VIDEO Amazing!
I've been following this thread but haven't commented until now. As a little background, I own all currently available systems. I usually buy games new if I can. I don't care which system they're on. I haven't used any of the XBL Gold features in about a year and a half. I got a PS Plus membership about seven months ago. While most of the games you get for free are garbage, it's a fantastic deal for the handful of great games you do get. I prefer the 360 controller, but prefer the PS3 UI. With the exception of Vita games, I generally prefer to buy physical media when it's available.
I'm not so butthurt about not being able to sell (or even share) games on the Xbox One. I don't get to do that with iTunes and haven't really complained about that. I'm not even so upset about the fact that I might have to initially connect to the internet to play a game. What pisses me off though is the thought of having to subsequently and frequently connect to MS (or Sony's) servers to authenticate a license in order to play. We heard the phrase "future proof" thrown around by Sony at the start of the last generation. Whatever they meant by it then, at least I can say that as long as the physical components of my 360, Wii (U), and PS3 function, those consoles will remain future proof for the vast majority of games. I'll never need an online connection to play 99% of the games for those systems. In that sense, they are future proof, as are all the consoles that came before them. But by it's very design, we now know the Xbox One will not be future proof. There will come a day when I can't play them anymore. And I'm not even just talking about twenty years from now when MS finally shuts down the servers. Xbox One has now made itself a target for malicious hackers. 48 hours of their servers being down will effectively make every Xbox One an overpriced blu-ray player. THAT's what makes me not interested in the console.
Also, my boyfriend and I have had issues with MS before. My boyfriend's XBL account was hacked a couple years ago and MS has to this day not been willing to allow him to reactivate it other than by sending him an email to an account that he no longer has access to. Back when Phantasy Star Universe (PSU) was still relatively new, I let my PSU monthly license expire when my credit card expired... OR SO I THOUGHT! MS continued to charge me for four months after my card expired and after I no longer played (there was no way to cancel the PSU charges online). They turned my XBL account over to collections. I eventually had to pay them for the PSU months I had played, but they had already cancelled my XBL account FOREVER. No one at MS could authorize my account to be reactivated. Everything was lost. Both my boyfriend and I were highly put out by these issues, but at least we were able to continue to play the games we had previously purchased. Under the Xbox One system, both of these situations could effectively deny us access to all the games we'd purchased, especially if we end up having to migrate accounts to a new SKU or replacement hardware.
I can see Sony implementing or allowing slightly more restrictive DRM than what we see on this current gen. But as the company that experienced 24 consecutive days of outage in their own online service in 2011, I think it would be suicide for them to implement DRM of the type MS has in store for us.
When all is said and done, if there's a game (or enough games) that I want to play on XboxOne that I can't get anywhere else I may buy one eventually. I'm not so much interested in boycotting them as just... well, I'm just not interested. I won't buy at launch. If Sony has similar DRM, I'll lose interest in PS4 too.
For me, this next gen is looking like a great time to catch up on the backlog of awesome current gen games I still haven't gotten around to playing.
