Microsoft refutes conspiracies about Xbox One DRM bait-and-switch

Any potential future changes won’t be retroactive for earlier games.

Kyle Orland – Aug 28, 2013 10:17 am | 145

Don't be lured in! They're trying to trick you! Credit: digitizedchaos

Mere moments after Microsoft made its now-famous about-face on disc-based game restrictions for the Xbox One, the conspiracy theories began sprouting up. Microsoft was just pulling a bait-and-switch, the argument goes, and once all you suckers actually buy the system, the company is going to reinstate all those used-game restrictions and online requirements and laugh all the way to the bank AHAHAHAHAHA.

Most people wrote these concerns off as paranoid ramblings that failed to account for the business and PR realities inherent in such a disastrous move. But the folks over at gaming forum NeoGAF didn’t leave it there, and they actually asked Microsoft Director of Product Planning Albert Penello to address these “concerns.”

Penello’s response predictably denied that any such thing would ever happen. “I don’t see [a return to the old DRM policies] ever happening with content you’re buying today either on disc and digitally,” he wrote. “All of that DRM stuff was in place because there was no physical security on the disc itself, so all the licensing was done digitally. When you build that type of model, then you need to make sure people can’t install games on a bunch of machines and then unplug them. That would have made us an awesome Pirating machine, and that can’t happen for obvious reasons. When we went back to disc security, those DRM policies weren’t necessary. So no reason to turn it on later.”

Sounds plausible. But what if Microsoft decides to add back those sharing features (and the attendant security requirements) later? After all, thousands of Internet petitioners have been clamoring for a return of the now-missing sharing features, and Xbox Product Chief Marc Whitten has said those features could return in the future.

Penello admitted that Microsoft adding back its originally planned sharing features and restrictions was a possibility (though he called it a “big IF”), saying that “you can imagine a world where we have both types of models at the same time.” Even in that case, though, he wrote that “I wouldn’t worry about us making those policies ‘retroactive’ which seems to be the issue I hear people worry about.” In other words, your launch-era discs aren’t going to be restricted, even if later games are subjected to new and different licensing policies.

So there you have it: an answer to the conspiracy-minded direct from a Microsoft executive. Though, of course, that’s exactly what Microsoft would say if it was trying to lure us into a false sense of security about trusting its system. Also, if you convert Penello’s response to hexadecimal and run it through a frequency analyzer, there are some patterns that definitely suggest a hidden message about us all being suckers. Don’t be fooled! The truth is out there!