Some more Xbox One info.

This is from Major Nelson,

M$ won't be charging a fee for trade ins,

You can access all your games on another machine once logged in,

You can't turn Kinect off but you can pause it,you can play games with it paused.

More can be found here

There are also rumors that M$ are in talks with Sky to provide its tv service.

Another rumor suggests that M$ may let you buy the Xbox One on a subscription basis as they did with the 360 in North America (for the 360 the deal was $99 upfront and then $14.99 fixed for 2 years,that also includd Xbox live sub).

Read the blog as I haven't even scratched the surface.

Sony won't have to do much convincing now methinks.

aka Microsoft pisses over its fans and tells them its raining.

Pais wrote:M$ won't be charging a fee for trade ins,

You can access all your games on another machine once logged in,

You can't turn Kinect off but you can pause it,you can play games with it paused.

Sounds like they're trying to alleviate some of the major issues people had/assumptions people jumped to. This is progress. I'm intrigued to see how they deal with preowned games. A few more steps like this in the right direction would be nice, but the negative press they've had might be hard to undo, especially since Sony seems to be pulling the same tricks but not getting the fallout for it.

i'm a bit....umm....wow. at the moment. will take a while to sort of take that in before i comment (i've just woken up)


on the surface it seems that its a mix of "good / so what / really no big deal when you think about it / bad bad bad"

I wonder how much of this is backtracking since the reveal really didnt capture most peoples imagination in the way they would have liked.

I think there's mostly good stuff in that article and it's reassuring to see. Here's one part I picked out that's interesting though. People will love this (ha)!

- With Xbox One you can game offline for up to 24 hours on your primary console, or one hour if you are logged on to a separate console accessing your library. Offline gaming is not possible after these prescribed times until you re-establish a connection, but you can still watch live TV and enjoy Blu-ray and DVD movies.

The trade in stuff sounds OK though and I'm loving the fact everything will be available on demand the day of release. Steam has no trade in's at all and everything is account locked so this is good news that there will be something on Xbone. I also suspect we'll see more Steam style sales like the one a couple of months ago on Live - no guarantees but it does seem that's the way that things are going.

Personally I'm just gonna wait at least a year before i decide then ill know about both and can make an informed decision, the 360 will be supported until 2017 so no rush

the 24 hour check in thing is a big one. really massive. and not good on the face of it. however, two things stick in my mind from recent reports

the first is the reports about the military, ie: some kind of code they can input.

see, to me, that would say that if your internet went down, u could phone ms, explain what happened, they give you a code, you input it, and voila, ur good to go. once ur back online, the code gets disabled

the other thing is that there is an interview somewhere saying that in terms of single player games, its down to the devs that make it as to the sp functionality if offline. meaning that devs could put into the game if it needs that check or not

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-06-07-microsoft-kills-game-ownership-and-expects-us-to-smile

Extremely critical article from Tom Bramwell on Eurogamer, sort of an homage to games collectors and that they will no longer be able to do so from the next-gen. But, as many have pointed out in the comments, this is very similar to Steam which gets universally praised. Because it's MS, people put the boot in.

yh, the normal response from ms "haters" is the offline mode, but as someone rightly pointed out, you need to be online to enable the offline mode

I can completely see where Tom is coming from. People like to own what they buy to do as they choose with - be it to sell or to keep in a collection.

The problem is, it doesn't sit with the digital age very well. The other issue is that the vast majority (and I include myself in this) don't want to keep a game for 15 years and then crack it out to play it. We consume what's in front of us and either get rid of it for the next thing (single player) or move on to the next version (multiplayer).

N1NJA FWG wrote:I wonder how much of this is backtracking since the reveal really didnt capture most peoples imagination in the way they would have liked.

Quite a bit I'd say. The post-reveal shit storm of bits of conflicting information leads me to conclude that they hadn't really settled on the finer details of how these features would run, so they just glossed over it. Then the press started to pry info out of various sources, some of which ended up getting corrected or just replaced with "we haven't announced how X will work yet". If they really had agreed on this stuff before the reveal then I can't see why they wouldn't have one person clarify it all. They could have put to bed weeks of negative rumours about how we'd be paying X amount to trade in games etc.

Daz190uk wrote:People will love this (ha)!

- With Xbox One you can game offline for up to 24 hours on your primary console, or one hour if you are logged on to a separate console accessing your library.

In fairness they did reveal that a while back (the 24 hour bit, not the 1 hour bit). It's actually one of the things that bothers me most. If they'd said "this has to always be connected as we NEED the cloud to do computations" then I'd see the sense in that. Logging in once every 24 hours means that we CAN actually play offline, the only reason they're stopping us from doing so is to prevent pirates. As a paying customer I'm suffering because others pirate games.

another example of the majority suffering because of a minority

Don't like the idea that they can delete games after a while. You play Forza5 and then 6 comes out,you don't buy it and continue to play 5. M$ gets annoyed and deletes 5 so you buy 6.

