Anonymous Xbox engineer explains DRM and Microsoft's Xbox One intentions

I am posting this again because the thread last night got hijacked, it had zero highlights of what the engineer said in the OP and because it also validates a lot of what I have said all week in regards to you have to kill the used game market for pricing and the whole industry to move forward.

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>The thing is we suck at telling the story. The whole point of the DRM switch from disc based to cloud based is to kill disc swapping, scratched discs, bringing discs to friends house, trade-ins for shite value with nothign going back to developers, and high game costs. If you want games cheaper then 59.99, you have to limit used games somehow. Steam's model requires a limited used game model.

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>The thing is, the DRM is really really similar to steam... You can login anywhere and play your games, anyone in your house can play with the family xbox. The only diff is steam you have to sign in before playing, and Xbox does it automatically at night for you (once per 24 hours)

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>Think about it, on steam you get a game for the true cost of the game, 5$-30$. On a console you have to pay for that PLUS any additional licenses for when you sell / trade / borrow / etc. If the developer / publisher can't get it on additional licenses (like steam), then they charge the first person more. [...] If we say "Hey publishers, you limit game to 39.99, we ensure every license transfer you get 10$, gamestop gets 20$" that is a decent model... Microsoft gets a license fee on first and subsequent game purchases, compared to just first now? That's a revenue increase.

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>Everyone and their mother complains about how gamestop fricks them on their trade ins, getting 5$ for their used games. We come in trying to find a way to take money out of gamestop, and put some in developers and get you possibly cheaper games and everyone bitches at MS. Well, if you want the @#$@ing from Gamestop, go play PS4.

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This is pretty true. A lot of people, even bigtime PS4 fanboys on this site, hated Gamestop for this practice and not all of a sudden they love them. LOL

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>The goal is to move to digital downloads, but Gamestop, Walmart, Target, Amazon are KIND OF frickING ENTRENCHED in the industry. They have a lot of power, and the shift has to be gradual. Long term goal is steam for consoles. [...] If you always want to stay with what you have, then keep current consoles, or a PS4. We're TRYING to move the industry forwards towards digital distribution... it's a bumpy road

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Like I have been saying, those retailers are going to do their best to keep the used game market which in turn keeps the new game prices artificially inflated.

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>The cloud capabilities is the shite they like the most. We basically made a huge cloud compute shite and made it free. What people are doing with it is kind of cool. THe original intention was to get all the Multiplayer servers not requiring 3rd party costs (Like EA shutting down game servers to cut costs), as well as taking all the games that servers hosted by the clients (Halo, etc), and have all that compute done in the cloud allowing more CPU cycles for gameplay. That will really expand what developers can do. Anything that doesn't need per frame calculation and can handle 100ms delays can be shifted to the cloud. That's huge.

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Just some highlights to share, ponder, and discuss. You can read the rest of it here.