Thursday
May222008
A REAL 360 DRM fix is incoming
Thursday, May 22, 2008 at 3:11PM
Yay!
From an interview with Marc Whitten - Xbox Live General Manager
It also notes they are going to start "delisting" Live Arcade titles, they upped the size limit for XBLA titles, and there is no spring Dashboard update this year.
There have been some high profile complaints on the web about how difficult it is to transfer things like XBLA game licenses to replacement 360s in the wake of an under warranty hardware failure. Would these changes to DRM policy address these issues, letting people who have experienced such failure re-license their purchases on their new Xbox so they don't have to be connected to Live to play? Are there any other sorts of changes to DRM policy being made here that would affect the end-user experience?
Yes, this new tool will officially launch next month on Xbox.com and will allow you to be able to consolidate these licenses onto one box so you can access things like Xbox LIVE Arcade games and TV show you have downloaded even if you are not online. Because this involved allowing users to re-download licenses for content that belongs to our partners it has taken some time to work out the agreements with them to allow this, but we have heard the concerns from folks about DRM and are happy to announce that everything is nearly in place to roll this out in June.
From an interview with Marc Whitten - Xbox Live General Manager
It also notes they are going to start "delisting" Live Arcade titles, they upped the size limit for XBLA titles, and there is no spring Dashboard update this year.
Reader Comments (6)
While we're talking about XBLA, how are you liking Penny Arcade Rain Slick Something Something?
Boo. No thread hijacking. Bad JP, no biscuit. And I won't answer the question either :-)
The "While we're talking about XBLA" is paper-thin and won't hold water.
Dude. You just spent a GTA IV post talking about how Gravatar works. My question is WAY more relevant than THAT!
That's a fair point, although I'd say they are about equally irrelevant. And look how the interesting GTA discussion got choked out by random "Uncle Timmy, how does the internet work?" conversation. Perhaps it's not the best example to support your "we should talk about about whatever we want on whichever post is topmost" thesis?
You just got caught on the wrong side of the sand I decided to draw. Blog comments are for blog post they attach to, not "Hey I just thought of this other thing that I'd like to ask you?"
I'll answer your question eventually, but not in a post about DRM. :-)
To be honest, my interest level / knowledge of 360 failure related DRM issues has been pretty low, as I have not had a 360 fail on me yet (at least not a retail box - back when I had a white board in my office I kept a WWII-fighter-esque record of 360 silhouettes). So they have some crazy solution where a new box with a previously purchased XBLA title has to authenticate online every time you run? What, is there some kind of Xbox-originals-like downloaded wrapper that does that? Aside from the annoyance to the customer, that just seems like more work than doing things the correct way - them xferring everything to your new box's hardware ID with some master key.
The comment thread for this post: http://www.hiddenjester.com/~tsanders/?p=374 goes through most of the "get up to speed on how warranty service messes up your content", plus the "official" Microsoft answer of "Spend a whole day tending to your content issues and we'll fix until until the next hardware unit fails".