Well, I'd bet that a chunk - a shrinking chunk, but a chunk nonetheless - of the audience that buys and plays Xbox games does not connect at all, especially kids whose parents won't spend money on Xbox Live.

Barring that, I don't have mine online at all times. When my Xbox was my main gaming platform, I often got tired of updates that didn't seem to do anything for me so instead of waiting for the (very short, admittedly) download times, I would just unplug the ethernet cable and leave it out for days or weeks on end, especially as time went on and I played less and less multiplayer. These days, I just don't want to connect my Xbox to the internet. If it gets turned on, it only gets turned on to play the occasional single player game. That's just anecdotal, admittedly, but I hardly doubt I'm the only one who doesn't care to have his Xbox on the internet at all times.

The "...but Steam does it!" argument doesn't hold much water for me because it's almost assumed, these days, that you will connect your PC to the internet and it will be online most of the time. Also, people expect their consoles to "just work". That is one of the marks against PC gaming - it doesn't always "just work". If it requires an internet connection that someone suddenly doesn't have for more than a day, then the console doesn't "just work" all of the time.

People definitely like to bitch about "hypotheticals" and this will probably affect less people than are complaining, but it is a worrisome mindset for MS to have, since I don't benefit from it at all and could potentially (however unlikely) be at a disadvantage because of it.

Remember when a console announcement used to be full of exciting stuff, rather than an endless slog of depressing anti-consumer shit and "audience-expanding" pandering? It's been a while.

You won't even be able to play your single player games until you connect to the internet again. You're right about it making no sense, though.

PS4?

My thoughts exactly. Just imagine if something like the psn hack happens to live and no one can play xbox for months? Live is probably more secure than psn, but nothing is un-hackable.

Its not the issue of being able to connect to the internet everyday, its the fact that they are forcing me to do things that they want. If i drop 500 bucks on something, i don't want to be told how to use it. to use the infamous vacuum analogy, need constant power to use it is fine. Being told that i have to vacuum twice a day or else its not gonna work correctly is the problem.

Cloud infrastructure although resilient isn't impervious where just this year Microsoft had problems with an outage due to faulty certs. It is one thing if your cloud save is temporarily unavailable. It is another if you just can't play the game because of their outage.

@baillie: This might come as a surprise to you, but since America is not a small island, Internet infrastructure is fucking terrible here. We pay $30 for cable Internet in my house, not counting the modem rental. That gets us the cheapest plan and generally slow, not so great Internet (in theory it's 5 MB up/5 MB down; in actuality, HELLLLLLL NO it's not) with outages and connection drops all the time. This is in New York City, where there is actually infrastructure and a lot of people; good luck in Middle America where most places still don't have broadband access.

It helps to have some perspective on how most people actually live, especially in the country to whom the console is the target audience.

It's one of those things that is either not an issue at all, or fully sucks. When you think about it It is really rare that the internet goes down for more than about 15mins, but if one is in the sort of situation that the internet is down for 24 hours....it's not coming back up quickly. The only time in my house that I've ever gone for that long is when the router broke, when we changed providers and when we first moved here. Each time was about a week or two of no internet. If you don't have internet for that long you are more likely going to want to play some video games and not having that option despite buying and owning the games is infuriating.

Edit: We might have to actually read a book or somthing. SHIT!

This is true. However the market for these consoles for the first two years at least is in high-income households which already have access to the internet. Access to the internet has been growing exponentially for the last few years, so I bet that in the year 2015 or so this issue will be essentially non-existent.

I am actually more interested in the Xbox that the PS4 but this is a deal breaker.

My connection drops occasionally, sometimes for days at a time. This is pretty bad.

@creamypies: as someone who works in the cell phone industry. That is an immeaurably bad idea.

Not sure if this is appropriate here but I just saw it and felt like sharing.

Has Sony announced anything about their console not being always online? Last I checked Sony (very cleverly) has not confirmed anything concrete about their policy towards having an always online console or used games (last I checked their official stance on used game was the same as Microsoft, some BS about supporting used game sells).

I still think come launch day both PS4 and Xbox one will have very familiar policy towards used games and fundamentally similar always online functionality (maybe a bit of difference here and there).

I would be shocked if Microsoft does not extend its authentication process to at least 72 hours or 7 days (most likely I see the Xbox One being able to play Blu Rays and certain single player modes of games without any internet connection depending on how developers make their single player game modes).

Even some sort of phone authentication process or even authentication through the xbox website would be solve most of my potential problems in case of an internet outage or some sort of outliner case

It depends on what the penalty, if any, there is if you miss the deadline. If you can't play until you connect... well that sucks but it would be better than a scenario where your profile gets banned or deleted if you miss the ping. But they're not stupid enough to do the latter right?

This is an incredibly stupid sentiment. I don't want to play online, Call of Duty, Madden, whatever other game, and so a modern console isn't for me?

Many people in North America don't even have consistently stable internet, let alone the rest of the world. Apparently they don't have any need for a modern console either? I don't know what kind of games you play, but that sentence comes off as "if you don't play Generic FPS X online, you shouldn't even be playing games, hur hur..."

Sony's official comment concerning always online, taken from a GameSpot interview:

“Did we consider it? No, we didn’t consider it," said Yoshida. "The main reason being that many countries don’t have robust Internet connections. It makes sense for people to have Internet connections to play online games, but for offline games there are many countries that we saw [that] do not really have robust Internet.”

I believe that Sony has yet to make any sort of comment regarding a used game fee one way or another. If they can control piracy, while still allowing their customers to keep their consumer rights, I think that could be a huge win for Sony.

@dudeglove: The way I interpret it is that your Xbox One is never truly off, just in standby mode.

So while you don't have to turn the unit on once every 24 hours, it always has to have a continuous internet connection so it can check in. Other wise the unit will brick.

