http://news.xbox.com/2013/06/update
Very interesting... I thought that MS would just weather the storm and hope that people bought XO systems anyway, but I guess that they've decided that the degree of hatred is too much, and they have to give up. So, they are. The 24-hour check is gone. Disc-based games will now require the disc to run, so no playing disc-based games without the disc in the drive (that'll be the DRM, instead of 24-hour checks to see if you've traded or sold back games).
However, also gone is that "Family share plan" that they'd been pushing. No sharing without sharing actual discs, and no sharing at all with downloadable titles; those are now locked to your account only. Speculation that publishers were less than pleased with the "family share plan" option might be accurate, who knows... apparently it would have allowed any 10 people to form a "family". Then anyone in that group could play any game any of them bought, anywhere, without needing a disc (just download it). The only restriction was that only the purchaser and one other person could play each game at any time. Still though, that was a pretty interesting option... maybe publishers thought that it was too generous. I mean, keeping the family share thing for digital-only purchases (though not also disc games of course, there'd be no way to do that with disc games without requiring installs that are locked to your account, requiring an online connection, and getting rid of used games, as they were planning on doing) certainly could still fit in this new, current-gen style of the DRM. That they're getting rid of it says something.
Overall though, this is very interesting news... it looks like the massive popular outcry worked! Losing the family share thing is too bad, but if publishers didn't like it, maybe it was doomed anyway. And losing the required 24-hour online DRM checkin is fantastic; sure most systems will be online most of the time, but that's not true everywhere, and it's a very blatant attempt at going for corporate profits and awful anti-consumer, "you own nothing you thought you bought" stuff. There's no reason for that check except because of corporate paranoia about piracy and used games, after all.
What would be the best system? Well, that digital games can't be resold, not even back to Microsoft or Sony, on their next consoles is horrible. I very badly hope that the EU's attempts to force some kind of resale into digital sales of software works, and MS and Sony are both forced to give in on this point. Resale of digital games is a right that must be won. I think this whole XO debacle shows that people still care about ownership of physical goods. PC gamers did give up a bit too much there, sadly, but maybe that can be won back as well... ownership is a right that we must defend. "It's a temporary license only and not a purchase" is not okay.
For physical games though, allowing resale with a disc check is a reasonable compromise. PC games abandoned that over the course of the last generation in favor of one-time-use keys for most titles, which is unfortunate. PC gaming never had the kind of used-games culture that console gaming did, so losing a lot of what used games marketplace the PC had didn't make nearly the same level of impact, but still, it's unfortunate. Of course on the PC worries about losing games forever aren't nearly as bad, since everything can be pirated, but legal resale should be an option as well. There is some evidence that Steam might actually add some variant of that "family share plan" in the future (though with MS abandoning it, we'll see), but still no sign of resale. What you should be able to do is to sell the game back or to a digital trading store or what have you, or alternately "un-register" the key you used so that if you then sell the physical copy whoever buys it can then use that key. Pirates can get around any of that DRM anyway, so there's no use in worrying about whether that'd enable more copying; anyone who wants to can do that already anyway. This wouldn't really change anything much on that front.
Microsoft have also abandoned registering disc based games (even as an option for third parties), meaning all disc based games will be loanable, sellable, and other words I've never had to suffix with "able" before. There is a strong possibility that the recent blow up with the military (um, that was figurative)
And yes, the recent fervor over used game rights should start a discussion on digital-only goods. Digital store fronts need to change, and the sooner the better. I'm not sure what the best method is for how to ensure copyrights are protected, but in the long run, we need to be able to sell, give or loan the digital games we own without restriction (the copy we have mind you, I am not suggesting someone be freely able to give away infinite copies after buying one).
Oh, they're also going region free, like Sony. Nintendo is the only holdout here now.
Nintendo is in a tough position when it comes to "region free gaming", although it is one of their own creation.
Nintendo's handheld systems were region free up to and including the DS, but that changed with the DSi, which implemented region locking but only for the digital purchases (DS cartridge games were still region free, which makes sense as there would be no way to back port any sort of way to identify the region the DS carts belonged to). Starting with the 3DS, the cartridges became region locked as well. This is disappointing, but I think it is related to the way Nintendo handles both their online stores and the built in firmware across regions. More on that later. In particular, the 3DS allows the sale of all cartridge games in digital form, so making the games basically identical was very convenient, and that included region based coding.
