I'm gonna be honest, I'm not very technical so all the talk of Clouds and what have you had me confused but from what I gathered, the reason they went down this DRM/install path was because of the Cloud.

Now that they are switching to Discs, what does this mean for Clouds? What other advantages are there?

1. I'm not trying to troll. I'm too lazy for that, I've been here long enough for people to know that but there will still be someone thinking it.

2. Try to keep your explainations as layman as possible.

the cloud is like "the internet 3.0".

what this means is MS will no longer own your games. basically the market chose MS office (documents on my computer) vs. google docs (documents in google's cloud).

the cloud will still be very useful. you can transfer your game saves around if you want to play at a friends house or own multiple consoles. you can have the cloud assist games if they are already online based (acts like a dedicated server).

oh,. and while sony went with a hardware solution i think MS's game DVR option is the cloud.

It would've been just like Steam.

You don't need to carry your Xbox One anywhere. Your XBL ID and games would've been accessible on any Xbox One (in the XBL supported countries).

The games were tied to your account. Now after the change, they're not (the physical ones at least), which means that you need the disc to play, because otherwise you could just sell the physical copy while still having access to the version on your HDD.

The gameplay changes due to the cloud remain uneffected.

Think of the cloud like a group of very strong computers that all talk together and have big big storage areas, so that they can compute a variety of things for you and store things for you. The web pages and digital content it produces for you can be read on multiple devices.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

So this is basically what psn and XBL were already doing?
If that's the case, why not just continue it?

Here is a great and working game example..




it's an absolute blast to play against AI modeled after friends... Famousringo AI version is a dick.. I hate him when I see him in my races.. and have the need to beat him.. is much more fun the normal AI.. you couldn't do this without cloud..it really can enhance a game..

To an extent.

Back in 1996, we were able to surf the web. The cloud was already giving us web pages we could read from our computer.

Compare that to today in 2013, where we can run our productivity programs from a browser (office), and host all our files on the cloud (dropbox), with basically no setup required.

The cloud becomes more tangible as web technology advances (good office port on browser, seemless file syncing, ported on multiple devices, all seamless and hassle free).

So what xbone was proposing was veering closer to what we now understand to be cloud technology, mostly all seamless services accessible anywhere. The original PSN and XBL were a first step, but the cloud becomes more tangible the more seamless and the more we relegate to the cloud to handle.

Okay, that actually sounds interesting. MS should have said all of this at the beginning.

Wait! If this is only possible through Cloud, what is this going to mean for Forza 5?

Like stated above, it's what STEAM is doing.

I made an account on day one  Sept 2003 on STEAM.

Every game I bought Disc or digital is still in my collection. Now I only buy Digital PC games from STEAM during their sales.

XB1's original strategy was good, and everyone fucked it up because their ignorance.

We had it so I could share my games with 10 people. In a house with multiple people playing the same games, it's a + and saves a shit load on money.

I could go ANYWHERE and play my games.

DEVs would make games cheaper because they knew that you could not sell your game so instead of trying to get as much from you up front, they could sell it for less.  They even had a way to sell your games through developers sites like Ubisoft, EA, etc, making so they get the cut in profit not places like Gamestop and Best Buy.

Think, every game you buy from now on would be in your library no matter what system is released down the road.

as for the cloud aspect, it's not going anywhere, MS will still use it.