of the system and that games can now be either installed to the HDD and Cloud or can now be played directly from the disk and that an internet connection would only be required at the initial start up of the system.
This is a welcome change and an audible sigh of relief could be heard across the gaming community today. What this means is that if you have the latest Call of Duty or Halo (TBD) and you want to loan it to your friend, you can just hand him or her the disk and they can play for as long as they want. If you don't have the latest Madden come NFL season, you can go rent it.
In order to make this change however, Microsoft had to make some sacrifices. What was sacrificed was the ability for 10 "family" members to have access to your library for play and if you want to play with someone, you both must now own the game. It's a small price to pay but in my eyes, very worth it.
So what do you guys think? Is this a welcome change? Has your faith in Microsoft been restored? I for one will now be running out to pre order my X-Box One now!
-Nurd!
SRCE: Xbox.com
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