When it comes to consoles, Nintendo has always been region locked. During the NES days, this made sense for a lot of reasons. The Japanese Famicom had no copyright protection at all, but they wanted to stem the tide of piracy so starting with the American NES revision of the Famicom, Nintendo added copyright protection. This was also done in Europe. Now, Europe and America used differing signal timings on their TV sets (NTSC and PAL, as we all know). Back then, this meant they couldn't risk the fallback if someone got it in their head to import an American version of a game and found the game didn't work correctly at all, possibly even damaging something in the PAL NES. There wasn't much between the game code and the raw hardware back then. The easy route was simply to make the copyright protection chip also serve as a region locking chip. Bam, problem solved.
This would continue for some time. This sort of reasoning explains why a US SNES can play Japanese Super Famicom games, but not European games. The region locking on the chip was used exclusively to prevent any legal issues with mismatched signal timing or any harm that might cause to either the games or the system (or even the TV). However, with the SNES and N64 after, Nintendo also implemented a rather cheap method of region locking beyond the chip, they altered the shape of the cartridge and slot. This can be easily defeated with a dremel tool, but clearly Nintendo felt that region locking was important. Apparently, tracking sales based on region was deemed important enough to be worth the cost in lost sales. It is worth noting that similar region locking policies were used by both Sega and Sony.
Today, there is very little reason to use region locking to prevent PAL/NTSC issues, as everyone is moving on to HDTV and the OSes of the various game systems tend to handle timing issues more than the games themselves anyway. Game importing is now seen as less important an issue than piracy. I suspect that rather than motivate people to get their systems "modded" to allow for playing imported games, which also would mean giving them the ability to play pirated copies of games, Sony felt it would be in their best interests to just remove region locking altogether.
That leaves Nintendo. The problem with Nintendo these days has a lot to do with their poor implementation of their OSes across their modern game systems, and also how online store regions are handled. When it comes to Microsoft and Sony, they have ONE version of the operating system across all regions. It just looks for a preset bit when the system was first set up to determine which region it is in, and goes from there. The American US can be set to "Japanese mode" very easily just by changing the language, except in regards to things like X/O confirmation. Those have to be set through hacking, but both capabilities still exist in the OS, it is simply a sort of "registry setting" that needs to be edited, nothing deeper than that. The same goes for the XBox 360 operating system. However, Nintendo's operating systems are different. They actually recompile a different version for every region. This is actually how the OSes of the original Playstation, Sega CD, and a number of other older game consoles with operating systems functioned. This was deemed easier due to space limitations, but that is no longer an issue today. Simply put, there IS no Japanese mode on a US Wii U. It doesn't exist because all of those options were removed when they recompiled it with the English settings. They may also add Spanish and French as language options, but that's just because they wanted to cover a whole region with one version. They didn't think far enough to simply go a step further and cover the whole world with one version. Part of the path to solving the issue with Nintendo's region locking lies in making the effort to unify the various region versions of the Wii U and 3DS OSes into a single unified OS (well, two actually, since it's two systems we're talking about here). That would eliminate any irregularities between versions and their use of the OS, but there is another issue that needs tackling.
The online store fronts are also region locked. This is also true for the 360 and Playstation stores. However, with those you can "spoof" your way into them by simply creating an account and faking an address in the region you want to see the store for. This is impossible on Nintendo systems, since as I mentioned coding for those regions simply isn't there. Also, the system and account are linked far too deeply, so it is nearly impossible to really do much further than that. Unifying the OSes would go one step further, but also allowing the user to simply go into whatever region they want without any "tricks" would go further towards that issue.
Nintendo would need to do some major underlying changes to really eliminate region locking at this point. It is possible, but Nintendo would need to show a stronger commitment to recoding their operating systems after the initial version. They have made a few admirable steps towards that this generation, but there's still a long way to go there.
With the defeat of the XO's online-check DRM system, console gaming looks to be staying the same next gen. The online DRM future may be coming, but it's been pushed back a bit.
However, all consoles have online stores, and PC gaming is quite heavily focused on online-check DRM now. There is no 24-hour checkup, of course; instead, games simply lock to your account upon purchase. Some current-era PC games do not have this DRM, but between MMOs, Steamworks, Origin, and UPlay, to name the most prominent ones, a quite substantial number of games now are locked to a single account, even if you bought a physical copy of the game. You may be able to sell (or give away) your Microsoft, Sony, Steam, GOG, Origin, UPlay, Blizzard, or whatever, account online, but you can't sell individual titles. This means the the right of ownership has been substantially surrendered for all digitally purchased games. It's even worse for Nintendo, of course, where games are locked to a specific system, not an account. There you have to sell the physical console in order to sell your digitally purchased games.
