I'm typing this from a moble device, so please bare with the auto-correct awkwardness.
More and more rumors and speculation are coming about from the next generation xbox, the so called "xbox 760", and one has me particularly unhappy. It's the rumor of DRM. Or digital rights management that might be built directly into the console.
This has been a long time thing getting more and more out of controll, and no one has really done anything about it. The theory is this: people buy game, people turn around after x time and sell/trade in game, digital rights companies gets no profit one that 2ndary trade in. Most of the time the 2ndary trade is done at 1/2 of less orriginal price, but that's never brought up.
To "some" *cough* E.A. *cough* companies, turning in several games you no longer enjoy for a new one, is akin to piracy. So they do junk like only allow you limited installs on P.C. games and junk like that. And it really is junk. It's harder to point at with p.c. games but now rumered for xbox, it lightened some complications.
(note: Blizzard's battle.net solution and steam are pretty damn swank in this topic, kudos to both and those like it).
The biggest of which is DRM sevearly limits the lifetime of a videogame by reducing it's shelf time. This may not really be bad for a quick one-shot game, but there are quite a few games that pump out DLC. Games like rockband, Call of honor battlefield, and x named dance games will have drops in dlc sales as players can no longer pick up dead shelfed used copies of the core game and purchase the subsiquint downloadable packs.
The technology (and profit grubbing butthurt compaies going QQ)is starting to lead to a greed run to a "rent to play" set up where no one really owns the game. You have X-time to play where x is the number of days and you have to pay full price to play each time. You might even have to pay to store your saved data, then pay more to retrieve it. As some one who still owns a plays a fully working Dream Cast (and older systems), this scares me. It really does.
I sort of understand the "why" but punishing your once dedicated customers is not the way to go.
-N00basaurus
