Kony Montana wrote:Whatever the case is, I wish they'd spell it out. It's hard to believe they're still figuring it out months from launch. How they implement it is still baffling to me. So, you bring your game over to your buddies house, and when you leave, he can pay a fee to play that game on his own profile. Does he need a physical copy of the game to be present to play it? If not, is that fee going to be equal to the MSRP of a physical copy?
From what I understand...
Every disc-based game must be installed to the hard drive in full before you play it. You can start to play the game while it's still installing, so you don't have to sit around and wait for the install to complete, but the disc itself is just a delivery method to get the bits on to the hard drive where all games play from.
Once the game is installed, it seems it's activated online in some way. So while the console doesn't require an "always" online connection, it does seem that it is required that it phones home once every 24 hours to do a license check. Because of that, you don't need to put the disc in the console to play the game as you do with installed disc-based Xbox 360 games.
If I bring a game disc to your house, we can install and play that game on your Xbox One, but only if I'm signed into Xbox Live on your machine, because otherwise, I could install the game and leave with it and you'd have the game for free. So it works the same as XBLA games do now in terms of DRM. If you then want to unlock the game so you can continue playing it after I've gone, you can pay a fee, which does seem like it will be the full MSRP, although it will be the full MSRP of whatever a digital copy will cost on Live - who knows if that will be cheaper than buying from a brick and mortar store?
The largely unknown part is what happens when you go to sell a game or trade it in. MS have specifically said that this is allowed, but they haven't given all the details on how this will work. It's rumoured that it will work like this: - MS will form deals with certain retailers that want to deal in used Xbox One games. When you trade a game in, it gets wiped from your Xbox Live account, so you can no longer play it. The retailer than pays an activation fee, a percentage of which goes to the publisher/developer of the game and a percentage of which goes to MS. The retailer can then sell the game to someone else.
The last paragraph is just a rumour though.