So, online DRM or no, the one major piece missing from all digital-purchases stores, even "DRM-free" ones like Good Old Games, is that there is no legal resale of digitally purchased games. That's not "DRM-free" in my book, GOG... no resale and that games are all permanently locked to my account is just another form of DRM. Some people don't call that DRM, and that's okay, but the point is, there's no resale, even on "DRM-free" online stores.
If people believe that it's okay to only own limited, non-separable licenses of games, and not actually truly having your rights for anything that you have spent money on, that's your decision, but I quite strongly disagree. We have rights, and there should not be a separate set of rights for digital purchases. Just because you don't get a physical object does not mean that it should be treated as a separate, and lesser, category of (non-)ownership.
Now, I know that in the EU some court cases about digital ownership have happened. I hope that the EU eventually forces companies into allowing digital resale. In the interim, though, something needs to be done. I understand that mentally people think that they own things they can see, but maybe not quite as much with things that are only bytes on a hard disk (or 'the cloud'), but if you've bought it, you SHOULD have that same degree of ownership rights that you do with discs.
Now, I'd guess that on, say, GOG, the answer is "well, there is no DRM on the games themselves, so if we allowed resale, how could we ever know if the person didn't just keep a copy?" However, piracy on the PC has always been very easy. It's even easier now. Adding this really wouldn't change much. Sure people could buy a game, sell it, and keep a copy, but right now they can download a game illegally and play it. There's already so much piracy on the PC that this wouldn't change much; all it'd do is make it like it used to be, when various attempts at PC DRM or disc checks were always easily defeated by consumers who wanted to keep their game and then resell the original, DRM or no. It's always been like that on the PC. And anyway, as selling a digital game obviously requires an online connection, for systems that do have DRM, such as consoles, Steamworks, etc., it'd surely be quite easy to implement a system where your right to the game is removed since you have sold it. I guess there could be workarounds (this is why MS did that awful 24-hour checkup thing, after all, to remove the chance of someone going offline and keeping a game that they have resold), but who'd want to keep their system permanently offline? Because as soon as you go online again, it'd be removed of course. Abuse of this would be limited; most people want to be online on a regular basis. And people who never were online to begin with wouldn't have this option anyway, so things would stay the same for them. Anyway, overall, ironically, only "DRM-free" presents a problem here -- but again, even there, it's just the same situation PC gaming has been in since the beginning, so it's nothing new, and I can't possibly see it to leading to more piracy than we have.
I understand that there are issues that would have to be worked out with this, but it's actually not impossible. I can think of a couple of options. First, most obviously, within each system (Steam, or Origin, or UPlay, or Battle.net, or what have you), there could be some kind of used marketplace, where people selling accounts could sell them, and others could buy. This would keep games locked within the store they were purchased in, though; that's fine for games with DRM that requires them to use that system anyway, but for games that do not, such as non-Steamworks games sold on Steam, that would be frustrating. Still, it would be a major step forward and would be much better than nothing.
Alternatively, there could be some variant of MS's now-dead Xbox One DRM system, where you could sell your game (somehow, I'm sure it could be worked out) to any authorized reseller. You'd need this because since games have keys, you can't just resell the game... and the idea of just being able to un-license keys, which surely would be possible and would allow resale, is flawed, I think, because there'd be no way to know if the person you're buying from actually unlicensed the key or not. But some kind of system like this is not impossible, and would work. It would be limited versus the infinite resale possibilities of disc games, but when you're talking about digital purchases you're talking about registered keys instead of physical discs, so it's trickier to deal with. Trickier but not impossible, though.
Finally, there's the "DRM-free" version, that I don't think any publisher would like, but would be pretty awesome. Each store would just allow people to either sell games back to the store, or to a used marketplace in the store. Anyone else could then buy the one they're selling. I don't know about cuts for the publisher; they want them, I'm sure, but that'd be saying that I didn't actually own the game, only a license to it that I'm now revoking. True ownership would mean resale where the seller and the store get the profits, not the publisher. I bought your game, it's not yours anymore.
For games with online-registered keys this is more complex, of course. Still though, digital games should not be lost forever once the rights to those games expire and it gets removed from sale online! Right now, there are many games on almost any digital store, PC or console, which are not available anymore. As of now, the only solution to that problem, unless there was a physical, non-internet-registered release of the game somewhere, is piracy. That is awful. You should be able to resell that game, regardless of its current new-sale state, as you can with physical products. So, people who don't own Outrun 2006 for Steam can't buy it now, but if I or any of the other people who do own it wanted to sell our copy to one of them, we should be able to. Of course if we're talking about a shut-down MMO there'd be no point to resale since it can't be used anyway, so getting keys for that kind of thing wouldn't be needed, but for any game not so limited, this MUST be an option in the future. As we move into a more and more digital world (like it or not, and I definitely do not like all of the effects of that, but it is happening), we can't lose the ability to legally play great games just because their rights expired, or their publisher closed and took their games with them! That is horrible. A solution, either one I mentioned or something else, needs to be found at some point.
