What the heck happened to that "leaked" Microsoft memo?

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/05/microsoft-next-xbox-will-work-even-when-your-internet-doesnt/

Should single-player games, Blu-ray playback, and live TV viewing be possible on a gaming console with no Internet connection? Most gamers would say "yes," but they have been worried that Microsoft feels differently; the next generation Xbox has been consistentlyrumored to require a permanent network connection.

It won't.

According to an internal Microsoft e-mail sent to all full-time employees working on the next Xbox, "Durango [the codename for the next Xbox] is designed to deliver the future of entertainment while engineered to be tolerant of today's Internet." It continues, "There are a number of scenarios that our users expect to work without an Internet connection, and those should 'just work' regardless of their current connection status. Those include, but are not limited to: playing a Blu-ray disc, watching live TV, and yes playing a single player game."

What happened!? Did arstechnica actually publish some e-mail that some random person sent them? Did a trusted source lie to them? Has MS changed their mind more than once about this?

Well it's true... for 24 hours at a time.

Yeah, pretty much. Everything written there is still true, as long as you've connected to the internet at some point within the last 24 hours.

"There are a number of scenarios that our users expect to work without an Internet connection"

There not a person alive who would read that and think, "oh, they must be talking about when their internet connection is temporarily down, but it still requires you to connect at least once a day, right?"

"Work without an internet connection" means work without an internet connection. As in, "this doesn't require an internet connection to work." As in, "works without an internet connection" will not be text found on the Xbox One retail box. It's not word play, it's not misleading, it's either a flat out lie, or someone changed their mind, or this was never written by Microsoft in the first place.

@spaceinsomniac: This is how business is done, dude. You use flowery language and technicalities to get around saying the horrible thing about your product. The Xbox One will totally work without an internet connection...for 24 hours.

It will horribly mutilate only a trivial one-percent of all babies!

You don't say "torture", you say "enhanced interrogation techniques." I get it. The thing is, does anyone here actually think that this "memo" helped MS more than it hurt them? Telling people that something isn't true, and then your customers finding out that it is true is FAR worse than just keeping your mouth shut, and then telling the truth in as inoffensive terms as possible. This wasn't how business is done, it was how fucking up and lying to your customers is done.

I don't honestly believe that if your Xbox One has been offline for 25 hours, you're going to pop in a Blu Ray and have it say "NOPE" on the screen. That would be suicidal on MS's part, not to mention pointless from a piracy standpoint. There is literally ZERO upside for them to do this, which tells me it isn't going to be the case.

Tempest in a teapot, methinks. I would bet money that once the smoke clears, we'll find the only thing it needs to validate once a day are your digital licenses for games. Period.

@thetenthdoctor: To early to tell, but I wouldn't be surprised, maybe it is 24 hours of activity so you could play a game for 23 hours and 59 minutes offline and then it tells you to connect to a valid internet connection.

That would be best case scenario but come on, it Microsoft we are talking about

Look at it from their side. You've made it so all games install and don't need a disc to play, so now I can switch from Forza to Halo without swapping discs. That's great, but now I can just give those two discs to my buddy, let him install them on his system while briefly signed in as me, then yank his Ethernet and play them all week for free? That would be a serious problem, which is why you can't do it on iPhone, PC, Mac, iPad, Android or any other system with disc-less media.

I see no problem with an Internet check at startup (which will probably be disabled if you're playing it on the console it was originally installed on anyway, just like 360), because it's a necessity in an environment where the disc isn't required to play. It's no more intrusive or odious than the 360's requirement of the disc, and I can't imagine any scenario where they would require it for anything beyond games. People thinking this is going to apply to Blu rays or other media are hitting the anti-MS crack pipe.