Which would fucking suck if your ISP craps out for more than a full day.

@creamypies: They live in a rural area or they are in the military wanna ask another question you should already have an answer too.

Or if your wireless router dies, or if you lose electricity, or if you accidentally unplug the unit for a day w/o realizing it, or if you move to a new place etc etc etc etc.

@baillie: The fuck I pay 70$ for 10 mbit

@spaceinsomniac: thanks for the quote, I do remember now reading that before. It does make a lot of sense. I still think PS4 will have a lot of similar functionality to Xbox One's always online features (the background downloading and it downloading demos automatically would work best in an always connected to internet mode) but probably not as restrictive due to their stronger presence in markets without good internet connections.

Allowing customers to keep their consumer right would be a plus for Sony, but you also have to remember that publishers and developers (specially big ones like EA and Activision) have been pushing for the new consoles to have this activation or license fee for used games. If rumors are true Microsoft are pursuing these big publishers pretty heavily (also evident from the reveal event) and I just don't see how Sony can justify pushing them more towards Microsoft's side business wise. Even though I and many other hard core users are not fond of EA's or Activision's games, they do make up a lot of the major 3rd party game sales. Also Sony publishes and develops a lot more games than Microsoft does so I do think they too would be concern about not getting in on all of the profits coming from the used game market, specially due to Sony's history of not being able to produce any big online multiplayer games in years (since SOCOM for PS2? mb Killzone 2?) and predominately having strong single player games. EA dropping their online pass is another indication to me that both PS4 and Xbox One will have similar licensing fee for used games or at least something very similar to it.

It will be really interesting to see what Sony does with used games, they have a clear opening from the consumer standpoint, but stand to lose a lot from publisher and developer side which they have been trying really hard to gather support from since midway through the PS3 life cycle.

@dudeglove: The only thing that makes sense is that every check-in allows you to go offline with all offline capable functions intact for the next 24h. There's no chance in hell that Microsoft would knowingly build a console that has the possibility of bricking itself permanently for the majority of users within months - especially considering that they are likely selling it at a cost!

So if you're offline for longer than 24h (or whatever time period Microsoft settles for, it's quite possible that the 24h is only for the devkits) you'll get a prompt that you need to reconnect, after which everything's fine and you're set for another offline cycle if you choose to.

I have to wonder... maybe Microsoft is deliberately trying to sabotage themselves from the gaming market with these idiotic policies. Oh wait... that's EA's job.

@dudeglove said:

fwiw Microsoft has said very little about how this will work and they have contradicted themselves a few times already.

In your scenario, Your console would likely be bricked until you resolved it with Microsoft through whatever means they let you do that. I'm going to assume at least the gaming functionality will be blocked. Really don't know about the Netflix, Tv passthrough services etc. My guess is the non-gaming aspects of it may still work.

My guess, completely speculating here fwiw, is they will have a way to undo the bricking. Whether that is as simple just having the unit be online during the next check, being able to request a check in when you boot it or having to contact customer support, we don't know yet. They haven't said much more than the there is once every 24hr check.

kk too lazy 2 read all 177 posts so idk if this has been said already but here it goes. your xbox does not need to turn on every 24 hours. like if its off for a week they dont care. what they mean is you cant play it for more then 24 hours with out an internet connection. who the fuck doesnt have internet and if you were to actaully think about their logic for a second here its cuz some ppl buy an xbox strictly for burnt games that would basicly never see internet unless they were playing on live. so by doing a check they can see if your system has played an unregistered game. one if your too cheap to buy games burn em and play on computer and 2 stop complaining cuz this basicly wont affect 95% of u unless your a a thief or b to cheap to pay your internet bills. and im sure if your internet went out they would let u pass that 24 hour mark im sure all it does is if u pass 24 hours and you log back in and they detect fraud on your account then they probably suspend u or cripple your system till you pay your bill. only time will tell.

@jay_man18: Is it 24 hours straight of playing one game? or 24 hours in total?

Although it would take a very weird set of circumstances to go wrong, this is the reason I went PS4.

There are so many ways MS could fix this.

One like Jeff said on twitter is that you can get a code to enter into your Xboxone.

Two be able to connect your Smartglass App to your Xbox then Phone to the internet.

Or just make it you can play Singleplayer games offline

@the_laughing_man: Single player games that can be played offline!? you be crazy.

It's funny how many people are willingly missing the point of all this. Just because you have internet doesn't mean you should be forced online. When those servers go down hundreds of dollars worth of games are now useless. As well as the system, and that's only one issue with it.

Microsoft truly showed their arrogance on this one. Any other company would make some consolatory pushbacks on their policy to appease criticism, but here they stand defiant that this is the future, get used to it or get a 360! Well, I guess they're right, but thank the good lord that the Xbone isn't the only new console readily available. This kind of anti-consumerist BS also really pisses me off and I hope enough consumers vote with their wallets on this to affect MS' bottom line.

I still don't get the big deal because I am always connected to xbox live...What's the difference. I think people are making a big deal out of nothing. I guess there are people that still don't have and Ethernet connection.....

sorry 4 posting on a old thread, but microsoft fixed this story for the connections, so if someone read this thread can easy find the "happy" ending:

• An internet connection will not be required to play offline Xbox One games – After a one-time system set-up with a new Xbox One (a patch that y download the first day y install the console), you can play any disc based game without ever connecting online again. There is no 24 hour connection requirement and you can take your Xbox One anywhere you want and play your games, just like on Xbox 360.

Trade-in, lend, resell, gift, and rent disc based games just like you do today – There will be no limitations to using and sharing games, it will work just as it does today on Xbox 360.

Source

Hmmm one post bumping up such a thread? Let me guess? paid by Microsoft?^^

Old news. Locking this thread down.