(Oh, and for those who agree with that Gizmondo article that the Xbox One could have had digital resale, but us darn consumers' complaints foiled third party publishers' plans to set up license resale stores, or something... uh, I admire your degree of blind optimism, bu that was never going to happen. Why in the world would they set up a store to allow resale, when they could just make everyone buy full-price new digital copies of their games? That'd be financially crazy, unless the first-party publisher was pushing them into it... which MS was most definitely not doing.)
The weird thing is that they took out the "share with ten people" feature. I understand that with the physical disc version that had to go. However, pure digital purchases could have kept this. By ditching it for even digital purchases, MS is basically throwing away any defense for future arguments about digital purchases.
That's true. I mentioned that issue a bit in the first post... I wonder, did they do that by choice, will they bring it back at some point, or were they getting pushback from publishers about it?
As for Nintendo, hmm... the OSes are actually physically different? That might make it tougher to remove the regions from the shop, but I'm sure they could find a way. It'd surely be very easy to remove the blocking of physical copies of games, though. Just tell all OSes to accept games from any region, it probably wouldn't be any more complex than that...
Well, most likely not that different. I expect the differences come down to the language settings and which nationality your profile gets registered for, making it simply impossible to sign up for the Japanese eShop. Internally, how they handle games should be nearly identical. The only real exceptions I could think of would POSSIBLY be any games that used the existing fonts in the OS instead of their own, and frankly outside of the PC world that seems unlikely.
However, unifying the OS would solve the issue with loading other region's cartridges. The other aspect comes down to making digital purchases linked ONLY to your online Nintendo Club account. At the moment, it is permanently linked to the online account created on that system when you first link up to Nintendo's servers. You CAN link the shops from Wii to Wii U, from DSi to 3DS, to your Nintendo Club account (join the Nintendo fun club today Mac!), and thus a record of ALL your purchases across all these systems is kept (you can look at this log of purchases on Nintendo.com). So, they CAN link everything to a single account. They just don't seem to be willing to take the next step and divorce the purchases from the hardware it is on. The Wii U is the very first console where individual online profiles per user can be made, but those profiles are all locked to THAT Wii U. So, the steps they need to take involve creating a SINGLE unifying account across all their modern consoles (3DS and Wii U) that can be moved from one console to the next, and with the digital record locked to the profile rather than the hardware.
However, I should add something. The "roaming profile" option exists on the 360, but software is ALSO system locked. Let me explain. So long as you are logged into the profile that bought some content online, you can play that content on any system you want, after verifying your profile online. HOWEVER, you can ONLY play digital content you bought with OTHER profiles on the ORIGINAL SYSTEM you bought the content on. In practice, this works out pretty well. Early on, MS couldn't transfer this system lock from system to system at all, then they had a way to do it if you called in but only under very limited circumstances. Eventually, they finally put a tool to transfer digital content system locks from console to console on their web site. It currently has a 3 month "cool down" between uses though, and it transfers ALL the content assigned to that system at once (with no regard to the profile that originally bought it, so if a family member bought some content, you're getting that transferred to the new system as well).
The reality is, if Nintendo made a transfer utility of that sort and just linked together all your online accounts across systems into a portable single account, they'd instantly be caught up with how Microsoft does things, but as you can see, even that is a bit clunky.
Still, nowhere near as clunky as having one 3DS online account with its own friends list, a Wii U account with it's own friends list, two hardware based "store" accounts outside of either of those online accounts (one for 3DS and one for Wii U), and a Club Nintendo account that "links" the separate hardware based "store" accounts together, but does not link together your online accounts. Oh wait, you CAN link your Wii U online account to your Club Nintendo account, but NOT your 3DS online account and... oh dear I've gone cross eyed....
I want to clarify something. The compromise scenario where digital games get all those new features STILL should not require 24 hour check-ins. That should NEVER be on the table for digital goods, and Steam proves it isn't necessary.
http://www.heyuguysgaming.com/news/12507...-must-read
Above is an MS person explaining how family sharing was going to work. Apparently it was going to have a 1-hour timer (he says 15-60 minutes depending on the game, other sources say 60 minutes flat). Yeah, that "one hour offline play at a friends' house" thing? That applied to the "family share plan" as well, MS just didn't tell us that. Apparently they had not decided exactly how many times other family members could launch a game hadn't been decided, but that time limit was there per launch (though you could save as normal, and it was the full game, unlike demos).
