Frugal Xbox gamers can breathe huge sigh of relief today as, according to a recent article on Wired (via CVG ), the newly announced Xbox One will indeed play used games. However what Microsoft giveth they very quickly taketh away. Wired’s Chris Kohler was able to infer from the way that Xbox One handles new games that consumers might be losing some of their purchasing power.
New games are installed to the hard drive when the game is booted up for the first time. Are installs mandatory? The response from Microsoft was ‘yes’, more or less.
“‘On the new Xbox, all game discs are installed to the HDD to play,’ the company responded in an emailed statement. Sounds mandatory to us.”
The story continues:
“What follows naturally from this is that each disc would have to be tied to a unique Xbox Live account, else you could take a single disc and pass it between everyone you know and copy the game over and over. Since this is clearly not going to happen, each disc must then only install for a single owner.
“Microsoft did say that if a disc was used with a second account, that owner would be given the option to pay a fee and install the game from the disc, which would then mean that the new account would also own the game and could play it without the disc.”
Penny pinching gamers might find it difficult to save money on used Xbox games during the next generation. Microsoft has yet to detail their used games policy for Xbox One but as of yet it seems consumers might be poised to lose some influence.
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