Shock! Horror! Microsoft state the obvious to the unbelievers!!

As anyone who stopped and thought for a second would have realised, Microsoft announced that unsurprisingly the Kinect Sensor can be switched off at any time you want! Really, in this age of people complaining about privacy did you think they'd allow a sensor to record you unawares, it was never going to be that way but people will jump to the gun!

They also clarify the used games policy up once and for all and the always online issues too. Give them their credit they've been more transparent than Sony who have not released much more info since their unveil!! We still don't even know what their console looks like!!

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Sony will probably announce something similar regarding used games/sharing. If it's the publishers behind it, then it would be stupid to think MS would be the only ones to do it. Also, may explain why there are no EA games scheduled for the Wii U.

So what I took from that is:

- You do not own the games you buy. You license them.
- Discs are only used to install and then license games and do not imply ownership.
- Publishers decide whether you can trade in your games and may charge for this.
- Publishers decide whether you can give a game you own to someone for free, and this only works if they have been on your friends list for 30 days.
- Your Xbox One must connect to the internet every 24 hours to keep playing games.
- You can switch off kinect

Sure ms are being transparent but I'm not sure i'm too keen on what I'm hearing!

I need to convince Demonize I am one of his "10 family members" and I never need buy another game again

Depending how the 10 family member thing works it could herald a return of the old GSA game share scheme

Technically you have only ever owned the license to the games you owned. And as I have stated many times before, I'm all for publishers controlling who gets to trade their games in as currently they get no money from trade ins at all, this way they can work out a fair deal so they get some money from these sales too. And before anyone goes on about the big ones like EA and Ubisoft just being money grabbing, there are hundreds of smaller publishers who this will affect and the other result can be seen with what happened with THQ, used game sales are ruining the industry and something needs to be done. This way the only people who will lose out will be the used games shops who will take a smaller profit from trading games in and rental services for games. And publishers only deal with the trade-ins with certain stores they won't be charging fees or dealing with you giving games to a friend, thats what I saw in it

I'd agree with 99% of what is said in the following video by Totalbiscuit commenting on all the used game moaning.

I don't even buy used games or ever trade mine in, but I do spend literally thousands on gaming, I love it and its my main pastime if I spend my money on a game it would be nice to then be able to do what I want with it, same as with my cd's, mp3's, dvd's, blu rays, books etc..

I also think that the lack of a used market will make games generally more expensive, we get great deals on games at the moment, I can't see that being the case in the next gen

My biggest fear will be Microsoft's monopoly on the digital market for the xbox. Their sales aren't that great and some games and DLC never go down in price even after years of release.

I think the reason steam has good deals is it has competition. If there was steam and only steam would the sales and offers be as good?

This line.....

Third party publishers may opt in or out of supporting game resale and may set up business terms or transfer fees with retailers.

...proves to me that individual publishers can charge a fee on trade ins if they want, or opt out of the pre-owned market altogether. You're gonna end up stuck with FIFA 14.......FOREVER!!!!

Nice of them to clarify a few things even if other questions are left unanswered or vague at best. I can still see what they've announced alienating a fair number of people. Especially as publishers have the option to opt out. I'd bet my right bollock EA will take full advantage of that.

Not happy at all about the 24 hours of offline gaming and then that's it! What happens if your connection goes down for an extended period of time for whatever reason. You're left with a highly expensive paperweight. How about moving house and waiting a week for your broadband to be installed. Remember Kent had no internet for a few days not that long ago, so after his first day of no broadband he'd be completely unable to use his console to play games.


Seems to me they've tried some "damage limitation" but not gone far enough.

Gabhlan wrote:I'd agree with 99% of what is said in the following video by Totalbiscuit commenting on all the used game moaning.

I watched that a week or so back. The guy makes a lot of sense. I always buy new games, the only used games I have are one's given to me by you generous folk.
Besides, there are some right skanks in the local gameshop. I don't want to touch a disc that they have had there dirty little hobbit fingers on.

I think people's main problem isn't the used game issue but simply that they want to be able to purchase a game and play it whenever and however they want; over the last 10 years or so gaming has started to become increasingly restrictive and we put up with it because we love to play games.

People's attitude seems to be that the game publishers are doing us a massive favour by letting us buy their games when in fact we as the consumers should have the power, but again because we love games we roll over and let them do what they want, we've seen online passes, microtransactions, dlc which should have been included with the game in the first place and now we are getting consoles which need to have pretty much constant internet access and have increasingly restrictive measures in place about what we can do with the content that we spend our hard earned cash on.

Sure we can dismiss this as just something else that we need to put up with to play the games that we enjoy so much but if we continue down this road I dread to think what the future of gaming is going to look like