So yeah, losing "family sharing" isn't quite as bad as some of the MS apologists believed. Also, the stuff the guy says about how used games have to die because publishers need more income is pretty much completely horrible for the reasons I explained a couple of posts ago.
So, you could basically share a timed demo with friends and family?
We didn't lose a thing. NOT A THING!
I heard someone complain about how we now "have to put in the disc to play, and that sucks". Well, that's not that big a deal on a home system. Secondly, and more importantly, if you wanted a digital future, nothing for you has changed! Just buy your game digitally and you never have to insert a disc again! Celebrate, we complainers have done nothing but improve your digital experience because you no longer have a 24 hour check in requirement!
I WANT a digital future. I am NOT the enemy of the "digital future". However, it seems that "digital future" has become such a catch-all "good thing" to some singularity worshiping people that they are all too willing to sacrifice any and all of their rights to obtain it. These are the people that would wonder why ANYONE would willingly reject Borg assimilation. Listen, NOTHING about a digital future NECESSITATES us losing our consumer rights. What we complainers are doing isn't saying digital is somehow bad, we WANT that future as much as you do. What we are doing is saying "hold on just a second, let us disarm this trap first, THEN we can continue to the digital future". What we're trying to do is slow down only JUST long enough to make sure the digital future is done RIGHT.
Because, fact is, we didn't do a number of things right getting THIS far. When the phone system - and later the internet protocols - were being developed, a lot of care was taken to make it a standard. It COULD have been different. It COULD have been set up so you could only ever call people on the same telephone network you were on. Early on, this was the case. It was "busted" in a case that probably won't see its like again in the future unless we push for it hard enough. Now, it is simply unthinkable that you would be unable to call someone on Verizon from an AT&T phone. (It is, surprisingly, still acceptable that a phone can be "locked" to a carrier though. That's another issue we somehow allowed ourselves to get into.)
Why is it that all of us in our "digital future" are split across 3 networks? No matter how much you might want to imagine it, discless installs weren't ever going to address the fact that Microsoft and Microsoft alone determined what games you could get on that piece of hardware, that there are fully 3 formats of video game hardware competing with each other. Video and music could never survive such a battle, but gaming has done quite well by it. It is a bizarre situation and we accept it. I mean look at the VCR. That HAD to have ONE winner. The consumer wouldn't stand for the confusion and exclusivity caused by an ongoing competition between VHS and Betamax. Between Bluray and HDDVD, only ONE could win. Video games are a bit of a different animal, but all the same, committees of companies could form that agree upon a standard that a video game console HAS to meet, and thus a promise that ANY game produced would be playable no matter which company you bought your video games from. This standard would be replaced or updated every 6 years or so, about a generation's life span, and everyone would build towards the updated standard from then out. What matches this? Networking standards. They go through exactly the process I just outlined every few years and new standards get ratified all the time. The wifi coalition recently finalized the AC standard and new routers will be getting built towards that standard very soon. Granted, having diversity in hardware and software ecosystems is desirable for other reasons, I'm just pointing out the contradiction when someone claims that they "dream of a future where the hardware is ephemeral and only the software matters", yet fail to address the simple reality that hardware DOES matter, and so long as there is no standard, there can never BE a point where it doesn't matter.
My point is, your digital goods are PERMANENTLY tied to very specific hardware, no matter how much you might want to pretend that's not the case. It gets worse when you consider the networks themselves. There is ONE store available on each console. None of them overlap. There is ONE network on each console, and none of them overlap. XBox players can never play online with Playstation players, because the two networks refuse to communicate with each other. When it comes to this, a standard is absolutely needed to solve the problem. A digital future needs an online gaming communication standard. However complicated or simple the standard will turn out to be, it must also allow for "plugging in" extra nonspecific data, a sort of module system, to allow for innovations that different game developers may bring to the field. The standard would also allow users to substitute any ol' server for the game developer's own servers, naturally as it would be a standard method of communication. Persistent data would be trickier, and likely require custom coding to handle it from game to game as it does now, but in principle the standard at least would cover all matchmaking and communication. It would be able to piggyback with telephony as well. Why go through all the hassles involved with things like Teamspeak when we already have a very powerful communication tool called the telephone? Can't we just USE that infrastructure for communicating in games and meetings? Let's upgrade telephony with the needed hooks for an online gaming standard and make "conference calling" a standard feature (and also upgrade the voice quality while we are at it), then we need not worry about which voice protocol is superior.
Frankly, for all the talk people are making about the "digital future", I am amazed that these problems aren't even being brought up. They're rather big deals in the long run and need to be handled.
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