Last week, Microsoft began letting selected users get a "preview" of the new XBox 360 operating system upgrade, the so-called "New XBox Experience." Yours truly was among them, and I've gotten a good chance to put the new upgrade through its paces. I'm not going to go in-depth with a discussion of the system because there are several accounts around. Of all the new tweaks, additions and features that have been rolled up into this update, little of it has a serious impression or appeal to me. The inclusion of MiiTwos would be a whole lot more impactful if Microsoft's first party "blue ocean" stuff was anything to write home about, as I do get a kick out of the Wii Music jazz quartet of Einstein, Jacko, Walter Sobchak, and Geordi La Forge. The Netflix streaming feature will be quite handy to many users, but I've been streaming Hulu, Netflix, and the like to my TV for a quite a while now so it's not going to change my world.
The hard drive installs, though, now there's something that does grab me. As a disciple of the cartridge generation, there are few things that annoy me more than extended loading times. As a former PC silencing guy, the XBox 360 has been downright evil from a noise perspective. Finally, after seeing the convenience that comes from unauthorized console solutions such as HDloader, PSP M33 Firmware, and XBox Softmods, the idea of having all your games instantly accessible should be inherently appealing to anyone else with rampant ADHD. This solution, leveraging the XBox 360's hard drive, appears to address these points quite saliently, but all is not as it seems.
Even though the NXE lets the user install games in full to the XBox 360 hard drive, it still requires the disc for the particular game to be in the drive before starting up so it can check the security info on the disc. This is a move straight out of the PC gaming playbook, where developers have relied upon a disc check authentication step for eons. However, while it peeves me to a degree on the PC where you're usually sitting within arm's reach of the machine, I find that this move in the XBox space really incenses me far more than I expected it would.
While I understand the motivation and the desire to hold to core tenets of hardcore Digital Rights Management, this move violates my first rule of DRM: do not inconvenience your paying customers. We have been over this rule a few times in the past, with Amber's troubles with Steam, and with my own take on the Spore activation saga, but the basic rule remains the same. This has never been a concern in the era of removable console media before because the protection was inherent to the platform design. Games were stored on removable media, and in order to switch games, you needed to swap media. However, now that I've got all these games loaded onto the hard drive of my 360, every time I stand up to swap from Gears of War 2 to Lost Odyssey I know that everything the system needs to play the game is already in the box, and I'm doing a dance to satisfy Microsoft and prove that I own a legal copy of the game. Now, the paying customer is being inconvenienced.
This is antique thinking grown out of the paranoia that someone might be experiencing the work developers have done without paying for it, and it has graduated from "simply covering your bases" as most disc-serial based copy protection does to something that legitimately requires me to do far more than I'd have to do otherwise to prove to Microsoft that I am not a criminal.
The usual counter-cry, "well, what do you expect, for Microsoft to just let the PIRATES go unchecked?" and I can't help but draw parallels to other forms of software sales. I can't help but notice that every time I boot up Microsoft Office it doesn't ask for a disc. Microsoft wouldn't be foolish enough to cause users to go through such an inconvenience just to load up their Word docs. Microsoft is trying to offer value to the consumer for what they get paid, and an inconvenience like that wouldn't make a difference. Ironically, if I wished to pirate games on the XBox 360, all it would take is some modified firmware and a dual-layer burner. Pirates don't worry about DRM; they're too busy playing their free games.
Anecdotal statistics would indicate that piracy of software like Microsoft Office far outweighs that of any game and despite this Microsoft doesn't treat me like a criminal every time I launch a copy. So why do developers of fully installable games use such arcane and inconvenient forms of protection? It's simple: because gamers let them. The number of people who are actually concerned with things such as this is insignificant when it comes right down to it, and I suspect that given that gamers can still play their 360 games from the jet engine that few will even pick up on this issue, but when it comes right down to it, the fact that this new feature treats XBox gamers like criminals makes me less inclined to buy games, not more. I suppose this really is a New Xbox Experience, huh? Does this bother you at all? Or am I just making a stink about nothing and I should suck it up, be happy that my XBox even performs for this bastard, and leave Microsoft alone?
