Discussions

42 seconds ago, cbae wrote

*snip*

If one gets a game as a gift on a physical disc (ever heard of Christmas?), one will forever have to have the disc in the console even if you wanted to install the game to the HDD from disc.

Oh man, now you guys are fishing for excuses AGAINST the XBox, just because your "my way or the highway" and lockdown-fetishes were averted for once.

Unfortunately, your arguments against the XBone now are as bad as the ones for it, back when it was a DRM monster.

Anyway: Most shops take back unopened games. Take back your gift, and buy the title online. Problem solved.

Tell your friends and relatives that you prefer online and thus they should gift a Microsoft-points coupon next time.

1 minute ago, cbae wrote

*snip*

Now, there's no way to go disc-less. You will have to have the disc in the console to play a game. You can no longer play your entire game library from any Xbox One console.

A lie.

You can do all this, if you go the download-route (do I defend the XBone now?!)

This one sharing feature is gone, but all the won back freedoms (including traditional sharing) make more than up for that.

2 minutes ago, JeremyJ wrote

@NitzWalsh: I didn't think the policies needed changing.  Now we are stuck with a more limited sharing system.  Now we are back to the problem of requiring disks that get scratched and broken.

Yay :-/

It's more choice for the consumer. And choice is good.

It's obvious that there will be still an online-store. Nothing stops you going all download-only if you want.

Online-sharing is gone, but a lot of freedoms are gained back:

http://o.canada.com/2013/06/19/microsoft-will-remove-all-its-drm-policies-from-the-xbox-one/

No more always online requirement
The console no longer has to check in every 24 hours
All game discs will work on Xbox One as they do on Xbox 360
An Internet connection is only required when initially setting up the console
All downloaded games will function the same when online or offline
No additional restrictions on trading games or loaning discs
Region locks have been dropped

That's worth this one positive dropped feature.

a moment ago, JeremyJ wrote

Ok, here you go:

http://news.xbox.com/2013/06/update

Can we please stop with all of the whining now???

Without the whining this wouldn't have happened.

WOW!

Sanity prevailed!

http://news.xbox.com/2013/06/update

An internet connection will not be required to play offline Xbox One games – After a one-time system set-up with a new Xbox One, you can play any disc based game without ever connecting online again. There is no 24 hour connection requirement and you can take your Xbox One anywhere you want and play your games, just like on Xbox 360.

Trade-in, lend, resell, gift, and rent disc based games just like you do today – There will be no limitations to using and sharing games, it will work just as it does today on Xbox 360.

This genuinely surprised me. All I can say is good job Microsoft for listening!

But if there would have been no outrage, this wouldn't have happened. That's why fanboyism is damaging.

But anyway, I can recognize when someone does a good job, and Microsoft did a good job by listening to customers.

36 minutes ago, kettch wrote

@wastingtimewithforums: Piracy isn't at issue here. The current issue d'jour is one person buying a game and then passing it around to his friends (whether he makes money on the transaction or not).

Deal with it. The second-hand market existed on consoles since the dawn of time. Any company doing business in this sector is aware of that.

The point is moot anyway. Sony backed out of this DRM scheme for console discs and even EA made similar statements after the backlash. Look, a company can learn after all! After two years of "NuMicrosoft"-insanity, truly refreshing.

It's only Microsoft who is the pariah here.

36 minutes ago, kettch wrote

The games industry is just now catching up to the enterprise market and saying that physical media doesn't matter but licenses do. If I buy a license to some LOB software, am I allowed (morally or legally) to install it on every machine in my enterprise?

In many cases yes. that's even possible with retail Microsoft software. If you have a retail Windows license, you can resell it or give it away, if you delete your old installation. Same with console games - by giving away the disc, you can't play the game anymore. It's akin to uninstallation.

5 minutes ago, ScanIAm wrote

*snip*

Yes.  I know that finance is hard to understand, but backers of a product are pretty keen to recoup as much as they can from their investment, so they seem to encourage DRM. 

Well, and the result is Sony made a spectacle out of Microsoft, and even EA publicly backtracked.

And all evidence seems to point out, that the DRM overkill on the Xbone was Microsoft's original idea all along.

5 minutes ago, ScanIAm wrote

And that is accomplished through the various forms of DRM. Please don't try to imply that gamers suddenly grew an ethics bone.

Non-visible DRM. The actual process for the end user has never changed on the console front.

You bought a cartridge for the Nintendo, you inserted it into the console and played. You were able to resell the game, lend the game and share the game.

You bought a DVD for the Xbox 360/PS3, you inserted it into the console and played. You were able to resell the game, lend the game and share the game.

Of course, the encryption and checking-mechanisms of the PS3 are far more powerful than of the NES, but for the consumer, both experiences are completely the same. There is not a single difference.

