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.
