There have been a ton of rumors and plenty of drama floating
around lately about Microsoft’s next console, codenamed “Durango”. The most
prevalent rumor is that the new console will always be online, with rumors
even circulating that the console cannot be played offline at all. A Microsoft
employee took to Twitter to defend the idea of an always on console, and
subsequently left Microsoft, although it is unknown if he was terminated, or
left of his own volition. Public opinion is varying wildly, with some people
claiming that this “always on DRM” won’t matter in the long run, and others
believing that it will lead Microsoft to its doom. There’s obviously a lot of
conflicting information, and until E3 everything should just be taken as a
rumor, but I thought I should weigh in.
Microsoft’s next console will not require a constant
internet connection to simply play retail games. I’ll bet money on that, but
even if it does have a system where it is constantly using the network, it
would not be for DRM. See, the Durango already has a system in place for always
on DRM, the PlayStation 4 will have it too, and it’s already in place for the
Wii U, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and every other home console on the market.
This DRM is called using physical media.
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| The bane of hackers since the dawn of time. |
Look familiar? These little guys are what make sure you
actually paid for the game you are playing. Both the Xbox 360 and the
PlayStation 3 offer the ability to install physical games to their internal
hard drives, but still require the game to be in the disc tray in order to
actually play the game. See, game discs are incredibly hard to replicate. You
can’t just burn the image of a game onto a blank DVD, pop it in your Xbox, and
boom, free games. You have to mod your console first, which, in addition to
voiding your warranty can go wrong very easily and lead to you destroying your
console. We’re not talking about just downloading some files and sticking them
on a flash drive either, we’re talking about soldering stuff to your Xbox’s
motherboard. The idea of “always on internet connection DRM” is fine on PCs
because:
A) PC architecture is very open-ended and in some cases
open-source, which can lead to people creating workarounds and mods with
comparatively little effort, and
B) Anyone who is downloading full sized games from say, Steam
or Origin, has a stable enough connection for a 10+ gig download, and most PCs
never move from somewhere they have a connection, so they more than likely have
the stability for DRM.
Consoles, however, are not subject to either of these. Most
of the firmware elements of the current generation of consoles still have not been broken to the point
of infinite free modding (although the Wii totally has). As long as hardware
manufacturers are able to develop new, stronger methods of encryption, home
consoles will probably never be fully broken during their lifecycles. I know
home consoles are moving more and more towards the digital marketplace, but
digital games on current systems already have DRM, and it works fine. There is
a way bigger problem with websites generating codes for Microsoft Points (which
I will not link here, seriously, do not download one of those things) than
there is with people pirating Xbox Arcade games.
The other claim I hear is that this “always on” system will
be used to eliminate the used game market, by locking copies to consoles. The
problem with this theory, of course, is that Microsoft literally cannot afford
to do this. GameStop owns a pretty big chunk of the market share, and their
business is heavily dependent on used game sales. If Microsoft decided to
literally destroy the used game market, GameStop could simply choose to not
carry their new console. This would be a way
bigger blow to Microsoft than it would be to GameStop, because Microsoft needs
a big install base of early adopters in order to compete with the Wii U and
PlayStation 4. Additionally, they are well aware of how many of their users do
not use the internet features of their systems. By their own admission, there
are about 76 million Xbox 360’s in the world, but only about 46 million Xbox Live accounts. Microsoft is not about to alienate nearly half of their
userbase.
If Microsoft’s next console does have some form of constant
internet connection, it will likely be used for background downloading and
updating, so you can set a schedule and have things download while you are at
work/school/whatever. It is possible that as long as the internet is connected,
it will be searching for updates and downloads, but let’s not forget that
Nintendo has already been doing this for years. I don’t think
WiiConnect24 did the Wii any harm at all.
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