Yes but I have no problem with having to keep the disc installed to play. If I sell the disc I then cannot play, it is that simple. Hopefully your brain will recover shortly.

TBH I hate fishing around for discs so it's something that's positive but only marginally.

That might be an issue for many but I have all mine in a rack so can cope. Though the fact that the trend is for cloud based verification means that you could lose access to your games because of something outside your control.

Yes, I get that you cheeky git , what I'm getting at is that I can't see any real benefit for MS in this whole rigmarole. All this just so you can do without a disc*, and it requires a net connection etc? It's a total PR FAIL before the authentication system inevitably starts FAILing.

* Especially when the system's designed to have multiple OS's and functions you can just jump to. Should I mention that it'll inevitably get cracked n'all?

I agree, I think that this has been demanded by the software developers to end second hand gaming. They probably feel that they should be buying the full price games. My concern is that the whole thing could change overnight. So you could buy a second hand game and it is initially playable then they arbitrarily decide to end second hand games and a game that you legally purchases now requires a substantial reactivation fee to be playable.

Then as you say there will be authentication problems at some point. Overall the fail is already prepared.

Publishers. Software developers get paid a contract fee for making the game plus a (usually fairly small) royalty on units sold. They pretty much don't care how many units the game sells beyond whether they'll have a nice holiday that year and how it affects their reputation (and therefore the fee they get paid for the next game they make).

Publishers, however, trouser quite a big chunk of the money paid for each copy, so they're much more bothered about how many copies a game sells.

Accepted. The publishers are getting greedy though. Authors do not get paid for second hand books, music artists do not get paid for second hand music sales, same for movie studio and DVD's.

Most probably. Sony have been keeping the Japanese ship yards busy for years.

New Xbox One controller details revealed

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/41 ... -revealed/

A simple flowchart to demonstrate how inclusive the DRM is for XBox One.

I was watching Business Daily (10th June 2013) on iPlayer and it was saying how much many customers EA and Blizzard have lost recently. It seems all but the hard core gamers are playing with tablets and smartphones now. I wonder if they will blame piracy for the drop off in customers?

Those two are very fond of treating their customers like crap and then lying about it, so... And this sort of thing always happens near the end of a cycle.

Few will ever be able to make real, sustainable cash from games despite the millions of mobile devices sold. Ironically, selling the same game on a console for much more will only help. The controller is key...

As I only have one Blizzard game (Starcraft) I can only base my experience on that. It is frustrating that that Starcraft wants to load new files every now and then and only if your account is an administration account. Not good.

I do think that the games industry is facing a problem of costs, even if they use a game engine as a foundation of the game. The games are highly complicated and that means console games are expensive to develop and that means that those costs has to be recovered in the retail price. The fact that they are now trying to screw over second hand games means the first time buyers who sell games will now have to account for that difficulty in selling their game into their decision to buy in the first place. Putting decent DLC out later will encourage buyers to hold on to the games and will increase revenue.

I'll save myself a lot of painful tablet work and just post this

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/news.php

£430 for the console probably won't last long, though I'd assume the Kinnect is what did that and wonder what Sony's providing. They've got some amount of (probably timed) exclusives which could go either way for both MS and the publishers, but very good for a launch history-wise.