We’ve been talking/warning about it for a long time – usually in the context of game preservation – but the recent Xbox game outage has certainly justified our concerns. Online DRM, the need to have an active internet connection to verify that you’re permitted to play the games you own, has been a hot topic for some time now. There’ll come a point in the (hopefully) far-flung future that authentication servers won’t be available, making today’s games unplayable. What we didn’t quite expect was a gaming black-out in the here and now.
That’s the first discussion point in this week’s DF Direct Weekly, where John Linneman and I have quite different perspectives to the online DRM debate. John’s looking at Xbox discs with no Series X/S data on them, pondering a time in the future where the vast majority of ‘smart delivery’ titles won’t be accessible. Me? I just can’t quite get my head around the concept of consumers spending hundreds of pounds on a console, and a lot more money on the games themselves without a 100 percent guarantee that you can always play them, certainly the single-player ones! Something needs to change but ultimately the solution is surely fairly straightforward, at least in theory: some kind of flexibility on online check-in?
We also spend some time talking about an intriguing patent that sees Xbox Series S users potentially able to play their back catalogue of Xbox One games by using their legacy consoles. It’s a necessity because – of course – Series S has not disc drive, which effectively means that right now at least, anyone upgrading from One S to Series S can’t take their games with them. It’s worth stressing that any time you see a patent online, you’re getting no guarantee that the idea contained therein will actually become reality – but this particular patent, while unwieldy and cumbersome, could actually work.
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