Might sound extreme but it could happen.

Pais wrote:This is from Major Nelson,

M$ won't be charging a fee for trade ins,

You can access all your games on another machine once logged in,

You can't turn Kinect off but you can pause it,you can play games with it paused.

Who thought M$ were charging to trade in?!?! It's the second hand activation fees the Nelson should be talking about....

The second point is pretty cool.

And I can turn Kinect off, pull the plug out.

There's Also an interesting comment in the comments box....

"What bugs me the most is the online every 24 hours.What is going to happen in years to come when another new machine comes out.The servers will be shut down and i'll be left with games I can never ever play again.Waste of money.I still play games on my old machines.NES,SNES,N64,Saturn,Dreamcast and even the first X-BOX."

I had never even considered this but it's true that once the generation is over the console will be useless.....

surely if you buy 5 though, your consumer rights wont let them delete it? ...........

they could say shut servers down for it but they cant delete YOUR games. Digital or not im sure there would be major lgal implications with that

Reaper FWG wrote:surely if you buy 5 though, your consumer rights wont let them delete it? ...........

they could say shut servers down for it but they cant delete YOUR games. Digital or not im sure there would be major lgal implications with that

This is where M$ have been sneaky, you'll never own a game, just the license to run and play the games....

Can they actually do that................. if I go buy a game, and it is physically mine, disk and everything its Mine (I am not a Lawyer) but consumer rights apply.

If evertything was Digital and download only maybe they could say tou buy a license to play this game we own it etc. but digital download and store bought must have different interpretations in Law?

the online/digital only thing for me is a weird one

in the short term, its a risky strategy. implementing a set of features, internet wise, as they have done, that negatively affects people that dont have access, have poor access, or lose connection. that is, obviously, a bad thing.

thing is, MS (and sony) are building a console that they want to last as the "current gen" for around 10 years. there is an element of trying to predict the future, ie: future proofing. thats not easy to do, and all you can go on is industry predictions. they have done it before. the original xbox allowed for only broadband connections at a time when tons of the world was still on dial-up and they got heavily criticised for it. and now, 10 years later, not only is broadband de rigeur, but look at 3g, 4g, and fibre optic. pipe dreams 10 years ago.

so, they look at industry predictions. things like these

http://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?articleId=888280
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/010410-outlook-vision-predictions.html

and you can see clearly where the thinking comes from in terms of creating something that sits within what will / may happen, rather than something that 2 years down the line isnt as up to date as it could be.

looking to the far east is a good indicator. they have had 4g for quite a few years now. their idea of an isp is very different to ours - there are no real equivalents to sky, or bt, or talk talk as the vast majority of their internet just does not come down a telephone wire anymore. people generally connect their smart tv's or their consoles, or their pc's to the mobiles internet connection. it is that fast and that stable. average worldwide internet speeds show that countries in the far east have an average of over 40Gb d/l. for wireless of some form or another. thats nuts. but its also a good indicator of where things are going.

the only question is how long it will take to get there.

so, i buy xb1 in november 2013, and the internet goes down. ball-ache. 5 years later, that eventuality just may be an ancient concept.


in terms of games suddenly being lost and never to be able to be played 20 years from now or whenever, the industry predictions would indicate that servers going off may never happen.

the issue of licensing is a weird and tricky one. technically, this has been the the situation for years with movies, music and games. music and movies cant really do much about it, or can only go so far. this is the first attempt the games industry are making at trying to enforce it

Killswitchmad wrote:

Reaper FWG wrote:surely if you buy 5 though, your consumer rights wont let them delete it? ...........

they could say shut servers down for it but they cant delete YOUR games. Digital or not im sure there would be major lgal implications with that

This is where M$ have been sneaky, you'll never own a game, just the license to run and play the games....

But you own the license to run and play the games forever, it doesn't expire and MS can't just arbitrarily decide that you can't play the game anymore. I guess they could shut the servers down and they could remove the ability to download the game (preventing anyone else from buying/owning it) but I definitely can't see them being allowed to delete it.

Although now that I think of it, didn't Amazon pull something similar to this with the kindle? One day they just deleted everyone's copy of some book, and up until then no one realised that they could do that?

presumably something happened where people kicked up a stink and the decision was reversed though, surely

Killswitchmad wrote:

Pais wrote:This is from Major Nelson,

M$ won't be charging a fee for trade ins,

You can access all your games on another machine once logged in,

You can't turn Kinect off but you can pause it,you can play games with it paused.

Who thought M$ were charging to trade in?!?! It's the second hand activation fees the Nelson should be talking about....

The second point is pretty cool.

And I can turn Kinect off, pull the plug out.

And if you pull the plug on Kinect then the Xbox won't work

Will be having a good look at what Sony have to say at E3