Microsoft now wants to introduce a locked down and restrictive system where any of these functions require allowance from the mothership. A completely foreign regime on consoles. And the shitstorm exploded as the result. It was entirely predictable that it would happen, unless you're a fanboy.

5 minutes ago, ScanIAm wrote

I was attempting to address the idea that the cost of games is too high. 

You were randomly grasping at any straw you could find in an effort to build the most beautiful and spectacular argument in the shape of a man.

The only thing you are attempting is desperately defending Microsoft's image. With lousy results I might add. You're calling me a troll, and you implied that the topic is overblown, yet here you are at page 11 of this thread,  fruitlessly continuing your apology, by slinging from one topic to the next, without scoring.

You tried to stifle discussion by bring up kindergarden shenanigans, this didn't work out. You brought the tired piracy bogey-man into this, and this didn't work out either.

11 minutes ago, ScanIAm wrote

*snip*

This all reminds me of the times when people would post, proudly, about being able to run *nix on a zx80 or some other obsolete hardware.  It's nice, but not supported, and I guarantee that if you give google a call when it doesn't quite work right, they'll....oh yeah, you can't do that.

Can you do it with the free Microsoft tools? What's the difference in support here?

And running the Android SDK is supported on XP.

System requirments:

http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html

Windows XP (32-bit), Vista (32- or 64-bit), or Windows 7 (32- or 64-bit)
Mac OS X 10.5.8 or later (x86 only)
Linux (tested on Ubuntu Linux, Lucid Lynx)
GNU C Library (glibc) 2.7 or later is required.
On Ubuntu Linux, version 8.04 or later is required.
64-bit distributions must be capable of running 32-bit applications.

Look, I understand why XP is not supported by WP8. That's excusable. But banning even Windows 7 is insane. If that's really because of a technical reason, then the engineering on that part is seriously botched up. There's no excuse for such an engineering decision.

If it's marketing, then it's just plain nuts playing these tricks with a niche platform. Microsoft should be begging developers, not playing lame Windows8-pushing tricks with them.

If they are demonstrating such bone-headed arrogance with a sub 4% platform, then something is seriously wrong with Microsoft's current management style. Pretty much all their product launches in the past 18 months generated endless controversy, and decisions like these serve as further proof.

10 minutes ago, ScanIAm wrote

*snip*

I don't know what you thought I said about the 'average' quality of games, but what I said was that many games suck.  What I implied, but not simply enough for you, was that due to the rampant theft of all electronic media, games got less risky and less creative and sucked more.  Now, in order to get the investment for a blockbuster game, you need some kind of proof that the game is protected using DRM.

The reason we get bombarded with games like Call of Duty XXI: "Saddam's Doghouse" is because the publishers are denied to get paid twice or thrice for the same product?

Sure.

Also, we are talking about console games here. The piracy on them is far less prevalent than on the PC. So that excuse is worn out in this context.

Piracy today is in the grand scheme of things far less of an threat than in the early-mid 2000s. Back then, PC gaming was king, internet connections got fast enough to download CD-ROM sized games over P2P and the games hand not much DRMization in them. But today, with the shift to consoles and their far more locked down nature, still blaming piracy for all the ills is fishing for arguments. 

By the way, what is it now: Is it about piracy or the second-hand market? After you were unsuccessful to hype the Orwellian restrictions of the XBone by condemning the later, you seem to resort the tired piracy bogey-man. Rest assured, the PS4 has anti-piracy measures built-in, and no one has a problem with it. Behold, you don't need a telescreen and madhouse restrictions to implement them in a sane manner.

Repost from: http://channel9.msdn.com/Forums/Coffeehouse/E3-Smackdown/e06dcd6112ef477494a8a1de0087fe2a

But it's more relevant here:

Given the bottom-pit marketshare of Windows Phone compared to Android and iOS, Microsoft should make it possible to develop on XP for it.

Android is doing exactly that:

http://www.cnx-software.com/2011/01/03/installing-android-sdk-on-windows-xp-hello-world-application/

http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html

Android is the market leader, they don't need to offer the option, but they did. Yet MS is restricting development for their underdog phone offering only to their most controversial OS of all time. Niche marketshare, yet monopoly arrogance.

It also begs the question why Google, a third party, is so easily able to make their Android SDK tools available for all Windows versions since XP, while Microsoft seems to have such severe problems supporting anything other than 8. No matter whether it's because of technical challenges, politics, or some kind of insane marketing approach. Any of these reasons is pathetic compared to the competiton, given that MS is the first party of the OS, the SDK, the development IDE and WP. There's literally no excuse. Reading Dahat's post, it sounds like they have pulled an IE and made the WP8 emulation a "critical component of the Windows 8 OS" or something. Wow.

Not even Apple is restricting iOS development to their very latest OS X release only.