There are a few different reasons you might not be playing on the same
Xbox 360 system that you originally bought. You might have upgraded to
an Elite system for the bigger hard drive and black HDMI. More likely,
your original system died and you were forced to have it replaced.
Gamers who received new systems were in for an unpleasant surprise when
they redownloaded their Arcade games or hooked up their old hard drive:
the games they paid for would only work when connected to the Internet.
No network connection, and they all reverted to demo versions.
Microsoft has just released a tool that allows you to move those
licenses over to a new console, but the question remains: what took so
long?
The online tool is dead simple to use, and there is a video to walk you through it
if you need help. Simply sign into the page with the Windows Live ID
that's attached to your Xbox Live Account, click on "start the license
transfer now" button, look at the number of licenses you have if you'd
like, and then click next. Sign into Xbox Live on the console you'd
like to move your licenses to, and click confirm on your PC. Then go to
download history in the account management tab on your 360, and
re-download the licenses. Now even when offline, the full versions of
the games will play.
You can only use the tool once every 12 months, so you can't change
your licenses over to a friend's system for a weekend and then move
them back. Still, this is a great solution for gamers who have had to
swap Xbox systems and were frustrated by the DRM attached to te titles they had purchased. With the 360's high defect rate, that's a huge number
of customers who were burned by this particular form of DRM. "Yes, we
know the licensing isn't perfect. We know that, we're working on it,"
Microsoft's Larry Hryb, the Xbox Live Director of Programming, said on his podcast, sounding rather annoyed at the situation. That was April 29, 2007.
The good news is that the system in place now is simple and easy to
use, and if you send your Xbox system into Microsoft to have it
repaired the licenses will now be fixed as well, but it's inexcusable
that it took this long
to get a process in place to fix the broken DRM. It's one thing to ask
your customers to have to deal with multiple broken systems, but then
forcing them to put up with broken DRM on their games on the
replacement units is annoying; anyone who has traveled with their 360
even next door and watched as their games reverted to demo form without
an Internet connection knows how much of a pain this is. Before this
tool was released, it was possible to get Microsoft to refund your
points so you could re-download the content onto your system, but that
often entailed talking to many people on the phone for a few hours and
then going through an annoyingly long process of redownloading the
content.
Hopefully
the issue is now fixed, and will remain that way moving forward. Sony
side-stepped the issue entirely by putting less restrictive DRM on its
downloadable games for the PlayStation 3. While on the Xbox 360 content
is tied to both your Live account and specific system, on the
PlayStation 3 the DRM is tied to the profile only; playing your games
on another system is as easy as logging in with your account and then
downloading the title again. The game will then work whether there is
an Internet connection present or not. While this raises some
possibilities for abuse, it's a much better system from a consumer's
point of view.
It's surprising that the issue of moving downloadable games to a new
system has caught Microsoft completely flat-footed; the company was one
of the first to push downloadable games as a mainstream method of
distribution for consoles, and has repeatedly stressed its dedication
to downloadable movies instead of Blu-ray support for the Xbox 360.
Hybb warns us, of course, to watch any movies we have on our old system
before moving licenses; the rights for movie rentals won't transfer
over.
Gaming is going digital, and Microsoft is going to have to learn to
respond to DRM problems faster than this, especially with Sony's more
gamer-friendly approach to DRM.
