| disolitude said: Both of these ideas are quite good...but there are limiting scenarios with both. For example, if a writable medium was used which tracks install and not installed states, you would need to uninstall the game every time youre going to play it at friends place, or have the card inserted in your machine at all times...back to medium swapping. With a dongle, youd have to have a unique dongle per game, otherwise you wouldnt be able to resell the game and have the game deactivate on your console...so instead of game swapping, we are dongle swapping. All in all I think the PC DRM approach works to an extent and if the console guys figure out how to incorporate game trading and resale which by the sound of things is what they are doing, we can hardly call them anti consumer. We will see thoug...whomknows how this will play out. |
It's not so much "is the game installed" that would be tracked on the writable medium, but "is the game installed and activated". The ability to deactivate the game would be easy enough, without having to fully uninstall the game.
And with the dongle, as I said, you'd have a dongle bank in the system. Since a dongle would be so small, it would be easy enough to have such a bank, especially since they wouldn't need to have a lot of information on them. And dongle-swapping only happens if you run out of spaces... which shouldn't be too big a deal if you have 20 slots in the bank, since people rarely want to have immediate access to more than 20 games at a time.
I don't think the PC DRM approach works at all. There's a reason why PC gaming hasn't suddenly exploded into dominance again with Steam, etc. Steam makes PC gaming viable again, but console gaming remains dominant.
And I'm sorry, but it's anti-consumer. Based on all of the information we have, they'll have a system that will kill small game resellers, destroy the private used game market, and significantly increase the overall price of used games. It also makes it so that gamers without a solid internet connection can't play even the offline games, severely restricts lending of games, and features further tech designed to give MS and third parties more control and take it away from consumers. This is anti-consumer, plain and simple.
On a side note, "whom" is not the appropriate word in your last sentence. The word there is "who". "Whom" goes where you might write "him" or "them", whereas "who" goes where you might write "he" or "they".
