Microsoft’s Phil Harrison talked to CVG following the press conference reveal of the Xbox One this morning, confirming that users who activate a used disc on their system will need to pay a fee to access the game’s content.
“Our plans are very consistent with the way the world works today, which is if I buy a disc I can install it on my machine, I can play it and anyone associated with my machine can play it as well,” Harrison told CVG, in part. “I can give that disc to somebody else – maybe my son who has his own Xbox One somewhere else in the house – and he can install and play it on his machine.”
Harrison also said that you can take the disc to a friend’s house and play it on their system, but “The moment I go home and notionally take that disc with me, you no longer have the ability to play that game. But the ‘bits’ are on your hard drive, so if you want to play that game you can buy it – you can go to the online store, buy it and it’s instantly unlocked and playable on your machine. All of the privileges I just described in my house would now apply in yours as well.”
He added that the Xbox One system is “exactly the same as owning a physical disc” it’s only the “method of distributing the ‘bits’ [that] slightly changes.” Harrison also noted that Microsoft has had a “series of high level meetings” with their retail partners so that they would be disclosed of their plans, and be part of their planning process.
When asked by Kotaku earlier today how regularly the Xbox One would need to be connected to the internet he responded: “I believe it’s 24 hours.” When asked to explain this in further detail by CVG, he said Microsoft “has not made a specific announcement on the details of that”.
Harrison did say however that the “Xbox One is designed to have an internet connection – it does not require an internet connection to be on at all times, but many of the great features and capabilities of the system are unlocked via a connection to Xbox Live or the cloud.”
“Blu-ray movies and other single-player games that don’t require an internet connection to Xbox Live will work. I think it is pretty rare of an outage of local internet connectivity to be more than a few seconds or minutes, so I don’t expect it will ever impact on somebody’s ability to use the system.”
(via CVG)