As you've no doubt noticed, Microsoft turned on its heel and removed a lot of stuff from the XBOne. Make no mistake, the fact that they changed their policies is a good thing. A lot of the features in question were completely unnecessary and involved preventing large chunks of the market from even playing the damn thing, as well as imposing dumb restrictions that they clearly didn't have to. However, in removing most of the dumb features(not all of them, mind, the Kinect is still mandatory <.<), they also removed several really cool ones, including the options of sharing games with friends/family and reselling digitally bought games, as well as not needing the disc to play installed games.
Now, I personally never thought these features outweighed the disadvantages of the system, but still, I acknowledge they were good features. With both the good and the horribly shitty stuff being removed, I've seen a lot of people pointing fingers and crying that "the whiners ruined everything by forcing MS to remove all the cool shit they had /wrist". Now, here's where I'm kind of puzzled, because statements like these fail to answer the single most confusing thing about the removal of these features:
Why the hell did Microsoft remove these features in the first place?
I mean, I can sort of get why they decided to remove the ability to lend your games digitally to people who installed a game from the disc, as that means you could just install the game, share it with all your friends, go offline, and then everyone plays it almost for free, nobody makes any money, and the economy of the entire world collapses, etc. If you don't have the disc for the installed game, you apparently have to buy a digital copy that you can play offline. Which, honestly, is fine by me. It's a very functional compromise for all parties.
However, removing the ability to share digitally bought copies? I seriously cannot fathom why they did it. As long as the games are bound to your account, nothing would have changed at all in how the system would operate. The guy sharing the game would have to connect to the internet to both buy the game and approving the sharing in the first place, and the guy who gets the shared copy would probably not mind needing a fairly constant internet connection in return of playing a game more or less for free.
Re-selling of digital copies would have been the same thing: as long as there's no physical medium involved, you'd have to be connected to even be able to sell the copy in the first place.
As far as I can tell, if Microsoft decided to specifically keep the ability to share and re-sell copies that have been bought digitally, it would have been a win-win scenario for everyone: we consumers keep the features that give us incentives to actually buy the console(provided the shitty ones still got shafted, of course), and neither Microsoft nor publishers lose any amount of control that they would have had with the old system.
So... could someone explain this to me? Was this just something Microsoft simply didn't think through properly?
Now, I personally never thought these features outweighed the disadvantages of the system, but still, I acknowledge they were good features. With both the good and the horribly shitty stuff being removed, I've seen a lot of people pointing fingers and crying that "the whiners ruined everything by forcing MS to remove all the cool shit they had /wrist". Now, here's where I'm kind of puzzled, because statements like these fail to answer the single most confusing thing about the removal of these features:
Why the hell did Microsoft remove these features in the first place?
I mean, I can sort of get why they decided to remove the ability to lend your games digitally to people who installed a game from the disc, as that means you could just install the game, share it with all your friends, go offline, and then everyone plays it almost for free, nobody makes any money, and the economy of the entire world collapses, etc. If you don't have the disc for the installed game, you apparently have to buy a digital copy that you can play offline. Which, honestly, is fine by me. It's a very functional compromise for all parties.
However, removing the ability to share digitally bought copies? I seriously cannot fathom why they did it. As long as the games are bound to your account, nothing would have changed at all in how the system would operate. The guy sharing the game would have to connect to the internet to both buy the game and approving the sharing in the first place, and the guy who gets the shared copy would probably not mind needing a fairly constant internet connection in return of playing a game more or less for free.
Re-selling of digital copies would have been the same thing: as long as there's no physical medium involved, you'd have to be connected to even be able to sell the copy in the first place.
As far as I can tell, if Microsoft decided to specifically keep the ability to share and re-sell copies that have been bought digitally, it would have been a win-win scenario for everyone: we consumers keep the features that give us incentives to actually buy the console(provided the shitty ones still got shafted, of course), and neither Microsoft nor publishers lose any amount of control that they would have had with the old system.
So... could someone explain this to me? Was this just something Microsoft simply didn't think through properly?
