I don't see what the difficulty keeping is in keeping the status quo for sharing and renting games. If you're done with a game, give the disc to your friend/sibling/whatever. As long as you have a disc you can play. You will still need mandatory installs but that's cool - i believe it's going to be play while you install. If you don't want to give the disc to your friend, they can buy the "license" to play the digital copy that's on their HDD.

For Digital Download, as long as you log in with your GT you can play on any console. Of course the same ownership rights as current will still apply which is totally fair. As the consumer, what matters is the choice to choose between the media. For me, unless it's on sale, I'll not bother with a "license". Online passes have always been up to the publisher and there have been so many current games which do not require online passes for multi-player.

By stone age - meaning consumer still has rights as long as they have disc? That's not suckage - that's awesome in my books.

The only good thing about steam is the sales.

Otherwise, you're stuck with one game identity, one copy. Which is the worst DRM inplementation of the current generation

I've mentioned before on these forums, I've chosen the 360 over steam this generation because i didn't like the idea of having my games tied to one digital identity. This already made sharing my steam games with my real family illegal and in breach of their own drm policies. Most of my media is physical except where i can't avoid it (sales/xbla). The only reason why we put up with steam crap is because it is sometimes so, so cheap.

I don't think they're changing their plans for simultaneous releases for physical and digital so you will be able to download any game you want digitally. From that announcement, they don't seem to be changing their rules on that, so for every download, the digital download will still be digitally signed to your gamertag and the first console it's downloaded on.

The convenience of not disc swapping is still there, and if you really want to, you can loan out your gamertag to another xbox if you want to "share" your digital copies - just like steam. The convenience of console is still going to be there - ie no need to worry about compatibility/drivers/specs. No convenience of being able to share with 10 family members - but this was never going to mean having all 10 gamertags gaming at the same time - in exchange for giving up the right to actually own something.

edit: also, my take on this is that MS backpedaled based on projections for pre-orders. For this generation no one is going to pay for both ps+ and xboxlive gold seeing how they're both required for multiplayer. By losing too much ground to sony at the start, and therefore the multiplayer community, they would have put themselves at a permanent disadvantage from which they would never recover.

This post has been edited by Kidicarus: Jun 20 2013, 04:10 PM